First of all, you’ll need to open up Automator (Applications > Automator) and create a new Service by double-clicking the Service icon. If you don’t see this option when Automator starts, go to File > New and the new workflow screen will show.

At the top of the right-hand panel, there are two drop-down lists. Change the first to say URLs and leave the second on Any Application. Leave the Replaces selected text box unchecked.

Now, in the left-hand column, under the Utilities category, find Run Applescript and drag it over into the workflow on the right.

In the right-hand panel, replace the placeholder text in the Run Applescript action by copying and pasting the following script:


on run {input}
set inputResult to (input as string)
ignoring case

if (((characters 1 thru 4 of inputResult) as string) is not equal to "http") then
display dialog "Invalid URL"

else
set curlCMD to "curl --stderr /dev/null \"http://bit.ly/api?url=" & input & "\""
set tinyURL to (do shell script curlCMD)
return tinyURL

end if
end ignoring
end run

Next thing to do is add a Copy to Clipboard action from the Utilities category underneath the Applescript action. This grabs the output from the script and copies it to the clipboard ready for you to paste wherever you want.

Finally, you need to save your Service so that you can access it in other applications. Call it something sensible like “Shorten URL” or “Send to bit.ly” so that it’s obvious what goes on when you run it.

Once you’ve saved it, you can test it out by selecting a URL, right- or control-clicking and choosing the name of your service (in my case, it was “Shorten URL”).

Once you’ve activated the Service, wait a couple of seconds while the script contacts the bit.ly API, then paste into your browser. You’ll see that a bit.ly URL has been created, and if you follow it, you’ll be taken to the original page whose URL you originally selected.

If right-clicking isn’t your thing, and you prefer using the keyboard, you can go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services and set up a keyboard shortcut. Now when you have text selected, just use that keyboard shortcut and you’ll get your short URL.

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I realize you can open a PDF, drag another PDF into the Preview window, and combine in that fashion, but in my experience, there’ve been issues with cross-platform compatibility when using this method. I turned to Automator, and within a few minutes, had a pretty simple and effective way to solve the problem.

1. I decided to create a Service rather than a standalone application or workflow, so it would be accessible from anywhere I may end up in the Finder, at any time.



2. Since PDFs were my focus, I set the service to target them while browsing from the Finder. You can obviously play around with these settings to do different things, depending on your needs.



3. The first action to drag into the editor is the heavy lifter here, and is very clearly named: “Combine PDF Pages.” I’d prefer they append to one another rather than shuffle them together.



4. At this point, I thought I was done, but when I would run the Service against a couple of PDF files, I had no idea where the resulting file ended up. For some reason, it wasn’t in the clipboard, but rather, was in some non-accessible directory of OS X. So added the “Move Finder Items” command into the editor, and the result was just what I wanted.



5. Finally, select the files in the Finder, right click, and choose your newly-created Service from the Services submenu. The resulting PDF shows up as some gibberish file name, right on the desktop.

Automator is a flexible tool, and can be made to do so many of the random tasks that we find need for on a daily basis. Hopefully, this simple solution will kickstart the process of creating your own custom workflows, as well.

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24 hours later it was still misbehaving, but by that time I’d finally snapped and decided to look into it. A call to O2 resulted in a recorded message that was played before the usual welcome message; “We are experiencing some difficulties,” an overly sympathetic voice cooed, “We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this might have caused.” (I’m paraphrasing, of course).

I didn’t stop there — I asked the mighty Google for more information, and it turns out those ‘difficulties’ affected quite a number of O2′s customers, both iPhone and otherwise, judging by the 20-odd page discussion that was raging on O2′s official support pages.

Tech news site V3.co.uk published several notices from O2 during the outages, which began rather hopefully:

We’re sorry that some mobile customers have had problems with data today – these services will be back up tonight.

…but ended on a decidedly more sullen note;

The system fault has been fixed and internet connections are gradually being restored. MMS and Visual Voicemail remain affected. We’re working on these as a priority.

Thankfully the problem was cleared up reasonably swiftly. Something to do with incorrectly assigned IP addresses, or leaves on the line (trust me, if you’re British that’s hilarious!)

While some tech sites are reporting on the data outages in London in much the same tone they would AT&T’s lackluster services in New York or San Francisco, I must offer my own (admittedly anecdotal) evidence to the contrary; my partner and I are both iPhone-toting, data-hungry technophiles who just happen to live in London. And this is the first time this year we’ve experienced any truly memorable disruption to O2′s data network. For clarity: I’m not saying we haven’t suffered the occasional dropped-call here and there. We have — at a rate of perhaps one dropped call every other month. You see, when all is said and done, the O2 network is normally exemplary (as it should be, considering how much we pay them).

