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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

Archive for 2007

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Customize your iPhone

Monday, September 10th, 2007

I’ve been enam­ored with my iPhone since stand­ing in line for it back on June 29th. It’s the only thing I’ve ever waited in line for (not even con­cert tick­ets or an Xbox360) and so far I’ve been thrilled with it—it’s the sin­gle coolest item I’ve ever owned.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t dive into hack­ing and cus­tomiz­ing it the minute var­i­ous 3rd-party options became avail­able, and now with Null­river Software’s excel­lent AppTapp/Installer.app (cur­rently an unsup­ported beta for OS X and XP/Vista), there’s no rea­son why any­one shouldn’t start play­ing (well, other than the pos­si­bil­ity of some­how ruin­ing your iPhone and maybe void­ing the war­ranty in the process—standard dis­claimers apply from this point on; you have been warned).

Tuto­ri­als in this series

If you already have the required soft­ware installed (see below), you can jump directly to each arti­cle as it becomes avail­able (this list may expand as more options become available):

What you’ll need

To play along at home, you’ll need a few things before we begin:

Each tuto­r­ial will also list any other soft­ware needed to com­plete the steps, but you’ll need the items above no mat­ter what.

Do you like to “do it yourself”?

I’m not really describ­ing any­thing ground­break­ing in these how-to’s, so if you want to just dive in and learn every­thing there is to know, the iPhoneAt­las list of native appli­ca­tions is a great place to start.

Add your suggestions

As always, if you have any tips, tricks or links that will add to the expe­ri­ence, post a com­ment on the appro­pri­ate tuto­r­ial (or this entry if it’s more gen­eral info).

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6 Comments

Interviewed by Adii

Monday, September 10th, 2007

It’s always nice when some­one shows inter­est in your back­ground, and I had the plea­sure of being inter­viewed by Adii a few weeks ago, and the result is now online.

Super­flu­ous Ban­ter­ing with Dan Rubin is brief, but includes some good ques­tions and hope­fully good answers. Adii (a designer and Word­Press “rock­star” from South Africa) has a series of inter­views with some tal­ented folks, so while you’re at it, check out the entire list.

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4 Comments

Setting up IMAP in Apple Mail

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Note: These instruc­tions still work under Mac OS X Leop­ard (10.5)

It has been brought to my atten­tion that a sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of peo­ple don’t know all the steps involved in prop­erly con­fig­ur­ing an IMAP account in Apple’s Mail.app. Though this has been cov­ered else­where I’m sure, I thought I’d share the steps in a quick-start way to help reduce the frus­tra­tion that results from assum­ing some things are done by default (know the basics already? skip to the last step »).

The Basics

Most of the IMAP setup process is iden­ti­cal to cre­at­ing a POP account. Within Mail.app:

  1. Go to Pref­er­ences (Mail → Pref­er­ences)
  2. On the Accounts tab, click the [+] at the bot­tom left to start the account setup process
  3. Change the Account Type to IMAP and fill in your details
  4. Set the Incom­ing Mail Server and Out­go­ing Mail Server details

Many peo­ple stop at this point and assume they are fin­ished. This is where prob­lems arise, and why I’m writ­ing this lit­tle tidbit.

IMAP Fold­ers

IMAP allows all mail (includ­ing your Sent, Drafts, Spam and Trash fold­ers, as well as cus­tom fold­ers) to live on the server. This is one of the main ben­e­fits of IMAP, since your account is iden­ti­cal whether access­ing your mail from any work­sta­tion or web­mail. The prob­lem is that hosts cre­ate dif­fer­ent sets of default fold­ers when you cre­ate a new account, and that Mail.app doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally con­nect the fold­ers on the server to its local func­tions (most impor­tantly, Sent mail and Drafts).

For exam­ple, Medi­aTem­ple only cre­ates your Inbox and Spam fold­ers; Dreamhost cre­ates your Inbox, Sent, Drafts and Trash fold­ers, but since Mail.app doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally assign those func­tions to the fold­ers on the server, it doesn’t actu­ally mat­ter in this case. This means if you don’t fol­low these next steps, you won’t have any sent mail or drafts saved any­where; this can be an annoy­ance or a major prob­lem, depend­ing on your spe­cific needs.

