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Apple needs to learn how the Internet works before iCloud evaporates
Last week a former Apple employee posted a scathing breakdown of Apple's cluelessness in cloud services. The article notes that Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is learning to grok cloud services. Let's see, we've gone through iTools (yes, I'm ignoring eWorld), dot mac (the very name was awkward), iWork.com (forever a beta, now defunct) plus MobileMe and now... iCloud. For users of all of these services, the reality of the experience fell short of the promises made by Apple at packed-to-capacity keynotes. In the case of MobileMe's calamitous debut, those failures meant a team-wide, brutal evisceration by the CEO. Is the same angry finger-pointing happening now? Maybe it should be. Apple makes great hardware, adequate software and terrible web services. It's a huge problem for the company, and it will continue to weigh Apple down as iCloud continues to offer sync and data management nightmares. This time it's personal Let's ignore the myriad App Store errors. Let's forget what a clusterfudge MobileMe was, or how Apple-hosted mail dies like Prometheus (regularly and painfully). And does anyone even recall the "exclusive" dot mac Dashboard widgets we were promised? No, you do not, for good reason. Apple hasn't seemed to have its eye firmly on this stuff until very recently, when it realized that forcing customers to connect their Mac or Windows machine with a cable to sync iDevices was a patently bad idea. Well, that and Google (and pretty much everyone else in the Valley) has been beating them to death with excellent online services for a few years now. My own bout of horrid luck with Apple's ignorance of data integrity and web tech kicked off over Thanksgiving. While returning from a friend's new home, I needed directions to my own house. I figured I'd ask Siri for directions (again, let's forget how Siri has been up and down). Whoops! Siri suddenly didn't know where I lived or who I was! Why? Because my own primary account info had been deleted from Contacts. And iCloud. And all my Apple devices using iCloud. Unbelievable. I'm not the only one who has had contacts mystically disappear. Granted, the designation for the "primary contact" or "My Info" is a local Siri setting, not something that would necessarily sync back to iCloud. It's not linked automatically to your Messages emails, for instance; those are stashed in iCloud directly, and I've been able to associate a number of former emails (@mac and @me) with various iDevices so Messages could route to them. You'd think that there might be a flag to prevent your "My Info" contact from vaporizing, so the "me" the iPhone knows is a bit more protected. On the other hand, it would potentially be weirder if the iPhone didn't respect contact changes from the cloud (iCloud.com, in this case) and left you with a phantom, unsynced "me" contact. At any rate, I soon discovered a number of my family members had been deleted, including my dad and my children. The relationships were saved into my primary contact, which was also deleted. My mom was still in there, along with six instances of Apple, Inc. Since I started using contacts across devices and syncing them, way back in the Palm Pilot Pro days, I've never had such a massive screw-up with my data. Duplicates are one thing. Removing user data without warning or even good reason, at the risk of breaking things (like Siri and Maps), is just bad business. To be fair, things can go awry if you hold your nose wrong in Google and Exchange contacts, but what is baffling is the inconsistent behavior and the inability to pin down how sync is really working. I tried a number of tricks to divine how things got so messed up, scouring my Macs, iCloud.com and my iDevices for discrepancies. At one time I had four multiples for almost every contact. At another time I had half the contacts I had before. I still have a huge mess on my Mac, including 4 copies of every group I've ever created (which are practically useless as Apple doesn't seem to grok groups that well either -- add that to the ever-growing list). But I did manage to stem the magical deletions. Incidentally, a call to Apple for help left the tech handling the call baffled, and none of my questions about the sanctity of my data were answered. I solved this problem on my own. Here's something I learned: if you want to see what Apple really thinks you have in our address book, log in to iCloud.com and check. iCloud represents "the truth" as far as PIM data is concerned -- it stores the only real copy of your data. I'm still unable to remove the 800 or so duplicates in Contacts, but for now I'd rather err on the side of keeping the data rather than losing