Micromat’s TechToolPro 6 is the bundle headliner this time around, offering some of the most comprehensive diagnostic and repair tools for your OS X system available anywhere. TechToolPro 6 is the most recent version and normally retails for $99.99 on its own. It checks your drives for potential errors or signs of failure, helps you rebuild your disk directories and optimize performance, plus recovers data from corrupt drives.

Another highlight is Postbox 3, the latest iteration of one of the best options out there for power email users who aren’t satisfied with what the build-in Mail.app offers. It’s a better fit and better designed than Microsoft’s Outlook for the Mac, and it’s a great Gmail client, too. The only downside is that there is no Exchange support, but it has a load of organization and filtering features that make tackling even the most unruly of inboxes a much easier task. Postbox 3 is normally $30 on its own.

One more app on the list that merits closer inspection is Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s a few years old now, but the game really stands up well despite its age. RPG fans will love it, especially if you enjoyed the first installment or if you’re a fan of games in the Diablo vein. Ordinarily, Neverwinter Nights 2 retails for $20 on the Mac App Store.

There are eight other apps in the bundle, too, as well as one more for the first 15,000 buyers. There is something for everyone, including the FontPack Pro Master edition, which ordinarily retails for $300 and includes every typeface designed by the SummitType font foundry (handy for designers), and Hear, an app that adds audio equalizer options to every app on your Mac (nice for the audiophiles in the crowd).

The deal lasts until Dec. 21, so you still have another 16 days to decide if it’s tantalizing enough to merit your hard-earned cash.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Find My Friends. A new app that lets you locate family and friends who agree to share their location with you on a map. This is included free in iCloud, and you have lots of controls over privacy, including setting specific times for sharing.

Find My iPhone. Introduced under MobileMe, it’s included free with iCloud. Lets you track your registered devices should they get lost. Now works with Macs, too, under Lion.

Free email. iCloud borrows the Me.com domain from its predecessor to provide free email addresses to anyone who wants one.

Contact, calendar, reminder, bookmark, note syncing. Automatically, in the background, all the content listed as well as email will be synced across iOS 5 and Lion devices, so long as you’re signed in, have an active network connection (Wi-Fi or 3G) and have syncing turned on.

Photo Stream. View photos taken from your iPhone automatically in your iPad’s image gallery, or in iPhoto on the desktop, or on your Apple TV. Basically, take a photo once and have it everywhere. Photo Stream automatically takes your 1,000 latest photos and keeps them on iOS devices, plus you can opt to keep them in your Camera Roll permanently.

Documents in the Cloud. Shared libraries of cloud-based document storage will make it easy to start a document in an app on your iOS device and continue it on the desktop, or vice versa. This will gradually make its way out to third-party apps, too.

Backup and automatic downloads. You can now restore purchases of apps, books and music (U.S. only for now) to devices associated with your Apple ID, and also set them up to automatically download content you purchase elsewhere. Finally, you can back up your device’s settings, data and apps directly to iCloud and then restore from that should you need to do a fresh install.

5 GB free; storage upgrades available. Everyone gets 5 GB of iCloud storage (including your email, backups and other data) free, but if you need more you can pay to get it. $20 per year gets you an additional 10 GB of storage, $40 gets you 20 GB more and $100 secures 50 GB for a total of 55 GB.

iCloud will be available to all iOS 5 users when that update arrives on Oct. 12, and to Mac owners running OS X Lion at the same time.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo
• Why Dropbox shouldn’t move to the enterprise space

1. Reeder

Most of us likely do a lot of reading on our Macs. Reeder for Mac is a great way to make that reading even more of a pleasure. The RSS app ties into your Google Reader account, and syncs read and unread status Google and with Reeder for iOS devices. The Mac version was already a lot like the iPad version when it first came out, and with full-screen support in the latest version, it’s even more so. Grab a coffee, but leave the newspaper on the table; Reeder with full-screen active provides a distraction-free environment for catching up with all the latest.

2. Screens

When you need to remotely access your computer, there isn’t always an easy solution, especially when you’re trying to connect from the road. Screens (combined with Screens Connect for hassle-free remote access) is a great way to quickly and easily setup and manage VNC access between Macs. With full-screen support, working on your home computer away from home (or your work computer from home) feels even more like you’re actually working on the target machine, since everything you see is on the remote Mac.

3. Fluid

I noted this update when it arrived, just ahead of Lion’s release, but it’s worth noting again. Fluid provides the ability to turn any website into its own, dedicated Mac app by creating a site-specific browser (SSB). Facebook, Google Docs, and Google Plus are all favorite Fluid apps of mine, and full-screen support means I can keep them even more safely contained away from more productive, work-related apps and content.

