Five Facebook Timeline changes you can’t wait to make

by Kristin Burnham, CIO   Dec 21, 2011 12:10 pm

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

Facebook made waves last week as the social network finally rolled out Timeline, it’s newly redesigned profile, to all users worldwide.

Timeline, which was first announced in September, is the most dramatic change in Facebook profiles to date. And while opinions about the new profile are mixed, one thing is for certain: Timeline is here to stay.

Once you switch to Timeline, you’ll have seven days to make changes to your profile before Facebook pushes it live. You can make it public yourself anytime within the one-week period.

Here’s a look at five things you can do—from aesthetics to removing content—in those seven days to get your profile ready for primetime.

1. Clean up your content

Because Timeline makes your past posts easily searchable to all your friends, the first thing you should do before going live with your new profile is clean up any embarrassing or unwanted posts. For many—early adoters especially—dredging up the past for all to see could be a privacy nightmare.

Facebook doesn’t make this task easy. You have three options when you adjust your settings: You can make all your posts friends-only; you can limit the posts by others on your Timeline; and you can review every item ever posted to your wall individually, and set your privacy controls accordingly.

For a detailed step-by-step on how to adjust your settings in these three ways, read: Facebook’s New Timeline: Important Settings to Adjust Now.

2. Have fun with your cover photo

 

One of the most significant differences between the old profile and Timeline is the emphasis Facebook puts on visuals: Timeline’s photos are much larger, and the cover photo is no exception.

Your cover photo is the long photo that spans the width of your profile. Inset is a smaller photo that shows up in searches for you and in your friends’ News Feeds.

Facebook says that you should “fill this wide, open space with a unique image that represents you best. It’s the first thing people see when they visit your timeline.”

If you’re unsure about what to put there, take a look at the profiles of your friends who have already switched over to timeline. Have fun with it.

3. Fill in the blanks

When you switch to Timeline, you’ll notice a new button on your Status Update bar: Life Event. In addition to updating your status and uploading pictures as you would before, Facebook encourages you to fill out important events that happened in your life.

 

If you click on the “Life Event” tab, a menu of categories will appear, each containing a number of options. To add an event, you can choose between work and education; family and relationships; home and living; health and wellness; and travel and experiences. Drill down further by selecting one, and you can mark the day you got your license…or had your first kiss.

Once you choose a category to update, you’ll be brought to a form to fill in the details: the location, who you were with, the date, a backstory, photos and a privacy setting for who can see this life event.

4. Highlight what matters

As part of Timeline’s more visual interface, you’re able to denote which posts deserve more prominence and which are less important, which is reflected in the size of the post.

For example, if you want to highlight a new photo album of a vacation that you just updated, hover over the item and click the star icon. This will turn this item into a “featured post,” which means it’s more prominently displayed.

Similarly, if you want to hide a particular post from your Timline—but not delete it entirely—hover over the post and click the pencil icon.

5. Review your “likes”

With the old Facebook profile, pages you “liked” and your interests were buried under your Info tab. Timeline, however, resurfaces these and places them at the top of your Timeline, below your cover photo.

To review all your likes from each year you’ve used Facebook, and to browse the interests you added over the years, click the “Likes” icon.

The first section will show you your interests. To add or remove some, click the “Edit” button at the top. The section below that will show you the pages you liked by year, and your friends who also like that page. To remove any of these, click on the page’s name, then select “Unlike.”

