Adobe CS4 Web Cast Launch Date Sept 9th 2008

GET READY for Adobe CS4! It is gonna to be BIG! The web cast will launch this month on Sept 23rd 2008. Mark your calendars, and go here to register to be able to watch it.

Enjoy!

How to Create Multiple Gmail Aliases on Single Gmail Account

I was trying to find a way to have a separate password for my PicasaWeb account as I do not like to give out my primary email account to 3rd party uploading apps. However, by messing around in PicasaWeb, I knew that you can change your Gallery URL, which in my opinion is rather useful to prevent spammers from obtaining your actual email address, which could be acquired by adding @gmail.com from your PicasaWeb albums URL. Similar to the issue with MobileMe Galleries.

I realize last night, by creating this, you are basically adding an alias to your primary gmail address too. Therefore, you can then use this new alias account and give it out to whoever you please as you can then create the appropriate filters in your primary gmail account for this alias and so forth. This in my opinion is much safer than the adding a + sign, eg. primaryemail+whatever@g…

To access this feature, go to your Google Account and click on “PicasaWeb Settings” and located “What is your Gallery URL?” and click “add new Google username” and you are set. 

As for the separate password for PicasaWeb, I am still searching and hoping that Google will implement this in the future.

Enjoy!

Jott is Out of Beta and starts to charge

Jott is out of beta and has started to charge for the service I knew this day would come as they would have to foot the bill to the greedy teleco companies, somehow or another. It was a fantastic service while it lasted. There is still a free service, but there is no outgoing email or text messaging support for your Jotts. Price start at $3.95 and up per month. I do wish them the very best and thank them for a wonderful free service while it lasted, but for now I will switch to Evernote.

iPhone Package Tracker

As I have been caught up in the frenzy of the App store, I have somewhat forgotten about the wonderful web apps that Apple was touting long ago and I definitely should not.

There is a bountiful of web apps that are gems. One such gem is a Package Trackr for the iPhone and it track UPS, DHL FedEx, FedEx SmartPost and USPS and its free! A native app would be wonderful but what is the point if the native app still need to be connected to the internet to query the tracking ID? Thus a web app for this purpose it awesome. One thing you could do to make it appear native, is to use the “Add to Home Screen” feature to create an icon on one of the home screen pages, thus giving you a one tap access to the web app  

Also, I believe it uses cookies to remember the tracking IDs, thus you don’t have to keep typing in the IDs every time you want to track it, very useful. Now only if we have the copy and paste function to make our life easier to get the tracking ids from our email to the Package Trackr App, sigh.

Enjoy!

Upload Photos to Picasa via iPhone Abruptly

I think I have found an abrupt way of accomplishing the act for now, though I yet to try it as we wait for Google to develop an native app for uploading photos to PicasaWeb Albums.

First off, you will need a Blogger account for this. Note, this is not a beautiful method and it will not support any album cataloging, but it should get the job done I suppose. As I was scouting around for a solution, I came across this Google Answer regarding How Picasa Web Albums and Blogger work together? In summary, photos uploaded to Blogger will create a unlisted PicasaWeb Album with the title of your Blogger account. Now as you know, you can post to Blogger from any email including the iPhone, you will just need to setup a Mail to Blogger address.

So to accomplish this, attached your iPhone photos to your iPhone email and sent it to your Mail to Blogger address and Blogger should create a PicasaWeb album for you. That’s it!

Note: I have not yet tried this method, but I think it should work, it not a pretty solution I know.

Google, we need a native PicasaWeb app!

Time to go Secure with Gmail

Gmail has just launched the Always option of using HTTPS protocol for your Gmail account via the web browser, and I strongly urge you to keep the “Always use https” checked. This will definitely beef up your gmail security via the web. The downside is that you will loose some of the Gmail speed via the HTTP protocol, but the trade off for better security is well worth it.

To access this setting: Login to Gmail and click on Settings and you shall find it on the bottom of the General Tab.

Now, I only wish Apple MobileMe will take the same route of using the HTTPS protocols.

