1. Open the Finder and look in your Applications folder.  Right-click (or command-click) on the iTunes application and choose Make Alias from the context menu.
2. Change the name of the alias to Save PDF to iTunes.
3. Move the renamed alias to the /Library/PDF Services folder.  (You can place it in the Library folder in your home directory, but you’ll have to create a PDF Services folder there. This way the service won’t be available to other users on your machine).

Now when you want to put a document on your bookshelf, you simply print it, click on the PDF button in the lower left corner of the print dialog, and choose Save PDF to iTunes.  The next time your iOS4 device syncs, the document will be on your iBooks PDF bookshelf.

If you have documents in PDF form already, you can just drag and drop the PDFs onto iTunes and they’ll wind up in the same place.

Here’s a recipe that will get you from ugly Xcode style printing to two-column, color, landscape formatted listings in 10 minutes flat.

Update: I’ve had some reports that enscript is now installed by Apple on some systems. If you’re running Snow Leopard (10.6.x) check to see if enscript is located at: /usr/bin/enscript. If so you can skip the MacPorts install and go straight to the Xcode steps below.

If you don’t have MacPorts installed on your machine install it now. There are easy instructions on the MacPorts Project Homepage.

Then open a terminal window and type: port install enscript

That will install the enscript shell script for pretty printing. Next, open Xcode and click on the script menu, that’s the black scroll character between the Window and Help menus. Select “Edit User Scripts”.

In the left-hand column named “Menu and Item Titles”, select the line labeled “Text”.

Click on the plus sign in the lower left corner and choose “New Shell Script” from the drop-down menu. Double-click on the new “Shell Script” line that appears and change the name to “Pretty Print,” or a name of your choosing.

In the text box on the right you’ll have the “shebang” line for your new script:



#! /bin/sh

Edit the text so it looks like this:



#! /bin/sh
#
# enscript.sh - Print the file using enscript.
#
enscript -Eobjc -G -C -r --color -2 -T 4 "%%%{PBXFilePath}%%%"

Click on the arrows to drop down the list in the Output: field below the text window and select Output: Display in Alert.

That’s all there is to it! Close the Edit User Scripts dialog, and you’re ready to print. Open an Xcode project and double click on a source file to open it in a window of it’s own. Then pick Pretty Print from the script menu and a neatly formatted source listing with line numbers and color highlighting will fall out of your printer.

Enscript has a full bushel of command-line switches, so you can customize your output in many ways I haven’t mentioned here. See the enscript man pagefor details.

The solution isn’t quite perfect, there are two shortcomings that I’ve identified so far; First, the color highlighting doesn’t match the on-screen highlighting done by Xcode. Someone with better REGEX skills than mine could probably fix that in an hour or so by editing the objc.st file that enscript installs in /usr/share/enscript/hl/.

The second problem is that the MacPorts version of enscript doesn’t seem to get the character encoding quite right. I’ve noticed a few character set problems in my source file printouts, mostly dealing with degree symbols and such. There’s a switch for something called “mac” encoding, but it doesn’t work at all with Xcode on MacOS X.

If you have a work-around for the character-set problem, or a new objc.st file you’d like to share, leave a comment and I’ll update this post.

This size of image is 16 kilobytes, the same size as one hundred full-length SMS messages of 160 characters each.

First a bit of background: About two and a half TRILLION SMS text messages are sent each year. In North America they are outrageously expensive. AT&T’s basic data plan for the iPhone costs $20.00 per month and includes only 200 text messages. Exceed 200 and you’re charged 5 cents for each additional message you send or receive. …and international texts get charged at 20 cents each. Unlike much of the world, US users get charged for receiving a text message as well as sending one. So a 160 character message that costs the sender 5 cents, and the addressee another nickel, is getting billed at an astounding $625 per megabyte. Spill over to 165 characters and it costs twice as much since it’s broken into two “messages”. No wonder the wireless carriers love texting!

Enter AOL’s new AIM app for the iPhone. The new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS includes a feature called “push notifications” so an app can “wake up” in response to a network event. The AIM app uses this to implement an instant messaging client that does an end run around the outrageous carrier fees. They move over either the WiFi or cellular data connection. And they do it as part of the flat $20/month unlimited data connection.

“But…”, I hear you say, “If the person I want to text isn’t an AIM user, I can’t text, right?”. Wrong… you can address an AIM instant message to a cell phone number and AOL will forward it via SMS. Your recipient gets charged by the carrier, but you don’t. Now if that isn’t a near perfect viral campaign tool to spread AIM as an SMS replacement, I don’t know what is.

All of this works on the iPod Touch as well, so if you’re seldom out of WiFi coverage, then a Touch running Skype and AIM keeps you connected without paying AT&T a dime.

But platforms like the Blackberry and Symbian have also had IM clients for a a long time. The operating systems on these phones can run applications in the background, so they don’t need to rely on a technique like push notification to build SMS replacements. Why then is a viable SMS replacement for the iPhone such a big deal?

I think it’s because of two factors. First, the media love the iPhone and it gets more than it’s fair share of media coverage, due in no small part to Apple’s brilliant marketing. Second, Apple iPhone users seem to make much more use of the web than users of other phones. At WWDC Apple made the somewhat incredible claim that 65% of mobile browsing happens on iPhone and iPod Touch. (Look here for the slide. Scroll down to 11:46 AM). If anyone has real data to support that claim, please leave a comment). I can’t substantiate that number, but AvWx.net, a mobile site with weather for small plane pilots, the iPhone users do have higher page view counts than other platform users, with Blackberry users a distant second.

So if iPhone users desert SMS in droves in favor of free IM, they will be efficient in spreading the word. And if that happens, can the users on other platforms be far behind? …and AT&T can kiss the $625-per-megabyte transport business goodbye.

Here’s the problem…  Schools don’t license applications one user at a time.  They buy bulk licenses for a whole classroom, a whole school, or a whole district.  The app store doesn’t really provide any way to do that.  Sure, the school district could set up an “enterprise” developer arrangement with Apple and then get the vendor to upload the program, but that requires more work on the part of the district to purchase those applications than it does to buy traditional educational apps.  Schools are as strapped for technical resources as they are for cash, so this problem alone takes much of the luster off the iPod Touch as an instructional platform.

Let’s hope someone at Apple notices.