Weaver's Loom: Apple

Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Unnecessary Drama

I have a theory that as human beings, we create a lot of unnecessary drama because of misunderstood communication. And in most cases the intent of the message is something good, but what’s received, well, not so much.

Political leaders have this worst, since every sentence they utter goes under a microscope and is often compared to every other thing that they ever said. A leader can, for instance, think that they are rallying the troops to liberate a country’s people from oppression, and be understood as a crusader trying to impose his views on the rest of the world.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Moving to GMail on your iPhone

After moving from a hosted Exchange service to GMail, you need to set up your email client on the iPhone so that it will receive the push notices.

To do this, you need to add a new Exchange service on the device. There’s a nice step by step of this at http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

Alternatively, you can use the standard GMail settings, on the iPhone, but my favorite approach is to actually use the GMail app from Google in the App Store. The reason I like that app over the standard iOS mail app is that it is much more of a true mobile client that takes advantage of the platform.

First get the App from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-from-google/id422689480?mt=8

GMail in the App Store

You can do this either from your iPhone/iPad directly, or using the iTunes store on your Mac/PC.

Once you have the app installed, you need to set up your GMail accounts. Either tap “open” from the App Store page about GMail, or find the GMail icon and launch it.

On launch the app will prompt you to log into your account. For a Google Apps account, this will be the email your administrator assigned you like rob@mydomain.com, and the password that you’ve set up previously by going to http://gmail.com.

Launching the App the first time takes you to the login page, where you can type in your email address and password. Note that this is the same whether you are logging in to a GMail account or a Google Apps account, to Google they are just different users as far as mail goes.

Once you log in, you will be shown the inbox for that account, and be able to read your email pretty easily. To navigate the folders (like sent, draft, etc), you tap on the little icon in the upper left corner that looks like a box with stacked bars.

This will cause the folders and settings pane to slide out from the left and reveal your email structure so that you can choose. Clicking on a particular folder will display that list in the same fashion as you saw with the inbox.

Additionally from this screen, you can add other email accounts by tapping on the profile area at the top of the pane, which slides the list of accounts down and changes the direction of the panel indicator at the top of the pane.

If you’ve already done this, you will see the list of accounts, and each one will be badged with the number of unread messages. Adding a new account is as simple as tapping the large plus icon and logging in. Tapping on a profile picture will switch you to that account once you are logged in.

The little gear icon in the upper right of this corner brings up settings for you email where you can set a few things (such as vacation responder, signature, etc).

Once you log into the new account, you will again see the loading page, this time with the image from the new account’s name and profile image

The next time that you go to the account selection page, you’ll see a list of accounts with the icon for each badged with the number of unread messages showing so that you can easily see what needs your attention at the moment.

Google apps on the iPhone are a mixed bag, with some being native, and others not, so it’s also a good idea to set up the Apple “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” for synchronization of those things (which can use the Exchange push in the same way as an actual Exchange server).

The best way to do this is to follow the instructions at http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

First go to your settings (normally you can find this by clicking the home button on and looking for the gear icon that says “Settings”.

Adding an account to your iPhone

If you’ve previously added accounts, the “Add Account …” will appear below the existing account settings list (in my case I actually have to scroll in order to get to this button.

Tap on the add account button and you’ll be presented with the choice of types of account that you want to use. You can use GMail here, but I prefer to use Exchange simply because it pushes the information to the phone asynchronously

Once you tap on the Exchange button, you’ll get a new page that prompts you for the authentication information. This uses Microsoft’s autodiscover method to figure out how the account should be configured.

Type in the user name and password for your account here, and give it a description. Typically I use the name of the company that has the domain that I’m adding (for example PMI-SFBAC for my pmi-sfbac.org address).

Then click the “Next” button which should bring up the Domain screen. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the server ends up being m.google.com, and that you still have the right username and password. To continue, tap “Next”.

The final step is to choose what you want to be pushed to your phone. Generally the important ones are the contacts and calendars, since those are business related.