By Jacqui Cheng | Published 6 months ago

Hot on the heels of last week’s Mac malware posing as a PDFis a new piece of malware posing as something even more insidious: a Flash player installer. Security firm Intego was the first to post about the new malware on its blog, noting that although the company has only received one report so far from a user who downloaded it, the malware does exist in the wild and may trick Mac users who don’t yet have Flash installed.The malware in question is a trojan horse called Flashback (OSX/flashback.A); users may end up acquiring it by clicking a link on a malicious website to download or install Flash player. If those users also have their Safari settings to automatically open safe files (which .pkg and .mkpg files are considered to be), an installer will show up on their desktops as if they are legitimately installing Flash.Continuing through the installation process will result in the trojan deactivating certain types of security software (Intego specifically noted that the popular Little Snitch would be affected) and installing a dynamic loader library (dyld) with that can auto-launch, “allowing it to inject code into applications the user launched.” The trojan then reports back to a remote server about the user’s MAC address and allows the server to detect whether the Mac in question has been infected or not.The threat is currently marked as “low,” but Mac users are advised to follow safe security practices—don’t open files or attachments that you don’t remember downloading, and turn off Safari’s setting for opening safe files automatically. It’s also worth noting that Apple now updates its malware definition file on a daily basis, and has already updated it to address the PDF trojan discussed last week. If you haven’t already scoured the Internet for a malicious version of the Flash installer, then it’s likely Apple will have added the new malware to the file by the time you run into it.

The Finder in OS X has four views: Icon, List, Cover Flow, and Column, which can be activated on any Finder window to display its contents in different ways.

Each has its perks and uses, though many may often use column view because it shows multiple levels of a directory tree in the same window and can therefore help in organizing and navigating files.

While this feature makes navigating and moving files around a bit easier, often when you scroll up or down in column view the column size will not change. This sometimes results in long file names being truncated or the column being too wide and taking up window space.

To get around these drawbacks of the column view, Apple provides some options for resizing the columns:

1. Dragging
   The basic option for resizing columns in OS X is to click and drag the column separator (to the right of the column), which will expand or shrink it accordingly; however, this can be a bit of a burden if you need to expand multiple columns in a window. In addition to dragging one column, you can dynamically set all the columns to the same size by holding the Option key when dragging one column separator.

1. Contextual menu options
   If you right-click the column separator, you will see a contextual menu appear that contains three additional options for “Right-sizing” the column, which pertain to the current column, all columns equally, and all columns individually. These options will automatically adjust the columns to resize to the current content, all contents, or set them to be equal in size.

1. Double-clicking
   The functions provided in the contextual menu can also be invoked by double-clicking the column with or without providing modifier key inputs. If you directly double-click the column separator then its column will be resized to fit its contents, but if you hold the Option key while doing this then all the columns in the window will be resized to fit their contents. Alternatively, if you hold both the Shift and Option keys when double-clicking, then all of the columns will be set to the same size.

These options in OS X provide you with the functions that Apple offers for adjusting column sizes. Unfortunately this means that there is no way to have columns automatically resize to fit their contents–a convenience that Apple has somehow skirted through the various OS X iterations. There does not seem to be a reason why Apple would avoid such an option, so hopefully it will make its way into the OS in a future version. For now, however, you will need to use one of these manual adjustment to resize columns in the Finder.

It’s likely that your hard drives are all formatted with one large partition.

The major advantage to splitting up individual disks into multiple partitions is to soften the blow when you need to reinstall your OS. This is achieved by putting your OS and applications on one partition and your media on a separate one.

For Windows users, there are several third-party programs that you can download/purchase that will assist you with this process. In reality, none of these are really necessary because Windows comes with a built-in (and well-hidden) disk-management system. Let’s get started.

 

Find the disk manager

 

 

 

Step 1: Open the Start menu and type “disk management” into the search window. Click on the entry that appears labeled Create and format hard-disk partitions.

 

Create empty space on the hard drive

 

If didn’t build your computer, the chances of having unformatted space is pretty unlikely. If you actually do have unformatted space, or you just bought a new hard drive and are partitioning it, you can skip this part.

 

 

Step 2: Recent versions of Windows are capable of splitting off unused parts of your hard drive into newer partitions (with older versions, as in Windows XP-era, you’ll probably need to freshly format the drive). To do this, select the drive from the list in the bottom pane of the window.

