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Mail.app autoconfig

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Continuing on from yesterday’s post, today I’ll detail a seemingly little known feature of Apple’s Mail.app in 10.5 and after (pretty sure it doesn’t support 10.4).

Anyone who has set up a gmail account in Mail.app knows that once you put in your email address “[email protected]” and a password, it just magically figures out the mail servers, sets SSL, and you’re good to go. What you may NOT know, is that you can make Mail.app do this for your customers when they put in their email address for your system.

The process is pretty easy. What you need to do is create a file called MailAccounts.plist, in that file, you put something like the following:

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CardDAV CalDAV autodiscovery on Mac OS X and iOS

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UPDATE 2 4/8/2012: It’s been a year and a half (almost), but Apple finally fixed CalDAV SRV record discovery in, I believe, iOS 5.0.2 (and therefore 5.1). So all of this is now completely valid, and supported by Apple (finally)!

UPDATE 12/18/2010: It’s taken me a bit to post this (sorry), but I can say that iOS 4.2.1 (the released version of 4.2) supports discovery of CardDAV servers over SRV records. However, CalDAV does NOT work. I’ve been told by people in the know that it’s coming, it just didn’t make it into 4.2.1. Now, I have no idea why… one would think it’s the same back-end, but who knows. Anyway, CardDAV works, CalDAV doesn’t, but hopefully 4.3 (or whatever they call it) will fix that.

Part of being a systems administrator is making the life of your customers easier. Whether it’s having a file share auto-mount when they login, having to only remember a single password (or just having to login once via SSO), or in this case, not having to remember what server provides what services. So, over the past few days I’ve been playing with autodiscovery of CalDAV and CardDAV for Mac OS X and iOS.

Address Book and iCal in 10.6 use SRV records nicely. If I tell iCal that my server is www.example.com, and I have an SRV records that say:

_caldav._tcp.www.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 8008 caldav.example.com.
_caldavs._tcp.www.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 8443 caldav.example.com.

iCal magically figures out that my actual caldav server is caldav.example.com (it defaults to lookup caldavs first, then caldav if caldavs isn’t available). I have a similar SRV record set up for CardDAV:

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Webcam image

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UPDATE: So, Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 has been installed, and the image quality is quite good. Though, I think I need to clean the window it shoots through. So, no more green halo from the Xbox camera. All and all, very happy. Probably have a brief review forthcoming.

ORIGINAL: Today I changed my webcam to an Xbox Live Camera (the ones for the Xbox360). The image is better than my old Intel CS430, but not great. Also, there’s a nice green ring in the image since it’s reflected from the window.

The solution is temporary as I’ll be receiving a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 this coming Tuesday that will have an even better image, and not have the silly ring.

So, please be patient. Also, I hope to be adding access to a higher resolution webcam image once the new camera arrives. Though, I’m not sure how high, or how often I want to update it since I don’t want my net connection to be taxed too heavily.

Thanks!