Update: MobileMe Password Security

UPDATE: In order for you to create a password for your Public drive is MUST be 6-8 characters no more no less. Now after you have created your public password in your iDisk preferences, in order to login to your public iDisk via your Web Browser you have to enter “Public” without quotes into the Name: field and the public password you just created. So it would be Name: public, Password: what you want but it MUST be 6-8 characters. DO NOT enter your MobileMe login or password it is NOT encrypted. That’s it!

Note: If you want to upload a file via the browser, you have to set Read & Write permissions in the iDisk ON. 

So my suggestion is to a Password for your public iDisk and check Read & Write to enable uploading capabilities. I really do hope Apple will improve the public iDisk settings soon.

Is your MobileMe passwords handled correctly? I have realized this, while accessing my public iDisk from a browser. The issue is this, while trying to upload via the browser you will be greeted with the message above, asking for your name and password to login to confirm the upload, BEWARE it notes that ”Your password will be sent in the clear”, this will happen if you leave the iDisk preferences as read only and without a public folder password. Though I have not tried, I am guessing it is asking for your MobileMe login and password, no way I releasing that in the clear. Your email passwords should be the most guarded password. Period! 

In my opinion, this sending of password in the open flaw should be fix! 

Solution 1: Change your iDisk Public preferences to Read & Write and you will be fine, BUT you will open up your Public drive to the world to upload or delete anything anyone wants! Not good, but it sure beats giving out your email password.

Solution 2 (could not get this to work for me on Tiger, yet.): Assign a iDisk Public drive a separate password under the preferences, however I cannot get this work yet! Maybe they are still fixing all the MobileMe issues including the email access

I really do hope that Apple will fix this security flaw and also the ongoing the email accessing issues, which has been going on for DAYS!

WordPress App for iPhone is Out

WordPress App is finally out, it supports wordpress.com and self-installed wordpress blogs, I will do a further review of the app tomorrow.

Enjoy!

Read Later with Instapaper

 

I have just started to use Instapaper, it basically an web app with a bookmarket that stores web pages for you to read later on your iPhone. They even have a native iPhone app but is still lacking some features of the web app such as “mark as unread” or “skip” functions. Overall I find it very useful as a scrapbook repository for web pages that you want to read later on, tagged with the added ability to convert pages on the fly to text makes it very useful too.

Google Gmail and Apple MobileMe/.Mac Possible SPAM Alert

I have been very concerned with this lately. Upon signing up with MobileMe, my life has totally changed, I have finally been able to sync and push my contact and calendar information over the air to my Macs at anytime and everything is in sync. I love it but it has a huge loophole and the same loophole that occurs with Google’s PicasaWeb Gallery, that is it will show your email address in the address bar! This is a very very big flaw that needs to be address ASAP! What this means is that spammers are able to obtain your email address free and easy! All they have to do is perform a search for your web galleries, located at either PicasaWeb or MobileMe and take the name after the / slash and add [at]gmail or [at]me.com to that name and bingo they have your email address! Below is an image of what I mean. They can just take emily_parker add the [at]me.com and they have her address, this is not good at all.

Gmail has the same issue, using the convenience of the single login to Google Account has it flaws, I think Google is well aware of this issue as I will explain in the solution later on. Flickr is the only image service that I know that will not showcase your yahoo email in the address bar, instead it will ask you to create a name for your photostream, unless you use the same name as your email, if that is the case I can’t help you.

PicasaWeb Solution: Login into your Google Account, select Picasa and click Picasa Web and click Settings, create a new username for your web address

that’s it, however if you want to keep using your gmail user id or if you are wanting extra security on top of the new username, uncheck Public Search option, this will prevent the search engines from finding your Picasaweb albums but you are still able to have your blog plugins work for your to import your images, so you are fine. 

 

MobileMe Solution: Create your own domain and use that domain to mask the web gallery address.

 

I really do hope that Apple and Google will create a fix for this flaw before the spammers catch on.