We’re currently looking for both repair technicians and onsite Mac consultants for our Colorado location. Both positions are full-time. If interested, tell us more about yourself here.

In the spirit of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the MacWorks team is pleased to share a Christmas tech miracle in poetic verse. Enjoy.

‘Twas three days ‘til Christmas, while warm in the car
I noticed my phone was not near… but far
I poured out my bags right there on the seat
Keyboards and hard drives and tools by my feet
Alas, I found nothing, not even a clue
My iPhone’s location was… somewhere, it’s true
I didn’t give up, I was ready to fight
I knew I would search and trudge through the night
The snow had just fallen and drifted around
My ears, they were straining, I needed a sound
A text or an email or tweet it would beep
But I could hear nothing, not even a peep
Finally, I thought of a mend to my swoon
Find My iPhone is on, I’ll have it back soon
I rushed to my house and grabbed an iPad
Kissed my wife on the cheek, grabbed a scarf made of plaid
I hopped in the car and drove around town
Upways and sideways, all over and down
I followed the dot my iPad produced
And tracked it, at last, to a nice, cozy roost
Someone had found it out there in the snow
I said I was grateful but I had to go
Back to my wife with a hoot and a whistle
Merry Christmas to all, may your joy never fizzle

That poem was inspired by the story below. Pat O’Rourke, one of our consultants, lost his iPhone 3 day before Christmas and was able to recover it using some resourcefulness and Find My iPhone.

My job as an onsite engineer requires many different tools, so I have several IT bags that I carry: My basic computer bag, a bigger bag with keyboards, desktop drives, etc. and my construction bag. My current appointment’s problems required me to go out to the car to retrieve a tool. As I ran the 100 feet from their front door to my car, somehow I dropped my iPhone. As I was wrapping up the appointment, I had a bad feeling when I couldn’t find my phone. When I got to the car I started looking around more carefully.

After I dumped all 3 bags — it looked like R2-D2 puked in my back seat — I knew I had lost my phone. I looked through the nearby snow but couldn’t find it. The client lives in a secure building so I was unable get back in to look inside… and I couldn’t call them because my phone was missing. In not time at all, the client came out to walk their dog and let me in to confirm that the phone wasn’t there. How was I going to let HQ know that my iPhone was missing? I also didn’t have the contact information for my next appointment. Not a good combination. Patrick is starting to Panic.

The clients live in a fairly rural area so finding a pay phone or hotspot wasn’t a good option. I was 20 minutes from my house so I decided to go there. On the way, I started thinking; I can use technology to solve the problem. I will use my computer to look for my phone.

Using Find My iPhone, I was able to see it was right near where I was parked. I grabbed my wife’s iPad, a snow shovel and returned to the client’s place. At a traffic light I refreshed the tracking location and found the iPhone had moved. It appeared to be on the other side of the street. I was scared that a snow blower or plow had found it and moved it to its ‘final’ resting spot. When I got back to the site, I was relieved to find the snow banks still intact. After a quick shovel and no iPhone, I refreshed the current phone location and found it was about 10 miles away in a shopping plaza.

When I got to the mall, the map on Find My iPhone was a little undefined so, I started at the Red Lobster. When I explained what had happened, I asked if could I play a tone on my phone and walk through the dining room. The manager said, “If you can bust someone with an iPad, I’d like to see it. Help yourself.” When I did not hear the tone, I sent a 4th request asking “are you in the Red Lobster?” No Luck. I thanked the staff at Red Lobster and went back to my car.

I compared the Google maps position with the map in Find My Phone. I started driving in the parking lot and pulled up to the Dairy Queen. Looking at the Find My iPhone app and Google maps, I knew I was really, really close. As I walked in the Dairy Queen, I sent the play tone on the iPhone. The girl working the counter said, “Are you looking for your phone?”

The story goes: someone “found it” and decided to leave it at the Dairy Queen. The employee asked, “How were we supposed to reply to you if the phone is locked?”

I thought it was odd that someone “found it” 10 miles away and decided to leave it on the counter at the Dairy Queen as soon as I started sending messages to the phone. Even still, I am extremely happy to be reunited with my leash.