Choose what to push

It really doesn’t hurt to have Mail turned on as well, since that keeps your inbox in the iOS Mail app up to date, but if you’re worried about your data plan, just set up the contacts and calendars, since that is the part that the GMail app won’t really be as helpful with.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Mac OS X Lion (Look Ma, No DVD)

I updated to OS X Lion a couple of days ago, and for the most part it was a smooth transition.

This is the first upgrade where Apple is using their App Store concept to distribute the OS, so it was a bit scary to hit “Purchase” and watch nothing happen for half an hour while Mac OS X 10.7 downloaded in the background.

There’s no real indication of anything going on unless you happen upon the “Purchase” tab in the App Store App (seems a bit redundant, doesn’t it?):

After the long download, there was a typical OS install (well maybe not that typical, since it just worked) that ran for nearly an hour. Once that was done there were a couple of minor housekeeping items (like loading Java again separately for some reason), but all in all not much looked different than before.

I was happily exploring features like “Launchpad” and “Mission Control“, when I stumbled on a weird problem. My mouse wheel was scrolling the browser in reverse. That is, it was working in the more natural direction: scrolling the wheel up moved the text upward, and down moved things down.

At first I thought I had some weird virus, but when I upgraded my other Mac, I found the same issue. So I did a couple of quick searches on the Apple site, and found some mentions of the issue.

Apparently somebody at Apple decided the way things scroll has been backward all this time, and made the mouse default the other direction. There were some how-to fix it, but they showed screen shots from a Mac with an Apple mouse, which has a few more settings than what I saw:

While set this way, moving the mouse wheel up made the scroll bar go down, which was confusing to me, since that was what I always thought the wheel was tied to. But it did make the text scroll in the direction of the mouse wheel.

After a very short period, I got used to scrolling that way, but soon realized I’d be in trouble if I had to go to a Windows machine, so I simply unchecked the “when using gestures to scroll or navigate move content in the direction of finger movement” and I was back to “normal”.

I’m sure at some point I’ll probably be sorry (like when I get an actual touch-screen Mac), but hopefully by then Apple will have a setting that will just make my mouse act like it does in Windows, and allow touch to act the way it should.

And then after all that, there is no DVD, no physical device in case something crashes. The theory is there’s a recovery partition (just like the old PC days), so you don’t need that.

Me being the old IT guy, I don’t trust that, so the next time I downloaded the Lion upgrade, I burned a DVD. The store will let you download the purchase again, but 4Gb still takes a long time, so media is king.

Monday, August 10, 2009

iPhone Visual Voice Mail returns

This weekend, AT&T finally fixed my visual voice mail. I still don’t know what they did to fix it, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to a hack that I’ve been reading about which lets the phone do tethering.

Now I didn’t try this hack on my newly replaced phone, but when I asked the AT&T people about it, they said they were working on a fix on their side for a wider problem (meaning I wasn’t the only one who had gone without visual voice mail for some time).

I’m hopeful that this problem won’t recur, but I wonder if perhaps it was caused by AT&T trying to block the tethering hack. Now my phone is happy again, and I’m no longer missing calls (at least as far as I can tell).

Thursday, August 6, 2009

iPhone non-visual voice mail …

A couple of weeks ago, I notice that my iPhone was not receiving voice mails, and I seemed to be missing calls on occasion. In fact, I hadn’t received a voice mail since around the time I upgraded to the 3.0 firmware.

Since I use this as my primary business phone, I was a bit concerned.

I had been seeing occasional error messages about being unable to connect to the network like:

So of course I called AT&T to find out what could be wrong. The first time I called, I followed the path that took me to an Apple representative, and they had me reset the network settings (From the Settings icon, General/reset/reset network settings). After doing that, all of my voice mail from the prior month flowed through into my visual voice mail box.

