Posts tagged iPhone
Sue? Sigh… I Say You’ll See It Soon
Mar 2nd
Someone is going to sue Apple in the not-too-distant future for their inconsistent and subjective App Store approval process. I think they violate many anti-competitive practices. It’s crazy to think that Apple has gone this long selectively allowing certain apps, all the while only defining guidelines for inclusion nebulously, and only considering applications after the work is done. Furthermore, rejections are often without any explanation whatsoever.
Someone, sometime, is going to sue. And they should. Apple is best of breed in most markets they have their toes, but they are really starting to behave pretty badly.
How Funny is “Fart for Free”?
Jan 30th
I was stuck in pretty terrible traffic last night, as a result, the 5 mile commute home took well over an hour forty five, during which time, I had to entertain a 15 month old. To pass the time, my daughter and I conducted an experiment: to find out which of the 16 fart noises that come in the iPhone’s “Fart for Free” application is funniest.
Fart for Free
I can now report the results.
I find fart #6 to be funniest. Each time I listen to it, I continue to laugh, unlike some of the others, which are funny the first time but no longer surprising or funny thereafter. 1 is good, a simple pop, but 6 continues to make everyone laugh.
But the science part of it is thus: will a 15 month old, who doesn’t speak any real English, whose comprehension is limited to just a few short syllables, find any fart funny at all?
The answer is an enthusiastic yes! Jillian found fart #13 to the funniest, if her reaction is to be believed. She did not laugh at all at fart #1, however, she gave a good smile for #6. She cried during farts 10 and 11, which either means she didn’t find the herald blast variety funny or she was fed up with her car seat, but I’m inclined to believe the former, given that 13 led to fantastic laughter.
There you go: the most objective viewpoint, someone who, thus far is ambivalent towards farts as a whole, someone who has no preference for any particular brand of fart humor, someone who has no sense of embarrassment in this arena, a blank slate, totally unmarred by experience or shame laughed hardest at fart #13. Another great human mystery has been solved: the funniest variety of fart sound effect.
iPhone OS 3.0
Jan 14th
I haven’t heard much about what to expect in iPhone OS 2.3. A quick Googling of the term, as of today, yields nothing of value, other than speculation. iPhone 2.2 came out in November, almost 2 months ago. Since we haven’t heard anything about 2.3, that leaves just a few possibilities.
First, it’s possible that Apple simply stopped development on the iPhone. I think the likelihood of this is practically null.
The other possibility is that Apple has been working on things, but nothing is ready. In two months, we haven’t heard anything at all – there’s been no SDK update, no betas. That means either they are working slowly, or they are working on things that are taking some time.
Rewind to iPhone OS 2.0. There was supposed to be a “push” mechanism by which applications would report to Apple, and a single iPhone tether to Apple would act as the pusher for all background services. That was delayed until “October” timeframe, and has since been ignored. Or has it?
My prediction: the next version of the iPhone OS to see light of day will be iPhone OS 3.0. It will feature background notifications via Apple’s push services (which I further suspect will take between 2 and 3 months to work properly). It will feature some sort of tool for better applications management, maybe folders, as the current springboard is inelegant and cannot handle large numbers of applications. It will include copy & paste, if only to shut up the online crowds, but also because it’s necessary for a true smartphone-type device.
I think the biggest changes will be at enterprise level. The fact is, the iPhone is getting a lot of play in executive settings, and I think better management tools and business integration is a mound of cash waiting for Apple. They’ve conquered the home market, everyone I know has a damned 3G now. The business world is ripe for the taking, as Blackberries are so far behind the iPhone in features and style it’s not even funny.
What won’t be a 3.0 iPhone OS? Wi-fi and bluetooth syncing, unfortunately. There will be no voice dialing, no MMS, no Flash, no video recording.
Why? Wi-fi and Bluetooth sync seems unlikely to me. Apple did not want to allow Time Machine over Airport for some time either, possibly because of data corruption. I think the holdup here is that the SQLite databases on the phone may not be atomically updated, and therefore, an interruption in signal availability could damage the phone. Of course, this could happen with the cable too, but I think the fact that the battery would be in use may also be of concern. This is, of course, pure speculation.
Voice dial and MMS seem unlikely, because if Apple wanted to ever include these standard phone features, it seems they would have done so by now.
Flash is a third party app. It won’t be in the OS. If Apple wants to bless it, they can and would do so for 2.x.
Video recording would be unlikely largely because the camera on the iPhone sucks. So why bother, if every iPhone filmed video would be poor quality, 100% of the time? Perhaps if new hardware came out that wasn’t camera-shorted, it would be more likely, but current models, with the terrible 2mpx camera, will not produce video worth watching.
This is entirely assumption, I have no inside information. However, I think the major gap in time is suggestive of big things to come.
