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At midnight tonight websites across the Internet such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Tucows and many others will go dark to protest two obscene and outrageous bills being considered in the House and Senate called SOPA and PIPA respectively. These bills would give the United States government unprecedented power to censure free speech online, the very founding principle of the Internet. Info-Mac will be joining them to give our small sign of support. Between 8AM and 8PM EST, Info-Mac's main website will redirect to a page where you can find information about SOPA and PIPA and find out how to contact your congresspeople to add your voice.
You can find out more about these bills and all the protest activities tomorrow here: http://news.yahoo.com/january-18-sopa-p ... 08407.html
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Just a minor reworking of iForum's server-side behaviors... it should now allow users to browse Info-Mac without logging in. You'll still need to login to post new topics, reply to existing topics, and use any of the tracking/subscribing features of course.
Expect an update to the iForum application itself that addresses minor visual bugs this introduces (like the persistent "logout" button on the home panel - even when you're already logged out) once I've finished sorting out our mess on the App Stores.
I have a love/hate affair with our host, DreamHost. Sometimes we'll have like months of uptime without issue, then weeks of headaches and downtime. Right now we're having one of those weeks. If Info-Mac disappears or behaves unexpectedly for short periods of time, I'll have to ask for your continued patience. Just come back later, chances are it'll be working fine again. I'm changing a few things around trying to make it work more smoothly, so we'll see if any of these changes help, but in the meantime accept my apologies!
Warning, I'm about to rant about a particularly frustrating issue that may affect some of our customers.
Years ago when I first developed iForum for iPhone, I uploaded it under the App Store account for "Avianware, Inc" - a company started by myself and two other developers who were all developing apps independently but pooled our resources to manage our apps on the App Store. Late last year I also began adding apps to the Mac App Store, ArraySync, ArraySync Client, ArrayShaker and Tilen.
Earlier this year, the original founders parted ways and I filed a new incorporation under a different name, The National Software Laboratory or "NaSoLab". Apple had originally said that the process for changing the name on the app store (where iForum and four other Mac apps are sold) would simply require the faxing of incorporation papers and dissolution papers (of the old company).
Well now, it seems that wasn't the whole story. The dissolution papers for the old company do not make any mention of property and products being transferred to the new company, a stipulation that was not mentioned earlier and is now required. Because of this, Apple is so far refusing to allow a simple name change. Instead, they want us to delete all the apps from the App Store, close our existing account, rebuild them all with different Bundle IDs (the way apps are identified to the app store which I'm not allowed to re-use for whatever arbitrary reason), enroll new Mac and iOS developer accounts, re-upload the apps and wait for the standard approval process.
This means three things. First, all our apps (including iForum) would disappear from the App Store, potentially for a few weeks. Secondly, anyone who downloaded any of our apps in the past will no longer get updates. Instead, you'll have to delete the old version and go re-download the new version. Third, any and all links to any of our software on either of the App Stores will be broken, and require updating.
At this time I'm still waiting for a response from a higher appeal board to give our case special consideration. However, so far it's seeming less and less likely we'll be given an exception. If it comes down to it, I'll be offering ArraySync customers a free personal license to activate the web-download version.
So to all our users, I sincerely apologize for this potential annoyance.
Cross posted on the NaSoLab Blog.
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This is just a note that I've fixed a weird bug that showed up in iForum recently that basically broke all of the back buttons at top of the screen. So if you've noticed that, it should be working correctly now.
On the website site, I've added the title of the most recent post to each forum menu, to get a better sense of recent activity across all of Info-Mac from any page. Nifty!
As always, if you encounter any problems or have suggestions let me know.
The Buyer's Guide has been updated for this week's updated MacBook Airs, Mac Minis, Mac OS X Lion, and the Thunderbolt display.
The Buyer's Guide has been updated to reflect this month's new iMacs. A little delayed, but better late than never.
Apologies for the slow and/or unresponsiveness of Info-Mac today. Our host, DreamHost, seems to be suffering an apocalyptic hardware meltdown that is affecting tens of thousands of websites across the interwebs.
Hopefully this will be cleared up soon.
So here it is, the new Info-Mac website! It's mostly done, except for the user control panel area which I still have to work on. But yeah, this one has been a long-time coming. From 2007 until now, it's pretty much been an HTML nightmare of nested tables and PNG images. No more - this one is table-free and makes extensive use of the latest CSS has to offer.
Some highlights:
One of the best new pleasantries is the way easier navigation. You can now access every discussion folder from the black navigation bar at the top, and it even tells you when there are new posts and topics.
Just below that, a nice location bar that tells you hierarchically where you are at all times.
From each topic page you can Like or Tweet any topics that you find interesting enough to share (and please do!) - sharing topics will do wonders to help bring more activity to the community.
After mulling about it for awhile, Info-Mac also sports a fluid-width layout. It will beautifully stretch to match your browser resolution.
So, feel free to look around, send some feedback, and enjoy the totally redesigned Info-Mac.
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2011 is slowly creeping westward across the planet. Hope everyone has a fun and safe night tonight. So long 2010!
Here's wishing all Info-Mac members a joyous Christmas holiday season. Hope everyone is with family and friends this weekend.
When iForum came out, a lot of users began entering iPhone emoji characters into their posts. These are special unicode characters unique to the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (and a few other mobile devices) that show up as little pictures. Until now these would appear as blank placeholder characters on web browsers not running on iOS.