Here are three lessons to take away from my expedition:

• A pass code on your phone is essential. Had there not been a passcode, I doubt would have found my phone. At very least, the person who had the device would know most of my personal info.
• Sign up for iCloud. Without the Find My iPhone tool, the phone would still be lost.
• Don’t lose your iPhone. I really shouldn’t have to say this one.

Several of our customers asked us to show them a video of the iPad 2 repair process. It is a pretty amazing video… we’re happy to show you what happens during the repair so you can see just how much care goes into every iPad we fix.

Please enjoy the video. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below. Otherwise, we’re available at 303.817.6252 or by email (just click the @ symbol at the bottom of the page).

Congratulations to our friends at Studio No. 6 for their feature in Inc. Magazine!

From flying frogs to sliding barn doors, the Studio No. 6 office is not your typical corporate setting. You will find no grey cubicle walls in this office! Here, you will find an open floor plan, moveable wall, hidden media center and unique tricks for housing both storage and work stations. Sound fun?

Check out Inc. Magazine’s World’s Coolest Offices 2011 competition where you will find a feature on the Studio No. 6 space. We are the second runner up in the World’s Coolest Small Spaces category.

This international competition had submissions from around the globe and major architectural statements here in the States. We are very proud and honored to be alongside such amazing work by fabulous designers and architects.

When Willie — a.k.a. “Willie the Bee Man” — first approached MacWorks, he had a stack of iPads for his employees in his bee removal business, located in Miami, Florida and Hill County, Texas. He heard that Marketcircle’s Daylite and Billings Pro work well between iOS and Mac — and could make his organization paperless if done properly. I had underestimated his definition of paperless until I saw the stacks of notebooks piling up on my first onsite visit.

I easily saw the growing need to streamline and utilize this software, along with other enhancements along the way. With Daylite and the iPad, each employee has a clear map of their schedule, directions to every client and the necessary contact information. This allows them to spend less time juggling addresses and phone numbers so they can focus on the customers.

Their customers request bee removal online at getridofbees.com or talk to an employee on the phone. Those requests are then imported directly to Daylite for Willie, or his wife Devorah, to dispatch their team of bee removal technicians. Once they complete the job, the technician sends in a note of status, amount due, and comments that get forwarded to Billings Pro for invoicing.

Check out Marketcircle’s case study on Willie “the Bee Man” at marketcircle.com/blog/willie-the-bee-man/ and give MacWorks a call to find out what we can do for your business.

For a long time now, we’ve been frustrated with Apple Mail’s decision to show one-page attachments in their entirety (inline) when we’re composing emails. By default, Apple mail will only produce a thumbnail for the attachment if it’s more than one page. That gets very messy if we’re sending several one-page attachments.

One of our consultants, Pat O’Rourke, found a terminal command that will change the default behavior to produce an icon for every attachment. We’ve paid our respects to the terminal gods and are posting the quick tip here. To use the command, follow the instructions below.

Open Terminal. You can find it in Applications/Utilities/ or just do a spotlight search for it. Paste this command in the terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Press enter.

That’s it. All one-page attachments should now show as an icon. If you’d like to return it to the default configuration, just paste this next line into a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool no

Press enter.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this process. We’re more than happy to help. If terminal isn’t your thing, then just let us know and we’ll help tame the command line for you.

Apple has been a little vague on the features of iTunes Match. Most of what we know came from the iCloud/Lion Keynote this past summer. To complicate matters, the press has been stabbing in the dark to explain exactly what iTunes Match does since day one. Now that it’s out, we’ve had a chance to play with it and answer all of our nagging questions about the service. We’ve determined it’s definitely worth the $25. Let’s dive in.

Legitimizing Pirated Music

From Apple’s Terms of Service:

You hereby agree to use iTunes Match only for lawfully acquired content. Any use for illegitimate content infringes the rights of others and may subject you to civil and criminal penalties, including possible monetary damages, for copyright infringement.

