jerakeen.org

I should write up ‘things learned from taking only an iPhone to the middle of nowhere where there’s no internet access‘. One of those things was, I really want a ‘that worked’ for updating my twitter status using Twitterrific. And anything else that does a write over the network.

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Avoid notifying users of success.

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If a read operation fails, meh. But if I just wrote a twitter update, and it doesn’t go through, I want to know. Twitter might fail, the app might fail, the connection might fail. I want success notification, rather than 1 minute of waiting for a failure message that might not arrive. THIS IS NOT A NORMAL SITUATION. But nevertheless. Maybe the rule should be ‘avoid notifying users of success where success is expected‘.

Another useful app - Byline is great when there’s wobbly bandwidth - usable even when the only connection is a spotty non-edge GSM link. Admittedly, you have to just put the phone down somewhere with a connection for 10 minutes while it slurps. But things stay slurped. It’ll pull the associated images of RSS items too, so I can look at my Flickr feeds easily.

It’s got disadvantages - you have to switch to Google Reader to read your feeds for a start. In the absence of a local Mac GUI client to rival NetNewsWire, this is painful (Fluid helps). And Byline doesn’t do ‘folders’ (tags? what does google reader call them? I’m new to this), so you just get a big flat list of unread items, which could be annoying if you subscribe to lots of feeds. I’ve recently gone through a grand purge of all my feeds and mailing lists, so my traffic levels are pretty controllable.

Except that my Economist subscription feeds did their weekly ‘the magazine shipped’ thing, and dumped 90 unread items in the list. And these are unread items that are interesting and might need reading. Unlike with the iPhone NNW client, I can’t selectively drop subscriptions from being visible on the phone - it’s all or nothing here, and Byline loads only 25 (I think) entries at a time for off-line reading. The Economist provides only a partial feed, so I had to sit where there was bandwidth and go through them in batches, ‘starring’ the ones that looked interesting then hitting ‘fetch more’ and waiting. Once I’d done this, and it didn’t take too long, the experience was great - I had the full content of the Economist articles synched locally for convenient reading (and the Economist has a nice one-narrow-column layout that lends itself well to iPhone reading).

Simple (ish) guide to distributing ad-hoc iPhone applications.

http://furbo.org/2008/08/06/beta-testing-on-iphone-20/

A curiosity of the notes application - it’s got a really ugly font. But it can be forced into a less ugly one on a per-note basis using an international keyboard. I assume the Market Felt font isn’t Unicode-complete, because if you insert a single (for example) Korean character into the note it’ll change its font to something more sensible that includes that glyph. And it won’t change it back if you remove the character.

This isn’t exactly convenient, and isn’t a system-wide setting. But I only have one or two notes on the phone, and I’m not willing to jailbreak it just to change the font. So I like my workaround.

On the iPhone home screen:

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There’s a trick to replacing the 4 persistent apps in the Dock at the bottom: you cannot drag into the Dock to bump them out of the way; instead you must drag something out of the Dock to make room first, and then you can drag an app into the free space

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..in comparison to the black ‘tab bar’ navigation widgets with the ‘edit’ mode buttons, which you can’t drag icons out of, but dropping new icons on overwrites whatever you dropped them on. Yay consistency.

http://www.extrapepperoni.com/2008/07/11/iphone-apps-firs...

Interesting reading. Also includes the best explanation I’ve heard as to why the iPod touch isn’t recognised as a subscription, and thus why the upgrades cost money.

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Apple probably treats the iPod Touch differently because to treat it as a subscription product, the company might have to separate and announce iPod Touch unit sales numbers, and it does not want to provide that kind of information to its competitors

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http://macjournals.com/news/iPhonerevenues.html

A herejustnow iPhone app. I’m having to learn Objective-C to do this, which I can just about put up with. CoreLocation turns out to be quite easy to use, too. Now all I need is the ability to install the thing on a Real iPhone.

I guess I may as well write down my few thoughts on this iPhone thing.

On O2’s offer to existing customers

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To thank you for being an iPhone fan, we’re offering you an early upgrade to the brand new version when it launches on 11th July 2008. You won’t have to wait until the end of your existing contract, all you’ll need to do is agree to a new 18-month minimum term contract

”

Is that an additional 18 months on top of my contract now, or merely a reset of the run to 18 months from now? Because if it’s the latter, I want mine now.