Still, O2 has been reaching out to its customers, cap in hand, doing that quintessentially British thing…apologizing. In a Reuters report published today O2′s Chief Executive Ronan Dunne is quoted saying:

Where we haven’t met our own high standards then there’s no question, we apologize to customers for that fact. But it would be wrong to say O2 has failed its customers en masse.

The story is much the same here in the UK for O2 as it is for AT&T in the States; smartphone ownership is on the rise and smartphone owners use a lot of data, relative to the amount consumed by so-called ‘feature phone’ customers. The network carriers simply aren’t prepared for this. Historically they’ve never had to provide this much bandwidth and their business models (typically structured into five year plans that don’t change much in-between revisions) simply don’t make adequate (if any) provisions for the scale of network investment and improvement that data-hungry devices like the iPhone demand.

Still, that doesn’t stop their execs bragging about the upgrades that have taken place. From Reuters;

The company [O2] had invested 30 million pounds ($48 million) in its London network to meet demand [...] and 200 extra mobile base stations had been installed.

Sounds impressive, no? But I wonder… that’s an awful lot of money, and an awful lot of new base stations. That sort of massive investment into network expansion was likely planned years ago as part of the company’s long-term growth strategy. Indeed, such a huge investment plan could easily have predated the 2007 introduction of the iPhone, and the subsequent explosion in smartphone adoption.

However, I’m not beating up on O2. It might be feeling the same pain AT&T has so publically suffered in recent months, but at least it’s not reacting the same way AT&T’s CEO Ralph De La Vega did, with barely-concealed threats of data-caps and tiered pricing plans for smartphone users.

AT&T’s message (at least how it comes across to me) has mostly been along the lines of, “You iPhone customers are a nuisance, you’re to blame for all our network problems, so you’ll have to pay us more money!” Conversely, O2′s message reads, “You iPhone customers chew through a terribly high volume of data that sometimes causes us problems – we’re sorry we weren’t ready for that, and we’re working on it”

Color me biased. But tell me you don’t think AT&T could learn something about good PR from their British counterparts.

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• A 2011 Mobile Forecast
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Let’s break down the features of MobileMe see if it’s worth it. The retail price of MobileMe is $99, though discounts abound, but for this article, let’s stick with the $99 price. My calculator app says this comes to $8.25 a month, or a little more than a quarter a day. Pretty cheap, but can you cut it out and save some money? What if Apple sold the features a la carte, like we wish our cable companies would do with channels? With a bit of research, here are what I think are the market rates for each of these features (or at least what I would pay for them).

Ring my iPhone/Display a message (Free)

The ability to force your phone to ring, even when it’s in vibrate mode is nice. However, we all got along OK before that feature was implemented. It’s nice, but I wouldn’t pay for it.

Remote Lock and Remote Wipe ($4.99 per month)

We all know Liz Lemon’s ordeal with her iPhone. While I don’t have adult photos on my iPhone, I do have information I’d rather not fall into the wrong hands. Being able to remotely lock and then possibly wipe my iPhone is really of great value to me. It’s peace of mind insurance and I’ll price it like AT&T’s insurance for other phones. Those who are not as concerned with having their phone fall into others’ hands may not value this as much as I do.

Find my Phone on the Map ($5.00 or combine with Remote Lock/Wipe for $7.50)

AT&T has a GPS service for other phones called “AT&T Family Map” and charges $9.99 to track up to two people. Since this is for just one phone, I divided the cost in half. Being able to find your phone when you lose it is awesome. I value this feature the same as the Remote Lock and Wipe: peace of mind if the phone gets lost. One without the other would be helpful and have pretty much the same value. Combine the two and I expect a bit of a discount.

iDisk (Free for 2 GB, .25 for each additional GB)

Yawn. 20 GB of storage in the cloud. Who doesn’t store data in the cloud these days? Standard pricing seems to be to give two GB away for free and charge about 25 cents for each additional GB (See DropBox or SugarSync). Given the fact that the iDisk tends to be rather slow, I’m not sure I’d want to pay much at all. The “seamless” desktop synchronization of the iDisk can’t match the true automatic synchronization of DropBox and SugarSync

Back To My Mac (Free)

Being able to remotely get files off your Mac? There’s an app for that and it was first developed in late 1980s and was named Timbuktu. In addition to Timbuktu (which still exists), these days there are free products such as LogMeIn Free and VNC (See my review of iPhone remote apps). Additionally, Back To My Mac isn’t 100% reliable, and if you can better rely on other free products, then how much is it really worth?