 

 

Step 3: Right-click on the main partition of the drive and select Shrink Volume. The program will then calculate how much space it can split off. The time it takes will vary based on the capacity of the hard drive.

 

 

Step 4: In the window that appears, enter the partition size that you want to cut away from the main segment. Note that the size is in MB, and there are 1024 MB in a GB. Click the Shrink button once the size is to your liking.

 

Select and format your partition

 

With space cleared on your hard drive available for partitioning, you are ready to set it up for use.

 

 

Step 5: Right-click on the empty partition, labeled Unallocated, from the bottom pane. Select New Simple Volume… from the menu that appears.

 

 

Step 6: A wizard will appear to walk you through the formatting of the partition. It will prompt you for the desired size of the partition, allow you to set a drive letter for the partition, and select the file system (you’ll most likely want NTFS). A summary of your choices will be displayed before any formatting occurs.

 

 

Once the format is completed, a new drive will appear for use in Windows.

(Optional) Step 7: Move your media onto the newly partitioned drive!

For best results when splitting your disk into partitions, a nearly empty hard drive should be used. The more data you have, the more difficult it will be for the operating system to separate a partition large enough to be useful. If deleting your data isn’t an option, try running the disk defragment program to move space around.

by Tony Bradley, PCWorld Oct 28, 2011 8:00 amEditor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Net Work blog at PCWorld.com.

Google recently unveiled the next major release of Android: Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”. The latest iteration of Android combines the features and capabilities of the Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” OS for smartphones, and Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS for tablets into an integrated OS that serves both types of devices simultaneously.

“Ice Cream Sandwich” will soon be available on the flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus samrtphone. If you don’t rush out to get the Galaxy Nexus, though, it is a guessing game when you might be able to get an Android 4.0 update for your existing Android smartphone or tablet…or if you ever will at all. That is the problem with Android.

Motorola’s latest Android phone—the Droid Razr—began pre-orders Thursday, and will ship to customers sometime during the first half of November. When users receive this cutting edge device, it will already be obsolete because it is built on Android 2.3.5—a variant of last year’s “Gingerbread” release. Motorola promises that the Droid Razr will be updated to “Ice Cream Sandwich” in the first half of 2012. Woo hoo?

Meanwhile, owners of the initial Android showcase phone, the Google Nexus One, are just out of luck. Google has already announced that the Nexus One hardware is “too old” and the device will not be updated to Android 4.0.

It is a problem that plagues all Android devices. A chart from undertstatement.com illustrates the Android smartphone models that have been released in the United States, and how far behind most of them are in relation to the current Android release.

Compare the Android update history with iOS. The iPhone 3GS was initially launched in June of 2009. It is more than two years old, yet when iOS 5 was released it was immediately available for download for the iPhone 3GS, as well as the iPhone 4. While it took more than six months for “Gingerbread” to be deployed on a statistically significant segment of Android devices, when Apple updates iOS it generally has 90-plus percent penetration in a matter of days.

I have a Motorola Xoom tablet running “Honeycomb”—Android 3.2.1 to be exact. The Xoom is one of the standard-bearers of what Android tablets are supposed to be capable of. When “Ice Cream Sandwich” is released for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, I would expect to be able to immediately download the new OS for my Xoom as well. I won’t hold my breath.

The reality is that I will be lucky to get “Ice Cream Sandwich” on my Xoom in the next six months. Meanwhile, my iPhone from April of 2010, and my iPad 2 are both happily running the iOS 5 update that came out a couple weeks ago.

Answering the question of why Android devices take so long to get the latest update, or don’t get the update at all, the understatement.com post explains, “Obviously a big part of the problem is that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to devices.”

Vendors often claim—as Google has with the Nexus One—that the older hardware just can’t keep up with the newer Android OS. The understatement.com post goes on to point out, though, that the hacker community often ports the latest OS to these devices just fine, so that argument seems to be invalid in at least some cases.