In the next few days, I was told by a couple people that they had tried to call me, and I again didn’t see any voice mail. I also started seeing the odd network errors again, sometimes in my email or browser:

So I called 611 again, and this time I talked to the AT&T people. They walked me through resetting the network settings, recreated my voice mail box, and a number of other things. At one point, I even got the screen that asked me to setup my voice mail. But still I wasn’t getting the new voice mail messages appearing in my inbox. Finally after bouncing back over to the Apple guys, we made an appointment at the Apple store so I could have the phone checked out.

Somewhere along the line, the visual voice mail simply stopped working. Now when I hit the voicemail icon, I wouldn’t see the list of voice mails, but instead the phone would dial my voice mail:

No matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to get the visual voice mail to come back. We even tried restoring it as a new phone without any luck. The support people thought that perhaps this was a result of the phone hardware failure, and maybe the Apple Genius could find a fix for it.

So I waited and went to my appointment at the Apple Store Genius bar. They ran some diagnostics, asked a few questions, and determined the phone did need to be replaced. They didn’t have one in stock, so they ordered one, and told me that they’d call when it was ready.

A couple of days later, I went to the store, and they activated my new phone. Naturally the first thing I tried was going to visual voice mail, and what did I see ?

So back home, more hours on the phone with both Apple and AT&T, now I have a case open with the AT&T network group.

To be continued ….

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Advantage Mac (again) …

This month has been a bad one for me and computers. First my MacBook Pro died (due to a video card that had been recalled), and then my desktop PC decided to fall over dead.

The Mac failure was another study in why I love Apple service: The video just died one day, no screen, external monitor wouldn’t work. Since a Mac has a real operating system (Mac OS X – a Unix variant), I was able to determine that the machine was actually still working by connecting from my desktop PC using ssh.

I did a bit of system administration black magic, and turned on the remote desktop service (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2370 or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2081446&tstart=1 for a writeup of how), and was able to connect to my MBP using VNC. That allowed me to validate things were working, and to make sure I had a current backup before doing anything else.

A quick call to Apple’s support desk, and the helpful tech looked up the problem, found there was a recall on the video logic board for certain MBP systems, and walked me through a few things to validate it wasn’t just user error. He gave me a case number, told me to go to the Apple store, and have them check for the recall.

So I made an appointment at the store, got there a little early, and waited for that piece. In a reasonably short time, my “Genius” was testing my MBP for the recall issue, and sure enough that was the problem. Next a few minutes as he got the RMA set up, inspected the machine (noting that there was a small ding on the case), and asked me if I wanted it shipped back to my home address. The usual disclaimer about “if we can’t fix it, we might charge you $100 for looking at it”, and it was off to the races.

A couple of days later, I get a call from the Apple Repair Center. The guy on the phone tells me that yes, the recall is covered, but it appears the machine was dropped (which it was many moons ago), and there are all sorts of things that need to be replaced to bring the machine back to factory specs. This all comes with a price tag of $1,200 … Once I recovered my breath, I tell him “but at the store they said all I needed was the recall”. He tells me that, yes that would give me a working machine, and they could probably have fixed it at the store, but since it’s at the repair center they have to apply quality to it.

I tell the guy I’m not in a position to come up with the $1,200 right now, so can he ship it back to the store and let them do the repair. At this point, he tells me, that since I’ve been nice, and since I’m a good customer, he’s going to waive the fee. So Apple basically solidifies my glowing opinion of their service, and I get what for all intents and purposes is a brand new MacBook Pro.

I’m so relieved that this didn’t happen with my wife’s PC …..

Murphy’s law bites me again …

…. But while my MBP was off for service, I revived an old laptop I have for backup purposes. I had it almost completely configured when I got my MBP back. Then, a few days ago, my desktop PC (a Sony) crashed.

I go to the Sony web site, and do one of those instant chat sessions, and through a little back and forth, the chat agent tells me it is either a bad video card, or my memory has gone bad. In either case, it will require service. Now the wheels start spinning, because I know how much video cards cost, and I know I’ll have to pay a few hundred bucks just to get somebody to look at the machine (no Genius bar to bring my Sony to).