MobileMe Gallery (Free)

Online photo gallery? Who doesn’t have one these days? Flickr and Facebook fit the bill nicely and if you don’t like those social networking sites pretty much anyone who develops film today will give you a free online gallery, with occasional minor restrictions.

Me.com Email (Free)

Would anyone actually pay for web-based email? Really? With offerings from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, someone has to be really out of the loop to be paying for web based email. Granted, Me.com makes it pretty and easy, but it’s more a matter of personal preference than any true value. Sending large files and sharing them are easy, but countless services exist to help with just that. The average user rarely needs to send a large file that one of these services doesn’t support.

iWeb Publishing (Free)

For those of us who use iWeb, MobileMe makes publishing delightfully simple. You can publish to other sites with a bit of a workaround, and those workarounds are easy to find on the web, so paying for this feature is for people who don’t know how to Google.

Over the Air Syncing ($2.00)

The value of this is based on Verizon’s Backup Assistant program that will back up your contacts for almost any Verizon phone. When we look at the T-Mobile Sidekick it’s included with the service. For syncing files between computers, see Dropbox and SugarSync. Contacts and calendars can be synced using Google as a conduit (See BusySync). Having your keychains and widgets synced is nice, but workarounds with other syncing software allow you to do that as well.

Personally, this is the killer feature of MobileMe for me. I work with a large number of clients and all my contacts and appointments are on my iPhone. Before I can get to a desktop to sync, I’ll often have made a few appointments and might accidentally double book myself if I didn’t have this feature. Sure, I could use Google to do it exclusively but that’s a few extra steps and time is often of the essence for me.

All of it working together as one package (Free or Priceless)

Seamless integration is nice, don’t get me wrong. Would I be willing to pay for it? Not really. I’d rather save money buying the features I need and make them work together myself, manually. For some people, the very reason they bought an iPhone instead of another mobile device is due to the ease of use factor, so for these folks, the more everything works together without thinking about it, the better.

So what’s my personal decision? When I add the Remote wipe/lock/find/ring feature ($7.50) with the Over the Air Syncing ($2.00), MobileMe justifies itself. Other features really aren’t worth paying for. So again, how much would you pay and what features are most valuable for you? Operators are standing by.

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I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.

One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital bits that limit integration. Luckily, a handy application from Waffle Software called ThisService makes creating proper services that integrate seamlessly with QSB a lot easier than you might think.

Being able to extend the functionality of QSB with OS X services really opens up a lot of possibilities. Grab text or files in QSB and pass them on to your services to do whatever you want with them, like creating a new To Do item in iCal. I’ve been focused recently on replicating functionality that I lost when I made the switch over from Quicksilver and I think that this improved service integration will get me about 90 percent of the way there.

The bad news is that this means I need to whip up a bunch of custom services for myself. The good news is that ThisService makes that task very easy. Just give it a script (AppleScript will do, but if you’re more comfortable with other scripting languages you can use those), define the type and name of your service and click Create Service. ThisService handles all the fiddly Cocoa bits and spits out a completed service into your ~/Library/Services directory where QSB will see it and serve it up as an available action when appropriate.

Actually writing your AppleScript will likely be the most complicated part, which is why ThisServices comes bundled with some handy starter scripts to put you on the right path. They also make a number of example scripts and services available for download from their site. The scripts don’t need to be complicated. For example, here is the one I use for adding To Do items in iCal:

on process(input)
tell application "iCal"
tell calendar "work"
make new todo at end with properties {summary:input}
end tell
end tell
end process

If you wanted to get fancy you could pass additional properties like the due date, priority, etc., but just getting a new item into the list is all I need.

Once you have your service setup accessing them through Quick Search Box is as easy as can be. Because showing seems to be more useful than describing, below is a quick little video clip of the To Do service in action. What kind of services would you like to have? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless you really needed to delve into the Services menu (located under the Application menu) you’re likely to never even know it’s there — when I asked a friend to screenshot her Leopard Services menu for this article, she replied “what menu?” That menu was, to put it gently, a bleeping mess. Every service showed up, even ones that couldn’t be used with program or you had little or no use for. Here’s what it looks like in Leopard.