it. Fixing contacts If you're having issues with contacts, I encourage you to check out these potential solutions. My issue was far simpler, it seems. One of the joys of being a loyal Apple customer for three decades means that I have a plethora of email suffixes. My iPad 3 happened to be using @mac.com to log in to iCloud, whereas everything else appears to have been using @me.com. Unfortunately the email forwarding config is completely independent from the Apple ID being used to sync your various iCloud applications. I made the mistake of presuming my Apple ID suffixes wer somewhat interchangeable. For a while, it really seemed like that worked, since when iOS 6 first came out I tested Maps and at the time Siri knew where I lived. Something changed, but with the black box that is iCloud sync, it's hard to say when. Apple has some ID issues going forward. For one, you cannot merge Apple IDs. For whatever reason, I happen to only have one Apple ID (that I know of) -- that means I'm a lucky person! Unfortunately Apple's databases apparently cannot divine the sameness in my addresses as it pertains to iCloud services. Thus, the one disturbance in the force (a different suffix on my account email) was enough to start deleting contacts, willy-nilly. I don't know about you, but if I were a small business owner I would think again before trusting my data with Apple after reading just a few of the many discussion groups on the topic of data loss around iCloud. I'm still not 100% convinced that iCloud won't just randomly delete my data. As a lifelong Apple customer, I find myself hesitant to recommend its products because of this critical failure. Your data is hardly more replaceable than your device, but I sometimes forget Apple is in the hardware business. Things are bad right now, but maybe they'll get better And "things" are worse than most people know. In almost every discussion I've had with developers, I hear some horror story about iCloud. Ordinary users are bitten regularly with missing data, and not just contacts. We're talking about work documents. Can you get those back? Often, you cannot. There is no Time Machine for iCloud documents on iOS. Versioning? Good luck with it. How we wish Apple could have bought Dropbox. Issues with iCloud document management are documented elsewhere, so I won't go into that. I'm talking about Apple being incapable of simply storing your data. It seems the company just can't do it. I don't know that I can stand another @whatever, either. I wish Apple would pick a technology and stick with it. In perspective, iCloud issues represent a small group of dismayed customers. As I kvetched on Twitter about my predicament, I was reminded by others how data is routinely lost across a variety of company cloud offerings. No system is perfect, that much is obvious. But what is also obvious to me is that Apple, on a fundamental level, does not get cloud services. This is wasn't a big deal in the eWorld days, but today it's the biggest problem Apple may face. iTunes Match, iCloud mail, Messages -- the list of failures in this area is growing longer than the hardware achievements of the company. There's a Twitter account for iCloud downtime that makes the former IT nerd in me want to Hulk smash some Xserves. In the end, it could be these user-facing services and their continuing failures that impacts the bottom line of Apple. What Apple needs to do is focus on the back end for a bit and fix the underlying technology problems a few legacy systems have caused. Stuff like taking an entire store offline to update a product catalog is no longer retro chic, it's downright embarrassing. The biggest question of all is whether Apple will figure this out before it is too late. Then again, maybe next year we'll finally get an update to the Mac Pro.
2014 Ford Fiesta gets MyFord Touch, smarter Sync voice commands
For all of Ford's emphasis on Sync, it's hard to deny that Fiesta drivers usually sit on the bottom rung of the automaker's technology ladder when they're denied MyFord Touch and the related perks of larger vehicles. Pick up the keys to a higher-spec 2014 Fiesta, however, and you'll be in for a treat. The compact will stuff a 6.5-inch touchscreen and MyFord Touch into the center stack, with a few software upgrades over what we've already seen in cars like the Focus and Fusion. The highlight is undoubtedly the more direct voice command system -- the Nuance-driven recognition no longer demands that we specify music categories or radio formats to start playing tunes. Bluetooth smartphone pairing and navigation by address should be streamlined at the same time. Motorists will have to wait until 2013 to reap the rewards, but it could be worth the wait to drive away with Ford's better electronics in an affordable ride.