Now all that has changed. Below you will see real iPhone emoji rendered correctly... on any device! The website converts the emoji unicode into HTML images for web browsers, while iForum users will still see the native iOS emoji. Awesome!
©®™
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A new version of iForum, 1.0.8, has been approved by Apple and should appear in the App Store shortly. This version has been recompiled with 4.2 SDK and should give improved performance especially for those using iPads with multitasking.
Enjoy!
The Info-Mac Buyer's Guide has been changed to reflect this week's MacBook Airs and iLife updates.
Some posts have been censored or deleted recently that may have left their authors confused as to why. It's never appropriate to start a topic on the forum suggesting users reply to the topic elsewhere or via email. So, don't make posts that say "contact me at xyz@abc.com to answer my question." Besides the security matters involved with posting your email address on a publicly indexed website, it defies the point of having a centralized collection of information if all the answers are given elsewhere.
Please help the community prosper by conducting the full conversation here. We all benefit in the end.
Thanks!
iPhone 4's new HDR (High Dynamic Range) camera mode is very awesome. Let me tell you why...
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The Info-Mac Buyer's Guide has been updated to reflect all the current Apple offerings. The Mac mini, Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, iMac 21.5", iMac 27" (Dual), iMac 27" (Quad), Mac Pro (Dual), Mac Pro (Quad), Mac Pro (8-Core), iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, and iPhone 4 have been updated.
Please comment with any errors or suggestions.
This past weekend, we were finding it curiously impossible to play our iPhone 4s on an iPod Hi-Fi. Older iPhones would play, but first warn us the device wasn't intended for use with iPhones. This time, there wasn't any playback at all.
Surprise surprise, it turns out iPhone 4's thinner profile was the culprit. Gently pushing the iPhone 4 "forward" in its seat solved the problem. Some quick, imaginative modifications rendered our player for the three-day Labor Day weekend camping trip.
I spent a few hours finding sources and giving the Info-Mac article on Wikipedia greater depth and detail. If you have a moment please take a look at it and see if you can improve it in any way. Make suggestions to the Info-Mac discussion page on Wikipedia. Remember, Wikipedia is an academic resource, not an advertising medium. Thanks!
I was notified earlier today that Info-Mac has been selected as phpBBHacks.com's "Featured phpBB" for the month of August. phpBBHacks.com is a resource for users of the phpBB forum CMS, a heavily modified version of which powers everything you see here at Info-Mac.
Congratulations to us!
Those of you subscribed to the Info-Mac Digest received three identical emails today. This is because our host decided to test their broken announcement list system with our email list. Sorry for that!
iForum 1.0.7 has been approved by Apple and is now on the App Store. This version corrects the issue with crashing on iPhone OS 3.1.x devices. Enjoy!
There are four timeline pages that display the latest content from different sections of the site. They are Community, Blog, Headlines and Classifieds. Previously, they showed all latest posts. Sometimes, when a topic is very popular, they would dominate these pages. This has been changed.
Now, the Community timeline page will display only the latest post from every recent topic. Each topic is represented only once. This allows more exposure for topics that aren't as popular.
The Blog, News and Classified timelines have been modified in a similar way, but these pages show the first posts from these topics.
This change appears in both the website and in iForum.
iForum 1.0.6 was approved by Apple last night and is now available in the App Store!
New features:
- iPad/iPhone universal
- iPhone 4 optimizations
- Refreshed user interface
- Supports all orientations
- New control panel section
- Greatly reduced connection errors
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For the next few days several sections of Info-Mac may display improperly or behave unexpectedly as a new theme is installed. The new design is pretty slick and should improve everyone's usability and enjoyment of Info-Mac.
If you have any comments or questions post them here. Your patience is appreciated!
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The Info-Mac Buyer's Guide has been updated to reflect yesterday's Mac mini and next week's iPhone 4, some of the specs for which are still speculative. If you can clear up the fuzzy areas let us know.
Here's a recap of the new stuff from WWDC. Images taken from various resources and are copyright their respective owners.
Uses external structure itself as part of antennae system. Phone is 24% thinner... "Thinnest smartphone on the planet"
326ppi "Retina Display" - highest in any phone ever
Apple's in-house A4 processor + advanced battery = very long life. Just look at that internal structure!
New gyroscope + existing accelerometer + appropriate developer APIs = 6 axis motion sensing.. "With Gyro enabled rotation is insanely better."
Ridiculous new camera system. 2 cameras, HD video, LED flash and LED video light, 5 MP photos with new ultra-high quality sensor for really stunning photos. Full iMovie editor for iPhone... really too much to list related to the cameras.
iPhone OS 4, lots of new end-user features and tons and tons of new developer APIs. Enhanced enterprise support. Renamed iOS.
iBooks comes to iPhone, brings feature parity with iPad plus some new features and new integration capabilities. Now some love for PDFs!
iAds for developers. Won't go into detail about that here.
Video calls. Like, not with Skype. Can switch between portrait and landscape, front or rear cameras. WiFi only for now, cell network later... "Apple going to standards body tomorrow to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Wow!
iPhone 4 available June 24. 16 GB = $199, 32 GB = $299. New accessories available too. iOS 4 available for older models June 21 without super crazy iPhone 4-specific features obviously.
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The Buyer's Guide has been updated to reflect today's minor polycarbonate MacBook update.
I've created a Facebook page to promote the end of Flash and adoption of HTML5. Check it out here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Web-Wit ... 744?ref=ts
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