In Snow Leopard, the Services menu now only displays actions that can be handled by that program. You can also choose what services show up, so if there’s one you never use, you can hide it. Services are also contextual and will show up when you right-click on an actionable item like text in Pages or a file in Finder. If you click on a file in the Finder, and then the gear icon in the toolbar, you can also see what actions apply to that file.

In Leopard, I could create a Finder or iCal action, but creating workflows that would work in any application wasn’t very user friendly. You might be able to create an AppleScript, or if you’re a Quicksilver junkie you could create an action for it, but Snow Leopard really lets the average user create tools to enhance productivity. Now that Automator can create Services, it’s really becoming a powerful tool. Also, in Snow Leopard, Automator can now use data detectors, so if you select an address, you can use Automator to write an action that’ll look it up in Google Maps.

I’m going to show you a few services I created today while learning the new tools — as well as a few I got from macosxautomation.com. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do these in 10.5, but how slick and easy it now is in 10.6 is amazing. I can easily see the Services menu now acting as a sort of Macro Central to it make it easy to find my actions.

Emailing Specific Files to Specific People

I’m in a weekly D&D group and we use Wizard’s Character Builder to manage our characters (sadly, it’s Windows-only, ensuring I’ll be a Parallels customer for the foreseeable future). Kelsey, our GM, wants a copy and I’ll send a copy to the guy that hosts the game in case I forget to print them out. I created the service in the screenshot below to automatically attach my characters to a mail message and send them off. Now, regardless of what program I’m in, I can just choose the service I created and email them. I’ve got a few services like this created to email files to frequent recipients.

Lookup Text On Wikipedia

If you’re typing away and you want to look up text on Wikipedia, download the Internet Services action from macosxautomation.com. This will bring up a pop-up window that’ll let you quickly search Wikipedia. In what’s likely an “I’m missing something obvious moment,” I can’t seem to get the action to work from within Safari. While we’re on the subject of Safari, that same Internet Services action lets you create a webpage popup of any page. By default, it presents itself as an iPhone, so you get a small, mobile optimized pop up. This is handy if there’s any web sites you frequently consult.

Browse Your iPhoto Library

This is another one I downloaded from macosxautomation.com. One of the features I love in iWork is being able to browse my iPhoto library and insert a photo into my document. Now, with the Browse Library service, I can have that same functionality in any program.

Weird Glitches and Problems

So far in my admittedly small data sample, I’ve only run into a few issues. I’ve already talked about the Wiki lookup not working in Safari, but I’ve also noticed Automator doesn’t see text selected in Microsoft Word 2008 as “selected text” — no services other than the general services show up in Word (I didn’t try out the rest of the suite). What’s interesting is there are a ton of Office-related actions included in Automator. I’ve had an e-mail discussion with Microsoft’s Mac BU about this and they’re looking into it.

Resources

MacBreak Video has a great session with Sal Saghoian, the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple. I’m constantly amazed at how Sal’s laid-back presentation style actually makes what could be a dry topic easy to follow. He’ll show you some great video examples of what the new Automator can do.

I’ve mentioned macosxautomation.com multiple times, and I’m mentioning it again. This site is promising to be my one-stop shop as I continue to learn about Automator.

The changes in Automator look fantastic. Until now, my Automator usage has been very situational. In Snow Leopard, I’m looking forward to creating workflows I’ll be using daily.

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I’ve said before that my iPhone is the command center for my life, and at the same time noted that there’s no real end-to-end solution that will let me blog across all services on the iPhone. The full-featured WordPress site is unbearable, and the iPhone app for the same just doesn’t cut it. I can use the drafts method to get an article off my iPhone and into a better front end, I can use Tweetie for Twitter, and I can easily email photos to my Flickr account. But I was struggling to find a one-button solution, but now I have: Posterous.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you folks: While we at TheAppleBlog pride ourselves on bringing you All Things Apple, All Day Long, this post doesn’t necessarily require a piece of Apple-made technology to work. However, if you’re like me and just like reading fun tales of how people use their iPhones in their daily lives you’ll forgive me this one transgression.

Posterous is the latest entry to the micro/social blogging scene; its closest competitor is Tumblr. I’ve got a Tumblr account and have found it lacking, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think when I started using it I was trying to force it into being the one-stop solution it wasn’t. I could get my tweets to work with it, and I could get my WordPress account to suck up the feed and Tumblr to do the same, but it always felt like a duct-taped solution. Part of the problem is Tumblr has a counter called Tumblarity which goes up and down as you use — or don’t use — the tool. I’m OCD and that number’s lack of movement bugged the heck out of me because only posts that originated in Tumblr affected that counter; using the feeds didn’t.

