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March 29 MacHeist 3 Bundle is on Sale NOW!Are you a Mac user? Are you interested in a bunch of awesome apps for a totally awesome price? Do you want to do your bit to help charity? Then you need to hike it over to the MacHeist site, and check out the MacHeist 3 bundle. Its on sale now! You can get over $900 worth of software for just $39 USD. As an added bonus, once sales reach specific tiers, special, additional applications will be unlocked and be given to all purchasers:
The apps are cool. The cause is good and just; and you can get it all NOW, and up to April 7th. At that time, the bundle is gone, and the deal closes. Don't wait. Get yours NOW!
The full press release can be found after the break... FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MacHeist 3 software bundle now on sale with unprecedented value for Mac users SAN FRANCISCO, California, March 25, 2009 After months of anticipation from Mac users around the world, the MacHeist 3 Bundle is now on sale at http://www.macheist.com, featuring 12 popular Mac applications normally valued at over $900 for just $39. This year's lineup offers customers a variety of pro and consumer apps. A sampling of the dozen apps includes iSale ($39.95), a two-time Apple Design Award winning eBay auction manager app, SousChef ($30), a digital cookbook and cooking assistant, World of Goo ($20), widely considered 2008's best puzzle game of the year, Acorn ($49.95), a powerful and easy to use graphic design and photo editing app, and Kinemac ($299), a robust 3D animation software. The bundle also includes four unlock apps. WireTap Studio by Ambrosia Software (normally $69) will be unlocked for all customers when customers raise $100,000 for charities, with 25% of all bundle purchases donated. BoinxTV Sponsored Edition ($199) is the second unlock, and The Hit List ($69.95) and Espresso ($80) are combined as the final unlock point. The sale kicked off on Tuesday evening immediately following the MacHeist Bundle Reveal Show, co-hosted by Veronica Belmont, Lisa Bettany and Chris Pirillo and streamed to several thousand viewers on MacHeist.com. Over a thousand bundles were snapped up by eager customers within the first 15 minutes of the sale. MacHeist is offering the bundle to Mac users for 14 days. The sale ends at midnight, EDT on April 7th. This year's bundle includes: iSale (equinux, $39.95) In addition, the first 25,000 customers receive Big Bang Board Games (Freeverse, $39.95) as an early buyer's bonus. Interested Mac users can purchase the bundle on http://www.macheist.com. Information on each product, screenshots, and a screencast can be found there. March 21 Over the Air Synching IssuesExchange Server 2003 SP2 and Windows Mobile 5 Devices with AKU1 and AKU2
The following article is a reprint that originally appeared on pocketnow.com back in March of 2006, nearly 3 years ago. I am reprinting it here for a couple of reasons:
INTRODUCTION Anywho, in my last post, I promised to give everyone as clear an explanation of what I was seeing, complete with screen shots from the device. Without much more hub-bub, here we go... WHAT'S THE BUZZ? TELL ME WHAT'S A-HAPPENIN' After I got the 700w hooked up to ActiveSync, created a partnership, etc., I noticed that the 700w, on occasion, would have problems synchronizing information with the Exchange Server over the air. I noticed that I wasn't getting updates to Calendar, Contacts or e-Mail as I wanted, or had configured. When I looked at ActiveSync on the device, it displayed the following:
Curious to know what was going on, I tapped the View status link, and saw the following:
If you go to Chris De Herrera's Pocket PC FAQ and check out his page on Exchange ActiveSync Errors and Solutions, and search for the Support code the Treo threw, you find the following explanation to the error: The request has timed out. It is generally a temporary or recoverable situation. The solution listed on the FAQ is to try again later. The problem is, after this error code is encountered, the device can't and won't sync over the air any more. The only way to clear the condition and reestablish synchronization with your Exchange Server, over the air, is to soft reset the device. Putting the phone into Flight Mode and then turning Flight Mode off (turning the cellular radio on and off) doesn't resolve the issue. Connecting the device to the USB cable may or may not sync the device with the Exchange Server through the PC's LAN connection. If your PC does connect to the device (there seems to be a problem with the way AS 4.x connects to the device via USB cable too. Sometimes you connect, other times you have to bounce the box (a simple log-out/log-in doesn't reestablish the USB connection) before the device will reconnect via USB, but that's ANOTHER problem...), you'll be able to sync when cradled/ connected via USB cable, but may or may not be able to sync over the air. However, a soft reset on the device always gets you back. So that's the basic description of the problem. Here are the funny things. When I encounter this problem, I'm almost always STILL connected to the Internet. I can bring up Pocket Internet Explorer and browse the web until I turn blue; but I can't sync OTA with Exchange. What's even more interesting is that I can reproduce the issue almost exactly, on both the K-JAM or PPC-6700 (both with AKU1). Occasionally, the K-JAM would display a different screen:
In EVERY occasion, on all three devices, the line of text, under, "Exchange Server," would read, "Synchronizing Folders", and then change to "Looking for changes". That text indicates that the device found the Exchange Server and was able to log into my account on the Server. What's frustrating the most is that even when AS OTA craps out, the synchronization marker on the device was changed to the current date and time. It didn't happen in the above, because the devices never got passed the, "Synchronizing folders" stage.
