Wibtown

After reading Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Development in 24 Hours up to chapter six and not really feeling like any of the information was settling in I decided to try to find another book that suited me better. Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X For Dummies is the one that I eventually decided on and it arrived yesterday.

So far I’m finding it far easier to follow than the Sams book but it has brought another bit of Mac strangeness to my attention. The early lessons in the book teach you how to make a simple calculator which has problems displaying fractional values but luckily it then teaches you how to fix that and this is where the problem comes in. To fix it you need to be able to type # which is known to people in the UK as a hash symbol but I believe it’s also known as a pound symbol and number symbol in other areas of the world. Problem is when I press the # key on my UK Windows keyboard it brings up \. I thought that this may be a similar problem to the @ and ” symbols being transposed but unfortnately it’s not as simple as that as the \ key brings up § and so on.

Wanting to be able to get on with my learning as quickly as possible I oredered a Mac keyboard as I would be needing one in the future anyway and then set about trying to find a workaround for my Windows keyboard. Whilst trying to find the workaround I discovered that UK Mac keyboards don’t actually have a # key for some reason so you have to press alt 3 instead which also works on a Windows keyboard, so that’s another problem solved for now but the burning question is why don’t UK Mac keyboards have a # key?

For anybody wondering how to include your Mac in a Windows workgroup for file sharing using OS X open up system preferences, click network, click advanced, select WINS and then enter the workgroup name.

You should now be able to access any shared files or folders that you have permission to.

blu screen grab, click to enlarge

Since I started to use Twitter I’ve noticed that there are a lot of desktop clients around all of which have different levels of features and usability but if you’re simply after something that will let you read and reply to tweets whilst looking good at the same time you won’t go far wrong with blu which is a product of Thirteen23. blu has been designed with Windows Vista and Windows 7 in mind but it will work with XP so long as you have .NET 3.5 installed.

The design is nice and clean with the majority of the blu window being taken up by the tweets that you subscribe to along with some large icons at the bottom whose function should be obvious just by looking at them. It also fits in very well with the design of Windows Vista with a slightly transparent look to it but if you don’t like that it can be altered in the settings.

One of the first things you might notice is a lack of a scroll bar which seemed a little strange at first but it does help to keep everything looking less cluttered and scrolling can be taken care of by using the mouse wheel, the arrow keys or page up and page down so it’s no big loss. The Twitter servers are checked for new tweets every two to twenty two minutes depending on your preferences and new tweets will appear at the top of the list whilst giving you an audible nudge to let you know they have arrived.

Posting a tweet is simply a matter of hitting reply or update to open the entry window which also contains a handy character counter and the ability to convert a URL into a TinyURL to save on space. This however does lead me to my first problem as for some reason it only works when a URL is pasted into the window rather than typed and as I found out it won’t work at all if Zonealarm is blocking the TinyURL website which isn’t blu’s fault but I thought that I should mention it just in case you’re having that problem.

Secondly the favourites system doesn’t seem to be working correctly at the moment as any profile that you add to it is lost when the program is closed which for me isn’t much of a problem for me but again I thought that I should mention it.

As I said at the beginning of this if all you want is a simple to use and good looking program to keep up with your tweets then I don’t think that you can go far wrong with blu.

Part 3: Using the Ipod.

If you’ve managed to get this far without any problems well done and the good news is that this is the last part and should also be the simplest.

The whole point of these posts is to be able to shut down Windows using an IPhone or Ipod Touch so to do that you’re going to need to install some telnet software on your Ipod. This is easy enough, just go to the Itunes store and search for telnet. I’ve been using the app that’s simply called telnet and priced at £1.19 but I notice that there is a free telnet app on there as well. (more…)

Part 2: Static local IP and testing the telnet server.

An IP address is a unique number that is assigned to your PC and other devices connected to your router so that they can talk to each other, the problem is that these numbers are assigned by your router on a first come first served basis and as such if you have more than device connected to your router the address will vary depending on the order in which your devices are turned on. This will cause a big problem as it means that the address of your PC and telnet server will vary and unless you know the address you can’t logon.

Luckily this is easy enough to fix, click start, network, network and sharing center, manage network connections and then right click on the adapter that you are currently using. Select properties, highlight internet protocol version 4, click properties and select the use the following IP address button. (more…)

OK there’s probably not many of you who will need or want to do this but if like me you sometimes use your PC as a media server and would like to be able to shut it down or reboot it without being in the same room then this could come in handy.  Also I mention using an IPhone or Ipod Touch but so long as the machine you are using has a telnet client it should also work for that.

I would just like to say though that whilst I have done this to my own PC with seemingly no ill effects I’m not exactly an expert on it so use these instructions at your own risk and don’t blame me if you break your PC or open up a few security holes.

Part 1: The telnet server. (more…)