Posterous is shining where Tumblr let me down, thanks to a very ingenious tool: email. I tell Posterous what email addresses to accept missives from and it will then happily feed all of my blogging services the contents of that message. It’ll dump them right into my personal blog, create a self-promotional tweet with a link, upload the photo to my Flickr account, create a LiveJournal post, and (something that keeps my OCD happy) create a Tumblr post in a manner that will make my Tumblarity go up.

If you click on this link to my Posterous account, and the links to all the sites I linked to above, you’ll likely see a post with a picture of a very nice motorcycle. That entire post was created on the iPhone and Posterous did the dirty work of cross-posting. So far, the only negative I’ve seen is just when the photo is uploaded to Flickr — I was hoping the message would get added as commentary.

Since my iPhone is always with me, Posterous is letting me carry through on ‘That’s neat, I should blog about that’ inspirations with a tool that requires no set-up or even an Internet connection until I want to upload. I love that I can see a picture of a neat bike on a street corner, snap the pic and in seconds have all of my blogs updated. With so many friends using different blogging platforms, Posterous feels like the Adium of blogging tools.

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• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
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I’m glad I don’t work in Marketing. It’s a troubled, stressful world where there’s no such thing as a “lie” and the customer is considered little more than an uninformed, paranoid bag of walking money. Marketing execs rabbit incessantly about “managing expectations” or “steering brand awareness” and other essentially meaningless buzz-phrases. Either it’s subtle genius, or howling bum-gravy.

Here are a few of the “highlights:”

• Customer experience seems to be high on the agenda, though geared toward Emily, a hypothetical customer broadly categorized as one of three types: Basic Communicator, Productive Connector and Escapist.
• “Reconsideration of the Microsoft brand by consumers” — speaks for itself.
• NikeTown, AT&T, Sony, Nokia and Apple are acknowledged as providing retail/customer service benchmarks that Microsoft could learn from or aspire to.
• A Digital Media Wall is planned that will span the length of the store wall. There are lots of design mockups of what might appear on it. Check out the proposal for details.
• Windows 7, PCTV and Windows Mobile will also get their own dedicated stages.
• The stages will get their own dedicated Microsoft Surface Tables.

There’s a lot more in there besides these few points. Here are a few of the visualizations. No prizes for spotting similarities with the Apple Store. (But, to be fair, how many ways are there to design a retail store that sells computers and software?)

Proposed Windows 7 Stage

Here it's called the Guru Bar. In the proposal it's called the Answer Bar.

If you squint, this looks like an Apple store. What are the odds?!

I found this one odd. Buried in the proposal is a chart that explains which sort of customers use Microsoft’s various services. Bing is said to be for “Search Explorers” and “Search Productives.” MSN is for “Information Seekers” and “Functional Organizers.” Frankly, I’m failing to see how these are truly distinct, different things?

Microsoft was quick to post a comment on the Gizmondo website, saying:

“As a part of our process in briefing creative agencies, we shared some early prototypes and concepts of our retail store plans. No final decisions have been made. As we previously announced, we are on track to open retail stores this Fall.”

I wish Microsoft every success in their Retail stores. I’ll happily visit them to see what techy goodness is on offer. But for what is supposed to be a proposal that should make me want to run out and start building the first Microsoft Store with my own two hands, the language in this document leaves me cold.

“The brand vision: realizing potential. The value proposition for the retail offering and experience is: inclusive exuberance.”

Inclusive Exuberance? Seriously?

OK, I know I’ll be flamed for my criticism. But look — if you think this sort of language is not a screaming insult to human intelligence and dignity… well, then, you’re probably already in Marketing.

For the rest of us looking forward to seeing what these new stores have to offer, we can only hope they’re not as cynical, “corporate” and soulless as this document manages to be!

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There are a few really handy features in OS X that get very little attention — perhaps because they don’t have a snazzy GUI, or maybe it’s because they only appeal to certain users. Whatever the case, Summarize (found in the menubar under the Application menu) is one of those handy features that gets little attention, but delivers big by helping you get to the point.

Think of Summarize as OS X’s way of creating a CliffsNotes version of whatever text you want to read, but don’t have the time to do so. It simply shortens your text into smaller, more readable chunks.

