Category: iPad

A few rough spots in iCloud

iCloud looks great on paper, but the effects of choices you must make to enable it are not obvious, so, as a busy person with more than enough troubleshooting to do, I am shutting it off for now.

No replacement for iDisk yet.

I’m probably one of the few people that use iDisk, but I do use it. I store my Papers library on it, and a variety of assets I use at work and at home. It was a great little server, without any hassle. According to this technote, I have to save my files and get ready for it to disappear.

I never used the iWeb or MobileMe Gallery features, but it looks like all of that is disappearing also. iCloud is neither a hosting service, nor an unstructured file-server. Documents can be stored by apps, but probably not dragged there by you, as far as I can tell.

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Installing .mobileconfig files on iPad (Setting up MWireless and U-M VPN)

Secure wifi networks often require installation of a certificate on mobile devices trying to connect. Apple provides a utility to allow companies to create configuration (“.mobilconfig”) files for iPhone and iPad that install the appropriate settings and certificates for their wifi network.

These .mobileconfig files can be put on the web for download to the device through Safari, but sometimes this doesn’t work. If the web server is not configured with the correct MIME type (application/x-apple-aspen-config for .mobileconfig files), the device’s Safari browser may not allow it to be downloaded. The link may not even function at all – it is not clickable in some cases.

If this happens, you can still install the .mobilconfig file by downloading it on a laptop or desktop computer and emailing it to your i-device. When you click on the attachment, it should start the installation process. However, you may have to change the extension to “.der” before emailing it to have it recognized as a certificate.

The University of Michigan has .mobilconfig files available for connection to the MWireless network and U-M VPN, and I found that emailing them to my iPad as described above was the only way I could install them.

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Best Groupwise calendar app for iPad so far…

Novell’s Groupwise version 7 is not compatible with the iCalendar (.ics) format. This makes viewing your Groupwise calendar a challenge on an iPhone or iPad.

In the past, I’ve used a kludgy method of syncing my Groupwise calendar to iCal by delegating any received appointments to a Google calendar, then subscribing to that calendar with iCal. This was hardly a perfect system: appointments would get missed or doubled sometimes. So it was nice to finally find a better solution: “GW Calendar” from Ghost Pattern Software.

GW Calendar allows you to see your Groupwise calendar in realtime in either one-day or week views. It also allows you to forward, accept and decline meetings, but not create new ones or do busy searches. There is no month view yet. And most importantly, no Push notification of upcoming meetings. However it is quite useful for accurate viewing of your Groupwise calendar over the next few days.

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