A ton of people on this thread on the Apple website are discussing and running into the same issue.

There are apparently 2 ways to fix this issue:

The first one is to simply disable “Use IDLE command if the server supports it” from the Advanced settings for your Account, as shown above.

The second fix is to wipe out all your emails and accounts and start all over. This method is pretty risky and I don’t think you should try it unless you really know what you’re doing. To do this, quit Mail, then using Terminal, move all the files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/ out into another location. Then Open Mail and recreate all your accounts.

Side note regarding Gmail and Priority Inbox
Personally I ran into this disappearing mail issue with Lion when I realized that Gmail was assigning some emails the Important Label without me knowing it. These emails were also skipping the Inbox. So basically, anything the Google deemed “Important” was never being show to me in Mail. How ironic right? The fix was to go into the Inbox settings in Gmail and Set these options:

Inbox Type: Classic (The Priority Inbox drives me insane personally)
Importance Markers: Show Markers (I tried using the No Markers option but it was causing the emails not to appear in my Mac Mail Inbox)
Filtered Mail: Override Filters (Again this option is here to leave messages in your inbox)
And finally in Lion Mail make sure to disable the IDLE option for the account.

Having done all this, I still don’t fully trust that Gmail is not putting things in the Important folder, so I have turned on the Show in IMAP feature for that label in Gmail Settings and check that folder once in a while in Mail.

I am using Mail Version 5.1 (1251/1251.1) for your reference.

Let me know if you are having similar issues with either Gmail Importance mail disappearing or Lion Mail deleting emails automatically.

Here’s how to get to the new Emoji characters in Lion:

1) Hit Apple-Space and type in “Keyboard” and Enter
2) From the Keyboard prefs pane, check the box for “Show keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar”
3) Now from the menu bar click the new icon and choose “Show Character Viewer”
4) From the left menu in Character Viewer click on the Emoji option.
5) You’ll find a list of all the Emoji characters and you can dig deeper and browse them by category as well. Tap any emoticon to see its corresponding name and available font variations in black and white. To use any of these characters just drag the icon to the text area of the app where you are typing, for example in Safari, iChat, Mail or Address Book.

You can also add any one to your favorites for quicker access.

Here’s a screenshot of what the characters and the new Emoji menu looks like. Enjoy! 👍

This one is “Pile of Poo” 💩 and here’s “Skull” 💀 with an Alien👽 . Tip: Two finger tap in Safari to zoom in and get a closer look at the graphics.

Check out these top 10 beautiful and professional options for displaying your iPad for top designers. Some of them are still being produced, and some are available for purchase.

Griffin A-Frame Tabletop Stand for iPad Price: $49.99

The heavy aluminum stand swings open to hold your iPad upright, in either portrait or landscape view … perfect for watching video, or viewing pictures. Or close the legs and lay the stand down to hold your iPad at the perfect angle to use it for desk- or table-top surfing, reading or gaming. Soft silicone cradles your iPad and accommodates the iPad’s dock/sync cable. Designed to accommodate Griffin’s flexible and hard-shell cases and many others.

The iPad DODOcase Price: $49.95

The limited first edition iPad DODOcase is inspired by the Moleskine journals of our favorite artists. Made by hand in San Francisco CA using traditional book binding techniques the DODOcase brings a classic look to protecting your iPad.
A perfect blend of the traditional feel of a book with the technological power of the iPad.

IPDK Price: $44.99

Shatterproof polycarbonate and shock resistant black rubber hybrid case for iPad. Includes kickBACK case, ultra-clear screen protector and a microfiber cleaning cloth.
Hinged kickstand for convenient widescreen and vertical viewing as well as low-angle typing. Polycarbonate and rubber hybrid case provides unmatched protection and shock resistance. Integrated traction nubs provide grip on flat surfaces

BookArc for iPad Price: $39.99

BookArc for iPad gives you a choice of four different positions. In “work mode,” iPad sits at an angle in both portrait and landscape positions, and provides access to the home button. In “storage mode” iPad sits upright in both portrait and landscape positions, perfect for charging and using your iPad as a stylish photo frame. No matter what position you’re in, you always have access to the charging port.

LUXA2 H4 Price: $?

LUXA2 H4, is an e-book holder made of solid aluminum with a sleek and chic design tailor-made for the Apple iPad and other e-book readers. With firm and strong bottom, 6 supporting arms with rubber pins, and silicone pad design, it is the best holder to read, browse and play with iPad. It holds, You Play.