4. MarsEdit

If you’re a regular blogger with multiple sites on the go, you’ve probably heard of the Mac standby MarsEdit. It’s a blogging client that’s compatible with most major blogging services, including Blogger and Tumblr, and it’s a native Mac app. MarsEdit’s latest update allows you to compose and edit posts in full-screen mode, which means you can get down to writing in a much more distraction-free environment.

5. Sparrow

Apple’s new Mail app in Lion remedies a lot of the problems many users had with it, and brings some nice new features as well, but that doesn’t mean it’ll feel right for everyone. Alternatives are always appreciated, and none maybe more so than Sparrow, a nice light native email client originally designed for Gmail. Sparrow now works with most other email services as well, and it has a refreshing simplicity that Apple’s own offering can’t match. Plus, now that it has full-screen support, it provides a great environment for catching up on your correspondence in a really focused way.

Those aren’t the only apps with full-screen support, but they are my favorite. What are yours, and which would you like to see get the update that don’t have it yet?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T
• Here Come the Social TV Apps
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide

A full-screen world

While it may seem a largely cosmetic feature, in Lion, full-screen apps are assigned their own space and get pinned to the top of the screen when you access Mission Control. You can access Mission Control to see all your spaces by swiping up with three fingers. You can also swipe from space to space by swiping to the left or right with three or four fingers. Depending on how you’ve assigned your spaces in Mission Control, it may be quicker to access other apps than cmd-tabbing. One downside, though, is that multiple apps running in full screen can’t occupy the same space. The biggest downside to full screen is losing the ability to drag a file from the Finder to a mail message as an attachment. Naturally, if I kick it out of full screen I can drag attachments in just fine, so it isn’t a huge problem.

Conversations

If you’ve grown to like Gmail or Outlook’s message-threading features, you’ll also like how it works in Mail. If there’s a conversation, you’ll see the latest mail message in your Inbox and a counter in the lower-right corner of the preview telling you how many messages are in this conversation.

Each conversation looks like the above screenshot. While you can’t make the page graphic (message boxes with a raised, shadowed appearance) go away — setting “show classic view” in Preferences only changes how the Inbox list looks, not the conversation messages — I quite like the look.

Better searches

Apple advertises searches as being better: Simply type in anything you can remember and you should stand a better chance of finding what you’re looking for. Using a slew of search phrases I had great results. The only time it got stymied is when I searched “word attachment.” It can search for messages that have attachments, just not apparently the app attached to it. I couldn’t find an easy way to search all of my mailboxes at once; the best I could do is all of the Inboxes, which doesn’t do me any good if the mail message is my All Mail Gmail folder. For that, I found creating a Smart Mailbox was the best way to search everything thoroughly.

Cosmetic touch-ups

There are a few cosmetic items that are welcome additions. One is the ability to hide frequently quoted text, so you don’t get long email messages that also contain the previous 10 emails in the chain. You can also see the first two lines of the email in the message list, too. There’s a new Favorites bar that lets you pin frequently used folders to the top of the screen and displays the unread-messages count. Heavy folders and rules users should appreciate this.

Final thoughts

Mail in OS X Lion gets a much-needed upgrade. Mail was one of the Lion changes I was looking forward to, and it hasn’t disappointed me. I haven’t run into any of the problems I’ve encountered with previous versions (endlessly updating Inboxes, messages that refuse to be marked as read, messages that refuse to be sent, SMTP servers that refuse to be remembered). If, like me, you’re a heavy user of OS X Mail, I think you’ll like this new version.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

The just-released Postbox 2.0 introduces a handful of new features that include Quick Moves, a Focus Pane, Quick Replies and better Conversation Views.

The threaded Conversation View is pretty well done with quick reply buttons readily available to respond to any particular email within the chain. I also really like the Inspector Pane that gives you some shortcuts, including all the links contained within the email thread.

The Focus Pane is all about organization. Quickly navigate to emails that match a date or topic, or are unread. If you want to deal with an email later, drag it to the “Later” topic and come back to it or click on “Today” to see emails only from today. The idea is that if organize your mail better, you’ll save time and be free of distractions.

Speaking of distractions, you can post directly to Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed from the menu bar also.

Pros:

Conversation View is very well done, with quick navigation, and the Inspector Pane could be very useful for link-happy users. Organizing mail into topics is accomplished quickly by dragging and dropping. The Focus Pane drills down to what’s really important. Keyboard shortcuts are a time saver for those who like to keep it old school.

Cons:

It’s $40, and the free Apple Mail works well enough for most. Organizing mail into topics requires commitment, and not all users care that much. There’s also no Exchange support. This is disappointing, considering Apple Mail has it built-in and business users can be notoriously organized when it comes to email.

