WiFi Questions and Answers

Macworld recently ran an article testing various theories surrounding WiFi. Most of them are not that surprising except for the remarkable increase in range with a home-brewed tin foil antenna booster. The one question I have is how well that booster works in a 360 degree survey. It looks like it would be great in one direction and dramatically decrease range in the other direction. If you’ve centrally placed your antenna in your home (like you should) I’m not sure how useful this is.

Home Screen: Jeff Richardson


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It’s been several years since I featured the home screen of my friend and New Orleans Attorney Jeff Richardson (Twitter). Jeff writes the iPhoneJD blog and is a leading voice the community of Apple-using attorneys. So Jeff, show us your home screen.


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What are some of your favorite apps?

I typically have lots of different meetings, phone calls, etc. every day, and I like the way that Fantastical displays my entries in a list format. It is also much faster to enter new appointments in Fantastical. Having said that, I still use the built-in Calendar app enough to keep it docked to the bottom of my screen.

Twitter has become one of my top sources of news — both news from the “real world” and iOS-related news that I keep track of for iPhone J.D. Tweetbot is my favorite Twitter client, and I use it so much that I moved it down to the dock a few months ago. I also use Feedly to keep track of my RSS feeds, mostly for iOS-related news, and the Feedly app on my iPhone is quite useful.

When I am driving, I typically listen to either podcasts, using Apple’s Podcasts apps, or music. When I listen to music, I use FlickTunes because it makes it easy to swipe the screen to change songs. FlickTunes hasn’t been updated in a long time — it still is not formatted for the longer screen on the iPhone 5/5s — but it does the job.

I use 1Password all the time — on my PC at work, my Mac at home, my iPhone and my iPad. Obviously I use it to store usernames and passwords (which, thanks to this app, are virtually all complex passwords). I also use it to store other confidential information.

And I frequently use LogMeIn Ignition, a quick and easy way to access my PC or my Mac when they are not in front of me.

But that just scratches the surface. There are 425 apps on my iPhone at current count. For example, I have a set of apps that I use all the time when I travel, including Apple’s Passbook app (I love using a digital boarding pass), TripItFlightTrackProGateGuru and the Delta app (that airline I fly the most). For just about any app beyond the first screen, I don’t pay much attention to what screen the app is on and instead I simply search to find and launch the app. I’ve grown to really prefer the iOS 7 approach to Spotlight because it is faster to flick down from a screen then to navigate to the first page and then swipe to the left.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

This changes all the time. Last week, for example, I enjoyed playing the new version of Dragon’s Lair for the iPhone, but that has more to do with me still feeling that sense of wonder from when I used to play and watch others play that groundbreaking arcade game in the 1980s. For a while, my wife and I would play Letterpress all the time.

What is the app you are still missing?

As a lawyer who writes documents in Microsoft Word every day, I’d love to have a full-featured Word app for the iPhone and iPad, one which includes a track changes redline feature and doesn’t mess up the formatting in my documents. The Office Mobile app released by Microsoft earlier this year is a start, but it needs more features. In the meantime, I use many other apps to fill the gap including Apple’s Pages app and the DataViz Documents to Go app, among others.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

What key do I hold down on my iPhone’s keyboard to get the Infinite symbol? Seems like it should be the 8 but that’s not working… 

Jeff…try Control+Command+Space in Mavericks. -David

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone?

I often think of my iPhone as being an extra brain. Thanks to a number of apps including Reminders, 1PasswordVesper, Notes, and Calendar/Fantastical, my iPhone remembers everything that matters to me so that I don’t have to worry about forgetting something. And thanks to a number of apps including Safari, Siri, Maps, Messages, and Mail, I can use my iPhone to quickly get answers to things that I need to know. Thus, I can devote my pre-installed brain to analyzing and acting upon that information.

If you were in charge at Apple. what would you add or change?

