Lastnight, Apple decided to activate the “Find My iPhone” feature that was announced yesterday at Apples WWDC keynote speech. The “Find My iPhone” feature is a iPhone locate service that works through Mobile Me & GPS.

Say I misplace my iPhone, and someone who works at the establishment I left it at finds it, well most people would just look in the phone book and try to call someone like Home, Mom or Dad, well I lock my iPhone so they can’t do that.

This is where the new “Find My iPhone” feature comes in handy. I login to Mobile Me, and locate my iPhone on a Google Map. I have left my iPhone inside Lenox Mall in Atlanta, Georgia. Well it is inside  a steal building so it can’t get a exact location, just with in a hundred feet. Well that doesn’t help much because I visited like 20 stores while I was there.

Well this is where Apple took it a step further. Not only can you locate your iPhone, but I can also push a message to the iPhone saying if found please email me or call me at some number or email. Well, ring ring, my friend’s, who is with me, iPhone rings and it is the store manager from the Lenox Mall Apple Store letting me know he found my iPhone next to a iMac in the store.

Not to quote Staples, but “That Was Easy.”

I have played with the feature, and have no complaints, it works wonderfully. I was able to find my iPhone in side Lenox Mall and even in a parking garage outside the mall. This is a great feature, and probably the feature that put the biggest smile on my face during yesterdays keynote at WWDC.

WHEN YOU UPGRADE TO IPHONE OS 3.0 ENABLE THIS FEATURE IMMEDITLY VIA THE MOBILE ME SETTINGS ON THE IPHONE.

While Paul and Christina’s guides are great, I wanted to further explore S3sync and give my experience using S3sync to backup my Media Temple (dv) server to Amazon S3. The steps I am going to walk you through are based on S3sync, a open source Ruby application, that will allow you to transfer files to Amazon S3 using secure SSL encryption. Let me start by warning you, that you need to know a bit about the UNIX commands. You will need a application like Terminal for OS X, Linux, or PuTTy for Windows to SSH into your web server. If you don’t know what SSH is, then this tutorial might not be for you. I will be using Terminal which is built into Apple OS X.

**It is very important that you use absolute paths through out this tutorial. If you are not sure what your absolute path is, enter “pwd” in the terminal window after you have logged into you server. For this tutorial, I am going to work directly from the root level.**

Step 1: Install Ruby

I could walk you through a step by step guide on how to install Ruby, but truth be told, I would recommend you check with your web host for specific instructions. For Media Temple, I would use these guides: (dv) 2.0 server or (dv) 3.0 server. The Media Temple Grid server comes with Ruby pre-installed so you can skip this step.

Step 2: Install S3sync

To get started, we need to connect to S3sync’s Amazon S3 and download the S3sync tar-file. Once we have done that, we are going to decompress it and download the SSL certificates for secure transfers.

Start by getting the S3sync tar:

Decompress the tar file:

Remove the S3syc tar file, get the SSL certificates, and decompress them:

Step 3: Setup S3sync

Next, we are going to make the directory that will store the backups before they are transferred to your S3 account. This folder will be inside the S3sync folder.

Edit the s3config.rb file, this is a step that only needs to be done with newer version of S3sync.

You need to replace the confpath with this:

Now, enter your Amazon S3 account information into the s3config.yml file which we will create in the S3sync directory:

Now that you are in the VI editor, hit the “i” key to enter insert mode then enter the following:

If you are having problems with this step, look at the s3config.yml.sample file which comes with S3sync. After you have entered your Amazon S3 keys and the absolute path to your certs directory, you need to hit the “escape” key then “:wq” to save and quit the VI editor. If you are not sure how to use the VI editor, check out this resource.

Step 4: Write the Shell Backup Script

Now, you need to change directories so you are in the S3sync directory which is where we will create the backup shell script. I have said it before, but this is very important for the automation part at the end of this tutorial, use absolute paths in this script. For the script example below, I am assuming everything is at the root level.

Hit the “i” key to enter insert mode.

This script is not very complex but I will walk through it with you a little bit. All of the echo statements in the script are where I output the status of the script for debugging purposes. These statements are not required, but they might help you troubleshoot any problems that might arise.Make sure you replace the directory you want to backup, the SQL database information, and the Amazon S3 Bucket information where you see:  **********

The script starts by deleting the contents of the backup folder, which will contain the backups that were generated the last time the script was ran. Next, we will generate the date for labeling the tar-files. After that, it is time to compress the actual web server files into a tar-file. Make sure you replace the “**********” with the absolute path of the directory you would like to backup. Next, we will generate a tar-file with the contents of a SQL database. Again, make sure you replace the “**********” with your specific information. Finally, we are going to compress the 2 tar-files into one and transfer that tar-file to your Amazon S3 account. Make sure you edit the last occurrence of “**********” with the name of the Amazon S3 bucket you wish to save the backups in.