Summary:

Postbox 2.0 supports POP and IMAP protocols, but has no Exchange support. There’s a 30-day trial, and it’s $40 if you want to keep it after that. If Apple’s Mail isn’t quite delivering and you need more organization, Postbox is probably the solution for you.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace
• Four Ways Facebook can Conquer Mobile
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2

According to MacStories Fernando Valente, a Mac software developer, emailed the Apple CEO questioning him on whether or not such a service would become a reality. After the email was sent, Valente, like many others, was not expecting a response. But much to his surprise only a few hours after sending it, he received one. The email from Steve Jobs was brief and to the point, simply stating that “nope,” no such service is on the way.

Fernando’s email was sent following last week’s widespread rumor that such a service was on the way. The rumor hinted that the speculated Mac App store would follow the same principles as the current iTunes store, with a strict approval process also in place.

However, Steve’s typically candid response has finally set the record straight, no doubt to the dismay of some, but to the delight of others. There will be no Mac App Store. At least not in the foreseeable future.

Would you like to see a Mac specific app store selling approved OS X software? Let us know in the comments.

The Setup

1. First off, you’re going to need a Gmail account. You can either use an existing one or set up a new one. If you want an existing Gmail account to be part of your new universal inbox, I’d suggest using that one instead of setting up new one and having to fetch mail from there as well. If you need to set up a new account, you can do it by going to the Gmail homepage and clicking ‘Create an account’.
2. Once you’ve logged into your account, locate the Settings page, the link to which can be found in the top right corner, next to your email address. When it has loaded, open up the Accounts and Import tab.
3. Set up your first email account for Gmail to check for you by clicking ‘Add POP3 email account’, which is the third white button from the top. This opens a new window for you to input the details of the email account you want to be checked.

Getting Gmail to Check Other Accounts

1. The first thing you need to enter is the email address for the account you want to be checked. Then click ‘Next Step’.
   
2. Another screen will appear asking for specific details such as username, password and server settings. If you are unsure about any of these options, your service provider will most likely have a help page. It will most likely be a page explaining how to access your emails from a desktop client, however you can use this information as well. Once you have added your information, click ‘Add account’.
   
3. You’ll be taken to another screen asking if you want to send mail from the account you’ve just set up. Whether you want to or not is up to you (you can always change this later). If you decide not to do this, any emails you send from your iPhone will have a From line as your Gmail account.
   
4. If you do decide to do it, you’ll be prompted to enter a few more details about your email account. This is not crucial to this technique, however, so I won’t be going through this.

Your Gmail account will now check your email account and pull in any emails that come through. You can add up to five accounts for Gmail to check, so this will accommodate almost everyone’s needs.

Access on Your iPhone

Now that you’ve got Gmail putting emails from other accounts in its inbox, you’re mostly there. All you need to do now is set up Gmail on your iPhone so that you can check it from there.

1. Go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars under the Settings app.
2. Tap ‘Add account’ to add the Gmail account.
3. Tap the Gmail logo to have your iPhone automatically set up the server settings that always stay the same for Gmail accounts.
   
4. Enter your details and tap Save.

Your Gmail account is now all ready to go on your iPhone and you can access it through the Mail app. If you check your emails then Gmail should have imported some of your recent emails from the other accounts, and any new emails you receive will be in the same inbox.

Conclusion

Obviously this isn’t the same as a proper unified inbox — Gmail only checks other email accounts for new mail every hour. This is the next best thing though, and it’ll get you by until Apple announces the official feature in the next iPhone OS. The upside is it doesn’t cost anything and you can get it now.

Welcome to a new monthly series from

As a small business owner/sole proprietor, connecting with customers is hard. There are all sorts of communication tools available, with social media being the most prevalent today. However, as old-school as it might seem, email is still the killer-app for the web. And, given that, you must have a strategy to connect with your customers via email. Thankfully, there are many tools on the Mac available to help you do just that.

What type of email campaigns might you use? Some examples might include:

• Marketing Slicks
• Press Releases
• Newsletters
• Advertisements
• And more

For the purpose of this article, let’s look at both Pro editions of Direct Mail from e3 Software and MaxBulk Mailer from MaxProg. Both applications are relatively easy to use, although I found Direct Mail to be a little easier to work with overall. Each version has more features than their basic counterparts. To see a comparison list between the standard and pro features, please read here (Direct Mail) and here (MaxBulk).

Direct Mail Pro 2.2.3

When you first launch Direct Mail Pro, you receive a warning about sending SPAM. This is noteworthy, because of the two apps, only Direct Mail Pro mentions this as a potential issue.

SPAM nanny screen from Direct Mail

Upon agreement, you are presented with the main application and can see the options available. Direct Mail Pro automatically detects and uses any email accounts already present on your computer. To get started, I created a sample email (I copied the HTML from another email) and then added Mail Merge tags for the date and first name (there are tags available):

Direct Mail Initial Window with an example Email - credit comes from U2.com

Direct Mail Pro integrates with the Address Book, Microsoft Entourage and Daylite (as well as others) so that you can easily add users or groups. Once the users are added, click Send Message…

Direct Mail Pro includes (for a significant upgrade fee of $60) an email delivery service if you would rather not use your own email account.

