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While digging around for a native solution to easily drag and drop pictures from my Mac directly to my iPhone, I stumbled upon the fact that Image Capture has the ability to share imaging devices connected to your Mac.

This would be useful for something like a small office setting with one scanner, which all users could access from their Macs rather than having to use the one machine the scanner is connected to.  This works for almost any imaging device, including the iPhone.

With your iPhone connected, launch Image Capture and select Devices>Browe Devices… from the menu bar.  Select your iPhone and click the Sharing… button at the bottom of the window.  Next, check the Share my devices and Enable Web Sharing boxes.  Provide a shared name, a password (optional) and click OK.  You’ll now notice a Shared checkbox for your iPhone.  Check it to share your phone.

Click Sharing.. once again.  You’ll now notice an IP address underneath the Web Sharing check box.  Open your web browser of choice and type in the IP address, including the port number (the numbers after the colon).  You are now browsing the pictures on your iPhone (and any other devices shared with Image Capture) through your web browswer!  Note, this is an internal IP address and will only work on your local network, but it’s a great way to share your pictures with others on your LAN.

While configuring our Middle and Upper School art rooms at work, I ran into an issue that was potentially going to cause a massive headache.  How to use Workgroup Manager (WGM) to manage a local, shared USB printer?

Managing networked printers is easy with WGM, it even lets you decide if users have the ability to connect their own local USB printer.  It does not, however, allow you to share this local printer and manage it.

What’s an admin to do?  The first thing I did was start digging around for property list files, and that’s exactly where I found my answer.

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Here’s a little discussed feature of Time Machine in OS X Leopard.  It works directly with some applications!

If you open Mail.app for example, and launch Time Machine from its menubar item you can directly access and recover individual email messages.  The alternative would be using Time Machine to recover your entire ~/Library/Mail folder, which isn’t very practical.  I’ve tested several other applications and so far I’ve found that this also works for Address Book to recover contacts and groups, and iPhoto to recover photos and albums.

One caveat I’ve found is that you need to use the menubar item to launch Time Machine, otherwise a Finder window opens and it doesn’t activate properly.  Other than that, this seems to be an excellent use of Time Machine!  Please feel free to leave a comment if you discover any more applications this works with.

I only have a few gripes about the iPhone, and they’re the usual suspects.  Of all the ones that won’t be corrected next month (3G and Exchange support), the biggest for me is the lack of support for sending and recieving MMS messages.

Until Apple adds this functionality, I’ve come up with a workaround.  It’s not pretty, but it works.  I’m sure others have thought of this too, but I wanted to share the process, along with an extra tip at the end.

To send a picture message, simply create a new email, attach a photo, and send it to your recipient’s mobile email address.  Most people I pix message are Verizon customers, so they would be xxxxxxxxxx@vzwpix.com.  The 10 x’s are their mobile number.  I beleive AT&T customers would be xxxxxxxxxx@cingularme.com.  For other carriers, a quick Google search should return what you need.  I’ve added these mobile email addresses to each person’s contact info in Address Book so I have it quickly available when I want to send them an MMS.

Receiving a picture is where the downsides comes in to play.  Your friends have to remember to address their pix message to whatever email account you have access to through iPhone’s Mail application.  The people who send me picture messages most frequently have learned to send it to my email address rather than my mobile phone number, but for people who don’t know this and send me a picture message, I still get the SMS with a name and password for viewmymessage.com.  I just reply to those and tell them to resend the pix message to my email address.

Also, unless you have your iPhone set to check for new mail every 15 minutes, it could be a while before you even know you’ve got a picture waiting for you.

So there it is, a bit cumbersome in places, but it gets the job done.

One final tip, I use gmail as my primary email address.  Since this is the address I tell friends to send MMS messages to, I created a filter to apply the label ‘Pix Message’ to any email from ‘@vzwpix.com.’  This way I can tag all my MMS messages that come through gmail and organize them for later viewing, adding to iPhoto, etc.

Disclaimer:  I assume no responsibility or liability for any actions resulting in the use of the following information.  I have tested this and it works great for me, so I feel confident it will work for you.  That said, do so at your own risk.

We’re preparing to manage all of our Macintosh clients at work at the start of next school year.  This was never implemented in the past for various reasons (personnel, funding, technology, etc), but since I was hired last December, I’ve made it my Grail quest.

A brief paragraph on our setup:  We have an Active Directory (AD) domain where all our user accounts and passwords live, and which handles authentication.  I’m running my own Open Directory (OD) domain on an 8-Core Intel Xeon beast of an Xserve for managed settings, file sharing, home folders, etc.  We’ve achieved single sign by binding the Macs to AD, and then passing off management to OD user/group/machine settings.

This is great, but it all relies on a working network connection.  Without one, there’s no access to the machine since it won’t be able to authenticate credentials.  I also have an older G4 Xserve configured as an OD replica in case anything happens to the Intel Xserve, the G4 will take over its role until it is back online.  But what if something happens to both Xserves or worse, or our network infrastructure?  I want to build in a plan to let users have access to the local machine only when the network is unavailable, and until we get the network back.  (Ok, so that was two paragraphs on the setup, sorry!)

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Our Lower School tech coordinator passed this link my way a few days ago, and it’s worth sharing.  If your school meets the requirements and has at least 25 monitors, CPUs and/or printers to dispose of, Apple will haul them away and recycle them in an environmentally responsible manner FOR FREE.

This is keeping in line with Apple’s commitment to be more environmentally responsible by cutting down on e-waste, with current and future products, as well as retroactively.  We’ll be getting rid of several eMacs and a ton of CRT monitors, both which contain hazardous chemicals and materials.  If these were to simply be tossed in the dumpster, they would end up in a landfill and eventually seep back into the environment.

I’d definitely recommend giving it a look if you and your academic IT department have a lot of old computers to dispose of.  If it doesn’t violate the terms of the agreement, maybe even organize an old computer drive at your school.  Have everyone bring in their dead, extra, or old computers and monitors from home, and schedule a pickup with Apple.

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