For example, let’s say you really wanted to read Charles’ Mystery of the White MacBook Upgrade Unravelled article here on TheAppleBlog, but just don’t have the time to spare. The article, as it appears on TheAppleBlog, is approximately 565 words. I realize that’s not too terribly long, but hang with me here.

In a Services-aware application such as Safari, Pages, TextEdit, Mail, etc., select the text you want to shorten. Next, visit the Application menu, in this case Safari, in the menubar. Scroll down to Services, and select Summarize. A resizable window will pop up with the summarized text in it.

OS X's Summarize Service feature

The Summarize service offers a slider which allows you to customize how much of the original text OS X tosses out. I’ve found that the 30-50 percent range is a good amount to use. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell exactly what percentage the slider is set at. In my test, the original 565-word article was summarized down to about 350 words. Even when lowering the percentage down into the 25-30 percent range, the gist of the article was still relatively clear — even though most of the details were tossed out.

The two radio buttons in the Summarize window determine how OS X summarizes the text. From what I can tell, using Sentences is the way to go. The Paragraph method appears to simply toss out entire paragraphs in random order.

Now if you don’t feel like using Summarize saves you enough time by itself, you can further your efforts by selecting the text in the Summarize window and go back up to the Application menu and choose Services → Speech → Start Speaking Text. OS X will read the summarized text to you in the default voice set in your System preferences.

Summarize is just one of the many Services Apple built into OS X. If you take a look, you may even notice some of your favorite applications add their own Services as well. And if you happen to be using an application that can’t take advantage of Services, such as Firefox, you can always copy and paste the text into TextEdit and go from there.

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According to a “state official” with knowledge of the state’s efforts, the server farm would represent a $1 billion investment.

The proposed tax changes aren’t just because North Carolina loves MacBooks and iTunes and quite fancies a bit of an Apple super-presence. Rather, the changes are proposed as a means for improving local economy and standards of living. In detail, companies qualify for the tax break if:

• They relocate to one of North Carolina’s poorest counties
• Provide employees with health insurance
• Meet a minimum wage standard
• Waive all other grants and tax breaks from the state

If the new server farm remains active for over 30 years, Apple would have corporate tax savings of more than $300 million. Why 30 years? The state already agreed to a similar incentive deal with Google, which opened a server farm in North Carolina last year, and expects to run the facility for 30 years, making a tax saving of over $260 million.

Software as Services

Apple has been moving progressively toward the Software as Services (SAS) business model for some years now. The iTunes Store and original .Mac products have long required robust server-infrastructure to support (at least in the case of the iTunes Store) millions of requests every minute.

The introduction of MobileMe saw a bold commitment from Apple to provide essential services to customers, and much of the instability and pain users experienced in the days following MobileMe’s launch were possibly due to an inadequate server backend.

The little-discussed, seldom-used iWork.com web-based collaboration service (currently in beta) will also demand a sturdy and reliable server infrastructure. While customers might tolerate the odd, fleeting instability in their MobileMe Photo gallery, a malfunctioning document collaboration service would be unforgivable.

Worth noting, however, is that Apple’s MobileMe and iWork.com subscriber-bases are tiny when compared with its iTunes customer base. The massive sales success of the iPhone (particularly Apple’s recent share growth in the smartphone market) means millions more hourly connections to the iTunes Store. Think of Apple’s recent download milestones — 1 billion apps, 6 billion songs — and the need for much-expanded server infrastructure becomes clear.

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A recent post on the Sonos forums emphasizes my point. In it, the poster provides an anecdote about how, despite prior resistance, the Sonos remote app for the iPhone convinced him to drop a considerable chunk of change on a Sonos system. The poster’s argument is this: the mere potential the iPhone offered in terms of perceived future added value actually motivated the purchase. When contacted, a Sonos PR rep confirmed that sales of Sonos systems have definitely benefitted from the release of the Sonos CR for iPhone. The company has even produced a video for people who may have the app, but no Sonos system to control, demonstrating how the controller will work.

It may sound ridiculous, but I can’t claim to be immune. Apple’s own Remote app has me contemplating an Apple TV purchase, despite the limited content library iTunes offers here in Canada, and our inability to access Hulu. The appeal is in how easy it would be to use Apple TV with the iPhone, not in what I would do with the media hub itself.