Multi-iPad table moves from concept to reality
Here's an item that would spice up any living room -- although it might be a budget-buster. The iPad table, a project of the Universal Mind interactive agency in Grand Rapids, links 15 iPads together to create one synchronized display. The co-creator of the iPad table, Joe Johnston (who put it together with David Tucker), told TUAW that the system was conceived and built from scratch including the industrial design of the table and the custom app driving the connected iPads. A private wireless LAN hands off object information from iPad to iPad, allowing the moving "hypercards" to bounce and sail across the full extent of the iPad matrix. Double-tapping one of the cards expands it into a full webpage or other content. It's easy to see how this sort of system could be popular and useful in a conference, retail or exhibit context. In fact, it strongly resembles another tabletop approach to touch computing that's had its branding co-opted to launch a different product: Microsoft Surface, Mark I. Before the Surface name was attached to the tablet convertible with the snappy keyboard, Microsoft was marketing Surface as a cocktail table-sized touchable computer intended for public, tourism and exhibit functions; that concept lives on as Samsung's SUR40 with Microsoft PixelSense. If you're interested in experimenting with multiple iOS displays linked together, Aachen University's Mobile Multi Display app is in the App Store now; for single-device inexpensive digital displays on the iPad, check out DynaSign or Digital Signage X. The utility of the iPad as a kiosk device took a big leap forward with iOS 6's Guided Access, which permits non-jailbroken devices to lock in a specific app and restrict sensitive screen areas while disabling the home & sleep buttons (making our "best of 2011" iPad accessory, the BubCap, a bit less necessary). Professional multi-display solutions from companies like Videro (profiled by us here) and Sedna are capable of driving the iPad as well as the Mac, but haven't yet reached the point of multi-device iPad display configurations. Thanks, Grant!
Ford sells its 5-millionth vehicle with SYNC: that's a lot of media-savvy cars
They grow up so fast, don't they? It was almost six years ago that we saw Ford SYNC step into the world, and the automaker has just handed the keys to the owner of the 5-millionth SYNC-capable vehicle. While we haven't been told what model had the distinction, the milestone represents another million SYNC cars, SUVs and trucks than we saw in May last year. The most striking aspect between then and now may just be the shift in focus (pun entirely intended) -- where we started off just happy to hook up our Zunes in a world of CD changers, we're only content today if we can control seemingly every mobile app known to humanity through a touchscreen. Ford might not want to look too fondly at its rear-view mirror, however, lest an abundance of technology-laden competition close in too quickly.
Doxie One portable scanner rolls in for $149, plays well alone and syncs with Mac, PC and iOS
Doxie has added another portable scanner to its heart-logo'd lineup, the Doxie One, which can digitize documents and images to an included SD-card with nary a computer in sight. Doxie says that'll let you travel light with the "paper-towel roll sized" device to scan and automatically generate Abbyy OCR-read PDFs, then sync up later with a Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad. From there, you can use the included app on a Mac or iDevice to transfer the scans to Dropbox, Evernote or iMessage. The device eschews the WiFi option of its recent Doxie Go sibling, but carries a lesser $149 sticker -- check the PR for the full dope.
Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac updated for WP8, rebranded simply as 'Windows Phone'
For Mac users who prefer Microsoft as their mobile partner, Windows Phone 7 Connector has been the one bridging the divide so far. The sync app has just been updated to v3.0, gaining support for Windows Phone 8 and a concise new name -- "Windows Phone" -- to match its Windows 8 counterpart. The new app plays well with Retina Macs too, while other goodies in the changelog include drag-and-drop capability for transferring files in either direction, along with support for iPhoto 9.3.2 and Aperture 3.3.2. Incoming WP8 devices such as the HTC 8X and the Lumia 920 will also get enhanced ringtone features and allow battery life to be monitored via the app. Persuaded? Then collect your goods at the source link below.
MetroPCS intros first Rich Communication Services on LTE, touts universal contacts and chat (video)
Smartphone users are well immersed in a world of contact syncing, media sharing, VoIP and video calls. They're just not used to finding everything in one place, let alone guaranteeing that any carrier-level features will work with other phones and providers. MetroPCS is hoping to put itself ahead on that front by offering a potentially universal fix. It's the first carrier anywhere to launch the Rich Communication Services standard on LTE, which provides a perpetually synced contact list that serves as the launching pad for everything else. Early adopters of the Joyn-branded service can chat through text, share media (including during calls) and start up WiFi voice or video calls without needing yet another specialized service and the extra sign-in that goes with it. Right now, the very young state of RCS on LTE leaves it behaving more like the isolated services it's trying to replace -- on MetroPCS, only those with the Galaxy Attain 4G and an after-the-fact Joyn app download can get the experience as intended. As long as more devices and carriers come onboard, though, the technology might be the long-term key to pulling us away from fenced-off conversations in Google Talk or Skype.