Macally VIEWSTAND for iPad Price: $49.99

Orgonomically designed to improve typing & viewing comfort / Offers various viewing orientation & angles / Sleek design to match your iPad. Ergonomically designed to improve typing and viewing comfort. Offers various viewing orientation and angles. Sleek design to match your iPad. Supports vertical and horizontal viewing. Durable Aluminum Body With Scratch Prove Thermo Polyurethane Coating

Joule Ipad Stand Price: $129.99

Designed With Both Landscape and Portrait Modes in mind.
Introducing the new “Joule” work stand for your iPad.
It’s stable solid base has a simple, clean, and elegant design that enhances your iPad and makes it easier to use.
Unlike most stands, the Joule won’t tip over when using the iPad’s touch screen.  Allowing you to better utilize your iPad on your deskop or kitchen counter top.

CNC machined in the USA from solid aluminum, the Joule comes in a brilliant polished finish or a black anodized coating. Custom coatings and laser engraved graphics are available.

Skadoosh by Jadu Price: $?

The Skadoosh iPad stand’s innovative design incorporates lightweight aluminum strength, a flip out support, and a push button lock to hold your iPad at any angle. The Skadoosh iPad stand is the perfect accessory to stand your pad. Hold down the button on the front of the stand and adjust the iPad to the optimal angle. Releasing the button locks it right where you need it. Use the touch screen abilities of the iPad confident that the Skadoosh iPad stand will hold it solid.

The iPad iFrame dock Price: $49.99

Easily slide your iPad in this frame dock to charge and display your photos, movies or app. Put in on your night table, work desk or living room to display your iPad in landscape or portrait mode while still charging it. A unique system allows you to easily slide your iPad in the dock in either landscape or portrait mode. A sturdy frame holds your iPad securely without damaging it. It just as easily slides out.

iPad Stand Hacks

If you’re looking for something cheap and dirty to hold your iPad up at a viewable angle while you work, consider buying any old “copyholder” or “book stand” that you can find online for really cheap. I personally picked up a couple of these $7 stands from Amazon.

ROLODEX Nestable Wire Mesh Freestanding Desktop Copyholder Price: $6.99

Acrylic Easel Book Holder Rack Stand Price: $14.99

Do it yourself, save money and less time waiting around… Simple iPad Stand Price: A few bucks or whatever

A small stand suitable useful for things like watching movies on the iPad. Made of three pieces of 1/4″ (6mm) acrylic. The pieces friction-fit together and the stand can be quickly broken down and set up, so it’s easy to toss in a bag.

Know of any others? Have ideas for using existing products as iPad stands?

Let me know.

The second beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available and includes Interface Builder, a powerful tool that allows you to visually build your interface and makes creating a UI as simple as drag and drop.

We’ve also added new sample code and updated documentation to the rich set of resources available to you in the iPhone Dev Center.
Log in to the iPhone Dev Center today and download the new version of the iPhone SDK.

Web Inspector Overview

To get started open Web Inspector by going to Safari 3.1/Develop/Show Web Inspector and you will see the new window open up. The initial window is split up into a top row with navigation buttons and search box. The navigation buttons take you the the next and last actions you make within Web Inspector and come in handy when debugging. The left navigation lets you view and inspect the loaded web resources including Documents, StyleSheets, Images, Scripts, WebFonts, Databases and Other files, as well as buttons to load the Console and Network details. Ajax request and responses show up under the Other file category. If any errors are found, the number of errors are placed on the file name in the navigator. For example here, Safari has found 1 bug in the file diggthis.js The main content area shows you the web source details for viewing. JavaScript errors are marked with an orange pop, while HTML and CSS errors have a red color. If you want to attach Web Inspector to the bottom of your Safari Window click the small box on the bottom left corner of the window. I found this this to be a more usable placement.

DOM Editing

Clicking on any HTML Document on the left loads the source on the right. Documents can also be viewed as a DOM resrouce by clicking ont he DOM button on the top nav. (Note you have flip between DOM and Source view for HTML files.)

Searching supports DOM and CSS elements and you can nest your DOM element searches to filter out exactly what you’re looking for. For example #page a returns all anchor tags in the div with the page id. The corresponding display element in Safari is highlighted as you select DOM elements.

The right pane displays Styles, Metrics and Properties for seleted DOM elements. Styles show you both the computed style as well as all the defined style rules for that object. Like FireBug you can edit your CSS rules in real time in the Styles boxes for each CSS rule. To edit any CSS property double click the name or value and an edit box opens allowing you to type in your changes. This is great for testing out new ideas on the fly.

The metrics pane shows you the layout rules including offset, margin, border, padding, width and height for the element. Finally the Properties pane lists all of the DOM object properties that apply to the selected element.

Downloadable Web Fonts

If you are using downloadable web fonts the Fonts file group shows you a rendering of all the fonts that are loaded into the user’s browser.