In the old days I would have just replaced the video card and memory with spares, but since I’m greener (and don’t really work on hardware any more) these days, I don’t keep things like that around. So now I have a useless desktop, with an unknown problem, with 500Gb of data that I can’t get to. Worse, the Sony has a RAID card, so I’m not sure the disks will be readable except in that machine (it’s really 2x250Gb).

So I’m still trying to figure out what to do to recover the PC, but I’m guessing that will wait for a while …

Restoring my wife’s PC

Luckily for me, I had rebuilt my spare laptop, so I’m able to get the most important files onto my spare laptop, and within a few hours, it’s happily driving my big Gateway monitor (with Quicken and email files restored).

This is possible because of two backup strategies: Quicken online backup (which is a remarket of Connected Backup), and Microsoft Live Mesh.

I’ve used the Connected product ever since I learned about it while working at Cisco. They use the enterprise version, and it does a great incremental backup of your PC, that helped me recover accidental deleted files more than once. For a few bucks a month, the home version does the same thing for a few gig of data.

Live Mesh on the other hand, is a synchronization tool, that is a bit like the old Microsoft Briefcase on steroids. You mark a folder as being a Live Mesh folder, and it gets replicated to the Microsoft cloud. You can then synchronize that folder across systems, and even share it with other users. I created Live Mesh folders for all of my web site work as a way to share files with my clients, and to keep data on my Mac and PC in synch.

What I hadn’t really realized was that I was in effect getting a backup with this as well. I simply shared the folders to my backup laptop, and voila, I had all of my important data back and ready to update. For me, this is one more bit of evidence that there will continue to be interesting applications brought about by the cloud: I hadn’t really thought of Live Mesh as a backup strategy, and it lacks the versioning piece, but in a pinch it’ll do.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Adventures in iPhone beta land

…Or how to brick your phone with an upgrade, and recover…

Earlier this month, Apple released the fifth beta of their 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. As usual, I raced to the site to download it.

I became very excited by the email that I got saying that submissions to the Apple store have to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, which to me means it won’t be long before this is a production OS. With that in mind, I strapped on my crazy cap and decided to upgrade my phone to beta 5.

After downloading the firmware and software for the new beta, I began the upgrade. According to the instructions, you needed the new beta of iTunes to do the upgrade, so that was the first thing that I installed.

Once that was ready, I followed the process that has become familiar to me for upgrading the phone:

Launch iTunes
Dock the phone
Right click on the phone and choose backup
After the backup click the “Restore” button while holding the option (alt) key.
Browse for the new firmware and watch things roll.

As it turns out, the mistake I made at that point was clicking the “Restore” button, later I learned that beta 5 won’t install unless you click “Check for Update” while holding the option key.

The first thing I noticed was that there was an odd cartoon that flashed up on the screen with a pink background. I figured it was some developer’s Easter egg, so I didn’t worry too much. After the usual series of minutes of resetting the phone and iTunes validating the software, the upgrade told me it was done, and I waited for the final reboot. This is typically the point at which the phone reboots, and iTunes detects it and activates.

Instead I ended up with an endless wait, as the phone never rebooted. So I went through the usual tricks to get it to come back to life. Eventually it worked, and I got a pink screen that showed the graphic you see with a new phone.

I plugged it in again, only to find that it wasn’t recognizing the phone (which after several tries led me to believe that the upgrade was not complete). Not only was the phone stuck, but I couldn’t seem to get it back into DFU to restore the software.

At this point it occurred to me that perhaps there was something nefarious going on: my phone had been jailbroken prior to the upgrade, so perhaps that was the issue. Luckily for me, I had my wife’s phone to play with, and it hadn’t been jailbroken, so I decided to try and upgrade it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work, so now I had two phones that were basically useless. Digging around the web, I found some references to problems that people had with updating to beta 4, and a workaround for the pink screen problem. The workaround talked about the problem being related to a change in the USB drivers for OS X 10.5.6 that made getting a phone into DFU mode difficult, so I thought it was worth a try (see: http://gizmodo.com/5166029/how-to-install-unofficial-apps-on-your-iphone-3g-or-ipod-touch-easily-and-safely) .

