Category: iPod

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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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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iPhone won’t sync to iTunes: disconnects during sync.

A few days ago, my iTunes started giving me messages like “iTunes could not sync contacts to the iPhone “My iPhone” because the iPhone disconnected.” It wasn’t syncing anything to the iPhone anymore.

After reading this forum thread I tried resetting the sync history in the iSync application preferences. This did not help and instead caused iSync reminder messages to come up every few minutes.

I also tried syncing the iPhone with all the “info” selections unchecked, and then finally replacing all info on the iPhone by checking “Replace with information from this computer” in the Info tab in iTunes. This last change seemed to work, but I realized later that something else had probably helped fix it:

I’d had a USB hard drive plugged into the same USB hub as my iPhone for the last few days, and when nothing else was working, I finally shut it down and unplugged it. So there was more power for the iPhone coming from the hub. It is a power issue.

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Video Recording on the iPhone

There are many iPhone applications available, but so far, no one has come out with an official application that does video recording. To get that functionality, you must jailbreak the iPhone and install one of the unofficial video recorder apps, and some type of networking so you can transfer the video files back to your computer.

The main problem with jailbreaking the iphone is that it is no longer in a standard, supportable condition afterward, and so things may not work as expected. I found that my syncing setup was all messed up, and I was basically starting from square one in terms of settings. There are some things it still does not do well, like syncing to iPhoto. However, there are enough benefits to a jailbroken phone to try it out, and hopefully (haven’t tried it yet!) it can be restored if it no longer seems worth all the effort.

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