Send Message Dialog Box

After you click Send, you’ll receive another SPAM warning. In some ways, this is irritating, although I can understand the precaution from the developer. Frankly, there should be an option to not see this dialog box.

SPAM nanny dialog box, round II

With the included e3 Delivery Service in Direct Mail Pro, you can track emails and view reports that include the email message, statistics, any hyperlinks, if the email was received by its audience as well as any potential bounced emails:

Direct Mail Pro History Tab with Reports/Results

MaxBulk Mailer Pro 7.1

When compared to Direct Mail Pro, MaxBulk Mailer Pro is a similar, yet different animal. MaxBulk takes a more hands-on approach to solving the email campaign problem. There is much more configuration involved than Direct Mail Pro, and with that configuration comes a little more flexibility.

There are no SPAM warnings when you first run MaxBulk Mailer Pro. The application window is very similar to Direct Mail Pro in that you have main some main tabs and simple toolbar for managing your email creation. In the example below, I have created a plain text email and provided some initial tags and specified formatting.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro Message Window with Tags

Unlike Direct Mail Pro, you do have to configure your email settings in the Settings tab. This is more cumbersome and can take some trial and error to ensure you have the right configuration prior to sending your message. Further, there is a preview tab that displays what the final message will look like and allows you to render your message in a browser.

Once your message has been sent, you receive a confirmation email with the relevant statistics:

MaxBulk Mailer Pro Delivery Report

A unique feature to MaxBulk Mailer Pro is that you can configure your own server to process the results of any email campaigns you send (this takes a little more configuration and advanced knowledge of database and FTP setup). Compared to Direct Mail Pro which includes its e3 Delivery service (and for a $60 premium), this is a nice feature.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro MLM Installation Dialog Box

Conclusion

Are you a do-it-yourselfer or do you like tools that do the work for you? If you’re the former, then I recommend MaxBulk Mailer. If you’re the latter, then I recommend Direct Mail Pro. Of course, there are other factors you need to consider, including:

Pricing

• MaxBulk Mailer Pro is $59.90, which includes the ability to track email messages that you set up on your own server.
• Direct Mail Pro is $119, but it includes the ability to track email messages, handle bounced emails and more without any extra work on your end.

Application Integration

• Native: Apple Address Book, Microsoft Entourage, Apple Mail, CSV files and more.
• Via a separate plugin, you can import contacts from Marketcircle’s Daylite as well.

As for me, I chose Direct Mail Pro. I find the product is more polished and it makes email creation and management easier. In the end, I don’t think you will fail to accomplish your customer communication goal with either program.

FTC Disclaimer: Not-for-resale copies were provided for this review.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Public Cloud Will Dominate Enterprise IT — One Day
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

So, it’s a bit disjointing when a few errant notes are played out of tune. If you’ve managed to survive this disaster of a metaphor this far, you know I’m talking about Bad News. A few numbers-heavy reports this week present us with news that, if not entirely bad, is at least disappointing…

According to Electronista, NPD Group reported this week that the Blackberry Curve — of all things! — kept the iPhone 3GS from the title of first place handset in this summer’s smartphone handset sales in Northern America. Verizon’s “Buy One Get One Free” deal is said to have been the culprit; it not only offered two handsets for the price of one but also lowered the average selling price of a ‘feature phone’ handset from the same period the previous year ($88 down to $85). The iPhone 3GS and the older 3G took second and third spots respectively, which is not too shabby considering they were only beaten-out on price.

Devious Droids

More recently, Verizon’s wily ways have proven (again!) to be bad news for Apple’s smartphone. In its BrandIndex report last week, YouGov announced that Motorola’s Droid had a loyalty score of 29.3 among younger men, easily beating the iPhone’s score of 22. Why is Verizon to blame for Motorola’s success? YouGov say that loyalty scores for Motorola remain largely unchanged, so they attribute the success of the Droid to Verizon’s cunning ad campaign that has very openly criticised AT&T’s spotty 3G coverage and poured scorn on the iPhone, decrying its closed software platform, low-resolution camera and lack of multitasking ability.

Might not sound so bad, but consider that just prior to Verizon’s ad campaign, the iPhone’s loyalty score was running at a high of 48.1! It seems obvious that Verizon’s advertising was hugely effective; irrespective of whether or not the Droid is a superior platform, Verizon managed to significantly influence customer perception.