Step 5: Test the Script

When you start the script, you should see a fast scrolling list of files as they backup. When it stops scrolling, the 2 tar-files are being combined and transferred to your Amazon S3. This can take a few minutes, so be patient. If successful, the prompt will reappear in the terminal window. Now, you should see the tar-file in your Amazon S3 bucket.

Step 6: Automate the Script

Now, I am going to walk you through how to edit your crontab file to run the script daily at a time of your choosing. If you don’t know how a crontab works, check out this great crontab resource. The basic format of a crontab entry is:

Start by entering your crontab file:

There may already be some crontab entries in this file, so make sure you do not edit any of the current entries. Scroll down to the last entry and insert a new line. One the new line, enter the new crontab:

This will run your backupscript at 0 minutes into the 6th hour of everyday. To change the time, edit the 0 for minutes or the 6 for hours (use military time.) This works off of your server time, so if your host is in a different timezone, the backup might not occur when you expect it to. Finally, make sure the path to the file is the absolute path.

Final Words

There are many local factors that can effect this script, if the script is not working, I would walk back through the tutorial, and make sure your file tree layout is the way it is suppose to be. Everything we created and edited in this tutorial, belongs inside the /s3sync/ directory.

One of the problems I struggled with, was that the script ran fine manually, but would not transfer the files to Amazon S3 when automated by the crontab. If this problem occurs use the “SET” command inside your script, and directly from the terminal and compare the environment variables (more on “set”.) Any differences you find might need to be annually adjusted in your script. For me it was the “PATH” varible.

I am not a pro with terminal, but I can try to help you troubleshoot any problems you might have when you setup your script. Just drop me a comment below and I will defiantly try my best to help you out.

Helpful Links

• Media Temple’s CronTab Guide
• S3sync Homepage and Wiki
• General UNIX Guide
• Christina Warren’s Screencast On S3sync

Why I Choose Amazon S3

Online backup services are really starting to become a big business opportunity, there are a wide range of online backup services that charge flat monthly fee’s, and provide both Windows and Mac support. I did a good bit of research on these other companies, and finally decided to sign up for a service called Mozy. This is a online backup service that provides a very user-friendly cross platform application to allow people to control their auto backups.

While Mozy is a nice, and easy to use, I found it to not be very useful. Mozy only allows you to store files that currently exist on your computer. This means that if you want to backup a large archive of pictures to your Mozy account, you can do this. The problem is though, you have to still keep these file on your computer locally. If you delete the files from your computer it will be deleted from the Mozy server. While this is fine for some stuff like my websites development directory, I also want the option to store files on the server and remove them from my hard drive.

With more and more people switching to laptops these days, small amounts of local storage space on computers is starting to become more of an issue. More and more, people are turning to the internet to store information that is not used on a daily basis.

Amazon S3 & Jungle Disk

What really makes Amazon S3 standout is the openness to use the space as you wish. While S3 is geared towards the technologically advanced developer types, a wide range of tools and applications have been developed to make it more user-friendly for basic computer users.

I have been using Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk, which is a Mac OS X based backup up application. Jungle Disk is like the Mozy client, but has more customization options and openness to how you can use the space you pay for. Jungle Disk allows you to setup you own Amazon S3 account, or use theirs which comes setup with the app. Once you have your S3 account setup with the software, you can add auto backup jobs with a ton of different customization options. One of these options gives you the ability to keep previous versions of files, and keep files that have been deleted. With Jungle Disk, you also have the option to drag and drop content to your S3 through a virtual drive in OS X’s Finder.

Final Thought’s

Like I said earlier, I have only been using Amazon S3 for a little while, and I have not even come close to tapping into all that the Amazon S3 can do. While I am very happy with it so far, I would like to dig deeper and explore other ways I can use it to save space and money. My next mission is to better understand how I can use Amazon S3 to optimize my website content by hosting some content on Amazon’s S3 server instead of my MediaTemple (dv) server.

Do you use Amazon S3? If so, how do you use it? Do you have a specific S3 application you recommend?

