Ben & The Alterians: Hunger Strike from Ben Hinc on Vimeo.

This is my first embedded video from Vimeo. This is actually my favorite Vimeo feature because the embeds are somewhat customizable. The color scheme can be changed (I left this one as blue since the blog is primarily blue) as well as the embed size (again, I left it at 400×300 because this works well for the template). I can also embed albums or channels of content. Below is my album called “Angel” which is a compilation of all my videos of my cat.

Despite the excellent embedding options, I did notice one major flaw with Vimeo’s player: the “share” and “embed” links don’t seem to work in anything except for Firefox, at least on OS X. This is just not acceptable to me so I went ahead and created two bookmarklets. All the do is load Vimeo’s embed or share page using the video ID that you enter at the prompt. The video ID is the 6-digit (currently) number that is in the URL of the video’s page. For example, for the video posted above (http://www.vimeo.com/402666) the video ID is 402666. You can click on the following to bookmarklet links to test this out, but the most convenient thing is adding them to your bookmarks so you can use them whenever you’re watching a Vimeo video. Opera users can right click or control-click and and choose “Bookmark link…” and Safari users can drag the links to their Bookmarks Bar.

• Vimeo Embed bookmarklet
• Vimeo Share bookmarklet

If anyone reads with some some Javascript prowess, I would like the bookmarklets to be able to suck the video ID from the current URL rather than forcing the user to enter it. I’m pretty sure this is possible but it’s out of my realm of knowledge. Besides the nice embedded player, Vimeo also supports 720p video hosting and playback. This doesn’t affect me now—I don’t have a camera capable of shooting at this resolution. Someday I might, so it make sense to use a service that supports it now rather than wondering if it will be supported eventually (YouTube, for example). Finally, I like that everything can be “RSS’d.” Albums, videos, videos in albums, videos in channels—I haven’t yet found something that I would want to subscribe to that can’t be. I also like the uploader although yet again it doesn’t work with Opera or Safari 3 beta (still running 10.4.10). For us Opera/Safari users, there is a non-dynamic upload page which helps (and is also something that Brightcove doesn’t provide). Finally, the per-video options are complete and useful. Videos can be provided with a name, description, and tags. Privacy options can be set as well as if the source file can be downloaded (I was specifically looking for this feature). Finally, the video can be placed in any number of channels and albums. Overall, a very slick experience that is as functional as it is pretty. Hopefully I won’t run in to any roadblocks with Vimeo and it’ll be my forever video host. I’m uploading all of my existing videos now…

Read on to find out how I found out…

This issue is noted in the readme file for the latest 1.1.2 jailbreak:

In order to kick the phone out of that mode I just had to launch iNdependence version 1.2.5 and wait a minute or so. If you are using iTunes 7.5 you will have to get a MobileDevice from a previousv version in order to run Independence.

Ok. Thanks for the advice. Now how does one go about doing that? I found other instructions somewhere that said that I needed to 1) obtain the framework and 2) use the MobDev Tool to select the obtained framework and tell iNdependence to use it. I still had two problems with this: 1) I didn’t know where to get the framework and 2) I didn’t see a MobDev tool.

My first task was locating this “MobDev” tool because even if I managed to locate the framework, it would still be useless without the tool. After some fruitless searching, I remembered that there was a beta release of iNdependence 1.3 on Google Code. Since the package for 1.2.5 that I’d downloaded contained no such tool (and various walkthroughs claimed it should be there), I figured it couldn’t hurt. After downloading 1.3b2 I saw what I was missing: the iNdependence MobDev Tool. There was also a very helpful readme that I have excerpted below:

Before you can run iNdependence for the first time, you must do the following:

1) Copy iNdependence to your hard drive somewhere (the Applications folder would be a good place)

2) Run the “iNdependence MobDev Tool” application. If it reports that you have the correct version of iTunes installed, then you simply need to choose the location where you installed iNdependence on your computer and you are done (skip the remaining steps).