Netflix and TiVo also offer tantalizing tie-ins with the iPhone/iPod touch. Thanks to a recent update, i.TV, a popular TV listing app, now also offers the ability to manage your Netflix queue. Which is giving people a reason to have a Netflix queue. TiVo has just launched a web app that allows TiVo subscribers to plan and schedule recordings. Although this can be used with any phone, the point is that you can do it on your iPhone, as well as manage your Netflix queue, control your Apple TV and your Sonos system, and most other things if you have one of the home automation systems that are iPhone compatible set up.

The examples are many, and not limited to home and home theater control. I recently signed up for Remember the Milk Pro, something which I would never have done if it wasn’t for the RTM iPhone application. In an informal survey conducted by TAB, a number of apps that inspired Other purchases came up. OmniFocus and Things are two other GTD apps which, though they work on their own, work like gateway drugs, pushing you towards their desktop counterparts. 1Password and Wallet, login information storage and management apps, also had the same effect.

There’s also the FreshBooks app, which makes web-based time tracking that much more appealing, since it truly becomes accessible almost anywhere. A FreshBooks representative told us that they’ve seen massive download numbers for the new app, but they’ve yet to figure out if those numbers are causally related to their increased subscriptions. The offered the app based on user demand, so for them an iPhone app was good customer service, and any sales benefits are tangential.

Most of these applications were probably designed to add to, or supplement the existing functionality of a stand-alone product or application. What is actually happening, and what is more exciting from a marketing standpoint, is that customers are moving in the other direction. The promise of enhanced usability, and true one-device-for-all remote integration, is resulting in users seeking out software, hardware and services that help them increase what they can do with their iPhones. The iPhone is the ultimate peripheral: universal; customizable; and generating more, rather than being the result of, consumer purchases.

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For instance, you may have an iMac at home with all your media, photos and family content, and also a MacBook which you use for business/travel. ShareTool allows you to connect to your home network from your MacBook when travelling, accessing the files on the iMac, sharing the screen and even printing to your home device.

Setup and Installation

The process of setting up ShareTool is remarkably simple. When launching, you are presented with the following window:

This allows you to select whether you’re wanting to share the content of this Mac, or connect to the shared content on a different network. This simple user interface design flows throughout the rest of the application, meaning that a fairly complicated network operation appears remarkably simple to the user.

ShareTool is able to automatically configure your network router, and had no problem altering the required settings on my Time Capsule. However, when tested on a different router it struggled to apply the port rules automatically, requiring them to be entered manually. I expect that most modern routers will work easily — if you own a fairly old device, you’ll need to be prepared to delve into settings a little deeper.

Once you’ve set up sharing, you’re presented with the following screen:

It is easy to copy the connection information to your clipboard or email it to yourself. You also have the option of selecting exactly which Bonjour services you are wanting to share:

Using ShareTool

Once you have set up sharing and decided exactly what you want to share, connecting to the network remotely is very straight forward. You type in the details provided when setting up sharing and, fingers crossed, everything goes to plan. I didn’t have any issues, but I can imagine that problems could occur centering around dynamic IP addresses, firewalls etc. ShareTool does support a few services (DynDNS.com, No-IP.com, and DNS-O-Matic.com) which would help to circumvent the problem of a regularly changing IP address.

Services appear as they would if you were plugged into the network and the software seems very reliable — everything worked well for me. There are a few preferences you can change relating to connecting/sharing.

ShareTool states that the software “works with all Internet connections (56k modem and all high speed connections)”. While this is technically true, most of the services in question would be unusable without a fast broadband connection at both ends. Those which involve greater data transfer (streaming audio for instance) would suffer the most.

If you use a VPN, you’ll know that Bonjour services aren’t automatically available when connecting remotely. ShareTool solves this by allowing you to enter your home machine’s internal IP address once you’re connected to the VPN. This performs the same function as normal, and will enable all the various services you have shared.

Security

If you’re transmitting data to and from your home network over the internet, it is important to consider the security aspect. Fortunately, ShareTool is extremely secure and encrypts all data with SSH. This uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), a universally accepted security standard. It also has a method in place for ensuring that it is your machine that is connecting to your network.

Conclusion

Whether I would recommend ShareTool depends heavily on what you’ll need it for, and whether you already have a MobileMe account. The Back to my Mac feature of MobileMe allows for File Sharing and Screen Sharing with relative ease, but ShareTool enables a host of additional services. Some, such as remote printing, can be achieved fairly easily through a combination of File and Screen Sharing, but others such as iTunes Sharing are only possible through ShareTool.

