In a previous post, I talked about how OSX Lion has helped make sharing my office’s internet connection over wifi easier. When I have my Mac broadcasting the connection, I can help cut down on the costs of 3G data by using WiFi on my iPhone and iPad when I’m at work. But when it comes to using iMessage as a replacement for text messaging, this creates a problem.

You see, unbeknownst to me, my company’s network blocks the ports that iMessage uses to send and receive data, thereby disabling my ability to receive messages from anyone on iMessage. The fact that this happened without my knowledge was a big problem.

I planned on meeting a friend for lunch and she said she’d message me when she was finished her meeting. Almost half an hour went by with no messages and I thought her meeting was going long. When I left my desk to use the washroom, my iPhone went out of range of my Mac’s WiFi and switched back to 3G. Boom! I get three messages from my friend saying she’s finished her meeting, asking to meet her somewhere and then wondering where I went.

What are your experiences using iMessage over a company network or public WiFi? Have you had the same problem? Leave a comment.

Since I became an iPhone owner a couple years ago, I’ve always found that jailbreaking has opened the ubiquitous device up to some really cool features not otherwise available in Apple’s walled garden. But as of late, with iOS updates flying fast and new features cropping up, I have found reason after reason to return my phone to its vanilla glory. With the release of the most recent version of iOS (5.0.1), I decided to give an un-jailbroken iPhone a try.

Here’s a quick list of some of the reasons why jailbreaking might be a thing of the past for me.

• Personal Hotspot – prior to the wireless carriers agreeing to free their data connections from the bounds of mobile devices and allow them to be tethered to laptops, desktops and anything else that will accept a bluetooth/wifi/USB internet connection, the only way to share my iPhone’s 3G connectivity was to jailbreak and run the fantastic MyWi application. But now with Personal Hotspot, there’s just no need to jailbreak in order to share a data connection. The only limitation to this is that on my 3GS, sharing over wifi isn’t supported with Personal Hotspot, but that’s only really a concern when I’m sharing a connection with my iPad, which so far has been a rare occurrence.
• iBooks - it just straight up doesn’t work on a jailbroken iOS 5 device. There are fixes/workarounds, but I’d rather not have to spend a bunch of time messing around in Terminal / iFile to make a 1st-party app work. Boourns to that.
• App Updates - this is a touchy subject, because one of the things you can do with a jailbroken iPhone/iPad is use cracked applications. Sites like apptrackr state that they are “for application trials, and nothing else”, but in the same breath they admit that the majority of their users come to the site to pirate. Full disclosure, I’ve done my fair share of “application trials”, but after a while of using the app, I either lost interest and deleted it, or found it useful enough to warrant the average $0.99 – $2.99 price tag. The main thing that pushed me toward legitimate app purchases – it simplified the updating process – with cracked apps, there are no update notifications, and the latest versions of apps might take weeks to show up in a cracked format. When I moved to iOS5, this became a major headache. Legitimately purchased apps are the way to go, hands down. I believe Apple’s system of selling Apps through the App Store defeats piracy the same way iTunes has done a lot to combat music piracy – something Steve Jobs mentioned when the iTunes store first launched.
• Performance - while jailbreaking your device doesn’t necessarily slow it down, as soon as you install any application that requires Mobile Substrate, (like my favourite jailbreak app, BiteSMS) you can be certain of a drop in performance, especially when it comes to opening or switching applications. This is especially noticeable on my aging iPhone 3GS. I’ve seen a marked speed improvement this week since upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and staying away from jailbreaking.
• OTA Software Updates - I don’t know if this is a byproduct of jailbreaking or not, but the OTA update for 5.0.1 failed on my iPhone and iPad, both of which were jailbroken at the time. I’m hoping the next round of updates go smoothly on my vanilla iOS devices.

One marked improvement I’ve seen on my iPhone 3GS since upgrading to iOS 5 is that it has improved the speed of installing multiple apps or app updates from the iTunes App Store. In iOS 4 or earlier, each app would download and install one at a time, making installing updates for many apps a sometimes slow process.

In iOS 5, however, apps will download and install simultaneously, speeding up the process of installing many apps or updates. More specifically, what happens now is that once an app is finished downloading and begins installing, iOS immediately begins downloading the next app in line. This process of installing and downloading in tandem noticeably speeds up the process, which is good for those of us who are constantly updating the many apps installed on our iOS devices.

Kevin Rose posted on his Google+ page October 15, 2011 that he envisions iOS to include push updates for apps in the future. He doesn’t have any inside information on whether or not this will actually come to fruition, but I’m certainly with him as far as the idea is concerned. Everyone with more than just the stock iOS apps will agree that it’s a pain to have to manually poll the App Store to see if there are updates for your apps.

To take it one step further, I imagine App Store updates could happen automatically on all your devices, just like photos show up in your photo stream now. The apps are already stored on Apple’s servers, so it would just be a matter of including an option to turn on automatic updates. With all the money Apple’s been spending on servers for iCloud, I’m pretty sure they could handle the extra bandwidth of sending out push notifications.

