Author: yuval

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General iphone

How I got the iPhone to display my Microsoft Exchange account Sent Mail folder

So I gave up on my Nokia N95-8GB.
The fact that Nokia appeared to have given up on the phone I spent so much money on, its sluggish performance and the outdated operating system could not be compensated by the excellent camera and impeccable phone reception worldwide. That and lugging along a BlackBerry for email as well as the Nokia was silly. The fact that the work-issued BlackBerry Curve was worse in too many facets than it’s older predecessor is a different matter. So i got an iPhone 3Gs.

I love it!

It is fast, things just work, the Internet is usable and with you wherever you are. The virtual keyboard is a spectacular tool when you are dealing with multilingual situations, all the more with right-to-left languages, I love it. Best of all, it connects (unsupported by our IT of course) to our corporate Microsoft Exchange 2003 server account.

Yet I noticed something a bit odd: I was unable to view my Sent mail, viewable in Entourage and Outlook as ‘Sent Items’. Looking online leads to articles mentioning another issue in which Entourage has a problem displaying iPhone sent messages properly (this is sort of a solution), but the issue remains open on Apple’s support boards (and I will post my ‘solution’ experience on it once I am done writing).

When I joined my employer almost four years ago, IT assigned us a first initial+last name@company email addresses (e.g. Joe Blow will become jblow@company.com). Two years ago we migrated to the Exchange system of our parent company where the email address is first name+last name@company (e.g. Joe Blow get an email address of joe.blow@company.com) . I can still and do use my old email address and both work. When I got my iPhone (a true moment of joy), I set it up giving it the short email address (first initial+last name@company, or jblow@company.com). My domain user name is just first initial+last name and it seemed to work – except for the sent mail issue.

Yet that was the actual issue: I had to switch the email address specified in the iPhone settings from the short version (jblow@comany.com) to the long version (joe.blow@company.com). Once I made the change, sent mail appeared just fine. I am not too certain how this translates to other organizations; it may just as well not. But if your Exchange, or possibly Active Directory administrators added email addresses or identities to your account, you may be suffering from the same issue.

Additionally, I am not sure this can be done on the fly by just modifying account settings. I was bold enough to delete the whole account and set it up again. I would definitely try the account settings route first as deleting accounts is always risky (all my contacts were gone, of course). But I am glad it worked and I have access to my sent mail.

Hope this is of help for others. A device so close to perfect makes such imperfections so noticeable and maddening.

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Categories
Computing Mac OS X

OS X printer setup bug: No IPP over HTTP

I have an old-ish US Robotics (!) wireless router which while not spectacular like many Linux-ed has one truly nifty trick up its sleeve – a USB print server. It allows you to plug in virtually any non-network-enabled printer and share it among whoever is connected to your wired or wireless network.

Today I tried to set it up to work with my Mac. The router is old enough to show OS X 10.3 (I think) support information on how to connect the Mac to a printer attached to its print server. I am on OS X 10.5 and there was one thing that was pretty darn off:
On OS X 10.5 your choices are more limited than on that older version in that photo. The add printer dialog box offers you three options for network connections: IPP, or Internet Printing Protocol – which is used by my router, LPD – a UNIX network printing protocol, and HP JetDirect, HP’s proprietary printing protocol.
Still, my printer would not work and after a while I found out why. The router’s network print server uses a URL such as
http://192.168.2.1:1631/Printers/My_Printer
The add printer dialog only allows you to add a printer by specifying its IP address and port, as well as its queue name. What it does not allow you to specify is what *protocol* to use when using IPP. The result URLs stemming from the dialog look close to the one I needed, but not right:
ipp://192.168.2.1:1631/Printers/My_Printer
If you notice, the URL is now with an ipp protocol prefix. And that does not work because it is simply the wrong protocol. There is literally no way to make this happen, through the ‘conventional’ means offered by OS X – this add printer dialog. I doubt that this is too big of an issue for too many people, but the fact that it used to work in previous versions of the operating system is a bit sad. So how do you still make it work?

A few years ago, Apple took over one of the biggest undertakings of the open source community – making printing on UNIX and Linux suck less. The CUPS project actually achieved that goal and its print server is built into every OS X machine. CUPS, like on any UNIX machine, can handle virtually any common printer on any protocol – part of the beauty of open source. And on OS X you can access its administrative screens (a bit rough but very usable) by going to the URL
http://localhost:631
Once there, you can follow CUPS’ web-based wizard to add a new printer and lo and behold – it offers a network print protocol option of (drumroll), of Internet Printing Protocol over HTTP. Make sure you have your password for the machine to actually complete the printer but once it is added, it appears in the normal, OS X printing screens.

In short – it appears to be an OS X bug or omission, but luckily not something beyond the realm of accomplishing.

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Categories
Computing

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac: Experiences and Incompatibilities

I am generally happy with Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. Things work pretty well – Word docs interoperate with Windows versions seamlessly ; Excel works almost perfectly with complex documents too. Entourage is faster, in general than Outlook, not a big achievement. But shortcomings do rear their ugly heads.

I would highly recommend avoiding the use the old Word format (.doc) with large documents and sticking with .docx (the modern extension). While working on my thesis, I was suddenly told there was no space on my hard drive when trying to save the .doc. Saving as .docx worked fine. I sweat bullets getting to that conclusion with no real support from Microsoft’s online documentation. This may have been addressed in the patches Microsoft issues regularly.

With Entourage, I was unable to find a way to get my notes – the Post-It looking things – which I use on my Blackberry for temporary information. Entourage also cannot invite people as optional. It can do great things Outlook cannot do, such as grouping contacts and emails into Projects. That’s neat but not fundamental.

Finally, today I encountered a big issue with PowerPoint 2008: On the PC, when saving a presentation you have the option to embed the fonts you used (assuming they have no copyright restrictions) with your file – to ensure optimal viewing or editing. The Mac version does not even offer that option and DOES NOT save the fonts for you – almost guaranteeing issues. Somewhat of a dealbreaker for me.

All in all, though, the layout of the applications is much less revolutionary (read Office 2007 for PC) and drastically more useful. There is some hint of the Office 2007 ribbons, but without the nonsense, hidden commands and extensive headaches. The applications also appear generally much more stable than their PC counterparts and run faster. Microsoft gets a solid 8 for this effort, as long as you are aware of the limitations and constraints.

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