Lots of scandal in the technology press this past week about the discovery by Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden [a couple of computer security researchers] that our beloved iPhones are keeping tabs on us wherever we go, storing this information in a hidden file called consolidated.db on the phone and also backing it up to your computer, whenever you sync your phone with iTunes.

Apparently it is mentioned in the terms and conditions you sign up to, when you buy an iPhone that:

Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have released a free app called iPhoneTracker, which you can download from their webpage, where they also give more information about how they discovered this sneaky shenanigans. iPhoneTracker will seek out the latest backup copy of the consolidated.db file stored on your comp and will display the info it contains on a map.  At the top of this post is the results i got, after running it on my comp.

[Unfortunately the fact that my life is such a tedious cycle of ‘work > home > work’ combined with the fact i havenae had my iPhone too long mean that my results are not as exciting as some of the ones published on the intarwebs, where people’s phones have been tracking them up and down the land]

Fear not though. Help is at hand.

If, like me, you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, clever hackmeister Ryan Petrich has come up with a free hack called untrackerd [available through cydia], which you can install and which periodically deletes the consolidated.db file from your iphone, thus erasing your tracks.

If you want to get rid of the location info which your phone has already backed up to your comp, when you last sync’d with iTunes, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper into [or delete and then re-sync] your iPhone backup files which live in your user ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder.

DISCLAIMER: In case you’re thinking that removing your iPhone’s ability to keep tabs on you means you can flit about the globe, sewing death and destruction all around, before disappearing into the shadows like a ninja; be aware that the location of all mobile phones can be tracked, even when they are switched off. The difference here is that the tracking is usually done and the data held by your phone provider, who are required by law to provide this info to cops, government etc. [AKA “The Man”] if requested. In the case of this iPhone scandal, the tracking is done on the phone itself, thus potentially making it available to anyone who gets hold of your phone.

just a heads up for anyone who may have lost touch with their fellow appletalker regulars and wants to maintain contact:

• i5m’s appletalker group on convore is kinda… sorta… acting as a bit of a post-mortem discussion forum at the moment.
  
  
• gamoe has set up an appletalker mailing list to allow folks to keep in touch
  
  
• there’s this interim version of the ‘scrapbook-as-entire-appletalker-site’, where you can add comments via disqus
  
  
• also, the appletalker twitter feed is still in existence, where any future developments will be announced.

there ya go.  who says there’s no such thing as life after death?

after a lot of pondering, during the past few months, and also some recent chats with a couple of the appletalker regulars, i’ve come to the decision to shut down the appletalker forum.

the appletalker forum was launched on 9th february 2006, as a refuge for a group of regulars from the macNN forums, at a time when there was a lot of discontent over there. from the outset, appletalker was intended to ‘discuss different’; we would have no moderators, we would try to avoid personal fallings out and, in our writing and posting, we’d strive for quality over quantity.

in the intervening five-and-a-bit years, i’m pleased to say that we managed to adhere to those principles pretty well; we’ve had some great discussions, some great laughs and even a few fights,  but we’ve always ended up still being friends.  and it’s as friends that i’ve come to think of quite a few of you over these past years, even though we’ve never met in ‘the real world’©

ultimately however the appletalker forum itself has failed.

five years on we have a membership of several hundred people but barely half a dozen regulars and even we [the regulars] are posting less and less frequently. i think it’s time to face the fact –sad though it may be– that the appletalker forum is dead and has been so for a long time.

i’ve never been able to understand why appletalker could never attract new users; it was an intelligent forum, we were friendly people, collectively there wasnae much we didnae know about apple gear. in addition i regularly tried things like adding extra features such as the scrapbook, the shops, and the ATPS, tweaked and hacked the original board software over the years to make it as useful as possible. and of course recently transitioned appletalker to a new board software with added iphone goodness –all in the hope of attracting more people. but contrary to the old slogan, “i built it, but they didn’t come!”

so, i think it’s time we moved on. i’ll hold onto the appletalker domain for a bit and see if i can think of something to do with it.  as you can see, at the moment what used to be the old scrapbook is now the entire appletalker site.  i may just keep it at that; a blog where i occasionally post my thoughts, rants, reviews… whatever on the world of all things apple, without the pressure of having to worry about visitor numbers, daily post counts, new user registrations and all the other depressing vital signs which running a dying forum requires you to monitor.

if i do retain the appletalker.net domain as a tech blog, any of you old regulars who fancy submitting articles or anything else are more than welcome.  just get in touch.

in the meantime, i thank you for your loyalty and support over the past five years, bid you all a fond farewell and trust that our paths will continue to cross, at least occasionally, out there in cyberspace.

cheers,

madra.

