Reading up on Sparrow Creator

March 6th, 2012

I’ve been using the free version of Sparrow on the Mac for a few months now. Why? Well, I was turned on to Postbox, a pay-for-a-free-email-client-based-on-Thunderbird by a friend of mine at Wayne State University a few years back. I liked it quite a bit because it offered features that weren’t part of Thunderbird and didn’t seem to be part of their roadmap. Since then, Thunderbird added the whole unified inbox, as the queues were taken from smartphones with their unified inboxes. Thank you RIM. Yes, RIM, not Apple nor Google)!

Well, Sparrow takes the whole e-mail client that should be free (those that come with your OS or Thunderbird) and makes it a bit like Twitter. Quick and to-the-point. No frills. It’s very slick.

Now, Sparrow is on the verge (no pun intended) on releasing (if approved) an iOS app to make e-mail much simpler. Dom Leca of Sparrow talks about it here, in this article. He mentions some of his ideas and also talks about what Google did wrong with their GMail app. Me, I find the GMail app pretty weak. It’s nothing more than a wrapper to a browser-based GMail client. I never thought it was very sophisticated nor did it gave me any reason to use it over the native mail client on my iPhone 4S. Also, if the search in the mail client is adequate, I never use the GMail app. I simply go to GMail in Safari or Atomic.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

March 5th, 2012

So, all I wanted to do at the end of last week was get Windows 8 Consumer Preview a quick ride around the block. Well, I tried to install it on my work PC with Microsoft’s Virtual PC, no luck. I tried to install it with Oracle’s Virtual Box, no luck.

I don’t want to have to mess around with VMWare Workstation (at home) nor do I want to mess around with dual booting. I guess I’ll have to give it a quick go with one of the aforementioned methods after all, though.

I had the very early version installed on my old work computer under VMWare Workstation, booted into it once and was, “meh”. I wonder if the consumer preview will float my boat a little bit more. I am most curious about the mail app. Is that weak? I kind of wish they’d do with the mail app what Apple did with the iMessage OS X app and let you install a beta version.

Is the installation and testing of new OSes something people look forward to? I guess you can do the same thing with Apple if you’re an Apple Developer ($99). It’s not free, but for the diehard Apple Developer, it’s close enough to being free. Well, maybe not, as Apple only charges $99 for their OS (IIRC).

If I do actually get Windows 8 installed, I’ll write something about it.

UPDATE: I realized I missed my mark of trying to write a post every week. Hell, I didn’t write a single post during the leap year month of February. Shame on me.

Dropbox for Google Docs

January 19th, 2012

So, on my way into work today, I was thinking, “Why isn’t there a desktop integration for Google Docs in the same way there is one for Dropbox?”

All it took was a 93ms search and the result was Insync! Not only is Insync the solution I was looking for: A desktop folder that is synced with Google Docs, but it can do this with multiple Google Accounts!

Taken from their site, here is some info about Insync:

Why should I use Insync over Dropbox?

Way cheaper storage — Google charges $0.25 per GB/year and Dropbox charges $2.00 per GB/year. That’s 8x difference. Plus you can get 20GB for $5/year.
Extensive sharing features…
- read/write + read-only sharing permissions
- nested sharing
- share recipients are not charged against their storage quota
- re-sharing permissions
- individual file sharing
Multiple Google account support (personal, work, school, org, etc.)
You can use Google Docs web to edit docs online

Insync is 100% free. How do you make money?

We plan on making money via premium features. Example: secure remote wipe of local GDocs.

What does “Perform these operations when I’m not using the application” mean?

It just means that if you are offline, Insync still has access to your GDocs to perform operations. It doesn’t mean Insync has forever access. By the way, you can revoke access to Insync at any time using your Google accounts page.

Why does Insync need access to my Google contacts?

We use your contacts to faciliate auto-completion when you are sharing.

What’s Insync’s favorite song?

That’s a no brainer.

Beware IE7 Standalone on Windows 7!!

December 6th, 2011

So, I wanted to test something at work using IE7 as a standalone app since you can’t have multiple versions of it running in Windows (we’ll get to this later). I had previously been using IE7 Standalone on Windows XP and loved it. I had no idea it would hose some file registrations in Windows 7.

Luckily for me, there was an exact post/article that led me to a fix. Thanks pyrocam.com!

I did run into a few hangups while running through the registration batch file, having to kill regsvr32.exe a few times, but who cares. I can now go back into explorer.exe and right-click Computer.

iPhone 4S Upgrade Woes RE: photos

October 17th, 2011

I installed iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 about a week earlier than the Oct. 12th release date. Loved it. Used the new album creation (like tagging really) to make a bunch of “albums” that made it easy. I digress. Anyway, I picked up my 4S on Friday. I took one last backup of my iPhone 4 at 835am EST on Friday.

I restored the 4S from the backup taken at 835am.

Later in the day, I noticed my Camera Roll was empty (well, it had 4 photos I took with the new phone to test the camera’s optics). NOTE: I DO NOT have iTunes set to sync my photos on the phone with anything on my computer. I just grab photos from my iPhone from time to time with either Windows’ native importer (into Live Photo Gallery) or Picasa or even Lightroom.

I tried to restore my phone again from the iPhone 4 backup, but it didn’t exist. I thought I’d try to make a backup of my 4S, just to see if it would end up showing all backups. iTunes only showed my iPhone 4S’ backup.

I started looking through my phone and noticed that its last iCloud backup was about 1.8GB in size. When I showed its details, I noticed that it had 1.5GB of photos. Crazy!!?!?!?!? I did a little more digging and found out where iTunes stores its backup files (for Windows Vista/7) here: C:\Users\_______\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync. There were 8400 files here, none with an extension.

I copied all of those files to a new folder and appended .jpg to their filenames. What this did was show me which of these were photos. Take note: There will be JPG files here from your phone’s app and browser cache, but you can have Windows (or a 3rd party app like Picasa) display the photos sorted by their dimension. This way, you can see the photos you took with the phone’s camera which are something like 2592×1936 (taken on an iPhone 4) in resolution. Icons from apps and the web will be smaller, like 320×240, and similarly small in resolution.

The files will look like this. The highlighted file, when copied to a new folder and adding the .jpg at the end, does in fact show up as a photo!

So, at this point, my photos have been saved, but they are not back on my camera, not in their own folder/album, and not in my camera roll, where I really want them to be.

In my digging, I also found iPhone Backup Extractor. This is a clever piece of software that goes into your iOS device’s backup on your computer and lets you extract out specific items, like photos, for example. I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS. I only tried the unregistered version, which would only pull out 2 items per extract. Since I was able to manually get to my photos, I ended up not buying this app. It does look VERY useful and helpful though. Something to consider having in my IT toolbox (yep, I’m that guy…the one who helps their family and friends).

The Blog of Peter Filias