WHAT WE THOUGHT WAS GOING ON When I talked to my friend, I found that he had done just that, not thinking anything of it. It was just some weird behavior or anomaly that needed to be worked around. Our conversation sparked him to do some investigation of his own, and he got on the horn to his contacts at Palm. It should be noted, that though my friend’s problems involved 4SmartPhone.net, this problem is NOT limited to just them. The problems and symptoms we are encountering can be experienced on EVERY Exchange Server. In a nutshell, we thought that the Treo (and consequently the K-JAM and the PPC-6700) were having trouble with Proxy Servers and resolving our Exchange Server's IP Addresses across the Internet. Verizon (and every wireless carrier) are constantly changing their wireless network configurations on their cell towers. Your device/Smartphone/cell phone communicates with your carrier's network via those towers. The location of these towers, both existing and new ones, are maintained in your device's PRL or Preferred Roaming List. GSM-based wireless devices have their PRL's updated automatically. GSM towers get their PRL's directly via the closest cell tower. When you go from Point A to Point B and turn on your GSM based wireless device, it finds the closest compatible cell tower and downloads a copy of the PRL. Your device then uses that PRL for communicating in that area. When you go from Point B to Point N (meaning anywhere...) it does the same thing all over again. Verizon requires you to manually update your PRL. To do this on ANY Verizon Wireless phone, do the following:
Verizon includes this documentation in the box with the Treo, with instructions for you to do this every 2-4 weeks. To get to the Internet on your wireless carrier's network, your device communicates with a nearby cell tower, that communicates with a proxy server, that gets you on the Internet. If you can't get to a tower correctly, you can't communicate with a proxy server, and therefore, can't communicate with the Exchange Server. If you're moving in a car, and can still surf the Internet, but can't sync, this behavior is still logical because one would think that you've just moved BACK into an area that's being serviced by a cell tower that your phone already recognizes with the PRL you have in your phone. Both he and I updated the PRL's in our Treos, and poof! The problem seemed to be resolved. However, if this was the solution, updating your PRL every 14 days or so, it was a problem. Most users don't know to do this, and don't even bother doing this once or twice a year, let alone once ever 2-4 weeks. BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD I tried a number of different test cases to try to identify the issue. Over the past few months, I've run and rerun the following tests:
Every time my tests were run, The device appears to receive the correct SMS message from the Exchange Server to initiate the sync. The sync started. I was able to note that on occasion, the sync would succeed, but attempting to find a pattern to the failures was not possible. The failures seem truly random, from a networking perspective. As I've said before, soft resetting the device usually cleared up the problem, for a while at least; which tells me that this is either memory or resource related...but I can't seem to find the pattern there either. OVERALL IMPRESSIONs AND AKU2
Even after a soft reset, you can STILL bump into problems. Something is definitely wrong. The above screen shot is from 10-Mar-06. The screen shots below are from today (13-Mar-06).
I spoke again to one of my WM colleagues and he's still bumping into the problem, and it still seems random to him. I've got yet another conference call with Microsoft scheduled for today where we are supposed to talk about this. I'm going to suggest that we all collaborate on this issue to see if we can't coordinate this effort and get to the bottom of it quickly. I know this is going to frustrate a lot of people if they continue to bump into it as much as I have over the last 60 days. There is a theory that there's a configuration issue with Exchange Server 2003 SP2 and AKU1 devices, but as you can see from the above, that may not necessarily be the case. I'm very confused, and very concerned... If you have bumped into this issue, or if you know of someone that's bumped into this issue, please make certain they respond back to this article in the comments section so we can contact you if we have questions. As soon as I have any further information, I promise to get the results out to everyone, so please continue to watch my home page. March 18 Apple to Release Snow Leopard on 08-Jun-09?