Client Side Databases

Also if you are using the client side database features of HTML5, the Databases category will let your explore the databases loaded in the client along with the all the tables and rows in each client side database. From here you can also execute SQL queries against the databases.

The Console

The console feature lets you type in JavaScript commands and view JavaScript errors, along with HTML and CSS rule errors. Clicking on any error jumps to the file, but unfortunately doesn’t go the corresponding line. The console has an input area for testing out JavaScript and DOM commands on the bottom. There is in fact a console object and my tests showed that Safari supports only a few of the functions for the console object. Here is a list of the FireBug console methods of which only a few are supported in Safari namely log, info, warn and error.

Supported methods:
log info warn error
Unsupported methods:
debug assert dir dirxml trace group groupEnd time timeEnd profile profileEnd count

Network

The network tab is actually quite nicely designed and show you what the transfer time or the transfer size for each resource and in total for the page. The capsule graph is color coded and breaks down the file types by Docs, CSS, Images, Script and Other. You can switch between time or size from the drop down. Web Inspector makes some suggestions as well for improving speed, for example here we see a recommendation to use file compression to save bandwidth. (I don’t really use this method now since IE6 is buggy with gzip deflation.) Click on any file to see the HTTP request and response header for that file.

Snippet Editor

The Snippet Editor is a little utility that allows you to enter blocks of HTML and CSS and have it rendered on the fly. It is quite useful for testing out your CSS and Layout in little chunks.

Note: While using the Web Inspector and Snippet Editor, I came across numerous little annoying bugs and usability issues here and there. Also lots of features that I would expect are not there. For example you can not click on elements to inspect them, you can not add new style rules if they don’t exist already, and you can’t edit rules for CSS files loaded using @import. I would have to say that FireBug is a superior tool at this time for professional debugging, but Safari is about half way there.

Developer Menu

The first thing you will notice is the addition of the “Develop” menu (Preferences/Advanced/Show Develop menu in menu bar) item with the following tasks:

Open Page with: (Other browsers installed on your system including FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera)

User Agent: Set you user agent from the list of options, or enter your own user-agent. Finally! This was previously part of the hidden debug menu and you had no way of specifying a custom user-agent. The other exciting additions here are the ability to set your user-agent as Mobile Safari 1.1.3 for either iPhone or the iPod touch.

You can also pull up the Web Inspector, Error console, Network Timeline and a Snippet Editor. Lastly the Developer menu allows you to disable various browser features such as Caches, Images, CSS Styles, JavaScript, Runaway JavaScript Timers, and Site-Specific Hacks. You can now also edit CSS in the Web Inspector. More on these in a later post.

Standards Support

Support for CSS 3 web fonts using CSS @font-face rules. check out what can be done with downloadable fonts in these working samples here, here, here, here, here, and here. The CSS and a sample web font are show below. If you are using Safari 3.1 you should see a cool font.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Acorn Initials";
  src: url(http://www.domain.com/Acorn___.ttf) format("truetype");
}

Safari 3.1

Support for CSS transforms and transitions. Below are some demos of these.

Here is a sample of the -webkit transform CSS which is now supported by Safari 3.1. Click on the Safari logo to rotate it 1440 degrees.

The following Safari logo is skewed 35 degrees using -webkit-transform: skew(45deg, 0deg).

The following image changes its scale using -webkit transform:scale() to zoom in 30% when you mouse over it.

Support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements. Watch out Adobe and Flash. Here is a demo of the video tag. There is also added support for SVG images in <img> elements and CSS images and SVG advanced text.

Support for offline storage for Web applications in SQL databases. That means you can now store your databases locally on the client’s machine. Here’s some sample JavaScript to do the client side databases. Check out this demo that shows you how it works.

database.executeSql("SELECT * FROM test", function(result1) {
   // do something with the results
   database.executeSql("DROP TABLE test", function(result2) {
     // do some more stuff
     alert("My second database query finished executing!");
   });
});

 
Running the CSS3 Selector tests reveals that Safari 3.1 has full support for CSS3 Selectors while FireFox 2 and IE 7 are still playing catch up.

Performance Improvements

Apple claims that Safari 3.1 “executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 2″. Performance measured in seconds. Testing conducted by Apple in March 2008 on a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-based iMac system running Windows XP Professional SP2, configured with 1GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 with 256MB of VRAM. HTML and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings. Testing conducted with a beta version of Safari; all other browsers were shipping versions. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors.” I tested IE7, FF2, and Safari 3.1 with 3 JavaScript performance testers and the Acid 3 test kit. The tools used are
1. Acid3 tests.
2. JavaScript speed test written by Jason Orendorff
3. SunSpider test kit from WebKit.org
4. slickspeed test from Mootools.net

Here are the results in milliseconds from the tests which seem to agree with the results found by Apple. You can see that Safari 3.1 does in fact have a much more efficient JavaScript processing engine, and is three quarters of the way there when comes to passing the Acid3 tests.