Google has added a new Gmail labs component that allows users to “Undo Send” an email for a few seconds after the message sends.

Once the feature is activated, a new “Undo” link will appear next to every sent email confirmation notice. When clicked, the “Undo” will take you back to the composing window confirm the retrieval of the email and allow you to edit it further.

However, “Undo Send” doesn’t really recall a message that has been already sent. The feature only holds emails in a queue for five seconds, giving you time for second thoughts. I personally wish it was available to more like 1 minute after you click send.

To enable it, log in to your Google Gmail account. At the very top of your Gmail Inbox, you will see a green chemical flask (). This will bring up the Google Gmail Labs experimental area. About 3 quarters of the way down the page you will “Undo Send.”

I want to start with Sitepoint’s The Ultimate CSS Reference. Sitepoint is a great resource for all kinds of information, they have a large amount of online web development content, but I still prefer to use physical books. This book is hardcover, which is rare to see in a tech book. I like the hard cover, because it doesn’t show wear and tear as easy as softcover books. For those that don’t know, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a web based language that allows you to attach style to other web languages. I currently code CSS at a 2.1 level which is the version of CSS that is most widely accepted by web browsers today.

While I don’t have any other CSS books to compare it to, I can say that I am very happy with this reference guide. The Ultimate CSS Reference explains CSS elements using a 4 part system, Syntax, Compatibility, Other Relevant Stuff, and Usage Examples.

The book starts with a very easy to follow introduction chapter on what CSS is. This chapter introduces beginners to exactly what CSS is, how it works, and how you link to style sheets. This chapter is not just for beginners, it also goes in to more advanced items like how to have style sheets for different media types (i.e. hand held, print, screen, …) and how to reference an external style sheet using XML PI. I would recommend everyone read this chapter regardless of your current CSS skill level, everyone is bound to learn something new from this chapter.

The next few chapters introduce you to general CSS syntax. You will learn how to layout selectors and general CSS syntax. These are great chapters to refer back to when you have a brain fart while trying to code CSS. To this day, I still have problems remembering how to layout HTML tag specific CSS code when being reference inside the tag which is linked and enclosed in an ID styled DIV.

The guts of the book are the chapters on the properties, this is where the 4 part’s I spoke of earlier comes into effect. Each property has 4 sections of explanation, starting with the Syntax section which gives you the property layout, and all its different property values.  The second section you will see is a Compatibility Chart. This chart includes IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7.0, FF 1.0, FF 1.5, FF 2.0, Safari 1.3, Safari 2.0, and Safari 3.0. Compatibility is measured with 3 variables, Full, Buggy, and None. I find the compatibility very useful when you design at a professional level and need full cross browse compatibility. The 3rd section is Other Relevant Stuff, this section is used to explain how other relevant elements might interact with the one you are currently reading about. The final section, is Usage Examples, this of course is where you can explore the element syntax in a real world example.

The last few chapters go into more advanced level detail. This advanced information includes vendor-specific properties, which walks you though elements that are specific to certain browsers. You will also learn how to work with multiple style sheets for browser specific compatibility, Workarounds, Filters, and Hacks that will help you to solve some cross browser CSS issues.

The book is available for about $30.00 on Amazon: The Ultimate CSS Reference. I highley recommend you pick it up, it is a great resource that will defiantly improve the level to which you code CSS.

Yesterday, March 17th, Apple premiered the iPhone 3.0 OS software. They have really stepped it up in this release, with over 100 new features for consumers. While no exact release date is set, Apple noted that it will be released sometime this summer. A beta version is available to developers immediately.

Cut, Copy, and Paste

I am very excited about this, many times I have needed to cut, copy, and paste content. This is something that was really hurting the reputation of the iPhone. It works like the magnifying glass, you double tap on a word, then a menu pops up asking you if you want to select, or unselect, from there, you can stretch the highlighted area to a larger selection, and cut, copy, and paste.

Spotlight

Spotlight is a new addition to the home screen. It appears as your left most home screen. Spotlight is a built in search application that will search through your entire iPhone. I am most excited to use this with SMS, Email, and best of all Contacts. What my hopes are, is I can use spotlight to make calls, so when I want to call someone, I can just scroll left, type the first few letters of the person I want to call, then click call! This would save me a lot of time scrolling through my massive contacts list.

