Your source for indispensable Apple and Macintosh news and reviews, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

Improve Apple Services with AirPort Base Stations

You can make iChat file transfers, iDisk, and Back to My Mac work better by turning on a setting with Apple AirPort base stations released starting in 2003. Launch AirPort Utility, select your base station, click Manual Setup, choose the Internet view, and click the NAT tab. Check the Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) box, and click Update. NAT-PMP lets your Mac OS X computer give Apple information to connect back into a network that's otherwise unreachable from the rest of the Internet. This speeds updates and makes connections work better for services run by Apple.

 
 

Where Have I Been?

I'm sure the question "Why hasn't Matt Neuburg been publishing many TidBITS articles lately?" is right up there in most people's minds along with other burning questions of the day. Or maybe not. But I'm going to tell you the answer anyway: it's because I've been very heavily occupied with FaceSpan 5, which is currently under heavy development by Late Night Software.

FaceSpan 5 is an application development environment - it's an application that you use to write applications, with the distinction that the programming language you use is AppleScript. It has a long history (it's been around as long as AppleScript itself), and this new version promises to be the best ever. This version is still in an early phase, and only a few hand-picked "alpha testers" have seen it; but it's far enough along that I've been able to use it to create a complete application. My role is as chief documentation author, bug-finder, suggestion-maker, and provider of various other forms of support. It's very exciting, but please, don't ask me when FaceSpan 5 will be finished, as no one knows the answer to that question.

 

Fetch Softworks: With Fetch 5.5, FTP and SFTP are simpler
than ever. Use it on Mac OS X to upload, download, mirror,
and manage your Web site, images, videos, and data sets.
Download your free trial version! <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>