Making your iPad 3G work in Canada

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If today’s news about Rogers’ rate plans for the iPhone left you feeling a bit cold about your 3G options for an iPad in Canada, perhaps this BoyGeniusReport story will warm you up.

BGR walks you through the steps necessary to make your iPad work with various providers in Canada. As the old saying goes, “Everything is easy when you know what you’re doing.” BGR has done the hard part for you, including figuring out the various APN settings for different carriers.

The most challenging part of the process will be cutting down a SIM card to (mini) size. There are lots of instructions around to help you but in the end they’re your fingers and your card, so be careful.

The instructions cover Bell, Fido, Rogers, and TELUS.

TUAWMaking your iPad 3G work in Canada originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 10 May 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fluid lets you embed webpages as your desktop or in menu bar

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I refer to my calendar a lot during the day, but I don’t always have my calendar program running. Most of the time I just want to glance at something to confirm the time/date of an upcoming event, or just double check a date: “What is the last Sunday in May? Oh right, the 30th.”

It occurred to me today that I could make life a little easier if I could have my calendar embedded in my Desktop. Those of you who remember Microsoft Windows’ “Active Desktop” feature may shudder in fear at the idea because, at least in my experience, Active Desktop was a complete and utter disaster. It never worked well, if you could get it to work at all.

There are extremely geeky ways of doing this but MacOSXHints.com had a simple solution I didn’t even know was possible: Fluid.app. Now I’ve used Fluid.app for a long time, but I never knew what the “Embedded SSB” or “MenuExtra SSB” actually did. Turns out that either of them are a potential solution, not just for calendars, but for any web page.

[Editor’s Note: Fluid just recently went open source, and though the blog hasn’t been updated yet, we’re told the SSB creator is now open source as well.]

TUAWFluid lets you embed webpages as your desktop or in menu bar originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 10 May 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Marking out iPhone app icons on the iPad

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David Frampton has an interesting idea for how to display non-universal iPhone apps on the iPad: put a black border around them, much like how iPhone apps will display if they are not scaled-up.

I think it’s a brilliant idea. It makes them distinguishable, but at the same time seems not too obvious.

If you look at iPhone apps on the iPad today, you may be able to tell the difference between the 57×57 pixel icons for iPhone apps versus 72×72 for native/universal iPad apps.

Would Apple ever consider doing something like this? Hard to say. Initially Apple has wanted to make it clear that iPhone apps are available for the iPad, but nearly everyone I’ve heard who has run iPhone apps scaled up on the iPad says that the experience is definitely sub-par.

When iPhone OS 4 comes to the iPad this fall, perhaps one of the ways that Apple will try to nudge developers towards producing either universal apps or iPad versions will be to scale their icons. I’m reminded of the way that System Preferences in Snow Leopard handles 32-bit Preference Panes: they force the user to re-open System Preferences. It’s not a huge issue, but just enough that I can imagine developers wanting to avoid the “ugh” factor.

The biggest reason that I see in favor of doing something like this is that there’s very little downside. The icons will look better not being scaled up and it helps the user identify iPhone applications at a glance. Developers would have a slight motivational push to make iPad/universal versions of their apps.

[via DaringFireball]

TUAWMarking out iPhone app icons on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 10 May 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IM+ lite now available for iPad and iPhone

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IM+ Lite is now available for iPhone and iPad as a free, ad-supported universal application.

Our full review of IM+ for iPad is in the works and should be appearing shortly, so I’ll just hit some highlights here: With the exception of Skype chat, IM+ Lite supports the same features as the full version of IM+: Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN/Live Messenger, AIM/iChat, ICQ, MySpace and Jabber.

IM+ has a speech recognition option (as US$0.99 in-app purchase) and allows you to browse the Internet with a built-in browser so you needn’t exit the app to follow links.

IM+ will notify you via push notifications of new email in Hotmail, Yahoo, or GMail accounts, as well as sending push notifications of new IMs on all supported networks.

The ad-free version of IM+ is $9.99, but if you haven’t tried it yet, the lite version is a good way to do just that.

Unfortunately IM+ still does not support group chats in AIM (although they do work in MSN, and in Skype if you have the paid version). If you rely on that feature you’ll still need to stick with BeeJiveIM.

TUAWIM+ lite now available for iPad and iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 10 May 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rogers offering $20 for iPad add-on to existing iPhone customers?

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The Apple Store for Canada is currently showing the above rates for iPad data plans, but before you get too excited, note a few things. First, Rogers’ official iPad page does not yet show any rate plan information. Second, BoyGeniusReport updated their article on this to say that “Apple has removed all traces of the $20 plan from its website,” but it is still available at the link shown. Rogers PR told BGR that the “the $20 plan was a mistake on Apple’s part.”

If this is true (and that’s a big “if” at this point), iPhone users in the USA are going to look longingly at Rogers again. Rogers earlier announced that tethering was going to continue to be free for many customers. And now it looks like they might offer some sort of a bundle deal for iPhone users?

Hey, AT&T, are you listening? This is how you treat customers when you hope to keep them, not rest on your exclusivity for as long as possible. How about you get your act together and offer tethering at a reasonable price (Not that I would expect Verizon would treat iPhone customers any better.)?