Landscape Keyboard (All Default Apps)

Let me start off by saying, my girlfriend is a text fanatic (I am slowly becoming one!), she is the reason I now have an unlimited text plan.  So I am very excited I will be able to text with the larger landscape keyboard. This will make typing quicker and more accurate!

Google Maps w/ Turn by Turn and 3rd Party Map API

Finally, the default Maps application by Google is going to support turn-by-turn directions. This is awesome, the current Maps app is great, but it sucks at directions. What excites me most about this, is that Apple is know going to allow developers to design turn-by-turn direction apps. This is huge, companies like Garmin, Tom/Tom, and Dash can now design iPhone versions of there popular GPS software.

The Rest

While I could write a paragraph on each new feature, I wont bore you all with that, so here are the rest of the new features that I am not going to spotlight:

• Attach multiple pictures to emails.
• MMS, allowing you to send audio, pictures, and other content.
• Forward SMS support.
• New Voice Memo App, allowing you to record voice notes and trim them.
• Added details to Stocks.
• Note Sync via iTunes.
• iCal with gCal support.
• Bluetooth Stereo Support (I hope this will lead to in car bluetooth iPhone audio support.)
• Push Notifications.
• Subscription App Support.

Additional Screenshots

There are over 100 new features in all. I am very excited for this release, and hope it is released in early summer so I can get my hands on it. It is available to developers today, but you have to pay $100.00 to be in the developer program, and get a beta release of the OS.

What features are you excited about? Anything you didn’t see that makes you sad?

31Three

I love how 31Three uses the image of a butterfly to add some complexity to its simple design. The image really makes the design pop.

http://31three.com/

GoPlan

GoPlan is on this list because of their color scheme. The dark header with a light colored content area is really becoming a common design trait, and goplan executes it beautifully.

http://www.goplan.info/

FluidBook

What resulted in me adding fluidbook to this list is how they use icons and typography to help the design flow.

http://www.fluidbook.com/

ExpressionEngine

ExpressEngine does a great job enfisizing the main content area of the site through a dark background and light content area color scheme.

http://expressionengine.com/

CarbonMade

CarbonMade is another example of how a color scheme can make a design. Using many bright colors can sometimes cause flow issues for a site, but CarbonMade uses bright colors to its advantage.

http://www.carbonmade.com/

3000k

3000k is probably my favorite on this list. They use both images and color to create a beautiful design that really stands out to me.

http://www.3000k.com/

Daferno

This is another example of how a lot of colors can be used to make up a simple and professional looking design. The use of orange and gray really helps to flow the eye to the main sections of the site.

http://www.daferno.com/

Amy Mahon

Amy Mahon’s design is easy, it uses a handwritten typography to standout as a blog like no other.

http://www.amymahon.com/

Level9 Design

Dark color schemes can be very hard to work with, but Level9 does an excellent job with the dark color scheme. For me, it is the background pattern that really makes this design.

http://www.level9design.com/

SimpleBits

SimpleBits is probably the most simple and plain design on my list, but again the use of a dark header with a bright content area really helps your eyes to flow with the design.

http://www.simplebits.com/

Creative Ireland Forums

The Creative Ireland Forum really does a great job of using colors to break up a forum. Most forum designs are very repetitive because it is just list of post or forums. The use of blue links on a light brown/tan background keeps your eyes from getting tired.

http://www.creativeireland.com/forums/

TickSpot

Tick is another great example of how multiple colors can be used to create flow in a web design.

http://www.tickspot.com/

Avenue Creative

Avenue Creative is just like Level9, in that it uses a nice background pattern to break up a very dark design.

http://www.avenuecreative.nl/

Simply Invoices

Simply Invoices uses just a little bit of color to break up a predominantly simple white design.

http://www.simplyinvoices.com/

Ploink-Brothers

Ploink-Brothers does a great job with color scheme and background pattern. The orange on brown color combination is hard to work with, but they have done it beautifully.

http://www.ploink-brothers.com/

For more great stuff like this, browse over to http://www.Q100Atlanta.com/

Again, I did not make this, I just wanted to repost it because it is F**king awesome! Credit goes to The Bert Show of Q100 on 99.7 FM here in Atlanta. You can listen to them live online for 5 to 10am M-F! They are awesome!

SKIP TO 1:20!

Yes, it is true proper GPS navigation is available for the iPhone. xRoad’s G-Map is a navigation application for the iPhone that suffered from a very crappy v1.0 which received bad reviews and caused the application to slip away from the spotlight. Well, they have updated to 1.2 and it is awesome. I have been waiting for a solid GPS navigation application for my iPhone for sometime, and was starting to get worried that it might never come. As with every application, there are positives and negatives. I am going to address these after the jump.

