TUAW Sunday snacks: Some tasty tidbits of random information
In between watching those Sunday NFL games, we're hoping that you're snacking on some TUAW goodness. For your munching pleasure I thought I'd cook up some of the interesting tidbits that have accumulated in our inbox this morning and present them to you for consumption.
First, from TUAW reader Tom, is a fascinating look at a pre-Apple "Apple logo." Apparently in 1969, Piaggio Vespa, world-famous for their Vespa scooters, had an Italian ad campaign featuring apples with both sides missing a bite. The campaign used the Italian phrase "Chi Vespa mangia le mele," or "He who Vespas eats apples." Echoes of the campaign can still be found on various Vespa websites, including the USA site where you'll find many dingbats and buttons are apples with a bite or two taken out of them.
Next, TUAW fan Keith pointed out something interesting. If you go into Settings > General > Usage, there's a list of your iPhone usage. Down near the bottom of the list of statistics is a section called Tethering Data.
This shows up on 3G / 3GS models, since tethering is allowed by many carriers. Of course, as "Seth the Blogger Guy" notes in the AT&T video, American iPhone owners don't get the joy of using their iPhones as wireless data modems for laptops because the AT&T network has insufficient capacity. We've talked previously about AT&T's view on tethering; read here for more info. Of course, there's always the jailbreak option. Read on for more news tidbits.
Several readers including Colin Q., Matthew, and Michael have sent us tips about problems with Intuit Quicken and QuickBooks with Snow Leopard. In my opinion, this is no big surprise given Intuit's past history of Mac software that is buggy and/or lacking features. Michael pointed out some issues with Quicken and Snow Leopard that were due to expired security certificates for Quicken 2005, 2006, and 2007. This issue has a happy ending, since Intuit has published online instructions on how to update the certificates and resolve the problem.
Colin's problem was more serious, dealing with QuickBooks 2009 and Snow Leopard. Problems that many users are having include having the application crash when doing such common tasks as invoicing or receiving payments. Colin even lost his QuickBooks database, but was fortunately enough to have a backup (QuickBooks does automatic backups, by the way).
As Colin pointed out, Intuit is acting as if Snow Leopard was a big surprise that they didn't know about, although developers have been aware of the OS for several years. The company is working on QuickBooks 2009 R8, due to be released "sometime in September," that will resolve the incompatibilities with Snow Leopard. You can sign up to be notified when the patch is available. In the meantime, just don't invoice any of your customers or receive payments...
Other users have noted similar problems with QuickBooks 2007; I personally run QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac to keep my business books, and have had no issues to date since upgrading to Snow Leopard. Your mileage may vary.
Finally, we received a note from TUAW reader Steve (no, not me!), who was proudly touting that he broke the record for the most text messages in a month by sending and receiving 662,258 texts from his iPhone 3GS. As Michael Jones mentioned, Steve could have just signed up for every SMS alert known to man, then sat back and watched those alerts roll in to get to this incredible number. If you want to hear about this and the 13,000 page AT&T bill he received, watch the video below.