Stop Dicking Around
Nov 11th
Apple needs to stop dicking around with these updates. Stop adding in things that are completely superfluous, and focus on the core functions: phone, SMS, email. Give us individual SMS timestamps and deleting, a unified email inbox, lock screen email notifications, more reliable email fetch, user profiles (for sounds and network settings), etc.
CrzyCanuck72, on forums.macrumors.com, discussing iPhone firmware version 2.2
iPhone 2.2: More Stuff We Don’t Need
Nov 10th
I posted an article recently called “Apple’s Jobs Gives iPhone Customers What They Don’t Want” that discussed the upcoming 2.2 firmware and its new features. iPhone firmware appears to give us Google Maps’ “Street view” and several other “features.” It does not, however, make available any of the most requested features: MMS, copy & paste, Flash, voice dialing, bluetooth/wifi syncing, A2DP (stero bluetooth), landscape Mail view, video recording, text-message forwarding, or any of the over 1800 issues listed over at pleasefixtheiphone.com. So what gives? Why is Apple not giving us these things?
I should start by saying that MMS, or lack thereof, is the one things that bugs the crap out of me on the iPhone. I’ve detailed before how useless and silly viewmymessage.com is. I can’t believe it’s not even something that can be accessed via a clicked URL. But I don’t think the iPhone will ever have true MMS. If Steve Jobs wanted MMS on the iPhone, it would be here by now. No, they are phasing it out, which is arguably good in the long run, but at the expense of its usefulness today. I don’t mind paying the extra few pennies each month for MMS. Even just to receive the messages, but not send them. But stop making the decision for me.
I hate to say that the iPhone, a device that literally converted me from a mobile phone carrier to a smart phone carrier, as someone who sold more of these puppies in the last year than most Apple employees, is doing more to turn me off to Apple than anything else. The iPhone and AppleTV both have let me down. A lot. So much so that even though I recently bought a new iMac (the 24″), I considered a nice new PC at a fraction of the cost, as prep for Windows 7, which looks to be really cool.
Apple’s arrogance and inability to listen to its customers didn’t matter nearly as much when they were a tiny niche company. But they play in the big leagues now, and I suspect that now that they have serious market share in the laptop and education market, they will find a mass defection in a few years as people start to get wise to their control tactics.
I find the new iPhone firmware, even before I get my hands on it, a let down. My iPhone can’t do what phones from 3 years before the iPhone existed does without sweating. If Apple doesn’t start delivering, I suspect that the odds are very high that by the end of 2010 I’ll be carry an Android powered phone.
Facebook for iPhone 2.0
Oct 1st
Yesterday, Facebook released Facebook for iPhone 2.0. I have to say, this is one of the best app updates I can ever recall. I’m incredibly impressed.
First of all, it introduced what appears to be a pretty decent speed boost. Interacting with the app is significantly faster for me on both Wifi and 3G.
Facebook for iPhone 2.0
Secondly, and more importantly, the app is much more robust and complete. Whereas before, the Facebook experience was very limited, the new app is almost a wholesale replacement while on your iPhone. The old version was so limited that you’d have to go to the browser for most operations such as adding a friend, viewing a photo tag, viewing requests, etc. And going to the browser directed you to m.facebook.com, which meant you had to login and go to the full site – a multi-step process to be sure. Also, the iPhone optimized Facebook site, iphone.facebook.com, was woefully underpowered. Both served as great platforms for basic browsing, but severely handicapped when it came to truly using the site.
So it’s that much more of a welcome treat that the new app is a full on competitor. As Apple continues to let me down, Facebook continues to do right by me.
Overdue Thoughts on Apple
Sep 30th
It’s been a long time comin’. Apple has engaged in plenty of really lame behaviors lately, and it’s time I sound off on them. Let’s take it section by section, shall we?
I’ll break this down into the following parts: OS X, iPhone, App Store.
OS X
Apple’s operating system, OS X, is still the best OS on the market today. I’ve heard several claims that Apple is proprietary and closed and doesn’t contribute to the open source ecosystem, but here is OS X. It’s built on an open source core, which is good, if nothing else, for auditing code flaws.
OS X is still the most beautiful experience out there, and still gets in my way the least when I’m trying to do work. Webkit still sits as the default browser in the form of step-brother Safari, and Webkit is not only open source, it’s also the available on Windows, super compliant, super fast, and it’s the core of Google’s Chrome browser.
OS X also uses open formats for mail storage, standard XML for most configuration files (yes, some plists are not plain text, but they are trivial to open as well), their backup software produces a browsable volume. Their native office suite produces clean XML file formats. The server system uses Open Directory, RSS, Apache, Ruby on Rails, iCal, WebDAV, Wiki software, Tomcat, L2TP/IPSec, PPTP, and more. SnowLeopard will implement CardDAV and ZFS. In fact, Apple has been pretty decent about using open source technologies. While they haven’t always given back in this form, certainly basing your apps and system around open formats is better than basing it on closed, proprietary systems, no?