The Positives

The largest positive for me with this application is how the maps are stored locally. I have found myself without cell service many times when I am trying to navigate with Google Maps, and it just doesn’t work. With no cell service. you lose the ability to load data (a.k.a. Maps) with the Google Maps app. This is not a problem with G-Map, because the maps are locally stored on the hard drive.

The second major positive for me is how you can set the maps to rotate based on your heading. This is something so incredibly simple, but nobody has managed to do it until now. G-Map offers 3 different viewing modes, 2-D north is up, 2-D rotates based on heading, and 3-D rotates based on heading.

G-Map will also automatically recalculate routes when off route, offer’s up multiple routing options, and allows you to search around you for gas, banks, police stations that are near you. The applications really is all that I have been hoping for, it has a few features that are not widely available, but will become more available soon.

The Negatives

Just like with any application there are some negatives with G-Map. G-Map does not offer voice directions. Yes, this sucks, but I can do without it until the company updates the app. I believe there is some sort of restriction on the Apple app store with voice turn directions.

Another negative for me, is that the menu system is a bit tricky to navigate. Typing in an address is very complex, there is no contact look up, nor is it easy to search for an address.

The final negative I have come across that bugged me is the lack of iPhone specific features. G-Map does not take advantage of multi-touch gestures. To zoom in, you have to use zoom buttons instead of the famous iPhone pinch.

Overall, this app is what I have been waiting for. It still has some flaws, but it is still early in development, I believe they will fix a good bit of these issues in upcoming updates. One other things, the app is divided in 2.; there is a east version and a west version. The 2 versions are due to size restrictions, these apps come in at about 700mb each due to the on board maps. Both versions run $19.99 in the app store.

Demo Videos:

Junction View

Around Me

3 Way Map Mode

Search Around Destination

more…

Additional Photos

Links

HomePage

G-Map US East ($19.99): iTunes Link

G-Map US West(19.99): iTunes Link

It wasn’t until I purchased TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, a very thorough guide to TextMate. This guide runs about $20.00, but is more than worth it. The keyboard shortcuts this book introduced me to covered the cost of books alone. I have saved so much time using the skills I learned in this book.

The Bundles

There are 2 bundles I find myself using the most. The first, is the TODO bundle which is something every developer will benefit from. The TODO bundle offers up a very simple way for programmers to stay organized by allowing markups in the code itself. How it works, is TextMate allows you to simple type “TODO” then click tab, and it will create a nice organized list where you can input TODO items on each page. Then, you can click control + shift + t and a list of all your TODO items across all the files in your current project will be listed with links that take you to the exact line said item occurs. This might not seem significant, but I find it very useful when it comes to making notes in my code, or when I need to change a variable for debugging reasons.

The second bundle I find myself using, is the HTML bundle. This allows you to conveniently create a wide arrange of HTML tags. With TextMate, you can just type “head” then click tab and a whole HTML head section will be automatically created for you. Same goes for a lot of HTML tags, including but not limited to style, div, body, …

Below is an example of both of these bundles in effect. Just so you understand how much time these bundles can save you, this example was created in about 10 seconds.

There are a couple of other minor things that TextMate offers that really makes a difference in my coding experience. For instance, when you are working with PHP and you type an if statement and hit enter, it moves your closing bracket to its own line, and provides a empty line in between the starting and ending brackets which is already indented. I am a OCD when it comes to keeping my code clean and organized, so this really comes in handy for me. Also, in the above example, on the left side next to the line number, you can see little markers that identify opening and closing brackets. These markers are clickable, and when clicked will hide the inner contents of of the bracket you had selected. I find this useful on CSS pages and PHP function pages. It just makes it easier to find a specific function on a page. No need to scroll through all of the function contents.

The final thing I wanted to discuss with you, is how TextMate works with Panic’s Transmit. Transmit is an FTP app that works with TextMate to provide a great set of keyboard shortcuts for easy uploading. This was made available after the Pragmatic Programmers guide was written, so you wont find it discussed in there, but you can find some articles on how this works on the TextMate site.

TextMate might be a bit on the expensive side, but it is well worth the cost. Also, do yourself a favor, pick up The Pragmatic Programmers: TextMate – Power Editing for the Mac guide, it will make sure you understand all that TextMate has to offer.