Obviously, that clause is there to prevent Apple from looking like they’re laundering your music. Even still, that’s what they’re doing. It truly doesn’t matter how you obtain your music, Apple allows you to replace it with a high quality track if you pay the $25 per year for iTunes Match. If it can match the song, you can download it. So, how will the man catch you for pirating music?

Realistically, they can’t. Apple doesn’t look at your metadata when they’re matching your music (as far as we know). The matching process uses acoustic match technology to figure out what track is what. With that said, even if the RIAA subpoenaed Apple to release their records… they wouldn’t have any useful records to release. So does iTunes Match legitimize piracy? We wouldn’t suggest that you torrent album after album and legitimize them through iTunes Match. However, the one-time shot of cleaning your library out may not be a bad investment.

Setup iTunes Match

The actual setup process for iTunes Match is fairly simple. Just download iTunes 10.5.1 or later (this feature is currently US-only) and look for the “iTunes Match” section just underneath the “iTunes Store” in the left sidebar. Sign up, pay Apple and get started. This will scan your music library, match any songs that iTunes recognizes and then upload the remaining music to the cloud. You do not need an iCloud account to participate in iTunes Match.

Replace your low quality music

Now that Apple’s processed your library, let’s replace a couple low quality albums that you ripped in 1995 with high quality audio from the iTunes music collection. Again, make sure that iTunes Match has finished working on your library before you continue. It will disappear from the sidebar on the left when it’s done.

Go to your music library and choose the list view so you can see each song individually. Add the iCloud Status column to the list view so you can see matched, uploaded, error, purchased, not eligible, duplicate or waiting. Obviously if it says waiting, you haven’t let iTunes Match finish… you should probably be more patient.

Once you’re all set, choose the album that you want to upgrade and make sure that all of the tracks say “matched.” Now it’s safe to move it to the trash. Just select the tracks and delete them. You’ll see the small iCloud button appear which tells you that a track isn’t on your computer but they’re available for download. Select those tracks, right click and choose download. Let it finish the download and you’ll have high quality music on your machine. Keep in mind, these tracks are m4a files that cannot play on every device in the world… but that didn’t stop us.

Mass Replacement

Earlier today, several news sites reported that iTunes would replace your low quality music by default. That appears to be outright wrong. Please feel free to tell us about your experience in the comments. For now, we’re going to assume that the default behavior is to leave your music alone unless you jump-start the process. The easiest way to replace your low quality music is with a Smart Playlist. This is somewhat complex, so follow along closely.

Click the File button in menu bar and choose “New Smart Playlist.” From there, create a playlist with the same rules as the screenshot above. That will give you a live-updated list of your low quality music upgradeable through iTunes Match. We pushed the bit rate to 320 Kbps to ensure that it gets all of your replaceable music. If you don’t do that, you could end up hanging onto the 256 Kbps version of an album that you “borrowed from a friend.” We figured: if it’s replaceable, replace it. This Smart Playlist allows you to do exactly that.

Depending on the number of tracks you need to download, you could delete everything at once and re-download it right away… or you could do what we did, a few albums at a time to make sure everything went smoothly. Make sure — whatever you do — that you do *not* check the box that says, “Also delete this song from iCloud.” That will make you cry. With approximately 13,000 tracks that aren’t up to the iTunes standard, we’re going to be downloading music for a long, long time. Please note a couple important key combinations below:

• To add the “Any” variable to your smart playlist, hold the option (alt) key and click the ellipses that replace the plus button.
• To delete tracks from your library through a Smart Playlist, you have to press option + delete. Nothing else will work.

iTunes Match Error, Duplicate and Not Eligible Tracks

One of the first things we noticed when iTunes finished matching our library was a few extra variables in the iCloud Status column. Let’s talk about “Duplicate” status first. We thought we did a great job of managing our content but sure enough, iTunes Match found a couple albums that were duplicated. To ensure music safety, double check that the original album says “Matched” next to it and the duplicate says “Duplicate.” Then, feel free to dump the duplicate, as it’s not doing you any favors.