UPDATE: I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Google on this post and I imagine many of you are looking for instructions. So I’ve embedded a video from YouTube user chr15b that shows you how to enable internet sharing on Mac OS X Lion.

One thing I happen to do every day when I come to work is to share my office’s internet connection with my phone. The connection comes in to my MacBook Pro through Ethernet and I then broadcast it to my phone over WiFi using the Sharing options in System Preferences. It’s a really easy way for me to cut down on my mobile data use when I’m sitting at my desk, since my office doesn’t offer a WiFi connection.

The unfortunate part of this happy little feature in Snow Leopard is that when I go back home and try to connect to my WiFi network there, I have to go back into System Preferences and turn off internet sharing so my Airport would go back to receiving mode instead of broadcasting. This was not a major annoyance, but certainly something that, after a long time of doing every day, got a bit tedious.

Sharing Preferences Pane in OS X Lion

After recently upgrading to OS X Lion, I was delighted to discover that this process of constantly needing to toggle internet sharing is a thing of the past. Now I can keep internet sharing enabled, and OS X Lion detects when an ethernet connection is present. Lion turns on sharing automatically when ethernet is connected and turns it off when ethernet is unplugged. No manual toggling required. It just works.

Apple’s been spending a lot of time in the past couple years making innovations in iOS. The iPhone, iPod touch and iPad’s technology has changed the way we interact with devices and now Apple is bringing those innovations back into Mac OS X with Lion, which will be available this summer.

Last time I wrote, I talked about the onset of some really nice desktop apps that have taken over web-based services. One of them was Sparrow, which has since come out of beta and is available in the Mac App Store. At the moment, I think Sparrow is definitely worth the ten bucks, but after seeing Apple’s preview of OSX Lion and the changes they’re making to the native Mail application, I have a feeling Sparrow’s days are numbered.

Sparrow Mail Client for Mac

Mail 5 for Mac takes the layout from its iPad counterpart and, in doing so, cleans up the mail viewing process, much in the same way Sparrow does. Actually, pretty much exactly the same way Sparrow does. This is going to be a problem for Sparrow’s developers, considering that its main selling point was its simplified layout and the great number of features its program lacks in comparison to Apple Mail.

Apple Mail 5 for Mac

So I ask you all: does Lion’s new Apple Mail make Sparrow obsolete? What do you think you’re going to use for email in Lion?

These days, so much of what could only be accomplished offline 10 years ago has been taken to the cloud. So much so, that perpetual latecomers Microsoft have even started doing TV ads on their cloud-based image editing solution. (On a side note, easy-to-use image editing software doesn’t make your kids behave – that ad seems to imply that the software comes up with the nice versions of those kids out of thin air. To the cloud, indeed.)

But now, there’s a slew of new desktop applications that are taking the content in the cloud and making the experience even better. To illustrate, I offer you two of my favourite examples from the past couple months: Sparrow (for Gmail) and Reeder for Mac (for Google Reader).

Sparrow for Mac

Sparrow takes everything I love about Gmail’s speed, organization and never-ending list of additional features and brings it to a desktop client in an attractive package with a small footprint. It supports multiple accounts and takes design notes from Tweetie for Mac, which itself is a port of the iOS client of the same name, which has now become the official Twitter client for iPhone. That evolution serves as further proof that iOS devices are influencing the way we interact with the web, even outside of the supposed “walled garden” created by Apple’s App Store.

The overall design and functionality of the application makes reading email on your Mac akin to reading it on an iPad (a pleasure I have yet to experience, as I’m not an iPad owner … yet). Sparrow is a beautiful and simple solution to desktop email. Right now, it only supports Gmail, but support for other email accounts is coming soon. I’d love to be able to add my MobileMe account to Sparrow. Sparrow also supports the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail does on the web, making the transition from browser to email client even more smooth.

Reeder for Mac

And then there’s Reeder for Mac, another application born on iOS that was ported back to the Mac (on a related note, I think Apple is really on to something with their next release of OSX). Reeder is an RSS reading application that syncs with your Google Reader account and presents articles in the simplest, most readable fashion I’ve seen. It supports all the same keyboard shortcuts as viewing my reader account on the web, allows for quick sharing of articles, animates smoothly through the browsing/switching of stories and overall just feels great to use. It’s the best reading experience you’re going to experience outside the iPad.

You can see that both these apps take cues from mobile app design – easy-to-use column-driven navigation, big easy-to-read fonts and smooth animations to transition between items. If desktop applications keep moving in this direction, there comes a point when the platform no longer really matters. All we’re concerned with is what screen we’re viewing the content on.

I know these are just two examples of great applications that take information in the cloud and turn it into something even better on the desktop. What apps do you use on your machine that enhance your experience of consuming information from the web? Leave me a comment!

For all its sheen, power, sophistication and adaptability, the iPhone’s core applications have been a source of annoyance for me. Safari doesn’t render pages all that quickly, the SMS app doesn’t allow group messaging or show photos for contacts (something that biteSMS does quite nicely) and the calculator app lacks simple functions like a tip calculator for restaurant visits.