The price difference is important. MobileMe costs $99 for a year, whereas ShareTool is $30 on a one off basis. If you already own MobileMe and only require Screen/File Sharing, then ShareTool isn’t necessary. If you are not a MobileMe user, it’s a great way to stay connected to your home or office network from anywhere.

Pros

• It’s really easy to set up with most modern routers
• A wide range of services are supported – you can share almost anything
• Encryption is excellent
• It is fairly inexpensive compared to MobileMe

Cons

• It doesn’t differ dramatically from Back to my Mac
• It requires some network knowledge for those with older routers
• Speed is a limiting factor – it works much better with very fast broadband connections

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Ipsum Everywhere!

If Rosborough Technology’s lipServiceX (1.2) didn’t exist, someone would have built it. As an OS X Services menu item, it gives you quick and (almost) ubiquitous access to “lorem ipsum” no matter what application your using. A key combination makes this the quickest way to get some ipsum into your project.

Dashboard Widgets

While there isn’t exactly a plethora of widgets, the following ones cover all the ipsum bases:

• Dolor Sit Amet (small & quick)
• Cicero (gets the job done)
• Lorem Ipsum Widget (fancy)
• Corporate Ipsum – a humorous alternative to “lorem ipsum” (though it generates readable text, so it may distract proofers).

Editor-support

• TextMate has a built-in generator invoked via tab completion of the magic word.

Browser-based

• Dummy Lipsum – Firefox add-on
• A very nice “ipsum” bookmarklet generator

Online “lorem ipsum” generators

While not exactly a comprehensive list, these sites get the job done:

• lorem-ipsum.info – My favourite; multi-lingual (enables character set anomaly testing)
• lipsum.com – (the original?)

For the “do it yourself” folks

• Lorem Scriptsum – AppleScript script (with source and many options)
• The classic Perl module
• GTK+ GUI and Python module
• Ruby ipsum

Finally, this Joel on Software forum discussion is a great primer on the efficacy of even using standard “lorem ipsum” with some creative suggestions on alternatives. I’d be very interested in what tips and tools other TAB readers use to “get their ipsum on”, so drop a note in the comments!

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Buy Domains, pay bills, reboot your server, and a slew of other options await the (mt)/iPhone crowd. I don’t rock the (mt) hosting, nor are any of my personal sites so visible that I would need to do any of these things spur of the moment from my mobile phone, but maybe that’s just me.

I do think the concept is interesting. The scope of “applications” for the iPhone is widening as companies [like Media Temple] begin to think outside the box of the typical Web 2.0 services. It leads me to wonder how much all the iPhone-only web sites will track a return on their development efforts. It’s not like Palm or Windows mobile devices have ever garnered so much attention from developers in the past – or rather, if they have, only a select few have taken notice.

What iPhone [web] services have you been waiting for?

Thanks for the tip Yas.

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Jing’s image editor is lightyears away from being as awesome as that of Skitch, so beyond the ability to grab a screen capture, there’s little similarity. However like the MySkitch service, you can quickly upload your pictures and video to an online storage service. The video capture function seems slightly limited, in that you select a part of your screen, and [from what I could tell] it doesn’t allow the option to follow your cursor around. Additionally, the video is compressed into a .swf Flash format. That’s ok for embedding in websites, but limiting if you want to do much else with it.

Limitations aside, Jing is a really nice collection of tools and services for those who want to produce screencasts and take screen captures to share easily. Jing is available for both Windows and OS X. For now it’s free, but based on this quote,

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else.

I’m weary of a bait-and-switch down the road. Ok, maybe bait-and-switch is a bit of a harsh term. Likely this method of product offering is just a good way to determine product and service placement for future projects. But I read it as the service not remaining in this format forever, but only for the data-collection period. Anyway, my conspiracy theory be darned, it’s worth a try.

On a side note, I’ve got a handful of Skitch invites if anyone wants them. Email me. I’ll post whenever I get more, but for now they’re all gone.

Oh, and incidentally, I still used Skitch to grab/post the Jing graphic for this post.
hahaha

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I actually just signed up for the 30-day trial of .Mac the other day, to see if there were any features that would be especially useful to me. So far, not seeing it. But who knows. The notMac Challenge is a big one, and I think the bounty – which at this point is $7500 which will be matched, up to $10,000, so upwards of $20 thousand! – will be much deserved if anyone can crack that nut.

Thanks to Chris for sending this tip over.

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