After downgrading the USB drivers on my Mac, I was able to get it into DFU mode, and restore the 2.2.1 version of the firmware. Inspired by this, I tried upgrading my wife’s phone on a PC (figuring the problem was something in the USB drivers). Sure enough, her phone loaded the 3.0 software just fine.

So, once again, I tried upgrading my phone, and couldn’t get it to go. I tried it on the Mac, then on the PC, same results both times. For some reason it wouldn’t work. I could downgrade to 2.2.1, but not upgrade to 3.0.

More digging on the internet, and I found a posting on the iPhone developer forums that talked about installing beta 4 then upgrading to beta 5 if you have an old silver back phone (both of mine are the metal backed pre-3g phones). I figured it was worth a shot, so I downloaded a copy of the beta 4, and ran the upgrade. Eureka! The beta 4 firmware upgrade worked !

At this point it had been a few days since I had my phone working, so I took a breath and decided to run with beta 4 for a while. I kept scouring the web and watching the discussion on the beta 5 upgrade problems to see what people were doing to get it to work.

In the mean time, I ran into an interesting (and scary) side effect of the USB driver downgrade. I forgot to upgrade the drivers after my successful downgrade of the firmware, not thinking that those drivers were actually for a different version of the OS. Whenever I plugged a USB stick into my machine, it would go into panic mode and shut down. I thought my hard drive was dying until I realized it only happened when I plugged in a USB stick, and remembered the driver downgrade. Upgrading to the current drivers fixed that issue.

Finally, I saw a post that talked about clicking the “Check for Upgrade” button while holding the option key instead of the “Restore” button. I decided to try this, and was amazed when it worked. So apparently, all along the secret was to use the upgrade button instead of the restore button. There’s some evidence that the reason this fails is because of part of the upgrade to the firmware, so it makes sense that there may be a difference in the way that iTunes processes an upgrade as compared to a restore.

At any rate, my current thinking of the process is as follows:

Download the firmware and iTunes beta
Install the iTunes beta
Dock the phone
Do a backup of the phone
Option click the “Check for Update” button
Choose the beta firmware IPSW file you downloaded
Be happy if it works.
If it doesn’t work, follow the link above to downgrade the USB drivers.
Go through a normal restore (should put you back to 2.2.x)
Repeat steps 5-7

Hopefully Apple will have this all figured out with the next release (and especially before the production update). As near as I can tell, this only affects the older phones, and doesn’t happen with the 3g iPhone.

I’ve been pretty happy with this iPhone OS, it seems to be quicker and more stable than the 2.2.1 was – still looking forward to the actual release.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Why is Microsoft bashing Apple ?

Today I read a blog that was a continuation of the series of ads that Microsoft has about why you should buy a PC instead of a Mac.

The article (see http://tinyurl.com/cncx73) was one of those cutesy marketing ideas that looked at the alleged difference in cost between a Mac and a PC and came up with an imaginary tax rebate based on the savings. The author used this whitepaper as the basis for the comparison. Like all of these comparisons, comparing apples to oranges results in the preferred hardware (in this case the PC) being shown to be a better deal.

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro, after being a laptop user for more years than I care to count. I switched when it became possible to do so without giving up Windows. With the current crop of Apple machines, you have the option of running Windows directly, setting things up to dual boot (BootCamp), or running Windows in a VM (using Parallels, Fusion, VirtualBox, etc.)

Which once again leads me to ask why would Microsoft bash Apple ?

For me, nothing changed in what I buy from Microsoft – I still need a copy of the operating system, and application suite. I can choose to run some parts under the Mac OS, or just use the Microsoft products as I always have. Granted there are open source alternatives for many of these, but that is true for both the Mac OS and Windows.