“Not Eligible” tracks appear to be simple compatibility problems. Most of them are Music Videos, iTunes LPs or Digital Booklets. We only had two music tracks that weren’t eligible to upload. One was from an old album recorded in GarageBand; the other was an OAR song that looked pretty messed up. Instead of tossing it, we converted it to AAC and iTunes matched it right away.

The “Error” tracks are much harder to place. You’re most likely dealing with corrupt files at that point. However, a couple full albums showed up on our error list. We don’t think they’re pirated, but it’s possible that Apple won’t match them because they’re popular and may have come from a nefarious source. That still doesn’t explain the other 23 tracks that threw errors. They’re all obscure with no easily identifiable similarities. If it means ripping the CDs again, no big deal… it would just be nice to know why they’re failing.

Your songs are yours forever

We’ve heard a countless number of people ask what happens to the matched music after the 365 days. Does it disappear if you don’t re-up your iTunes Match subscription? Absolutely not. Your music stays your music forever. If you fail to renew your iTunes Match subscription, you’ll lose the convenience of having your music library backed up to the cloud and the ability to download/stream songs from your home computer that weren’t purchased on iTunes. Other than that, there isn’t a kill switch that will turn off your music.

On an interesting side note, music that you replace with iTunes shows “Matched AAC audio file” when you look at the song info.

We think that pretty much covers all of our initial questions about iTunes Match. If you have a question about something we didn’t answer in this article, please just leave it in the comments. We’ll answer it for you from there. Thanks!

If you’ve had trouble logging into the Lion Server App (not Server Admin, the other one) after setting up your server… it’s probably not your fault. While troubleshooting the issue on a client’s brand new Mac Mini Server, one of our consultants — Tito Lauro — found a knowledge base article with a great fix. Initially, it may appear that your credentials are incorrect but it’s most likely related to an unloaded background process (daemon) called “servermgrd.” Even if you configured the server properly, this daemon may not load.

In the KBase article, Apple posted a terminal command to see if the daemon is running and another command to kick it into gear.

To check if servermgrd is loaded, see the output of this command in Terminal:

sudo launchctl list | grep -q com.apple.servermgrd && echo loaded || echo not loaded

If the output is “not loaded”, load the com.apple.servermgrd job into launchd with this command:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

As always if you don’t feel comfortable in terminal you can contact us to help.

I remember watching Steve Jobs sitting on a couch during the iPad’s first keynote: people were legitimately shocked to see that it couldn’t display a Flash ad as he browsed the internet during the demo. Some people wrote it off as an unfinished product, ‘the final version will surely ship with Flash.’ When it didn’t, the technology world threw a fit and called Apple closed-minded. Pundits also believed Apple tried to cover up the lack of Flash by doctoring the images in their product videos. While I’m sure it wasn’t their intention to mislead customers (more likely to maintain the usability aesthetic), they quickly replaced the doctored Flash content with the actual error image. So why was this a big deal?

Many people thought we would “finally” see Flash on an iOS device with Apple’s tablet introduction, the iPad. They were sorely disappointed. It was never Apple’s intention to bring Flash to iOS for many reasons. Due to the whispers and rumormongering, Steve Jobs put everything out in the open with his Thoughts on Flash article.

Steve mentioned six reasons for the lack of Flash on iOS devices:

1. Flash is proprietary software for the web. Steve believed that web software should be open and freely available. No one should have to pay to write web content. HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript are available to everyone.
2. Adobe argued that Apple couldn’t offer the full web experience because 75% of video on the web was served through Flash. Steve explained that most of the popular content was already iPad compatible with more sites converting everyday.
3. The reliability, security and performance of Flash has never been good… it was the number one reasons Macs crash.
4. Flash drained batteries far quicker than a H.264 encoded video wrapped with CSS and HTML5. Also, even if a video was encoded with H.264, Flash could not utilize the built-in hardware decoding for better performance and battery life.
5. You can’t touch Flash. Just like mouse-over effects in JavaScript, most of the Flash content couldn’t understand touch input.
6. It adds another layer of complexity (through additional software) to the user experience. Apple wanted to keep things as simple as possible for their customers.