Hungry Hungry Handsets

It’s not all bad news, not really; according to a recent study conducted by AdMob and reported by Hardmac, the iPhone has captured 50 percent of the world’s 3G network bandwidth. Other mobile OS’s are trailing far behind it seems, with Symbian taking second place with 25 percent share. Android takes third place with 11 percent and RIM and Windows Mobile fail to make double digits.

I said it’s not all bad news, but the carriers might disagree with me. They’re suffering at the hands of smartphone-wielding customers and their bandwidth-hungry handsets. AT&T has been gradually upgrading its 3G network to try to cope with the added strain of millions of data-hungry mobile devices but it’s an expensive upgrade that will take years to complete. But, still — nice to know we iPhone users are being a nuisance and shaking things up a bit for The Man!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview

The email, as quoted by 9to5 Mac’s Seth Weintraub, says:

Just reading again – where did anyone promise tethering by EOY? Where did you see that? We promised MMS by end of summer and ended up being a few days late for that…

In their defence, 9to5 Mac was channeling reports from TechCrunch and CNET which got them to arrive at the “before end of year” conclusion. You can hardly blame them — CNET’s headline in November 2008 read “AT&T confirms tethering coming to iPhone in 2009.” That’s pretty unequivocal as far as assertions go, right? Yet, I don’t recall anyone from AT&T sending CNET a snippy email in the interim…

Last week I wrote how AT&T told the Wall Street Journal that it needed ‘more time’ to work on tethering functionality. I also mentioned how AT&T’s CEO Ralph De La Vega said, way back in 2008, that tethering would be available “soon.” A year later it’s not unreasonable to wonder just what De La Vega’s definition of “soon” might be.

Add together the history of dropped calls, patchy 3G coverage and recent reports that the company might start throttling data for iPhone users, the snarky email above only adds to the sorry state of affairs at AT&T. However kindly you may choose to interpret that email, there are countless ways it might have been more professionally composed.

For a company still enjoying exclusive distribution and service rights for the iPhone across America, (and the prestige and profits that partnership with Apple entails) its performance in the last two years can only make us hope Apple is considering offering the iPhone to other cell carriers willing (and actually able) to do the job properly.

In any case, while the email doesn’t specifically deny tethering will become a reality this year, it certainly makes the proposition sound unlikely. AT&T announced last month it is working to expand its network, and have invested heavily in the hardware upgrades necessary to do so. That’s welcome news to long suffering customers, but those upgrades aren’t going to be completed until the end of 2011.

Or, as Mr De La Vega might put it, “soon.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories

Reported today on Electronista, the survey from TNS claims that of the 1,000 UK residents polled, a whopping 26 percent claimed they will buy, or probably will buy, a Palm Pre following its debut on the O2 network on October 16. That’s compared with only 16 percent who expressed a desire to buy the iPhone when it was launched two years ago.

Furthermore, a stunning 32 percent of consumers currently signed to other carriers expressed a desire to switch to O2 in order to get their hands on Palm’s beleaguered new device.

The report from TNS states;

While awareness of the Palm Pre is lower than that of the iPhone pre-launch, the figures suggest that once the new handset hits the shelves it has the potential to capture a substantial share of the UK’s smartphone market.

I know what you’re thinking, and I wondered the same thing; are UK consumers horribly uninformed, undemanding digital dilettantes…or is there something more to these results than first meets the eye?

A Rare Positive Sign for Palm?

Electronista suggests the apparent eagerness to get a Pre may lie in the fact that O2 is offering the handset for free with a two year contract. When the iPhone launched, O2 charged £269 ($426) for Apple’s paradigm-shifting handset. Says Electronista:

The study if reflective of the wider UK market would be a rare positive sign for Palm, which has struggled to maintain attention for the Pre in the US and has only exported the Pre to Canadians until the pan-European launches this week

I’d love to know more about the socio-economic and geographic distribution of the sample TNS polled. Sadly, there’s no such explanation, beyond a single line at the end of their summary that reads, “Online study of n=1,003 adults aged 16-64, October 2009.” I asked TNS for more information, but never heard back from them. (If they do get back to me, I’ll update this article appropriately.)

Kevin Evans, Associate Director at TNS Technology, adds:

With other promising new launches including Vodafone 360, MOTOBLUR and next-generation versions of Windows Mobile also challenging the iPhone’s position as the dominant mobile multimedia platform, this is an exciting time for the industry and a great time to be a consumer.

Really? It remains to be seen whether the Vodafone 360 and MOTOBLUR platforms provide a truly compelling route into smartphone adoption — they’re mostly built (and marketed) around the aggregation of social networking services and multimedia consumption. These features might attract young consumers unable to afford an iPhone, but I’m skeptical that this price-advantage will afford them a “substantial” share of the UK smartphone market.