3) If it reports that you do not have the correct version of iTunes installed, then you’ll need to find the version of the MobileDevice framework that was installed with iTunes 7.4.2 and put it somewhere on your computer. Something useful might be at:

http://rapidshare.com/files/68410680/MobileDevice_7_4_2.framework.zip.html

4) Once you have that, choose the location of the MobileDevice.framework folder using the first file chooser.

5) If that works, then choose the location where you installed iNdependence on your computer using the second file chooser.

6) At this point you should see a success message.

If you do not successfully do this, then iNdependence will not run (it will show up in the dock quickly and then disappear). After you are done, then iNdependence will run without problems no matter what version of iTunes you upgrade to. You only need to do this once.

As you can see, my problem with locating the framework solved itself. After successfully using iNdependence to convince the iPhone to get out of recovery mode, I went through the remaining steps of the jailbreak instructions. Now I have a lovely jailbroken 1.1.2 iPhone once again.

Last night I decided it was time to manually update my iPhone to 1.1.2 (iTunes was telling me it wasn’t yet available). I waited because I wanted to make sure that a working jailbreak was available. The update worked and the jailbreak worked—but not without a few moments of panic.

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More after the jump…

Step one involved cleaning out my already-jailbroken 1.1.1 installation. I removed all non-essential apps. I’m not entirely sure if that was a necessary step but I wasn’t taking any chances. All I had left in the end was Installer.app, BSD subsystem, and Community Sources. I then installed Oktoprep which got my iPhone ready for the 1.1.2 upgrade.

Step two was manually downloading the 1.1.2 firmware image and getting it to install via iTunes. This is accomplished by holding the “option” key and clicking “Check for Update” and then selecting the firmware image file (ending in .ipsw). Once iTunes was finished doing it’s thing, the fun began. The GUI jailbreak was released yesterday and it worked pretty well once I completed one crucial step. The jailbreak for 1.1.2 uses iPhuc to communicate with the iPhone prior to it being jailbroken (after which it is much easier to use SSH or now AFP).

After trying the jailbreak GUI app several times—and after rebooting and reconnecting as iPhuc recommended—I noticed a note on the bottom of the TUAW page where I downloaded the jailbreak.

Update: If you’re missing the readline library (i.e. iPhuc doesn’t work for you), you can download it here. Extract the zip to your Desktop, then in Terminal, type “sudo cp ~/Desktop/opt/local/lib/libreadline.5.2.dylib /opt/local/lib”. You may need to sudo mkdir the /opt/local/lib folder first.

This step is very crucial if you haven’t ever used iPhuc. Without it the jailbreak isn’t able to communicate with the phone. Once I completed this step the jailbreak proceeded flawlessly although it did take a while.

I haven’t necessarily seen a specific benefit to 1.1.2 other than perceived reliability improvements. But, I’m one to always want to have the latest and the greatest and with a working jailbreak, why not upgrade? And, if you’re comfortable with little SSH/terminal action, install the aforementioned AFP server which allows OS X to see the iPhone as any other shared drive. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

One of the first things that confused me greatly was all these new labels showing up in my Gmail web interface. Not only did I have the “Sent Mail” and “Trash” sections that I always had but I had new labels that contained sent mail and messages I had deleted. What I came to realize, and what Google confirmed on their help page, was that these were messages that had been sent and/or deleted by my mail client. However, deleting them from my mail client only applied the “Deleted Messages” label—it did not, indeed, move these messages to Gmail’s actual Trash. On the help page, Google seems to imply that this behavior is somehow acceptable:

After you perform certain actions in your IMAP client for the first time, you’ll notice a few new labels when you next log in to Gmail’s web interface. For example, sending a message in your client creates a ‘Sent Messages’ label in Gmail, indicating which messages you sent through your client and not through Gmail’s web interface.

Wait, what? Why would I want to differentiate messages sent through my e-mail client and messages sent through Gmail? The point of using IMAP is that everything stays synced. Why would I want a separate label identifying what was sent at my desk as opposed to what was sent through the web? Add to this the fact that I almost never use the web interface and all my e-mail is either sent from Mail.app or my iPhone.