An aside. When trying to tell O2 where I live, I get the exciting error [House Number must be numeric]. Um. No. Because mine isn’t. Idiots.

Interestingly, the page about the iPhone upgrade makes mention of O2’s «new iPhone Pay & Go SIM cards». Hmmm, interesting. Though if I can get me an iPhone 3G cheaply I’ll probably end up just jailbreaking it instead. Or if the iPhone 3G isn’t jailbreakable, and you can’t buy old ones any more, I wonder if it’ll have disgusting amounts of resale value…

On 3G

Let’s (almost) gloss over the actual ‘3G’ feature here. The standard Steve approach was used - ‘3G simply isn’t necessary, EDGE is fine!’. Until the iPhone has 3G, at which point it’s ‘Look how much better 3G is!’. I have the iPhone 1, and I find EDGE just fine. My total web page download time is already faster than it was on the 3G phone I used to have, because my web browser doesn’t take 20 seconds to load. 3G will be nice. But meh.

On Pricing

Gruber has a bit on the new pricing structure, and this is the interesting bit for me. What I read here is that ‘subverting the old phone industry business model’ didn’t work. So they’ll do the same thing everyone else does instead and just sell subsidised phones through carriers. So much for changing the world. But this implies that they’ll do the other thing everyone else does, and sell unlocked versions of their phones for more money. If they’re no longer getting a cut of the carrier revenues, why would they care any more?

Oh, and Gizmodo relays the interesting point that, sans monthy revenue to book against the iPhone, Apple may start charging for feature upgrades on SOX grounds. Except that the Apple TV gets free upgrades. The ongoing revenue thing is just an accounting ‘profit from this thing is amortized over 18 months’ device, no?

The ‘state of the art’ for iPhone apps is a single URL, serving a static page with lots of JavaScript and Ajax. Clicking (touching, whatever) things loads in fragments and changes the page. IUI works like this, Hahlo works like this, the Facebook app works like this (hence IUI‘s behaviour).

To preserve state, normal usage is to use the URL fragment to add bookmarkability and history. And sometimes, this actually works. But given that the point is to pretend to be a native iPhone application, it’s wrong. You should be storing state in cookies.

Justification: Native iPhone apps act like you never quit them. Even if they get closed by the system at some point, they’ll come back to the state you left them in. Bookmarking a rich web application should act the same - I want to bookmark the application, and have it open in the state that I left it, not the state that I bookmarked it in. So you should update the ‘current state’ in a local cookie every time to navigate somewhere, and respect that state when you next visit the application. Combine this with the 1.1.3 firmware’s webclips thing and you can almost pretend to be native.

Which is why I expect the much-anticipated iPhone SDK to be nothing more than ‘local web applications’. Give developers a little bit of local storage (you know, like webkit just got), a way of promoting a bookmark to the home screen (we have that one now) and a way of storing some HTML and JS on the phone, and Jobs can claim he’s given us an SDK. And he’ll be right.

Me? I’d be happy with that. It solves all the sandboxing, security, ‘bring down the network’, etc problems. And it will keep people from jailbreaking the phone trivially. The only alternative I can see is installation of signed apps only, with the iTunes Media Store as the single point of installation. Which would suck more. But there will be howls of outrage.

here we go again.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49293967,00.htm

Just got a Macbook Pro. Didn’t come with iLife ‘08, but because it’s recent, I get a cheap upgrade. Bookmarking for reference - not sure if I’ll go for it.

http://www.apple.com/uk/ilife/uptodate/

very important thing to do when you can’t work out why pausing the DVD player starts music playing on the other side of the room.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302545

via blech, thanks. Ever since I got the Dell, I’ve been fighting the guilt of leaving the Apple fold. It’s nice to know someone else has done so too.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/30/bye-apple

A scary comparison chart of all the models of MacBooks and MacBookPros. Not that I want one. First-gen apple hardware scares me.

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/comparison_chart...

For personal reference, this site tracks when apple hardware was last updated and gives buying advice based on likely update times.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/