There is no denying that hardware eventually becomes obsolete, and that some older devices truly lack the horsepower and capabilities that the newer Android OS demands. On the Apple side of the fence, there are still legacy models that are no longer supported as well. It’s just that they are three years or so old—not devices that were sold as cutting edge, flagship smartphones a few months ago.

Google, Android device manufacturers, and wireless carriers all need to work together to implement a more streamlined system to get the latest updates out to devices faster, and to create a more predictable environment where users can be confident that the cream-of-the-crop smartphone or tablet they are investing in won’t be rendered obsolete for six months or more while it waits to catch up…just in time for the next release of Android to put it two steps behind again.

by Christopher Breen, Macworld.com Oct 24, 2011 12:15 pm

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with my new iPhone 4S, as I relied upon it for email, web browsing, and Twitter. It was not a completely satisfactory experience. And it wasn’t because it sucked down the battery like its life depended on it (which, of course, it did). Over the course of an hour when the phone was supposedly idling its charge would drop 20 percent and the thing ran hot.

If your iPhone is likewise power hungry and you’re looking forward to a tidy denouement at the end of this missive, I may disappoint. While the phone is now behaving itself thanks to some spying, resetting, and fiddling, there remain a number of suspects. My hope is that not only can I describe how I went about troubleshooting the problem, but call upon others who have experienced poor battery performance to comment here so that we may be better able to pinpoint common issues. My story goes like this:

I was on the road when I received my iPhone. Understanding that I would be, I planned ahead by setting up an iCloud account complete with synced mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks, and notes before I left for my trip. I also packed my MacBook Pro with this data and made sure that Photo Stream was active in iPhoto as well as on my iOS devices.

When I received the phone I set it up so that it would use all the goodies—Siri, location services, notifications, iCloud, reminders, and the various sync services for my several email accounts. The next day I took the phone to the beach to test the camera, try it over the local 3G network, and sit in the pocket of my discarded shorts while I explored the area’s underwater environs.

After a long outing I returned to shore and pulled out the phone. It was noticeably hot. It had been in the shade and the outside temperature was perhaps 80° so this was not heat from without but rather within. I woke the phone and noticed that its battery charge had dropped 10 points. I held it and watched as its battery percentage display dropped a point every couple of minutes. I’ve never had an iPhone do that before.

I returned to my digs and the phone remained hot. I tweeted about it a few times to see what was up and received several replies from followers who claimed their iPhone 4S was likewise pulling power at an alarming rate. Several theories were offered—Siri, location, iCloud, Find My Friends—but there was no consensus on what the issue might be. A couple of people suggested that a restore would fix the problem so I gave it a go and went to bed.

In the morning the phone seemed to better behave itself, but it was using a Wi-Fi connection rather than 3G. When I returned to the sandy scene of the crime later that day, the phone acted up again. Could it be something to do with 3G? Unsure.

I flew home the next day, got off the plane, and in the 30 minutes I used the phone to check email and Twitter, the battery dropped 10 points and the phone was warm. Again, a 3G connection. More Twitter carping brought more theories but no answers.

It was time to get serious. And the first two steps to doing that was to dig into the data provided by the phone. I tapped my way to Settings > General > About > Diagnostic & Usage > Diagnostic & Usage Data. When you tap this last entry you’re taken to a Data page where you see a series of entries. These are log files that detail untoward issues your device has had. Mine was full of CrashReport entries. I scanned through them and—as far as I could tell from all the gibberish in these reports—there was a problem syncing my iCloud contacts.

I then downloaded Recession Apps’ 99-cent System Activity Monitor. (Note that this app has crashed a time or two itself.) This is a utility similar to the Mac’s Activity Monitor that details the processes your iOS device is using as well as indicates, in real time, how hard the processor is being pushed. (No, the oft-recommended and worthwhile iStat app doesn’t do this.) When I launched System Activity Monitor and tapped the Processes button at the bottom of the screen I found the processor graph jumping into the 60-percent range every few seconds. This activity was reflected in two entries competing for the top spot—dataaccessd and CrashReport. The iPhone appeared to be in a crashing loop—where dataaccessd attempted to do something, blew up, tried again, blew up, and on and on. And this was killing the battery.