Detail links at SunSpider:   IE7     FireFox 2.2     Safari 3.1

Microsoft Windows

• Improves Back/Forward performance
• Supports signed Java applets
• Shows Caps Lock icon in password fields
• Adds support for showModalDialog
• Localized in 16 languages
• Adds support for International Domain Names
• Improves handling of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean text
• Contextual menu now allows opening a link in a window or tab
• Improves pop-up blocking to work with plug-ins

Other Improvement

• Double clicking on the Tab Bar opens new tab
• Includes URL metadata when images are dragged or saved from browser
• Opens Download and Activity window in current Space
• Supports trackpad gestures for back, forward, and magnify on MacBook Air and compatible MacBook Pro computers
• Shows Caps Lock icon in password fields
• 13 Security Fixes
• Increased site compatibility
• Improved application stability

Mozilla/5.0 (Aspen Simulator; U; Aspen 1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Mobile/5A147p Safari/5525.7

This means if you load up sites that only look right on the iPhone they won’t render correctly on the Aspen Simulator. An example of this is the Yahoo Ajax Flickr website designed specifically for the iPhone. This page renders correctly if you’re on an iPhone, but will show you the basic mobile version if it doesn’t see iPhone in your user-Agent. Next version of Aspen will hopefully have an option to easily edit the user agent string of the Safari browser. For reference the mobile Safari app is located in this folder:

/Developer/Platforms/AspenSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/AspenSimulator1.2.sdk/

Let’s take a look at the basics:

70/30 -

• Developer gets:
  • Hosting
  • Credit Card Processing
  • Access to millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers
  • 70% of what they sell online.
  • Paid out monthly
  • The SDK, Tools and Documentation
• Apple gets:
  • Subscription fees of $99 or $299
  • A vast Inventory of Apps
  • 30% of the sales
  • Full Control over what apps are listed in its App Store
  • plus…

What else?

Well if you have an iPod touch, and not iPhone, You need to pay a “nominal” fee to upgrade your device to be able to get the App Store on it.

So why does Apple want to restrict its App sales to the App Store you ask? The reason given is that it is a security risk. People who sign up for a developer account are supposedly safer since Apple has their personal information on file such as credit card numbers and phone and such. So if someone does write some malicious app that gets into 2 million iPhones and causes world hunger, we can all point to the right person and demand justice.

It might be unreasonable to conclude that if Apple is the single point of inspection, that no viruses will get through to its Store. Sure they will do a good job of inspecting all the stuff that comes in, but something somewhere will go wrong. And that is bound to happen.

Up until now Mac software has been distributed and sold by developers themselves. Not many Mac owners complain of a virus infection however. How is it that with a mobile device this changes?

One thing is for certain, Lots and Lots of money will be made on this by both Apple and top notch Cocoa programmers. Another side effect will be new coders coming to Cocoa Apple land and getting a taste of things in Cupertino. Xcode and other iPhone SDK development tools are Mac only tools, which could potentially boost Mac hardware sales as well. Oh and did I mention you need Leopard?

Finally, new apps mean new iPhone and iPod touch customers who up until now have not bothered switching to the land of apps and Apple. And more people hitting up the iTunes store looking for apps means more eyeballs that will most likely browse around the isles for other stuff like movie rentals and music downloads.

So we all are part of a major shift in technology usage and Apple is in the middle of it all as it builds its digital goods empire. This is probably the biggest shift we’ve seen since the personal computer was commercialized.

It makes perfect business sense, and seems like a winning business model for developers and Apple. I leave it up to you to determine how efficient and beneficial it is for consumers. My only question is then why did Apple wait over 9 months to release the SDK, and is waiting another 3 months to release it to the public? And what will Google Gears, Microsoft and Nokia do if anything to steal some of Steve’s spotlight?

A last thought: What happens if I buy an app for my iPhone and want to put it on my iPod touch? Will I have to pay for it again?

The plugin sniffs the client’s user agent and uses its special theme for iPhone visitors. The theme looks similar to the basic WordPress blue theme and contains sections for your categories, trackbacks, permalinks, comments and even a share links section with post links to delicious, digg and technorati.

I have installed this plugin and tested it on this blog from the iPhone. Now this blog loads very fast and is very readable on the iPhone and I don’t have to zoom in to read either. I’m hoping to see an admin theme in the future as well. Read more and download the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme v0.1 here to iPhonify your WordPress blog.