Microsoft adds WP8 app to Windows Store just in time for launch
If you're aiming to get your hands on one of the many Windows Phone 8 devices launching later today, it would be nice to be able to sync it with your Windows 8 PC, no? Redmond has you covered in the nick of time, as it's just released the free Windows Phone app to its Windows Store. That'll let you get music, photos, or video over to your computer and back, use Windows 8 apps to share things like searches, automatically save photos or videos taken with your phone to your PC and check your phone's storage to see how it's being used. It'll also let allow you to download phone apps and learn more about your device, while pulling off a trick we've saw first with Apple, then WP7 -- letting you track down your smartphone if it goes missing. You can grab it at the source, then all you'll need is a WP8 (or 7.8) handset -- so stay tuned for our liveblog at 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST to see when that might happen.
Rdio posts Android beta app with new sidebar UI, unified playback and remote control
Rdio has spent a large part of 2012 revamping its mobile app, and a new beta shows that it's still full of ideas with two months left to go. The 2.3 test version makes the ubiquitous hidden sidebar even more unavoidable than we've seen before, but those not irked by UI homogeneity will be happy to see Rdio gain some multi-device harmony: along with syncing whatever's being played from desktop to mobile and back, the beta introduces a remote control that lets Android gear either serve as the remote or as a target for other devices. A play-later queue persists across devices, too. Although we haven't been given a timeframe for the finished version pushing out through Google Play, there's nothing stopping avid subscribers from taking a slight risk with the beta and getting a taste of their musical future.
More car companies link iPhone nav apps to dashboard displays
Rather than offer proprietary in-car navigation solutions, auto makers Ford and Chevy are looking to smartphones for their driver's navigation needs, says a report in the New York Times. Ford is working with Telenav on a solution that will let smartphone owners connect their phone-based maps application to car's in-dash display. The Ford solution is powered by Ford's Sync system and requires the use of the CarConnect app, which costs US$25 a year. An Android-compatible version is available now, while an iPhone version is in the works. Chevy is offering a similar system in its 2013 Spark model. Spark owners can take advantage to the Chevy's MyLink system and the $50 BringGo app which sends navigation data to car's dash.
Ubuntu One reaches Mac in beta, completes the cloud storage circle
For all of the many directions Ubuntu One's cloud storage has gone, it hasn't headed the Mac's way. Official clients have been the province of Linux devotees (naturally, Ubuntu is recommended) and their Windows friends across the aisle. A newly available Mac beta puts all three major desktop platforms on an even keel, very literally -- the OS X port is almost identical to what you'd get in Linux or Windows, including a few rough points where other interface concepts clash. Still, the Ubuntu One test build has a handy Mac-specific menu bar item, and it's one of the few cloud options that will natively support both the Ubuntu box in your den and the MacBook Pro in your bag. Grab your copy at the source link if you can deal with a few unfinished elements.
Missing your iDisk? OpenDrive is an easy-to-use substitute
When Apple killed MobileMe and iDisk I was pretty unhappy. It was great for quick small backups, and an easy way to share files with friends by giving them access to a public or password-protected folder. There are plenty of sync/backup solutions out there, like MediaFire, Dropbox, SugarSync and others, but I really liked the desktop mounted iDisk, that looked and acted like an external drive. Other similar options include Google Drive, SkyDrive and, of course, Apple's iCloud, but none functioned quite the way iDisk worked. This weekend, I took a look at OpenDrive, which does a fine job of doing what iDisk used to do. You get a desktop mounted virtual drive, complete with public and private folders. You can drag anything in, or set it up to sync with any files on your computer. The system encourages collaboration, and it is easy to give someone a URL so they can download a single file, several files or a folder. Files are encrypted (AES 256) and on the Mac you get a menu bar control that opens the virtual drive. You can also mange everything from a web browser that lets you set up folders, security and get direct links to files. OpenDrive has a free subscription option that gives you 5 GB of space. There are various plans starting at US $5.00 a month for 100 GB storage, and 25 GB/Day bandwidth. With increasing costs you get more storage, up to 1 TB, custom branding and more daily bandwidth. I tried the free solution and it worked well. In fact, it was very much like my old iDisk. I dragged in some files, and easily shared them with friends through a browser GUI that allows them to view a file if it's a video or photo, or download it. Documentation is a little thin and I'd like to see built-in help. For backup or syncing OpeDrive has plenty of competition, but for pretty much capturing the spirit of the iDisk, OpenDrive is fairly unique. Pricing is reasonable, and even the free 5 GB plan will probably be very useful for people doing casual file exchanges. There are some file size limits. The $5 home plan limits file sizes to 1 GB, the $15 Office plan ups that to 3 GB, and the $25 Pro plan allows 5 GB files. OpenDrive works as advertised. The company offers free iOS and Android apps for sharing between portable devices, and Macs and Windows computers are supported with feature-complete applications. You can also use the service with a browser. OpenDrive is just one way to handle backup, sync and file sharing, but it closely replicates what iDisk provided and adds even more features. If you miss the ease of use of iDisk, OpenDrive is worth a try, especially since you can see if it meets your needs at no cost. %Gallery-167825%
Showtime's second screen iPad app hits 2.0, goes from Social to Sync
With its season premieres of Dexter and Homeland (trailers are embedded after the break) on deck for next Sunday evening, Showtime has refashioned its second screen iPad app in version 2.0 and even changed the name to reflect new features. Now dubbed Showtime Sync, it follows other network branded apps (AMC, MTV, NBC and Syfy come to mind) by focusing on pushing relevant content, viewer polls and the like to the tablet while the show plays. It syncs up automatically from the show's audio, which should make things simple when watching via DVR, VOD and even DVD / Blu-ray or streaming (could you have Showtime Anytime streaming on one tablet synced to another one?), while promising lots of photos plus behind the scenes content when the episode ends. Hit the source link to grab the free app, how you come by the episodes you'll have to figure out on your own.
Box Accelerator may triple cloud upload speeds versus its rivals, comes to syncing apps soon (video)
Upstream speeds are frequently the bottlenecks for cloud storage: an entire company might be held back waiting for that last presentation video to go online before the big meeting. Box wants much more parity through Accelerator, a custom infrastructure that should make uploads hum. It uses Amazon's EC2 for help, but the real magic comes through a mix of Box's own network and special prioritization. Accelerator goes beyond just location to factor in the browser, OS and other criteria that could affect a data packet's journey. The company claims through outside studies that its average 7MB/s speeds make it the upload king by a wide margin, to the tune of 2.7 times its fastest worldwide rival and 3.1 times any of its American counterparts. Peak speeds are up to 10 times faster than before, if you go by the company's word. Most of the focus is on corporate customers and speeding up access near the provider's ten global access points, but Box is planning both to ramp up performance in more areas and bring Accelerator to the company's syncing platforms in the near future -- an obvious lure for would-be Dropbox customers.
Synology launches DiskStation DS413j NAS server for your own private cloud
If you like your data local, but crave remote access, you've now got options like Synology's new DiskStation DS413j -- a network-attached storage (NAS) server for your own private cloud. The feature-packed box has four drive bays for a total of 16TB storage, and you can mix and match HDDs of different sizes without losing the comfort of RAID. Along with what you'd expect from NAS, its media server will stream content to your console or TV via DLNA or UPnP and push tunes to your stereo, with iOS and Android apps for couch DJing. The server will sync your files across computers if you wish, and give you access to all that data on the move via the internet or mobile apps. And, if you need more files, you can download directly using your favorite protocols -- it'll even automate them if you trust RSS feeds to make recommendations. All this can be yours for around $380, depending on the retailer, but don't forget to budget for drives to fill those empty bays. %Gallery-164329%
ASUS boasts about AiCloud features in new teaser (video)
Router, Rowter. However you say it, you probably need one, which is why ASUS is temping you toward buying one of its new AiCloud models. The new service is designed to unify your data across devices, letting you share and stream multimedia and documents from PCs to smartphones. You'll also be able to store files online, remote control your PC from your tablet and create single-click download links to share with your friends. ASUS is so excited about the project that it's released a new advert telling you all about it, which we've included for you after the break.
With iOS 6, your iPhone address book may be invaded by Facebook email addresses
I'm generally a fan of Facebook. I only use it to keep in contact with people I actually know and hang out with in real life. And for my friends that live in other countries, it's the easiest way to share photos, videos, and other life events. That's why I'm pretty excited about the iPhone's Facebook integration in iOS 6. The ability to post to Facebook from almost anywhere in iOS, use single sign-in to log into any number of apps, and 'like' apps and songs is going to be great. However, there's one unpleasant outcome of Facebook integration in iOS 6: it may load up your contacts list with loads of practically useless @facebook.com email addresses. As I'll explain, this is a huge boon to Facebook's underutilized email service, but a bane to iOS users (and within a matter of days, OS X, Windows, and Android users) across the globe. First the good news: In iOS 6 (and OS X 10.8.2) Apple and Facebook have teamed up to sync your Facebook contacts and their info with the contacts in your existing Contacts app. This is actually a win for users, because most people update their mailing addresses, phone numbers, instant messaging names, and emails addresses on Facebook more often than they would manually send out vCard or simple email updates to contact details. The Facebook contacts sync, in the end, automatically updates your friends' info in your Contacts without you (or your friends) lifting a finger. Syncing contact info is an all-or-nothing feature. Now for the bad news: iOS 6's sync options may also be a Trojan Horse for Facebook's underwhelming email address service. Since 2010 Facebook has offered all of its users @facebook.com email addresses based on the Facebook vanity URL name on the account (the words that appear after the www.facebook.com/ in your Facebook profile's URL). And if you haven't chosen a vanity URL, it's a lot worse: you'll be assigned an @facebook.com email with random numbers in front of the @, à la CompuServe in 1994. Any email sent to your Facebook email address will be automatically routed to your Facebook messages folder on Facebook.com. With the rollout of @facebook.com emails in 2010, Facebook aimed to take on Gmail and improve the stickiness of Facebook.com. That way, when you checked your email you'd be going to Facebook instead of Google or Yahoo or AOL. But as Facebook discovered, no one really cared (or knew) about their @facebook.com email addresses. That's why in June of this year, without notifying users or getting permission, Facebook set every single Facebook user's publicly listed profile email to their @facebook.com email address and hid all their other email addresses from view. Facebook's excuse for this was that they were protecting user privacy, but that's pretty much total crap. It got worse in July, as early beta testers of Facebook sync discovered quickly that the @facebook.com addresses were replacing the default addresses for scores of contacts. The sync API was pushing the most-recently-added email address, rather than the primary -- which automatically meant the @facebook address, since that was newest. While this behavior was deemed to be a bug by Facebook affecting "certain devices" and quickly fixed, our tests now show that the @facebook addresses are still being sync'ed over alongside the user's real world, primary email address. Here's the big problem: Most of Facebook's 900 million plus users still don't know @facebook.com emails exist, yet their @facebook.com email is now listed on their profile by default -- unless they've gone in to change settings to hide the (useless) email address. So what's going to happen in 2-3 weeks when iOS 6 comes out? There are 900 million Facebook users. There are going to be close to 400 million iOS 6-capable devices in the wild by the end of this year. If even a quarter of those users enable Facebook contacts sync, we could have scores of @facebook.com email addresses added to 100 million users' contact lists. As an Apple user who likes clean, uncluttered interfaces, this is a huge drawback. Suddenly all of my contacts will now have at least two email addresses (their "real" one and their unused @facebook.com one). That means when I start typing their name in Mail's "To" field I'm now going to have to select from at least two choices for their email address -- or even more if they already have multiple emails. The result? More taps and impaired productivity. Yes, after I select the primary email address enough times, eventually it will default to the top of the list, but most email users aren't as tech savvy as the people reading this and they might not even notice the "@facebook.com" email address they're using to send their friend a message. And it's not like anyone ever goes to Facebook to check emails when someone says "Didn't you get that email I sent you?" so the result could be a lot of misdirected messages. Useless contact detail is never good for an OS that prides itself on simplicity. But this isn't just a complaint about data clutter and user confusion. Yes, the Facebook contacts integration is only on iOS and OS X, but the Contacts apps on both of those systems sync to other email services (like Gmail, Outlook, etc) and Windows PCs, which then connect to Windows Phones and Android phones and all their contact books and Exchange servers and the list goes on and on. (There are already Android phones that sync Facebook contacts, as well as plenty of third-party apps that enable sync.) So it's entirely possible that within 48 hours of iOS 6 launching, Facebook will have successfully spread its @facebook.com email address to many millions of contact books and email clients -- on myriad types of devices -- across the globe. That's something Facebook has never been able to do with the @facebook.com email addresses, until now. It's of a piece with the shady default "public" email change they made for users a few months ago (which I'm sure, "coincidentally" for them, timed nicely with the upcoming iOS Contacts sync). It's sneaky, and in my opinion it's wrong. While no one at Facebook would send me an email saying "Yeah, this is something that's gonna work really well for @facebook.com email adoption," I've spoken to plenty of Facebook employees off the record. They say Facebook isn't exactly unaware of the benefits iOS sync will deliver to Facebook's email rollout. So what can you, the user do? As a symbolic protest, you can hide your @facebook.com email address from your Facebook friends. This won't stop it from being synced with your Contacts on iOS and OS X, but it will keep Facebook friends from picking it up off your profile page. If you want to make sure it doesn't sync out to other people's address books, commenter Chris suggests setting the Privacy flag on the @facebook address to "Only Me" -- that will keep it entirely secret and out of everyone's hair. To make either of these changes, click the Update Info button on your profile page, then scroll down to Contact Info on the right and click Edit. Find your @facebook address and then set both flags to maximum privacy. Once iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.2 arrive, you probably will want to wait a week or two before enabling Facebook contact/calendar sync, to give this whole mess a chance to sort itself out. But what if there turns out to be no way to block the @facebook.com address invasion? That would be a shame because, besides the @facebook.com email mess, the Facebook integration is going to make a lot of things easier for iOS and Mac users. Other than that? Hope Apple adds selective sync to allow you to control which information iOS draws from Facebook to add to your Contacts. As I've said, this is not only something that will affect iOS or Mac users. The @facebook.com emails will use iOS and OS X as a Trojan Horse and ride it into contact books and email servers across devices across the globe. And that wouldn't be a bad thing if people wanted to use their Facebook email addresses as their primary ones or even as a secondary option, but given that @facebook.com email adoption is basically nill after two years, I'm going out on a limb and saying no one really wants it. It's just excess data that we have to sift through and it shouldn't be forced on us in the guise of otherwise excellent new features.
Windows Phone companion surfaces for Windows 8, could take over syncing duties
It's tough to ignore that the Zune era at Microsoft is quickly winding to a close. That doesn't mean you'll necessarily be out of options for syncing a Windows Phone's contents by the time the Zune desktop app fades away, however. A tip to The Verge has shown a companion app for Windows 8 users that will reportedly load the first time a Windows Phone 8 device syncs up, giving a fully Metro-friendly place to transfer any media. Windows 7 would get its own parallel, just in case some of us aren't willing or able to upgrade our PCs in concert. The replacement desktop apps could be available at about the same time as the Windows Phone 8 launch, if the claims are at all accurate -- which might leave less than two months before one more vestige of Microsoft's MP3 player days goes away.
Mozilla pulls Firefox Home from the iOS App Store, posts source code to GitHub
iOS users keen on Mozilla's Firefox Home will have to find another browser syncing solution: the application has been retired. The app worked in conjunction with Firefox Sync, and was designed to give users access to their desktop history, open tabs and bookmarks on the go. Mozilla says the project "provided valuable insight and experience with the platform," but ultimately decided its resources were better focused elsewhere. All isn't lost, however -- the company is making the source available on GitHub, encouraging users to tinker with the iOS Sync client Firefox Home was built on. Feel free to swim in the code yourself at the source link below.
Mark/Space Welcome Home eases us into new Nokia Lumias, lifts the burden of app hunting
So you just bought a Nokia Lumia 900 and are wondering how on Earth you'll get all your old phone's data over to that new Windows Phone. Nokia and Mark/Space have you covered with a new, Lumia-tuned Welcome Home to Windows Phone app. The Mac- and Windows-based utility goes beyond just shuffling calendars, contacts and media; if you're jumping ship from Android, a BlackBerry or an iPhone, it will scan apps linked to the outgoing hardware and offer QR codes to download either direct or close-enough equivalents for the Windows Phone world. Fresh Lumia owners might appreciate the price more than anything -- unlike the Android porting tool, the Lumia version is a free treat just for joining the Nokia flock. It's available today, but we have a feeling that most of the demand will come after September 5th.