Based on the information I now had, I switched off contact syncing in iCloud. I returned to System Activity Monitor and everything settled down. The iPhone wasn’t completely inactive, nor should it have been. But the user processor percentage was now running under 3-percent most of the time.

In the hope that I could confirm the issue (and the suggestion from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber that a corrupt contact could be part of the problem), I traveled to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Contents and Settings. This wiped the phone.

On restart I chose to set it up as a new phone rather than pulling a backup from my Mac or iCloud. I also made sure that it didn’t sync any data with iCloud until I was ready. When the time came, I switched on contact syncing within the iCloud screen and fired up System Activity Monitor. There was a lot of activity for the first several minutes as the iPhone grabbed my contacts from the cloud, but then it settled down. There was no crashing loop apparent. I then proceeded to switch on calendar syncing and checked System Activity Monitor. Again, no problem. And so it went, switching on one iCloud syncing option, checking System Activity Monitor, and moving to the next one. At the end, everything was hunky dory.

Another account perhaps? I configured a Gmail account using Exchange rather than the usual Gmail option. No problem. A regular Gmail account. Nope. Yet another Gmail account used by my ISP? Nuh uh. Maybe this long-dormant Yahoo account. No. A standard POP account? Nix.

Huh.

Which is where I largely leave it to you. What I know is this: The combination of crash reports provided by the iPhone and System Activity Monitor helped me determine that I had an issue with contact syncing that caused my iPhone to drain with alarming rapidity. But wiping the phone and syncing via iCloud solved the problem. Yet it did so the second time rather than the first. Why? I haven’t a clue.

But perhaps, with your help, we all might gain that clue. If your iPhone is draining not just a bit more quickly than other iPhones you’ve owned, but in a “what the…” kind of way, consider aiding the cause by troubleshooting it in the way I’ve described (or any other way where you can make real observations). I look forward to your comments.

It’s been a solid 12 hours since the Disrupt Hackathon commenced, and things are getting a bit loopy. For the most part, this place is pretty quiet. We have a few sleepers in corners, and just about every cushy object in this building has been occupied. But the vast majority of hackers are wide awake, coding away.

And with good reason — $500,000 is at stake, among other awesome prizes.

Each table is littered with trash — Red Bull, Doritos, Snapple, and quite a bit of beer. The pizza has been absolutely demolished, and now Chinese food seems to be the main attraction. Unfortunately, a plate shortage led some to take matters into their own hands and rip up pizza boxes to use as make-shift plates.

Another development was the eruption of a massive bungee-dart war. According to the hackers “hundreds of darts were flying through the room.” In truth, I’m pretty sure there aren’t more than a few dozen darts in this building, but I bet it was epic nonetheless.

I’m getting ready to call it a night, but for these hackers this is just the beginning. Progress has been made, but many have also encountered a few hiccups along the way. The Ping Pong Hero app we mentioned earlier is having some Bluetooth issues, while Ryan Tsukamoto’s AR air drums have run into quite the obstacle — the iPad’s craptacular front-facing camera.

Still, determination seems to be the most dominant emotion in the room, and there’s no doubt in my mind that tomorrow will yield many success stories.

Tags: Disrupt

Title says it all. More to come. For now, the letter from Steve Jobs himself:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Update: Apple has confirmed that Apple COO Tim Cook will replace Jobs as CEO, following Jobs’ own recommendation. Considering that Cook has filled in for Jobs in the times of his medical leaves (including the one he has been on this year), this has been widely expected if and when it came time for Jobs to step down.

Also as requested, Jobs has been elected as Chairman of the Board and will remain with the company in that capacity. Cook will join the Board as well.

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Tags: apple, Steve Jobs