Fortunately, there are settings in Mail.app (and on the iPhone) that tempers this ridiculous behavior. Below is a shot of the Mail.app preferences pane for IMAP accounts. (Click to enlarge.)

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The three settings that alleviate my pain the most deal with sent mail, trash, and junk. We’ll get to the junk later—that’s actually on a different screen. First, sent mail. I’ve already established that keeping separate client-sent e-mail and web-sent e-mail is silly. The fact is that Gmail knows when you send a message—there’s no need for your e-mail client to tell Gmail or for anything to be stored on the server. Gmail already stores every e-mail you send on its server so really all you need to do is check the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder and everything you’ve sent using Gmail no matter where you sent it from—Mail.app, web interface, iPhone, etc.—will sync up with your client. Isn’t this the way it should be? It is that way but there’s one setting in Mail.app (and the iPhone) that makes it much easier: “Store sent messages on server.” This single checkbox is the cause of the mysterious “Sent Messages” label which Google apparently has no issue with. My issue? It’s annoying. Unchecking this box will tell Mail.app to not synchronize the messages that it sends with Gmail. Then, you can safely delete the “Sent Messages” label from Gmail and act like it never existed. The Trash experiences a similar albeit slightly more complicated problem. Since deleting a message from the inbox whether using the web interface or a client merely removes the “Inbox” label, I prefer to use this paradigm in both Gmail and Mail.app. Simply put, when I delete something from my inbox in Mail.app, I am doing so with the understanding that it is not really deleted—it just isn’t going to be in my inbox any more. The problem with Mail.app’s default settings is that it tracks these deleted messages and puts them in its own trash can of sorts. If set to “Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox” and “Store deleted messages on the server,” you’ll end up with messages that are in the Trash in Mail.app but in the Gmail interface they will appear everywhere but the Trash: they will be in All Mail with the label “Deleted Messages.” This means absolutely nothing to me. It’s almost as if they’re half-deleted. The easiest way to get around this is to tell Mail.app to not move deleted messages to the trash. Instead, they get removed from the Inbox which is synced to Gmail’s inbox. Thus, you are essentially performing the same function in both apps—relegating a message to the “All Mail” folder only. The only caveat is remembering that “deleting” a message from Mail.app’s Inbox really isn’t deleting. To do that, just drag the message to Gmail’s trash. But really, how many messages do you delete? Typically you either want them or their spam so I find myself dragging quite infrequently.

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Speaking of spam, this was a more interesting problem. There’s a Google-provided help page that suggests that Gmail’s spam protection is enough and that client-based spam filtering should be turned off or messages will be downloaded twice. I’m not sure what they mean by this as I’ve been running Mail.app’s spam protection since day one with Gmail IMAP and haven’t had an issue. The secret is tuning the “Advanced…” settings regarding where messages flagged as Junk by Mail.app go. Instead of sending Junk to Mail.app’s own Junk folder, the key is telling it to send anything flagged as junk to Gmail’s Spam folder. This in effect provides double protection: anything Gmail thinks is Spam will already be in the Spam folder and will never hit Mail.app’s inbox. If something slips through and is then flagged by Mail.app, it will be reported to Gmail as spam and removed from the Inbox. Thus, Gmail will learn and get even better at catching spam. It’s a win-win.

As I don’t write many e-mails that I save as Drafts, I haven’t tweaked these settings in Mail.app but I’m sure it would be a similar solution to the other mailboxes. Amazing, the settings in the iPhone are even more straightforward.

MobileMail allows you to associate the iPhone’s mailboxes directly with Gmail’s IMAP mailboxes. So, by associating Drafts with Drafts, Sent with Sent Mail, and Deleted Mailbox with Trash, you can be sure that everything you do on the iPhone is exactly mirrored on Gmail. The one caveat of this setup is that deleting a message from the iPhone’s inbox really means delete in the sense that it will actually be removed from the Inbox and sent to the Trash. To remove from the iPhone’s Inbox without deleting, simply moving the message to “All Mail” works just fine.

If I’ve missed anything in regards to Mail.app, MobileMail, and Gmail’s IMAP implementation, please leave me a comment. We can all learn from each other!