Cre­at­ing IMAP Folders

Cre­at­ing new fold­ers is simple:

  1. Control-click (or right-click if you have a multi-button mouse) on the Inbox for your account (if you have mul­ti­ple accounts within Mail.app, you’ll see sub-Inboxes in the left side­bar that have the names you’ve assigned each account), and select “New Mailbox…”
  2. In the result­ing dia­log, make sure that the cor­rect account is selected in the drop-down menu, and enter a name for the mail­box (e.g. “Sent” if you’re on MediaTemple).

The mail­box is cre­ated on the server, and Mail.app updates its folder list for that account. Do this as many times as you want, when­ever you need a new folder to help orga­nize your mes­sages (for our pur­poses, make sure your cre­ate what­ever function-related fold­ers are missing).

Set­ting Mail.app Straight

Now that you’ve made sure the fold­ers exist, in order for Mail.app to save your drafts or copies of your sent mes­sages it needs to know where to put them, so this final step is the most important:

  1. Click the folder name that matches the func­tion you want to assign (e.g. “Sent”) so it is high­lighted in the list
  2. Go to Mail­box → Use This Mail­box For → [func­tion name] (e.g. “Sent” again)

That’s all there is to it—your folder will dis­ap­pear from the list, and reap­pear as a sub-folder beneath the func­tion you spec­i­fied, with the same name as the account it’s con­nected to. So, if your account name is “My IMAP Account”, the “Sent” folder will now be located under “Sent → My IMAP Account” in the Mail.app sidebar.

Hope­fully this will ease some of the frus­tra­tion of set­ting up an IMAP account for the first time. After you’ve gone through the steps once, you’ll remem­ber them for the future and never be with­out your drafts and sent mes­sages again.

Update: Check out the com­ments below for some extra tips and tricks.

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39 Comments

Web 2.0 Cultists

Friday, April 6th, 2007

Lately I’ve found myself hav­ing the fol­low­ing “dis­cus­sion” (I pre­fer “heated debate” myself) regard­ing ‘Web 2.0’, usu­ally with some­one who has con­sumed a cer­tain amount of Web 2.0 Kool-aid:

cultist: “I want to make sure we have enough Web 2.0 fea­tures in our application.”

me: “‘Web 2.0’ is just a term, and doesn’t sig­nify any­thing impor­tant in and of itself. Sure, it’s a way of eas­ily defin­ing things like improved usabil­ity, user-centric design, friendly appli­ca­tions, and other tan­gi­ble con­cepts that devel­op­ers and design­ers can and should take to heart, but it only refers to those prac­tices because we’ve decided it should, as a community.”

cultist: “But ‘Web 2.0’ is such a sim­ple way of say­ing all those things! It makes it much eas­ier for peo­ple to under­stand what they should be doing!”

me: “Just like ‘AJAX’ makes it eas­ier for peo­ple to lump ‘super­flu­ous JavaScript visual effects’ under the same ter­mi­nol­ogy as ‘com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the server with­out a reload’? ‘AJAX’ is not syn­ony­mous with ‘ani­ma­tion’, peo­ple! It’s impor­tant to know the dif­fer­ence as web devel­op­ers and design­ers; it’s up to us to be the respon­si­ble party.”

cultist: “But peo­ple don’t under­stand those things if there isn’t a sim­ple term to describe them!”

me: “Then per­haps they shouldn’t be using some­thing they don’t understand.”

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24 Comments

OMG I’m Naked!

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

So, I had this dream last night, and I was stand­ing in front of the entire inter­net totally naked, and when I woke up, I real­ized it wasn’t a dream!

Today marks the 2nd Annual CSS Naked Day, Dustin Diaz’s lame inspired attempt to increase aware­ness of… oh crap, I’ll just let Dustin explain in his own words:

“The idea behind this event is to pro­mote Web Stan­dards. Plain and sim­ple. This includes proper use of (x)html, seman­tic markup, a good hier­ar­chy struc­ture, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.”

So join us as we strip down, take it all off, and skinny dip today. You’ll be glad you did.

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