So you have a bunch of pictures on your Mac and you want to add a prefix (like say “My Wild Party-“) or a date to all of them, or maybe you’ve already painstakingly renamed them one by one, but want to change the name now. But there are 600 of them. Isn’t there any easier way to rename files and folders on the Mac?

You got a Mac because its easy, and powerful. Sure, the biggest geeks will open up Terminal.app and work all kinds of magic. In fact, this is another option for renaming multiple files. But those of us who either haven’t the time to dabble in such sorcery or simply want a more Mac-like way are left to different devices.

Enter Automator. Automator lives in the Applications folder on your Mac. Automator exists to automate those boring, time-consuming, repetitive tasks. That’s right, you don’t need any additional software. It’s all there on your Mac already. Automator is made with non-programmers in mind, so you don’t have to know any geeky code just to rename your tons of files.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be using Automator for many of those repetitive tasks you used to do manually. This is a very simple guide to renaming multiple files, or batch renaming, though you can do a lot more with Automator.

Okay, so let’s say you’ve got all those files to rename. First thing you do is launch Automator. Now since Automator is rather open-ended, from this point on there are a lot of ways of going about things. But for simplicity and sanity’s sake, I’m going to list only one set of steps to get where we want to go. But you should be aware that there are lots of options here if you want to play around with it later. For reference, I am utilizing Version 2.1.1 (247.1) of Automator.

1. Once Automator finishes bouncing in your dock it’s going to be asking you to choose a template for your workflow. The default template, simply titled “Workflow” is fine.

2. If Automator isn’t showing the Library, make sure you hit “Show Library” in the toolbar. Once the Library is showing, you’ll want to click on “Files & Folders” with the Finder happy face to the left. Once you do that, make sure you select “Get Selected Finder Items” from the list. Using the search bar will narrow down your search. Drag the selection to the area to the right, or just double click it.

3. Look for “Rename Finder Items” and add that. Now the second and final part of our workflow has been added.

4. Now you can hide the Library or expand the window. The first part of our workflow has no options, but the second part is full of them. In this case we will select “Add Text” and “before name”. If you wanted to add the text after, you would of course select “after name”.

5. Now we write the prefix we want to include before the file names. In this case I want to name some pics we took back at the Appletalker beach party (we had a blast). I am careful to include a space after the dash, but you can select to include an underscore to be more compatible with the net or not include any separation at all if you don’t like.

6. Now you have to actually go to the Finder and find the files you want to rename. They can be anywhere. They can be in a folder with other files you don’t want to rename. It doesn’t matter, because Automator will only touch the filenames of those files you select. Here I’ve selected my pics.

7. Now we head back to Automator, being careful not to deselect our pics. They should look grayed-out but selected in the background. Now the moment of truth: Hit the Run button at the top right of the toolbar.

Automator may warn you and ask you to make duplicate files. In my opinion, this is a bit overprotective. You’re not actually modifying any other attribute of these files except for their file names, something which we do everyday without any need for warnings. If you’re incredibly paranoid, go ahead and do it. But take it from me, there’s no need to duplicate files and it’s just a waste of time and space. And if you’re worried about making a mistake, don’t worry, I’ll show you how to change the file names afterwards.

Automator should display some log information at the bottom pane after completing the task, unless you have the variable display selected, in which case you get a sad nothing displayed. But it should work either way.

8. Congratulations! Your files have now been successfully renamed! And with no extra software or geeky terminal commands.

9. But what if you change your mind about the name? In this case, I’ve decided to add the year to the end of the title. No sweat. I just take a character I want to put it next to (in this case, I want to put the year before the dash, so I enter a dash), and then I include a space, the year and the dash together, meaning that Automator will replace the dash with the year with a space before for separation and of course, another dash in its place.

You can choose whatever format suits you best, of course. This can get tricky if you have dashes everywhere, for instance. In this case you may have to write out a longer piece of the file name, or the whole text to amend.

10. The file names have now been amended. You see? No need for worry- even if you make a mistake renaming, you can always correct it later, as long as you take some very basic precautions (I don’t mess with the original names usually, but if you need to, you might consider Automator’s advise and have it duplicate the files beforehand just in case). By the way, if you ever need to simply remove a section of text just replace it with nothing- no space, just make sure there is nothing in the “replace” field and it’ll delete whatever text you inserted in the “replace” field.

Afterword

Now if you were paying attention, you noticed that the “Replace Text in Finder Item Names” action has a specific option for adding dates and times. You can do much more complex things than add the year. You can have every file labeled with its date and time of creation in almost any format. The possibilities are vast. But you don’t need another tutorial for that. Go ahead and try it out yourself! Automator brings incredible possibilities to the Mac without the need to write one line of code.