I always say: “If you don’t want your open source work used in commercial derivatives, then don’t use a permissive license.” There’s no clause that says you have to give back when using the BSD license.
I Entrust My Data to… Microsoft?
Sep 24th
I used to love my iPhone, because it kept me all up-to-date and synced. See – on my mac, Address Book and iCal were fully matched up to my calendar. But then I realized that I really don’t need to sync very often, at first because syncing pre-version 2.1 was painful, but later because it’s just not needed. MobileMe syncs over the air, but I’m not paying $99/yr for that service, especially not after the well covered problems with it, and the fact that I don’t see myself migrating from Gmail anytime soon. IMAP, however, was handling my work mail. When iPhone firmware 2.1 came out, I began immediately using ActiveSync, which easily crawls through port 443 (or 80, I think, if you have no cert) on the firewall. I set it up to handle my email and calendar. Then I realized, now that my calendar was handled by ActiveSync and Exchange, iTunes wasn’t syncing it anymore. And by the way, it was seconds behind live data. And I had to sync my phone even less.
Fast forward a few weeks and I finally decided to sync my contacts. I backed up, then wiped my phone contacts and synced them with Exchange. My contacts all arrived in good shape with their pictures. But now iTunes doesn’t sync Contacts with my iPhone. So the backend is now complex, but only on the Apple side.
On the phone, email, contacts, and calendar are pushed to the phone, often times before they even show up in Outlook itself. I sync my calendar from Outlook to Google and I pull my Google calendar down to iCal, only when I open iCal, since I’m subscribed via an ical file on Google’s servers. I set up Address Book to sync with my Exchange server via the OWA interface that Address Book supports by default, but it only syncs every hour, and only when the Mac is running. So it seemlessly syncs with Windows/Exchange, for free. But it takes several programs to get to the Mac, and then, only once an hour.
I sync less and less these days, but if the iPhone included the ability to sync via Bluetooth or wifi – both of which should be fairly trivial to implement – I’d sync much more regularly and trust my Mac to be the master copy. Instead, due to Apple itself, I rely on Exchange.
All of this makes me wonder if one day in the not too distant future, I’ll be using a phone running Android. After all, if all of my core data is synced elsewhere anyway, why would I want a phone that has no voice dial, can’t do picture messaging, can’t view flash, can’t do copy and paste, doesn’t allow for any wifi syncing, permits apps seemingly at will with no guidelines, gets more closed every month, has shitty battery life, and drops calls randomly? Just because it has a pretty apple on it?
iPipes
Sep 19th
iPipes on the iPhone
Long before the SDK, long before jailbreaking your phone became a one click process, backwhen a jailbreak was a 45 step, multi-hour committment, there were “web apps,” iPipes has been my favorite “web app” for the iPhone since then. There are many apps out there, but – put simply – web apps just don’t compare to native speed, especially on a 1st gen iPhone’s EDGE connection. iPipes, like the other software made by “themacbox,” is top notch, works very well, and is still a challenge long after games like Dominos and Rock, Paper, Scissors have lost their mojo.
iPipes is based on a very simple concept: given a time limit, contruct as long a pipe as possible using the given pieces to contain a crawling green “snake.”It’s easy to string together the first dozen or two pipes, but eventually you may find yourself backed into a corner or wrapped around with no way out. Passing several levels is easy and you will likely do so in the first try. But stringing together 100 pipes is a challenge, even on the early levels.
Although I’ve never really spent too much time obsessing over high scores (I usually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-85 per level), I once got 99 and then the counter stopped counting, the green stopped crawling, and it just… stopped. So I sat down determined to finally break 100 and see if the game would crash again. It didn’t. I got a 107 — which could probably be easily beaten by someone with more than 6 minutes to spare — but is still my high score. If you have an iPhone, I encourage you to check out iPipes – it’s free and available online.
You Cannot Resist The iPhone
Aug 18th
I have so many gripes about my iPhone 3G that I could write a decent sized essay, and yet, it’s still the greatest phone ever invented, and by a very comfortable long shot. Poor Nate and Jensey caught a glimpse of mine yesterday, and suddenly their plan to “get iPhones this Christmas” was rapidly directed to the rubbish bin as Nate informed me about an hour ago that they were headed to the AT&T store. How many people have purchased the iPhone after inspecting mine? Enough that Apple ought to be giving me some kickbacks.
But alas, I kid, because, honestly, the thing sells itself. One glance at the silky smooth native apps, Google Maps, MobileMail.app, MobileSafari, multi-touch, the App Store… it’s hard to resist.
iPhone 3G
This device is magical, and once you have one, it’s hard to deny that no phone has ever been as slick, as useful, as integrated, and as beautiful.
I had some issues with battery life with my 3G where it would only last about 8 hours, talk or not, with the 3G enabled. I did a reset and restore on it last week and since then, I’ve had fantastic battery life even with 3G on. And you know what, the 3G is faster than before. I love this thing. I feel so damned connected.