And as for the “next-generation versions of Windows Mobile,” (I must tread carefully here, so as to avoid the accusations of “Fanboy!” in the comments below) WM7 has been so often delayed that at this point, it’s more accurately labeled vaporware than considered potential competition to modern smartphone platforms. I’d like to think that Mr Evans had his tongue wedged firmly in his cheek when he suggested Windows Mobile contributed to this being an ‘exciting time’ for the industry.

I’m all for competition shaking up the market (after all, strong competition is the only thing that drives downs prices and keeps products from stagnating), but I have to question just how representative of the UK market these results can truly be. So, with that in mind, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that, 12 months from now, the exciting shake-up of the UK smartphone market, as promised by this report, will not have come to pass.

In the meantime, I wonder how many publishers and broadcasters will run with the results of this survey, citing it as ‘evidence’ the iPhone has had its day?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview

But now, as August finally draws to a close, there’s news that some investors might have been a bit naughty in their dealings with Apple shares. And the Securities & Exchange Commission is very keen to get to the bottom of it.

Reporting yesterday in the Huffington Post, Dan Dorfman says that he has obtained copies of internal SEC documents from what he calls a “regulatory contact” that show the SEC is investigating trading that occurred in four very specific periods of time, suggesting that more than one violation in trading may have taken place. Wall Street sources, he writes, have speculated that:

“…the agency’s investigation likely centered on possible trading that may have been based on the illegal use of inside information involving three particular Apple-related developments.”

The SEC is asking very pointed questions. It wants to know:

• Whether anyone got an illegal lead on precisely how sales were faring on key items in Apple’s highly successful Ipod product line.
• Whether anyone was given a precise insight into the health of the company’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, a cancer survivor who took a six-month leave of absence last January and then received a liver transplant. Subsequent questions about the viability of his health then led to a great deal of volatility in Apple’s shares.
• Whether anyone had exact knowledge of when specific releases would be made by the company with regard to Jobs’ health or Ipod sales and pretty much of an awareness, as well, as to what those announcements would say.

Dorfman adds that a trader told him that he saw “uncanny” trading taking place at Apple. “[I]t almost looked at times like the buyers and sellers were working at the company,” he quotes the trader as saying.

Coincidentally fortuitous buying and selling happens from time to time. But on four separate occasions? However this unfolds, you gotta admit that August has been a tumultuous month for the boys and girls in Cupertino.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

What You Will Need

• Your Mac
• Your iPhone (it needs to be jailbroken)
• PlistEdit Pro (or another application capable of editing plists)
• Coda (or another application for editing HTML)

Before We Begin

To use a custom CSS signature, we will be modifying a preference file on your iPhone. Simply using copy and paste within the new 3.0 OS will not maintain the HTML and formatting of our signature. Your iPhone should already be jailbroken and capable of mounting as an Apple File Protocol (AFP) share on your Mac. For instructions on this process, see here.

Step One

Once you have logged into your iPhone over AFP, browse to the following location:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences

Copy the file com.apple.mobilemail.plist to your Mac. Go ahead and duplicate this file, appending “backup” to the end of the filename so you have a clean copy in case something goes wrong.

Step Two

Open your email signature that we created (see the original post here) in your HTML editor and copy the contents to the clipboard.

Step Three

Use PlistEdit Pro to open the file you copied earlier in Step One. Towards the bottom of the list, you will see an entry called “SignatureKey.” The value for this string will match your current iPhone signature.

Double-click this value to highlight the contents and delete what’s there. Now paste the HTML code for your email signature that we copied in Step Two. Save this file back to your desktop.

Step Four

Browse back to the Preferences folder on your iPhone. Copy our new edited plist file and replace the original on your iPhone.

Step Five

All done! Create a new email and you should see your HTML email signature at the bottom.

Limitations

Unfortunately, due to limitations in the iPhone 3.0 OS, Mail on the iPhone only supports one signature. There are third-party applications available on the App Store that address this issue, but I have not tested them with HTML email signatures. Hopefully in a future OS update, Apple will allow users to have unique signatures for multiple mail accounts.

This process and file location has remained the same since iPhone OS 1.1.4 and will likely remain the same, meaning as new OS updates come out, they should not break this functionality (unless Apple adds support for multiple signatures at some point). However, if an update does break your signature, the process outlined above should still work to put it back.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories

Is anyone really surprised?

We know that AT&T and every other cell phone carrier overcharges for service, taking into account the sheer volume of users and how long cell phone technology has been around. Considering how much providing basic cell phone service costs, and how relatively inexpensive it is to add text messages and data support, it’s clear that companies like AT&T stand to make a pretty penny.

I mean, honestly; it costs an extra $20 a month for unlimited texting in addition to $30 a month for “unlimited” iPhone data usage. Really? Text messaging costs two-thirds the price of always-on, feature rich email? Emails that support video, audio and images; something iPhone users still aren’t getting because of a lack of MMS support. There’s just no way the pricing structure is based on the product.