When I bought the first Macbook, it was only very slightly more than a comparable IBM thinkpad (which at the time was the business laptop of choice). The only selling point for me was that I would have a second operating system on which to test my development work. In other words, I was getting a dev box that I could use for much less than buying a second machine would have been.

My other reason for buying the MacBook was that it weighed about half of what the ThinkPad did, and had that nice aluminum shell to protect it. Lugging a laptop with a power supply and extra battery around cost me about 10-12pounds in my backpack, so reducing that by about half was very attractive (especially on the 20 mile bike ride home).

What I learned after the fact has made me very glad about making the purchase.

Advantage 1 – Better battery life

I gained a great deal of battery life. My first MacBook Pro gave me 4-6 hours of life on a charge, meaning I could go from meeting to meeting and not have to worry about it dying because I couldn’t find a plug. I could also make it through most flights without the machine dying. I used to have to lug extra batteries for this.

Advantage 2 – Instant sleep

On some laptop PC‘s, when you close the lid, it will try to sleep, or hibernate. The problem is that it doesn’t always work, and even if it does, it seems to take forever to wake back up (and occasionally won’t wake up). With the Mac, I was pleased to find that as soon as I closed the lid, the machine went to sleep. On the MacBook, the little power indicator does a slow blink to let you know it is asleep, and that happens almost immediately.

Especially on days that I was rushing out of the office to catch the train, or hop on my bike, it was immensely gratifying to know I didn’t have to worry about whether the machine actually was sleeping or not. I can recall a few times getting home, unpacking my PC, only to find that it had been ON in my backpack for the whole ride home (and sometimes had overheated because of being in that enclosed space). I eventually learned to shut down the machine before leaving, which meant another 15 minutes or more of non-productive time.

Advantage 3 – Start up time

When I was lugging a Thinkpad to work every day, I would plug it in, dock it and go get breakfast. That was because it took around half an hour to fully boot up the machine from being powered off. With the Mac, if I had powered it all the way off, it only takes a minute or so to boot up, and it is almost instant when starting from sleep.

Advantage 4 – Support

While having a Thinkpad and working for a large corporation, I never had to really think about hardware support. If something broke, I’d just take it to the IT guys, and they’d get it working again (or replace it). When I went out on my own, the very scary possibility that my work machine might die came into play. I bought service contracts for my first few machines, and learned that while they protect you, it is definitely not the same as you get with the desktop support guys.

To get support, you had to wade through a web site, and it was almost impossible to find a real person to talk to (other than the chat bots that everybody seems to use now). And if you had a hardware problem, it was: ship it back to us, we’ll fix it and if it was under warranty we won’t charge you, average turnaround two weeks.

To be fair, I’ve never bought a machine from one of the retail markets like Best Buy or Fry’s, and that’s mostly because of my experience when talking to the people that work there. My impression is that you’re not going to find stellar support there, since you’re basically working with a group that has a broader focus than just the PC’s they sell.

With my first Mac however, things were indeed different. I bought the machine through the web, and the first time I had a problem, I was able to call support. And when I had my first actual issue (a hard drive failure that was caused by me dropping the Mac from about belly high), I took it to the store and they fixed it. Let me say it again: they fixed it, and I only left it with them for a couple of days. And this was before I bought an Apple Care contract!

Advantage Mac OS X

So for me, the advantage is clear, and Microsoft doesn’t even lose out since they don’t sell hardware. I gain significantly in productivity with the Mac, and have my VM for those Microsoft apps I need to stay compatible.

I still don’t get why Microsoft bashes the Mac, maybe they’re worried about the home user who might not need any PC software, but that seems like a sale they would have lost anyway. I’ll continue to buy solid hardware like Apple makes, and decide on which operating system based on the needs I have to interact with my customers, which will include Windows for the forseeable future.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

iPhone beta Recovery …

Recently I downloaded the iPhone beta 3.0 firmware upgrade and decided (without thinking it through) to update my phone to use the new version. In hindsight, Apple makes it pretty clear this is a bad idea, and warns you that you won’t be able to revert to a prior version of the software:

But warnings were meant to be ignored, so I blithely went ahead and updated with the new firmware. Immediately after doing so, I had a d’oh moment when I realized I better not have my business phone running on beta software, so I wanted to revert.