But none of the native iPhone apps irk me more than the Calendar. I can get by with slow page renders and finding another app for tip calculation. But I don’t understand why Apple hasn’t made any significant improvements to the Calendar app over the last couple releases of iOS, or even in an App Store Update.

So here’s my list of beefs with the Calendar app, simultaneously acting as a list of feature requests for future versions.

1. Locations should be links to the Maps app. If I enter a location into an event in Calendar, I should be able to click that location in the event details and have it pulled up in the Maps app. So many other apps do this: Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook Places – need I go on? It makes no sense that this feature doesn’t exist.

2. Default Alerts. Not all events are the same, I get that. I may not need to be notified an hour in advance to call someone back, or to get groceries on my way home from work. But what gets my goat is that nowhere in the Calendar app or the Settings app on the iPhone is there a place to set the default amount of time in advance to alert me that there’s an upcoming event in my calendar. This means that if I’m quickly entering a meeting in my calendar, and I forget to set an alert, I’ll never be notified in advance of it happening. How is that functional?

3. No Weekly View (and no landscape view). One of the things I like about Google Calendar (and Outlook, although trust me, there are few things I like about Outlook) is that it shows me my week at a glance – I can see the work week ahead and map my time accordingly. When I go to my phone, there’s no such option, and it would be so simple to implement – just turn your phone to landscape orientation to see the weekly view. I prefer typing in landscape as well, and the Calendar app denies me that convenience.

So, there you have it. I know it’s not a long list, but I do think there could be some serious improvements made to the Calendar app. Come on, Apple – don’t let this become one of those situations like Microsoft has with Internet Explorer – simultaneously the market leader and the least innovative browser out there.

What do you think should be added/changed? Leave me a comment below. And if you’re looking for alternatives to the iPhone Calendar app, here’s a great list.

Facebook launched its location-based service today, called Places. I’ve been reading about it on Mashable, TUAW and pretty much every other tech blog in my Google Reader for weeks, months even. So now that it’s finally here, I was excited to download the new version of the Facebook app for iPhone and give it a try. And this is what I found.

This feature will be available in my region soon? Thanks for nothing, Facebook. I hope they’re not taking time to add a bunch of locations before they launch – they should let users populate the locations, like Foursquare does. And on that note, apparently Places will integrate with Foursquare, Gowalla and other established location-based social networks. So if Foursquare has a litany of locations in my locality (aliteration FTW), why doesn’t Places feed from that? Foursquare has an API, after all.

Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Until then, Facebook Places remains a much-hyped mystery.

One of the great new features of the iPhone 3G S is its ability to record video, and the fact that it lets you trim the clips after you’ve recorded them. However, that’s where its native video editing capabilities end.

Video Edit's project editing screen

Enter Video Edit, an application by Winnipeg developers DHI Inc. Video Edit allows you to easily cut together multiple clips, trim them inside the application, and render them to a new clip, which you can then send to YouTube, email, post on a blog, Facebook, Twitter et cetera.

I got an early look at Video Edit and my experience with the application was good. The editing was quick, easy and the rendering time was fast, as promised. I found only a few shortcomings, which I’m sure will be addressed in later versions of the app.

• You can’t delete project files. Creating a project is easy enough, but when you’re finished rendering it, if there’s no further edits or additions to make, you’d think removing it from the project list would be an option. Not so.
• While every other part of the application operates in either portrait or landscape mode, the Camera Roll screen forces portrait mode.
• Uploading clips to YouTube or posting them to other sites must be done outside the application in the camera roll, after you’ve rendered the clip. I’d like to see an option to upload it inside the application directly following the render.

Video Edit employs help overlays to get you started. It's so simple you barely need them.

But that’s it – just three small gripes on an otherwise great application that fills a much-needed gap in the iPhone’s functionality.

For more info on Video Edit visit www.videoeditapp.com. To be released June 2010.

Recently I acquired a lovely new 2009 Acura CSX, which I have really enjoyed driving these past few months. One of my favourite features of the car is that it has a USB port which I can plug my iPhone into and play music through the factory stereo system.

However one significant beef I have with this option is that the controls on the factory system are terrible for selecting music. I have 3770 songs in my library, and scrolling through them with a slow-to-react wheel is definitely not the most efficient method of selecting music. Especially when I need to do it quickly and get back to keeping my attention on the road.

To circumvent this problem I’ve gotten into the habit of picking an album or playlist before I get into the car and then plugging my phone into the USB port. Once that happens, you relinquish control of your music to the car’s controls, which, as previously mentioned, are shitty.

But I shouldn’t have to do that. I want to be able to quickly find what I want to listen to and get on with the driving. I hate to say it, but I think Ford’s Sync technology actually does a great job of this.

One way that I like to listen to my music, and maybe this is weird, is to put my library on shuffle, find a song from an album I like, then turn shuffle off to hear songs from that album. I can’t do this in the CSX, though, because it sorts songs by song name and not by album.

My solution is to create a playlist with all the songs in my library sorted by album name as opposed to song name. It should allow me to do what I want to do – scan through a bunch of songs until I find the one I want and then turn off shuffle to hear that album.

Despite my grief with using the system this way, I should say that the USB port in the car is a really amazing feature and something that sold me on the car originally.