As you can see from that list, Steve wasn’t wrong. Those are six very powerful reasons to abandon Flash. In fact, Apple worked with Adobe over the course of several years to fix the poor experience on the Mac without much improvement or commitment from either side. When Apple introduced iOS, Adobe had no chance of getting their software onto the new system. After seeing a few preliminary demos, Apple realized that Adobe was trying to adapt PC technology to a Post-PC era… and they couldn’t figure out a way to make it work.

After this public spat between Apple and Adobe, things seemed to get better until Apple decided to stop shipping Macs with Flash pre-installed. If you want Flash on your new Mac, you’ll have to download it yourself.

Let’s take a quick look at Steve’s arguments and see how they fit with mobile web in 2011.

1. Open web software is really where innovation takes place in 2011. No reputable company is building Flash applications any more. With tools like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, we’ve seen amazing web applications appear in our browsers: Facebook, iCloud, Google. All of these websites utilize cutting-edge web technologies to deliver your content everyday. Also, keep in mind that Apple is responsible for the open source WebKit framework now in use by Google Chrome, Safari, Adobe Air, etc. They obviously like open web standards.
2. With the popularity of the iPad, the iPhone and the iPod touch, most people balk at a website when they can’t watch a video on their mobile device. In fact, people consider a flash-only video lazy development. That’s very different from the 2010 era of web video. Did Steve change the market? Maybe, but we think the world is better for it.
3. Every tablet I’ve seen demo Flash crashed right in front of me. Flash has been the bane of my existence for a while on both PC and Mac operating systems. Most of my problems were related to performance and reliability. Looking at the security concerns, Apple would open the iOS system to all of the potential vulnerabilities produced by the Flash software.
4. My battery life is already bad enough. I’m not interested in Flash making it worse.
5. Web developers changed the way they approach new content now that everything is touch input. It’s not just iOS devices; most Android phones are touch-only as well. We can’t use JavaScript mouse-overs on touch devices, so we had to rethink the user experience for the web. Since most Flash software was built heavily on mouse interaction, there’s no way to port that to a touch-based platform.
6. I constantly have conversations with developers who want to convert their existing apps to iOS. No developer will ever create a feature-rich experience with conversion software. By discarding Flash support, developers had to learn Cocoa and build feature-rich, native apps. Apple extended a few olive branches by letting Adobe convert Flash to native Cocoa… but it will never be as good as the real thing. Take Machinarium for example: it’s one of the most interesting, yet poorly implemented games in the App Store… because it was built with Flash and converted to iOS. Fewer layers means better software. Period.

As you can tell by the title, today is the day that Adobe finally gave up. They admitted that Steve Jobs was right in April of 2010 without saying those exact words.

However, Adobe is building an army for the next generation of web technology. They recently acquired several companies like Nitobi, Typekit, Auditude, EchoSign, Iridas Technology, PhoneGap, etc. and are building some great HTML5 tools for the modern web developer. It’s not surprising to see them say “HTML5 is the better solution.” It truly is. With so many web developers already dumping Flash because of Apple (that’s not the only reason), Adobe jumped on the HTML5 bandwagon and started developing software for the future.

One important puzzle piece that most people missed today: Adobe is still working hard on the Adobe Air software… and will continue that for quite some time. The biggest difference between Flash and Air is the way it’s packaged: Flash is a plugin while Air is a native application that uses HTML and JavaScript as its framework. Since you can export your Adobe Air application to iOS, this will surely become the platform of choice for Adobe developers.

We’re excited to see what comes with these new developments. We’re excited to see what Adobe can do when they’re not trying to reinvent a dead standard. We’re excited for the future of the web. We expect that one day, all applications will be served from the cloud through web standards we have yet to see… personal computers will just be an interface, not the whole solution. When that happens, we’ll still be here to help you with questions and fix it when it breaks. We’ll see you there.

