Wise on Tech » iPhone

Stream Video to your iPod or iPhone

Jonathan Wise — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:44:38 +0000

Looking for a simple way to stream your (non-iTunes) video library to your iPhone or iPod touch over WiFi? Check out Air Video from InMethod.

The server app transcodes your media on-the-fly so you can consume formats the iPhone OS doesn't support. The newest version even offers experimental web-delivery. The app comes in two parts -- the server that runs on your Mac or PC, and the Client that you install on your mobile device. The server advertises itself over Bonjour, so there's virtually no set-up involved. In practice, files that need conversion before playing start-up on my iPhone within about 30 seconds.

The free client can view only 3 videos from your server. The $2.99 full version has no limits. I'd love to see additional mobile devices exported, but otherwise I'm very satisfied with my purchase.

Using PHP and a Shell Script to Restart an AppleTV remotely — via the web

Jonathan Wise — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:30:18 +0000

As a follow up to my previous post, here's how to do the same thing, but from a web browser (say, on your iPhone) -- it assumes you've already written a shell script, as discussed earlier.

Configure Apache to run PHP on your Mac (these instructions are for Leopard, but similar ones are out there for Tiger)
Configure Apache to run as your own user, instead of the WWW user -- a serious security risk. Only do this on an internal network! The WWW user won't have adequate permissions to do what we need to.
Put this .php page in your /Library/WebServer/Documents/ folder as RestartMedia.php -- you'll need to supply your own image file in the same path as well.
Visit http://yourcomputer.local/RestartMedia.php from a browser. Clicking on the text or image will execute a shell script located at: /Applications/Automation/RebootMediaServers.sh

Obviously you can customize this at will, including file locations. This was just a quick hack that does the job for me -- and the webpage is optimized for Mobile Safari.

Learning to Develop for the Mac – Historically

Jonathan Wise — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:08:23 +0000

Going back to the beginning, and learning Project Builder, Interface Builder and ObjectiveC on NextStep. Can you believe this is the technology that NeXT had the same year Windows 3.1 came out? And its the same stuff that's used to build Mac and iPhone apps today...

Click for a bigger picture.

In fact, the technology is so close that I used a tutorial for developing a sample Mac app, to develop a sample NextStep app. The notion of "FAT Binaries" that work on multiple hardware architectures came from NeXT as well, since it ran on any number of platforms by the end.

Clean up Google Mail Folder Structure on your iPhone

Jonathan Wise — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:55:26 +0000

If you use GMail, or Google Apps for Your Domain on your iPhone, you've probably noticed an odd folder structure, with most of your folders being found under [Gmail]. This looks ugly, and it turns out, is easy to fix:

In your "Advanced" Mail account settings, set the IMAP Path Prefix to "[Gmail]/"
(The trailing / is added automatically)

Now your folders will look flatter and much prettier. This works in Mail.app on your desktop Mac too! And don't worry -- it'll still be able to find the Inbox on its own.