For the past past few months my blog has been suspiciously quiet. The reason for this is that I have spent all of my free time (and sleep time) developing Filerr for Mac OSX.

Having worked with Mac computers since 2002 and working for companies such as Saab, Skype, Sony Ericsson and Sony Online Entertainment to develop exciting new applications for mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad, it has always been a problem copying files with certain names to Windows computers or Windows formatted USB drives. Even when using Dropbox to share files some file names just wouldn’t copy across to Windows computers!

After waiting for a tool to appear for Mac OSX that solved this I finally decided to create it myself. Filerr will be available for purchase and download on August 26 for just $6.95.

If you are a blog writer and would like to review Filerr please contact me and I will send you free license keys. If you decide to publish a review of Filerr on August 26 please let me know in advance and I will send you more rebate coupons you can give to your readers!

If you like me have been struggling to keep your passwords and notes in sync on your iPhone and your Mac, you will be pleased to hear that 1Password now supports DropBox for syncing data between iPhone, iPad and Mac computers.

“1Password 3.3 added tighter integration with Dropbox to enable automatic syncing between Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Windows. Also known as “syncing to the cloud”, this amazing feature allows you to keep your Macs, Windows, and iOS devices in sync at all times, even when they are running on different networks. To enable syncing, simply configure 1Password to store its data file in Dropbox.”
From 1Password 3.3 release notes

To enable syncing you need 1Password 3.3 for Mac, and 1Password Pro 3.5 for iOS. On the iPhone you need iOS 4.0.

Full details on how to configure 1Password DropBox synchronization

If you like me use PGP Whole Disk Encryption to protect your Mac you might have discovered that your Time Capsule backups are stored completely un-encrypted. This means if someone steals your Time Capsule disk they will get full access to all your emails and files, even if you have encrypted your system disk. Based on some old tips I have found on the web I have put together a complete guide on how to encrypt and decrypt Time Capsule backups so you can use them both for backup as well as restore.

Continue reading Securing Time Capsule Backups

With all the talk about Adobe Flash possibly being phased out for HTML 5 recently, what Adobe does not need at the moment is a major security vulnerability in Flash and Acrobat that opens up your entire computer to hackers.

Yet this is exactly what has happened.

This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

This text is from the latest security advisor from Adobe and Adobe recommends all users of Flash to upgrade to the release candidate test version of Adobe Flash 10.1. A fix for the current Flash version 10.0.x will not come until June 10th.

This exploit is already in full use by World of Warcraft trojans that will steal your game password.

So, you have two choices at the moment:

1. Ignore it. You then risk having multiple trojans installed on your computer.
2. Install the test version of Flash 10.1. You might get more crashes since this is a test version of a major update to the Flash player but you should get no trojans.

If you are interested in typography you might find the article Safari Web Browser on Windows and Font Rendering interesting, posted at dougitdesign.com.

For many of the reasons explained in this article, it is laughable to hear some visual designer, developer, UX person, or whomever say they are an expert in typography, yet they use a box running Microsoft’s Windows. You might be an expert in the way Microsoft’s font rendering wrecks the shape of letter-forms, and how to deal with that mess, but if you had a real expertise in, and love of, typography there is no way that you could be using anything but the Mac OS X as your system of choice.

Read more

If you want to develop applications for Mac OSX and want technical support, support video access and developer forum access you would previously have to purchase a Mac Developer Program that costed $499 per year for individuals ($3499 for corporations). With this you would also get exclusive access to pre-release software launched by Apple.

As of today Apple has dropped the price for both subscriptions to $99 per year. This is a great deal if you are planning to develop Mac OSX applications! It took me about five minutes to purchase my own subscription.

Interesting quote I found by Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe:

Adobe is a company of Mac users. You are hard-pressed to find someone at Adobe who doesn’t use a Mac or that is without an iPhone. We love Apple products so obviously we want our player to be top notch on that platform.