Many people will point to the “5GB per month” limitation of the Rogers plan as a step down from AT&T’s unlimited $30/month iPad plan. That’s true, but I doubt many people who pay for unlimited will use more than 5GB.

UPDATE: I re-checked at 2:45pm and Apple’s page no longer shows the $20, and Rogers’ website now shows only the $15 and $35 options. Like AT&T, these plans do not require a contract, and come with free access to Rogers’ Wi-Fi “Hot Spots.”

[Via Clever Simon]

TUAWRogers offering $20 for iPad add-on to existing iPhone customers? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 10 May 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Case Study: Standing at your Mac to save your back

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BusinessWeek is worried that Your Office Chair Is Killing You. “Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much worse than a standard office chair,” says Galen Cranz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

This article caught my eye because just about a month ago, I bought this standing desk from Amazon.com. I had been in the market for one for a long time but had held off because they are usually ridiculously expensive. At the time, that desk cost me $96 ($86 + $10 shipping, all prices USD); it may have been a pricing error because that same desk today is selling for $277 + $7.50 shipping or you can buy a pack of two for $723 + $73 shipping! (Like I said, it’s ridiculous.)

Reading up on others around the web using various different desks, it is not unusual to see people spending over $1000 for a “standing desk,” especially custom made. You can spend much, much more.

I’m not trying to sell you on this particular desk, but to answer the question that everyone seems to ask me when they see it: “How well does it work? Aren’t you tired of standing all of the time?”

Read on for more…

TUAWCase Study: Standing at your Mac to save your back originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 09 May 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Use networksetup to change AirPort networks from the command line

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The other night I needed to change Wi-Fi networks on a computer that I was connected to via ssh. Just about every page that I found via Google led me to try the exact same thing (type “airport -A”) with one minor problem: it didn’t work.

Let’s back up a little bit. You may know that there is a commandline tool called “airport” which is buried fairly deeply in the filesystem:

System » Library » PrivateFrameworks » Apple80211.framework » Versions » Current » Resources » airport

Not the usual place to find a commandline utility. Translation? “This is here for Apple to use, but it’s not something you ought to rely on.” But of course that’s not going to stop us.

Read on for more…

TUAWUse networksetup to change AirPort networks from the command line originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 06 May 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Can the Cloud replace the Finder?

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Sachin Agarwal, cofounder and CEO of Posterous, and former Apple employee who worked on Final Cut Pro, thinks that the Finder is dead. I wouldn’t break out the sackcloth and ashes (or the champagne, depending on your feelings towards the Finder) just yet.

He has two main points:

  1. We will no longer interact with applications or files on a desktop PC

  2. The central point of syncing your data will no longer be your PC, it will be MobileMe (the cloud)

Let’s address his second point first: bwahahahahahaha. OK, I feel much better. As anyone who has used iDisk knows, iDisk is terrible in its current form. It’s slow, it’s easily corrupted, and it does not handle sync errors well.

I’ve been waiting for Apple to get MobileMe and especially iDisk in shape for years, and every year I ship off my $100 for MobileMe hoping that this will be the year. We are no closer to it than we were three years ago. Or five years ago. Sachin says that “the Finder hasn’t been updated with anything sexy in years.” That may be true, but the same thing can be said of Apple’s use of “the cloud” through MobileMe.

Read on for more thoughts…

TUAWCan the Cloud replace the Finder? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 May 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple.com’s Downloads page being updated again

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There are signs of life at Apple’s Download page. If you look at the list on the right Hot Plan 1.5.1, Screenflick 1.6.13, and Volumetrix 2.0.1 were all added on May 4th. Before that, Pasteboard Recorder was updated on March 26th.

If you look at the All Categories: Most Recent list, you will see almost two pages of apps were updated yesterday.

Apple redesigned the Apple.com website in early March, which included the removal of the downloads link from the home page. At first this seemed like just a redesign issue, but then Apple stopped updating the downloads page altogether.

Many developers wrote in to say that traffic had dropped off significantly after this happened. Others commented that they had always used the Apple download page to find new software.

So what happened during the hiatus? My guess is that even a company with Apple’s financial resources occasionally hits limits. Given that Apple links to the downloads page on every Mac via the Apple Menu » Mac OS X Software… link in the menu bar, I couldn’t imagine them abandoning it altogether. Glad to see it’s back.

Thanks to TUAW reader Wayne Beyea for sending this in.

TUAWApple.com’s Downloads page being updated again originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 May 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rudix, a lightweight way to add new Unix utilities

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Rudix offers a collection of Unix utilities which do not come with OS X by default.

When setting up a new Mac I always install these Unix utilities: wget, ncftp, lynx with SSL support, and the GNU Core Utilities. I compile them manually whenever possible, despite options like MacPorts or Fink. I don’t need everything that MacPorts and Fink offer, and installing them always felt like overkill -9 (that’s a commandline joke, kids). Generally they try to mimic the commandline syntax of either Linux or FreeBSD, neither of which I have used extensively.

Although Rudix offers a giant 361MB DMG with all of the packages includes, I recommend only installing what you need. You can find each program with its own OS X .pkg installer. These pkgs install to the traditional location of /usr/local/ (something both MacPorts and Fink avoid, a side effect of the volume of software they are designed to install, as well as a difference in approach).

TUAWRudix, a lightweight way to add new Unix utilities originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 04 May 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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