Tag: iPhone

Mac Messages Beta

Apple has just released the developer preview for OS X Mountain Lion yesterday and at the same time released the beta version of Messages, an upgrade of iChat. Here is the link to download Messages.

Installation is straight forward but you will be warned that the machine will need to be restarted. After installation, the spanking new icon will appear in the dock. The rightmost icon in the screenshot, not the middle one.

After installation (and configuration with your iCloud account), the familiar iChat UI will appear. Alongside with a new “iPad inspired” message list. Messages will continue to work with the existing accounts, just with additional features. As you can see in my screenshot my Google Talk (Jabber) account works fine.

I really wanted to know whether old messages from the iPhone will be imported. They were not. Which is no big deal. I’m not sure whether some background sync will happen while I use it. I’ll update if it does that.

I sent a test message to a buddy, Nazham:

At the same moment, my message and his reply appeared in both Messages for Mac and the iPhone. This is what Apple meant by “Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.”.

I love it.

Knowing Apple, Mountain Lion might be the only OS X I can upgrade my 2010 MacBook Pro with and I hope the price will be more or less like Lion.

Until next time, happy computing.

Problems Saving Alerts in MyProfiles

Let’s face it. iPhone/iPad “new mail” alerts sucks and if you have multiple email accounts set up you’ll never know which account received the new email.

When you’re driving or having a meal, it’s convenient to know whether the email is from your boss, is an important alert from a system dying somewhere, or just your friend saying hi.

I’m not saying that you should procrastinate replying emails from friends, but those kinds of emails are just not worth crashing into the road divider or choke on chicken bone or something. Joking.

There might be some other tweaks or tools but I decided on MyProfiles. That’s the best I can find.

It works fine until one night I turned the phone into silent mode (via hardware switch) and the alert sound still played! I was surprised. At first I thought that I forgot to disable the alert override (Override Silent) item but I was wrong. It’s stuck at ON no matter how many times you try.

Override silent is a useful feature, trust me but I don’t want all of my alerts to sound all night long.

The quickest way I found was to edit the configuration directly. The configuration file is at: /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.intelliborn.myprofiles.plist

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>allAlerts</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>alertDuration</key>
			<integer>1800</integer>
			<key>alertId</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>alertInterval</key>
			<integer>300</integer>
			<key>alertVolume</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>displaySummary</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>filterMailboxesArray</key>
			<array>
				<string>EmailAccount1</string>
			</array>
			<key>global</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>ignoreRingerState</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>mailToMeOnly</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>name</key>
			<string>COMPANY</string>
			<key>repeatAlert</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>sound</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>soundPath</key>
			<string>/System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received2.caf</string>
			<key>type</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>vibrate</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

You’ll need to change the key to 0, near the line:

			<key>ignoreRingerState</key>
			<integer>0</integer>

I don’t know how to restart the daemon as this is not a springboard app. I also don’t know whether restarting the springboard will take the new configuration.

So what I did was just launch MyProfiles again and then tried to edit the alert configuration. What I found out was that the configuration for override silent is untouched and even if I play around with it, it still won’t change from the new state I manually entered in the XML file. I also restarted the engine just to be sure.

But hey, it worked and when in silent mode the alert no longer play any sound.

* To do this you need to have SSH enabled on your iPhone/iPad. Hey if you’re using MyProfiles that means you have jailbreak your device anyway…