I’m intrigued by the idea of wearable computing. I’d love to have a virtually invisible, wireless earpiece that can tell me information about the world around me without me needing to look down at my iPhone screen, such as reminding me of a person’s name and other key information as soon as I see them, letting me listen to podcasts or music wirelessly and without any distracting hardware, etc. If Apple were to take something with the promise of Google Glass, give it the polish and ease-of-use that Apple is famous for, and then make the whole thing unobtrusive so that it is easy to wear and you don’t look ridiculous doing so, Apple would have a real winner on its hands. The signs that Apple is currently working on some form of wearable computing are undeniable, which is exciting because at some point I suspect that Apple will produce something similar to, and at some point far beyond, what I’m imagining.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I work at a large law firm, currently over 300 attorneys. When I started in 1994, we were one of the few large law firms to use Macs, but for a variety of reasons including lack of law-related software for the Mac, we switched to PCs in the early 2000s just like every other medium/large law firm. Today, thanks to the iPhone and the iPad, almost every attorney I know is now using an Apple device for both work and play, something that I never would have predicted a decade ago. Indeed, the device that sits on my office desk might have the title of “personal computer” but my iPhone and iPad are easily as sophisticated as any computer and are far more personal. I am thrilled to once again have well-designed, Apple-quality hardware and software in my life, I am excited to see where Apple takes the iPhone/iPad in the future.

Thanks Jeff. 

 

Pixelmator 3.0FX


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Last week the Pixelmator team released version 3.0FX of my favorite pixel pushing application. When I think of the hundreds and hundreds of dollars I’ve spent over the years on other photo alteration apps, I cringe. Version 3.0 adds a liquify feature, which my kids have already used to melt my face off pictures, and layer styles to quickly apply shadows, inner shadeows, gradients, reflections, an similar alterations on a per-layer basis.

The underlying engine also got an overhaul and is noticeably faster. They also opened a can of Mavericks on this version adding support for several new Mavericks technologies including App Nap and Compressed Memory. This is a free update if you’ve already bought it. You can find Pixelmator in the Mac App Store and on the web.

 

Fantastical 2


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I’ve been having lots of fun with the newly released Fantastical 2 for iPhone. This calendar application got an iOS 7 redesign and it looks great. The new version now supports reminders and a much appreciated light theme, which fits in better with iOS 7. Flip your phone into landscape mode and you’ll find a good looking week view. 


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Fantastical’s premier feature has always been its parser. It is even better in the new version. You can type (or speak) in plain language and Fantastical creates an event. Now you can even create events with repeated formulas like the second Tuesday of the month. It now also can create reminders by starting sentences with “reminder”, “todo”, “task”, or “remind me to.” 

The new version supports Background App Refresh, Dynamic Type, and 64-bit support for the iPhone 5s. After a day of use, I’ve put it in my dock. The app is on sale for $2.99 but the price will go up to $4.99.

 

 

Transporter Sync


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Transporter just released a new device called the Transporter Sync. It is a $99 device that you can attach to any USB storage device and turn it into Transporter cloud storage. It has all of the benefits of the traditional Transporter device of your own personal cloud storage with no subscription fees. The difference is it gets rid of the built in hard drive and attaches to your existing storage. You can plug it into a thumb drive, an external drive, or even something really big like a multi-terrabyte Drobo. All of this costs you exactly 99 bucks. I think I’m going to buy one and attach it to my Drobo and put it all in my personal cloud. We could have our 12 years of digital photos on all of our devices this way. Crazy. If that isn’t enough for you, there’s a Sandwich Video.

Apple Mail and Gmail

There is quite a bit on the web the last few days about Apple Mail’s support (or lack thereof) for Gmail. Joe Kissell has been at the front of this over at TidBITS. In my mind Apple Mail and Gmail have never been like chocolate and peanut butter together. They are, in reality, much more like oil and vineger. Apple Mail has matured and developed into a pretty terrific IMAP email client. The rules engine is unmatched and features like VIP and Smart Mailboxes have become essential to me.

The problem is that Gmail is not an IMAP service. Neither is it POP. Gmail is something entirely … well … Google. While in the past people have been able to get Gmail working in Apple Mail it always involved copious amounts of scotch tape and chewing gum. Apple has never had any interest in building in support for things like Gmail labels and inbox filtering to Apple Mail. Why would they?

If you use Gmail, you should be using all of its features. Google has done some really useful things in their email sandbox over the years. You will never be able to use those features in Apple Mail. So my advice is to get over it and move on. Use the browser for your Gmail accounts or something like MailPlane, designed around Gmail.