No problem I thought, I’ll just follow the steps to downgrade that I wrote about previously …

Well, this turned out not to be so easy, as soon as I tried to reload the prior version of software, I got to a place where the firmware restore would simply stall, and eventually fail.

I tried every version of firmware on my machine, including the beta, and my phone simply couldn’t be reloaded.

Just when I thought I was going to have to give up and take the phone to the Apple store, I remembered that jail breaking your phone involves a process of putting your phone into DFU mode (allegedly stands for Device Firmware Update, but I think it stands for Dumb Frantic User). In essence this does a hard reset of the phone and puts it back to a factory clean state.

Once I fired up PwnageTool, and ran through the process of jail breaking my phone (mostly because it has a step that helps you through the steps of getting your phone into DFU mode), the restore of the firmware worked again, and I was able to restore to the current 2.2.1 version of the firmware without any problems.

Monday, March 2, 2009

How to Downgrade Your iPhone (or iPod) Operating System

On the first day of 360iDev, I was in a session to learn about programming an iPhone, and somebody mentioned that a friend of theirs had updated their iPod firmware, and couldn’t figure out how to reset it back to the prior version. Since I had recently done this, I thought I could write this walk-through.

Apple uses the iTunes application to upgrade your operating system which does a nice job and for the most part protects you from doing anything too terrible by automating the process. On the iPhone, iTunes will give you an alert about the availability of a new operating system, and ask you if you’d like to upgrade, and tell you that if you have problems you will have the option to restore from a backup.

The interesting thing about the backup piece though, is that it doesn’t really restore the firmware, only the settings. For most users this is fine since the reason for needing to go through the “restore” process is actually because of a problem with the firmware, and the “restore” does all the work required to get your phone back to working with the new firmware and your old settings.

If however, you need to go to a prior version of the firmware, the process is not so obvious. Until recently I didn’t even think this was possible for somebody to restore to the prior version unless they were a developer.

After I updated my firmware on my iPhone recently, I noticed that my hard drive was getting to be very full, which prompted me to search for what was using up my disk space. This led me to find that the old version of the firmware gets saved by iTunes when you do the update.

Firmware files have an .ipsw extension and can be found at the following locations:

On Windows:
Documents and Settings\Application DataApple ComputeriTunesiPhone Software Updates

On Mac:
~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates

To restore the firmware to the prior version, do the following:

Launch iTunes (with your iPhone connected)
Click the button that says “Restore” while holding down the “Option” key (use the Shift key on Windows). Note: if you get a prompt asking if you want to back up your phone, you probably weren’t holding down the key when you clicked, and you’re actually going through the restore process.

Alternatively, if you’re an iPhone developer, the XCode Organizer can also drive this process of selecting a version to install on your phone.

In either case, the actual firmware change is done through iTunes. Now you should see the firmware file being extracted:

Your phone will be reset, and you’ll see the firmware being validated in iTunes:

Next you’ll see the update message:

At this point your phone will be reset back to factory settings for that prior version of the firmware. You’ll probably get the prompt that tells you an update is available, which you can cancel.

Finally if you want to restore your settings, pick the backup you want to use (you can also tell it to set up as a new iPhone, which just means you won’t have any of your settings from before). This will restore all of your apps and setting, although you may end up with a message that tells you about applications that won’t work if you have any that are for a newer version of the firmware (in other words if your backup contains an App version that wasn’t available for the firmware you reloaded).

After all of this, iTunes will probably ask you if you want to upgrade your firmware to the current version, which is how you would go back to the current version when you are ready to do so (or you can go through this whole process again to go to a specific version). You may want to turn off the automatic update checking if you are going to switch to other versions very often.

Note that your “problem” applications from the prior message will work once again after you are on a version of the firmware that is current enough to support thos applicatons.

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