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With my first use of iMovie for iPhone 4 I noticed that something was missing. While they offer you a choice of two transitions that can be used between clips in your timeline, they offer you no way of fading from or to black on either end of your project. This got me thinking, More »

Many companies today have a need to share resources like calendars and contacts across multiple people within the organization.  There might be a need for a CEO to share a personal calendar with an assistant, a public calendar that everyone needs to see or possibly a company-wide group of business contacts.

As an IT consultant, when I’m out in the field many customers ask me about using MobileMe to sync all of their companies contacts and calendars.  For a small business office of one or two people, this might be a viable solution, however, for companies that need more control over their resources, a server based solution is probably a better way to go. More »

Opera Software made quite a big deal about submitting their mobile browser, Opera Mini, for approval in the Apple App Store. This wouldn’t be the first alternate browser to show up on the App Store, but it would be the first one not based on the webkit rendering engine that Mobile Safari uses. The question is, how does it stack up against Apple’s own Mobile Safari? More »

The iPad is Apple’s next big venture.  Aimed to fill the gap between the smart phone and the laptop, Apple has equipped the iPad with the next generation of iPhone OS (3.2) and created an SDK specifically for the iPad to allow developers to create apps exclusively for the new device.  This means that it will not only run all current iPhone apps, but it will also run platform specific apps such as the new iWork suite and other 3rd party apps aimed at taking advantage of its hardware. More »

Low-Cost, Reliable, and Abundant Storage Spaces

I’m always running into situations- seriously, like weekly, where clients need to find some place to put their files. And it’s not just video people that have this issue, although it’s easy to see why they need more room to put their stuff, it’s businesses of all kinds, storing all kinds of different types of data. Anyone storing any data always has one major concern: they don’t want to lose any of it.

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The smartphone has assimilated an increasing amount of functionality over the years, from cameras and video, to email, calendaring and the increasingly dizzying array of apps for sale across all mobile platforms.  However, more often than not these mobile implementations barely rise above glorified proof of concept demos.

Today I’m looking at two emerging spaces in the app eco-system: advanced mobile IT management tools & mobile virtualization. More »

Data gets lost; it’s not an “if” but more “when”, followed by “now what do I do”. If you’re like most businesses, you have a backup plan in place, and it’s similar to one of these:

1. Your server(s) backup your data. If it isn’t on the server, it doesn’t get backed up. Your users are instructed to save their files to the server.
2. Your server(s) back up, and your client machines are also backed up by the server via a backup client running on each machine.
3. Your client machines automatically store their information on the server (via Remote Home Synchronization, or similar)

Now these are all fine methods for achieving a backup (some better than others), but it leaves out a possible group of individuals More »

Just updated, still cool
As the only team member at Iris Professional Services that uses a Blackberry instead of an iPhone, I get the pleasure of testing out anything new for Blackberry and Macs. Sometimes that’s not such a good thing, but there are products like Missing Sync that are definitely in the “Good Thing” category. PocketMac is free, but I never was able to get it to work correctly. Of course, that might be attributable to User Error and your experience may differ, but the bottom line is that I finally gave up on it. More »