Twitter, Facebook and all of the other social networks are flooded with complaints of short battery life for the iPhone 4S. But it doesn’t stop there… other people are having issues with their battery life after upgrading to iOS 5. Apple has commented that there is a fix on the way but there could be something else at play. The iPhone 4S has an amazingly power processor without much of a bump in battery capacity — that’s going to make it drain much quicker than an iPhone 4 or even the 3GS. Apple added a ridiculous amount of location-based features with iOS 5 and notification center is our prime suspect for battery drain. Even still, we’re hoping to make your life easier by offering a few tips to maximize your battery life on your favorite device.

Complete Restore

This is the most drastic of solutions, but we’re talking about it first because it really should be everyone’s first troubleshooting step. What do we mean by complete restore? Plug your device into your computer and restore it with iTunes. Here’s where it gets daunting: you cannot choose “restore from backup.” To get the full effects of a restore and prevent potential software issues from making their way back to your device, you must choose “setup as new.”

Before you do that, make sure you realize the potential drawbacks. All of your pictures will disappear (so make sure you back them up), your SMS messages will be gone, any locally stored app data will be deleted, and you’ll have to set everything up from scratch. Ouch. Here’s the thing: even if Apple puts out a “fix” for the battery issues, it’s impossible to isolate everyone’s specific problem. There could be thousands of different devices out there all draining their batteries too fast. The only way to ensure you receive the proper benefits is to completely restore your device.

Once you’ve done that, move onto these next steps. Or you could start here… but you’re not doing yourself any favors by skipping the restore.

Turn Off Excess Location Services

Location services are a hot commodity with the iPhone. Every app developer wants to tap into your location to offer you special deals, help you find a restaurant or tell your friends that you’re at the park. Here’s the thing: the more location services you allow, the more your device will talk to the network. The more your device talks to the network, the quicker your battery dies. So cut back the tracking and regain some juice. Go to Settings -> Location Services and sort through your list. Anything that has a little arrow next to the on switch has used your location within the last 24 hours. If you see apps with the blue “on” switch that you don’t need, just turn them off. Digging deeper, you may want to scroll down to System Services in that same menu and turn off a few of the system services if you don’t need them. Also, keep in mind that location-based reminders with drain your battery like nothing else.

Turn Off or Limit Notification Center Widgets

Throwing every possible widget into the Notification Center is not the correct way to save battery life. Head to Settings -> Notifications to sort through your list and clean out anything that you could live without. Honestly, I have mine turned off… I’ve never found it very useful to my workflow.

Turn Down Brightness and Turn Off Auto-Brightness

I usually keep my brightness at 25 percent. Most of the time, that’s enough to do anything you need unless you’re in direct sunlight. The brighter your screen, the more battery you eat with every second of use. I also leave auto-brightness off because I don’t feel like it works well enough to put up with the extra battery drain. Extra? Yes, in my testing, leaving auto-brightness on actually drained the battery more than keeping it off.

Limit or Disable Push

This ends up being much more complicated than some of the other settings. Email push is a big offender here. If you need instant email, maybe this isn’t the best option… but if you handle 15-minute intervals, go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars and scroll down to the “fetch new data” section. Tap it, swipe push to off and then select “every 15 minutes.” That will significantly reduce your network traffic, especially if you get a lot of email. For other push apps like Facebook, you’ll need to go to their system settings and disable push for each item — tedious, but worth it for the extra battery life.

Set Auto-Lock to 1 Minute

This will turn off your screen with 1 minute of inactivity. If you checked Twitter and went back to work, you may forget to lock the screen. If it’s set to anything longer than 1 minute, you’re wasting precious battery life. Change this to 1 minute to ensure maximum potential.

Corrupt Contacts and Time Zone Settings

A couple unconfirmed solutions were reconfiguring your contacts and disabling the automatic time zone settings based on location. Yes, another location issue… just turn it off as we mentioned above. The contact issue relates to corrupt contact records. If you’re syncing contacts through Google or iCloud, we recommend cleaning them out and trying again. A solution like Contacts Cleaner might also be good for your address book.

Hopefully that was helpful. If you have anything you’d like to add to this list, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments. We’ll make sure to mention you in any updates. Thanks!