Automator will work with almost any Apple app, like the Finder, as we saw, Safari, iCal or Address Book, among others. Apart from Apple apps, Automator can also work with apps like MS Office and Photoshop. Imagine the possibilities! Good luck and have fun! Just remember to backup your data first!

well, it’s all very well making the transition from ipod touch to iphone and opening up a whole new world of photographic fun and frolics but, let’s face it, the iphone camera is pretty basic. what it needs are some photographic apps to ‘jazz things up’ a bit. so this week, i ‘ave mostly been eating photographic apps:

camerabag - photographic filters

meet my new favourite app!

on first firing up camerabag you are presented with a dark and empty screen with a picture of a camera lens in the middle and four icons along the bottom. from L to R these icons allow you to; take a picture with the phone’s camera, email an image, save your work, or open an existing photo from your phone’s camera roll, or photos folder.

startup screen

it’s this last option that you tend to start with first. open up an image and camerabag will show you that image with one of its built-in filters applied. the filters all mimic the look and feel of classic old disposable cameras, or film stock. simply swipe left or right with your finger to cycle through the available filters. when you’re done, you click on the floppy disc icon to save the image. that’s all there is to it!

it sounds so childishly simple that you could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of novelty app and not for ‘serious’ use but, in reality, the effects are so well chosen and configured that selecting an appropriate filter in camerabag can improve almost every photo you throw at it.

well, enough jabbering. let me run you through the various filters, using this photo of me and mazza, when we were still young and handsome:

original image

‘helga’ filter

‘colo[u]rcross’ filter

‘lolo’ filter

‘plastic’ filter

‘magazine’ filter

‘instant’ filter

‘silver’ filter

‘mono’ filter

‘1962’ filter

‘1974’ filter

‘cinema’ filter

‘infrared’ filter

[there’s also a ‘fisheye’ filter, which i’ve switched off in camerabag’s prefs, because that is a pointless novelty one!]

on the subject of preferences; camerabag’s give you a set of options for how it should treat your photo. these include toggles for borders and cropping, which control whether or not camerabag applies borders to, or crops an image to fit in with the filter in question. for example, the ‘cinema’ filter will crop the image to widescreen aspect ratio and the ‘instant’ one will crop it square and apply a polaroid style border on it. as you can see from the screengrab, i’ve turned both these options off.

another important option lets you choose what size to save your ‘camerabagged’ image out at. i’ve chosen to save at full resolution.

below those options are the aforementioned toggles, which allow you to turn individual filters on and off. i’ve turned off ‘fisheye’ and did toy with the idea of turning off ‘infrared’ as well, until i found that —in combination with ‘silver’— it actually made a really shite, boring photo i took at the weekend for my blipfoto journal almost presentable.

‘preferences

all in all, camerabag is so easy to use and delivers such good results that it almost feels like cheating, every time i use it. i could recreate all these effects fairly easily in lightroom or photoshop on my macbook, but it would take two or three passes and a bit of twiddling with various sliders each time.

my one criticism of the app is that, if the image you’re working on is very tall and narrow, or is widescreen, it tends to display very small on the filters screens, as camerabag will fit all of the image on the screen in portrait mode, with no landscape mode or fullscreen mode available. it sometimes makes working on the images a bit of a ‘squint and hope’ affair.

other than that tho’, i’m finding it difficult to think of anything bad to say about this app at all. it’s just so damnned good and such damned fun!

note: whilst this app will run on an ipod touch, as well as an iphone, you’ll have to transfer images onto the touch from elsewhere, as the ipod touch hasnae got a camera. unless you’ve got one of the new ones —in which case you’re an early-adopting bastard!

COST: £1,19 
RATING

as i mentioned a couple of posts earlier, i’ve been on a bit of a quest to find apps which use the additional features i have on my iphone, as compared to the ipod touch. mostly this means i’m looking at apps which avail of compass, GPS and/or camera:

redlaser & pic2shop - barcode scanners

a bit of an change for you today. i’m going to review these two apps together and compare them. they’re both quite similar and do similar things, so there disnae seem much point writing two separate reviews. also, they’re both free so, if you’re interested you might as well grab both and see which you prefer.

redlaser & pic2shop both use the iphone’s camera to capture barcodes and identify products. so therefore they require a camera [duh!] and an intarwebs connection to search their databases and look up the items.

to use, you select the appropriate capture mode, which fires up the iphone’s camera. you then simply line up the barcode in on-screen sights and let the app get it in focus. with any luck you’ll then hear a beep -similar to the barcode readers in supermarkets- which tells you the barcode has been read. redlaser seems to acquire and read the barcodes quicker than pic2shop. both apps have difficulty reading barcodes on bottles or crumply/reflective materials. again redlaser seems to score slightly better.