Looking at the Big Picture

The WSJ report reveals that AT&T’s profit margin for its wireless services are considered high at 25%. It makes sense, considering many people likely pay extra for hefty plans (data, text, video, etc.), when the actual impact on AT&T’s network is marginal. Granted, sometimes coverage is spotty and “crowded” but the fact is, that’s not because we’re causing too much strain on the network, it’s because AT&T should be investing in making these networks more interoperable with others and capable of carrying more users, but is instead price gouging customers for increasingly horrible service.

Are they taking advantage of us? Yes. We know that. (Even David Pogue agrees with his “Take Back The Beep Campaign”) So why on earth would AT&T quietly stand aside and allow Google Voice, since it represents such a dramatic shift from the norm? Google knows that voice calls and text messages are very easy on bandwidth. AT&T knows that allowing Google to steal its profits marks the end of an era. Landlines gave and continue to give ground to cell phones, and customers are switching to VoIP services or other mediums like Twitter or Google Voice for communication. Cell service might be next on the chopping block, if something like Google Voice is allowed to take root and grow.

The Future

Can AT&T reinvent itsefl and survive? The economy is tough, so now is the perfect time to be daring and really focus on your customers. Or will AT&T continue to overcharge and stifle innovation like Google Voice and other services? I personally hope that we will move towards a better future where carriers will play nicer with each other, with other services, and with other emerging technologies. For example, wouldn’t it be great if when I was at home, my iPhone routed calls over my Wi-Fi connection instead of over the “crowded” network? It might alleviate some of AT&T’s service outages. Things like this are possible, but only in consumers wield their power and demand that carriers provide them.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview

As any person who frequently uses email will tell you, email signatures are very important as they usually provide more information than just a standard name and email address from the sender. You can spice up an email signature since Mail offers support for HTML signatures. If you are fairly comfortable with getting your feet wet with HTML & CSS, they are a snap to create. Read on for how you can make one!

A Note on iPhone Support

This how-to is written specifically for Apple’s Mail in OS X. Also, these signatures will display on an iPhone, but currently there is no method (aside from jailbreaking) to support these signatures on outgoing emails originating from an iPhone. Depending on the amount of content in your email signature, you may need to further tweak the CSS to get something that looks the way you want it to. For those who have already jailbroken their phone, look forward to an upcoming article on how to accomplish these signatures on your iPhone.

Let’s Get Started

Here is a quick example of what we will be creating.

For this how-to, you will need Mail, Safari and some type of HTML editor; my preference is Coda. Our email signature is simply an HTML page with some CSS styling. The code for mine is included below.

<style>
#sig a:link{color: #690;}
#sig a:visited{color: #690;}
#sig a:hover{color: #690;}
</style>
<div id="sig" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;line-height: 14px; margin: 6px 0; padding: 8px; border-top: 1px #999 dotted; border-bottom: 1px #999 dotted; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; font-size: 10px; color: #555;" >

<strong style="color: #690;">Chris Ryan</strong> Blogger, Designer, Thinker & Nerd
web: <a href="http://www.theappleblog.com" style="color: #690; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #999999 dotted;">theappleblog.com</a> email: <a href="mailto:chris@theappleblog.com" style="color: #690; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #999 dotted;">chris@theappleblog.com</a></div>

Copy this code (tweaked for your own purposes) into a new HTML document and save it as signature.html. Now open this file in Safari and inspect it to ensure that everything is correct as you would like it to appear in the bottom of your emails. Be sure and click the links to make sure they work correctly as well (and link to your content and not mine!).

If everything looks good, then go to File and pick “Save As” and save the file as a .webarchive. This is the same format that Mail uses to save your signature files.

Our next step is to go into Mail and create a new blank signature. This is found under the Mail menu and by clicking on Preferences. In the Signatures tab, you can click the plus icon to add a new signature. By default, Mail will pre-populate this signature with your name and email address. What has really happened is Mail has created a new .webarchive file with that signature content. We’re going to replace it with the file we created earlier.

Close the Signature window and quit Mail (changes should be saved automatically). Now go to your home folder and then open the Library folder. Inside you will find a Mail folder and inside of that, yet another folder called, you guessed it, Signatures (Home → Library → Mail → Signatures). Inside of here are the .webarchive files for your signatures. If the signature you created above was the very first one, there should only be one file in here. If you already have multiple existing signatures, you can double click these files and use Safari to inspect their contents.

Locate the file that matches the simple new email signature we just saw in Mail. With the icon selected, press return as if you were going to change the file name. When the file name highlights, copy this to the clipboard (Command + C) and press return again to switch out of file renaming mode.

Go back to the desktop where you saved the .webarchive of your signature file and rename it using the filename you copied to the clipboard. You should now have a file with a very cryptic filename (such as “AAD4FDB4-8AE3-49F2-8079-161E16525CC0.webarchive”).