I saw this last week on ComputerWorld, and haven't had a chance to say anything about this until now. Sorry... Real Life intrusions can suck sometimes. On top of that, I noticed the date... very close to when Apple was going to make its big announcements on 3/17, so I decided to hang out to see if any information about Snow Leopard might also come out on 3.0 Day. It didn't, not even in the Q&A period; oh well...
As I was saying, I saw that Apple is planning on rolling out Snow Leopard during the early part of June 2009. What I find interesting, if this is in fact true, is that the iPhone 3.0/iPod Touch 3.0 software will also be made available at about the same time, if not the exact same day. (So as a new MB and 2G iPod Touch owner I need to pull together $139.99, plus tax, so that I can buy all the software.) When Apple announced Snow Leopard last year at WWDC, they said it would be ready in about a year; and again, that fits this time frame. According to The Baltimore Sun, the Moscone Center has an opening June 6 through June 12 marked only as a generic "corporate meeting." That week is the same time of the month that Apple has held WWDC at Moscone in 2007 and 2008. As of this writing, Apple has not yet published a schedule for WWDC; but it seems logical that they will release iPhone 3.0 and at least announce a release date for Snow Leopard during the conference. With the recent hardware refresh from Apple, all of the desktop pieces are now in place to support Snow Leopard. Speculation of the actual release date, again, is said to be between 6/6 and 6/12 (or right around 6/8). As with everyone, I am very interested in this latest version of the OS. Its said that Snow Leopard will support OCL (Open Computing Language). OCL allows developers to borrow computuing power from the GPU and apply it to general, nongraphics tasks when the card isn't occupied. All current Macs now support OCL via their nVidia processors, so there should be a decent performance boost to Snow Leopard compatible Macs. Does your Mac support OCL? Is it Snow Leopard ready? Will you upgrade your current or relatively new Mac to Snow Leopard? Why don't you join us in the discussion and let us know. March 03 Samsung Epix Unresponsible Power ButtonAbout 2 months ago, I reviewed the Samsung Epix for Gear Diary. At the time, I really liked the device. I still do, but the romance is starting to wane a bit. Here’s why... I am having a really weird experience with the device. Every so often, the sound will completely cut out, regardless of what the volume level is set at, be they loud, medium, soft, vibrate or completely off. When this happens, I’ve also noticed that the device won’t turn on when the power button is pressed. It stops to think about turning on, and then maybe, just maybe the LCD will turn on and I will be able to use the device. Everything, well...almost everything works. When the sound is out, the sound is OUT. I can’t hear anything. Period. The microphone still works, so people can hear me on a phone call, but I can’t hear them, and the only way that I’ve been able to correct this problem (because the darn thing doesn’t have a soft reset hole/button, is to remove the battery. Not fun, and not nice. Is anyone else having this problem? Does your Epix become unresponsive? Does the sound cut out entirely? If so, I’d really love to hear from you. I’m wondering if mine isn’t defective, or if there’s a larger problem… March 01 MS Rolls out Vista SP2 RC’s to TestersI noticed recently that Microsoft has started seeding release candidates for Vista SP2 to select testers. The RC is supposed to be “near-final,” what ever that means... We might-could send you another build...or we might-could not. It just depends. The build, number 6002.16670.090130, was released to the Technical Beta team on Thursday 19-Feb-09, via Microsoft Connect and will also be made available via Windows Update. SP2 is primarily a collection of bug fixes and updates to Vista SP1. On the server side, SP2 adds built-in Hyper-V support to Windows Server 2008. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t saying much about the RC releases, other than they’re in testing. Rumor has it that MS will release the gold version of SP2 and Windows Server 2008 some time in April. It seems that April is to be a big month, as MS is also supposed to release the publically available RC for Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server as well. My understanding is that the following is a short list of what’s going to be included in Vista SP2:
My understanding is that the following is the full list of what’s included in the SP2 update (thanks goes out to Kevin Tofel of JKontheRun) Emerging Hardware Support •SP2 contains Blue tooth 2.1 feature pack supporting the most recent specification for Blue tooth technology •SP2 includes all previously released security updates, and builds on the proven security benefits of Windows Vista •Resume performance when Wi-Fi connection is no longer available after resume from sleep •It is our goal that applications that run on the Windows Vista Operating System today and are written using public APIs will continue to work as designed on Windows Vista SP2. •Customers installing .net framework 3.5 service pack 1 will notice shorter download and installation times with Vista service pack 2 or Windows 2008 service pack 2 already installed, •Inclusion of Hyper-V |
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