FIRST PIC: redlaser - SECOND PIC: pic2shop - i’m having to hold redlaser off the barcode, as its acquisition time is so quick i couldnae get a screengrab before it went to the results screen. pic2shop takes a second or two longer, so i could screengrab in time:

BARCODE READING: redlaser

after the barcode has been read, both apps then search their database of items to try and match the barcode. here again, redlaser was the winner for me. whilst both apps do equally well with what you might call ‘global’ items; books, DVDs, electronic gadgets and the like, redlaser was far more successful at identifying ‘local’ items such as food packets and suchlike from my local supermarket. this is obviously a ‘YMMV’ situation - you’d have to test both apps in your own country and see which is best. one thing i did find tho’ was that pic2shop did throw up spurious results on more than one occasion, when confused by a smaller local item [it identified a bag of ASDA cheese’n’onion crisps as an HP laptop battery!], whereas redlaser either got it right or identified it more vaguely [but still correctly as] “product of ASDA stores ltd.” as regards database lookup times, i’ve only tested it over wifi, not ‘in the field’. both apps returned results instantly.

search results screen. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. redlaser’s layout is a lot cleaner:

DATABASE RANGE: redlaser
SPEED OF RESULT RETURN: draw

i think that both apps must somehow allow you to submit your own info to their databases, as i hardly imagine the developers have the means to access barcode info for products around the world, but i’ve not been able to find a way to do this through either app. if either app cannae identifiy a barcode, they throw up a similar screen which provides options for searching via google or amazon for the item. i think both apps are glaringly missing a “submit item” button here.

UNKNOWN ITEM HANDLING: draw

item not found screen. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. again, redlaser’s layout is a lot cleaner:

for those situations where either app is having problems reading the barcode, both will also allow you to manually enter the long number underneath and search manually. unfortunately your humble reviewer is to feckin’ lazy to be arsed testing this, but i’ll assume it works on both apps.

manual code entry. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop:

when a barcode has been correctly identified, both apps will return a small thumbnail of the item and a price comparison list showing the current price of that item at a variety of sites. in theory, you can then click through to order that item directly. this usually works well, although sometimes clicking through just results in a blank screen and spinning cursor. the blame for this may lie with the sites in question tho’, rather than the apps, as both seem to baulk at the same sites. i prefer redlaser’s interface for the results checking. it’s more neatly arranged and, after viewing a result, you can return to the results screen by clicking a iOS style back button. pic2shop superimposes two grey arrows on top of the results themselves, to navigate back and forth and –when viewing a retailer’s web page in the results– you have to make sure and position a clear bit of the page underneath the back arrow, otherwise any links underneath activate when you click on it.

the reason pic2shop have had to use this stupid navigation system is because their app is polluted with adverts, so in the space at the top of the screen, where redlaser uses a nice iOS style navbar, pic2shop sticks a feckin’ ad! :vomit:

results clickthrough. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. once again redlaser’s layout is just so much cleaner and more logical:

redlaser also wins, when it comes to accessing previously scanned items; the main screen comprises a compact list of items you have scanned, which you can click through at any time [you can even favourite items and email them as a wishlist]. with pic2shop, previous results are available from the results screen by scrolling down the page. if the results for the item you have just scanned fill a full screen, as they do in these screenshots, it is not immediately apparent that there are more results underneath. in fact, for a long time i thought that pic2shop only remembered the last item scanned. after you’ve scanned about a dozen or so items, having to swipe down through that many screensful of results to find a previous item soon becomes a major PITA. redlaser’s list is a much cleaner and better implementation.

previous results. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop - redlaser’s previous results are always there, nicely listed and selectable on the main screen. pic2shop just keeps adding to the full results screen, so you have to scroll through the whole thing every time:

ACCESS PREVIOUS RESULTS: redlaser

so that’s about it. in my opinion, redlaser beats pic2shop in every department. ironically, when you fire up the apps, pic2shop looks the more professional as it displays some nice toolbar icons and [if you’ve used it before] a thumbnail of the last scanned item on the results page. redlaser just has a boring looking list and a ‘lightning bolt’ button. you’d be forgiven for thinking [as i did initially] that redlaser was going to be the lesser app. once you’ve used both for a while tho’, you realise the opposite is true. pic2shops’s home screen icons are about the only area were it beats redlaser.

for me tho’, the final nail in the coffin for pic2shop is that it uses adverts. i know they dinnae bother some people but i absolutely loathe advertising, both on TV and in applications. even if the apps were evenly matched, for that reason alone redlaser will be the one i keep and pic2shop will be going to the great app store in the sky.

NOT HAVING FECKING ADVERTS: redlaser

REDLASER
COST: free
RATING: - one star off for not being able to add your own items

PIC2SHOP
COST: free
RATING: - not as accurate. and let down by poorly designed interface and adverts