Now, drag this file back into the Signatures folder and Finder will alert you that it wants to overwrite this existing file. Click “Replace” to accept and when the transfer is complete, your Signature should be ready to go.

Launch Mail and go back to your preferences to verify the new signature is showing up. If you have multiple email accounts setup within Mail, make sure you drag the signature to the appropriate email accounts.

Create a new message and viola! Your new signature is there (or if you do not have them turned on by default, they are accessible from the Signature menu in the upper right area of a new email message window).

One Last Word On Coding

One special piece to note about the example code above is the usage of -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; which overrides the iPhone’s default attempts to re-scale the signature. This was essential in making my signature look best on the iPhone. Again, with the amount of content you have in your signature, you may need to play around with the CSS to get something that displays the way you want when you view your sent or received messages on the iPhone.

Depending on your comfort level with CSS, you can tweak the signature a bit more and even add a small picture. Some HTML based email browsers, like Yahoo or Gmail, will not display this picture by default though. There are other solutions to this, such as using Data URLs to represent your picture and for more information on that, check out this how-to.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Since the first camera phone, the Sharp J-SH04, was released back in 2000, new cell phones have continued to raise the bar by delivering an ever increasing number of pixels and functionality into the waiting hands of mobile photographers. With the arrival of the iPhone App Store and the new iPhone 3GS, the bar has been set higher than ever and emerging iPhonetographers are taking full advantage.

Obviously there are some limitations to the type of images you can produce with an iPhone. It’s not going to replace your DSLR anytime soon, as Duncan Davidson makes plainly clear. But it’s got huge potential as a tool for making great images anytime or anywhere precisely because it’s a tool you’ve always got with you wherever you go. It’s a niche part of the photography market for sure, but serving a niche market is what Apple does best.

With popular services to facilitate image sharing, and with image quality steadily increasing, one can only imagine that this niche will continue to grow while the gap between the camera phone and the dedicated camera continues to close. If Flickr usage is any indicator, it would seem that the iPhone is far and away the most popular camera phone out there. All this despite the fact that its closest mobile competitors offer things it doesn’t, like more megapixels and a built in flash. What accounts for this discrepancy?

Popular Cameraphones on Flickr

It’s the apps!

The three megapixel camera and new touch interaction that came with the 3GS were a clear step forward for iPhonetography. With an intuitive way to quickly adjust the color temperature, focus, and exposure of the image users now have more freedom to capture scenes that will work well within the iPhones limitations. The real power of the iPhone as an imaging device though comes from the amazing applications available for it in the iTunes App Store.

• AutoStitch is an application for creating panoramas by stitching together multiple images taken from the phone. It does an amazing job at connecting the individual photos together and creating a seamless shot. I’m a total amateur, but I took a couple of quick shots from my balcony and had AutoStitch combine them with the result you see below.
  
• Photogene provides a full suite of editing options for your photographs, with features including cropping and rotating, effects filters, and fine tune adjustment of the photos color and exposure. I actually used Photogene to crop the raw panorama image produced by AutoStitch that you see above.
  
• Vint Shift will let you have some fun with the “tilt-shift” effect. If your not familiar with this style of photography, it’s all about simulating a smaller depth of field in the photograph to create the illusion that the scene your looking at is taking place on a much smaller scale. Again, as a total amateur I used Vint Shift to snap the photo you see below.
  
• CameraBag lets you apply a set of filters to your photos so you can recreate historic camera styles. CameraBag provides 11 styles in all including:
  • Helga: A square-format tory camera with washed-out highlights and old-school vignetting.
  • 1974: This is your father’s camera. Faded, tinted, and hip.
  • 1962: Dynamic black and whites from the photojournalists of a bygone era.
  • Mono: Smooth gradation from black to white.

  

These are just a few of the over 1000 photography related applications available in the iTunes App Store, with more showing up everyday. It’s not all about the tools, though. Taking great photos takes talent and creativity, but perhaps more importantly, it takes practice, and I also wouldn’t underestimate the role of serendipity and being in the right place at the right time. Which is why I’m so optimistic for the potential of the iPhone as a great photography platform. It has often been said that the best camera is the one you have with you, and if that’s true then I like the iPhone’s chances.

Some great examples of iPhonetography in action

As I said above, I’m a total amateur when it comes to photography, so I wanted to include some links to people who are truly taking advantage of all that the iPhone has to offer when it comes to mobile photography.

• Trelvix
• Sion Fullana
• Greg Schmigel
• Paul Goodman
• iPhoneography
• iPhone Flickr Group

If you’re aware of others who are pushing the envelope of iPhonetography, or if you have a favorite photography app you’d like to share, please add it to the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities