Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ!

After a sixteen year run in Seattle, I’ve moved myself and my company to Asbury Park, NJ. I’m still in the process of settling in, but am open for business. Same great personalized service … in a new location.

My new address is:

710 6th Ave Unit 207
Asbury Park NJ 07712

My new phone number is 732-910-5254.

For my current clients, please update your address book and phones. I have ported my old 206-850-5135 phone number to Google Voice. So even if you call the old number you will still reach me. But it is better to just use the new number.

I look forward to meeting and supporting new Mac, iPhone and iPad users and businesses in my new east coast metropolitan location as well as continuing to support my wonderful west coast clients.

In a previous post about How To: Create IMAP Mail Account on iPhone account on the iPhone, I made reference to this ingenious little iPhone app called Pastebot.

Pastebot is a powerful clipboard manager by Tapbots that stores text & images copied from your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad (compatible though not universal yet.). You can organize, apply filters to, and copy clippings to be pasted or sent to other apps, or even to your Mac.

Have you ever gone to a website on your iPhone and it was the type of site that would read much better on a full screen? Or maybe the site is Flash based? With Pastebot and a few “touches” you can paste that long ungodly URL directly to your Mac’s browser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this little utility already.

Pastebot, the “little utility that could”, and does, is only $3.99 on the iTunes App Store. Combine that with the free Pastebot Sync from the Tapbots website and you have a very handy and useful combo.On the iPhone, Pastebot will keep track of every item you cut or copy. It will automatically save 99 items in its “clipboard”. You can name and file any of those items into folders for later use. I have copied all my eMail signatures into a folder in Pastebot, and now I can easily copy any of those back to the iPhone clipboard to paste into eMail I compose on the iPhone.

A few days ago I had the most bizarre thing happen. I was working on my computer, a MacBook Pro 15″ 2.53 HHz Intel Core Duo Uni-body and an attached Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display. I was in the middle of something, when the image on the screen split in half. The left half of the screen was on the right and the right half on the left. For a split second  (no pun intended) I freaked! Then my brain immediately went into troubleshooting mode. After I tried a few things in the Display System Preference, I just decided to restart. That fixed the issue. And I thought nothing more about it.

Now a day later … Thursday June 12th … I was again working on my computer, when the whole 24″ display went black! No warning. No dying wheeze. Nothing. Blackness. Wow … the screen went to sleep? No. The MacBook Pro screen was NOT black. Panic time!

Q: How do I create a folder in the iPhone Mail app?

A: YOU CAN’T!

It’s another mystery of life. Why in the world can’t you create a folder in the iPhone Mail app!!?? You can move an eMail message, or a group of messages from one folder to another, but you can’t create a Mail folder on the iPhone. It’s just another of the glaring oddities of the iPhone.

I can understand not being able to do this with a POP account, because iPhone Mail doesn’t sync the mail messages themselves via iTunes. So it would follow, you couldn’t sync newly created folders with moved messages from the iPhone.

One would think though, it could be done with an IMAP eMail account. But it’s just not so.

It’s an enigma wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a burrito …

My only suggestion to all offended and incredulous iPhone user, is

And so it has come to pass. The magic “Jesus Tablet” has come to mere mortals. And it’s name is iPad! Like Manna from Steve Jobs and company, it has been delivered unto us this holy day Wednesday, January 27th 2010. Steve came from the mount @ 1 Infinite Loop and presided over his flock from a singular leather chair, stage left of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, San Francisco. The “reality distortion field” is strong with this one. I could only imagine the excitement of the yet unanointed.

With so many rumors flying, no one knew what to expect. Would Steve start with something innocuous, the new iPhone OS (which didn’t happen) or a new iPhone (which also didn’t happen) and then at the last moment …. oh … just one more thing. No. He launched straight away into setting up and introducing the new iPad.

There will be those that will rip it apart for what it doesn’t do. No phone. No Camera. No Verizon. No multitasking. But as a consultant, I need to talk about what it does do. And the possibilities it brings. Oh. And the joy!

It seems I’ve helped dozens of clients trying to set up IMAP mail on their iPhone. So I’ve finally decided to document this in a “How To” post. For those of you who’s ISPs do not support IMAP mail, at some point in the future I may do the same thing for POP setup. For those ready to tackle this … read on.

There are some quirks involved with setting up IMAP mail on the iPhone. Especially for those ISPs or mail providers who don’t support SSL (secure sockets layer). The default for iPhone is to create any account with SSL on. Some of the biggest confusion for first time users is how long it takes SSL to be negotiated the first time the IMAP account is set up, especially if your are doing it over Edge or 3G and not a Wi-Fi connection. But even with Wi-Fi the wait can seem like an eternity! And all the confusing error dialogs that are popped up for you to act upon. Hopefully I’ve documented all those situations.

Okay. That may be a little harsh … but you would think after paying for a system upgrade, that was supposed to be rewritten from the ground up … a major bug like the IMAP/PHP bug would have been fixed. I know this problem is still effecting people. They are still logging complaints at Apple’s Discussion Groups. I was hoping … but no go!

I have been an Apple user/evangelist (current translation: fanboy) since I bought my first Mac Plus sometime in 1986. I purchased that little beige wonder to use in my recording studio in Asbury Park, NJ. I always thought Apple was bulletproof. They could do no wrong, and always cared about the experience of the Mac user.

Do I still feel that way? I’d be a blind zealot if I said yes. There have always been questionable calls on Apple’s part throughout the years. But at some point Apple stepped up to the plate, took responsibility and made things right. No matter what the cost. Financial or otherwise. It seems this concept gets harder and harder for Apple. For whatever reason.

It started June 25th with my post “Apple Developer {dis} Connection or … How My Apple ID Was Hijacked“. I explained how my Apple ID was hijacked by someone,

There are only so many hours, minutes, seconds in a day. The number is finite. This is a given. But it seems there is an infinite number of social media sites and they seem to grow exponentially. Okay this may be an overstatement … but that’s what it seems like. These sites have a habit of eating away at said hours, minutes, seconds. This is also a given.

I now have both personal {@joestreno} and work {@emacconsulting} accounts for Twitter, blogs for personal {go2jo.com} and work {emacconsulting.com} thoughts … not to mention personal accounts with Facebook, MySpace, Blip.fm, and Ping.com. Though Ping.com is a site that lets me simultaneously update my Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace … plus any other social media sites I might need to update my status on.

Sometimes it feels like I’m teetering on the abyss of info overload! Or maybe “sharing” overload. I can share my thoughts, my photos, my musical tastes, my recipes, my current location and possibly more information than anyone would need to, or even care to know.

What’s a self-promoting egotist entrepreneur computer consultant like myself going to do? Too little time? Too much to share? Enter Blogo …

Tweetboard is a cool little piece of java coding that lets you add a forum to most any website or blog using Twitter as the engine. It will allow threaded replies like no application I’ve seen yet. As the Tweetboard website explains it:

“Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.”

Written by the folks at 140ware, this little piece of java heaven is a little tab that resides on the left side of your site. When there are new Tweets to be read the tab color becomes red and displays the number of new tweets since your last visit.