jerakeen.org

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

Suddenly, the iTunes Application store is awash with updates for all my apps. The App Store application on the phone is also reporting updates. For different apps. The App Store application on the phone shows me release notes. The iTunes version doesn’t seem to have any way of seeing release notes. The iTunes version keeps complaining that I’ve bought this app already when downloading updates. And the interface keeps displaying messages about ‘purchasing..’ which makes me worry that I’m spending money. And the screen shot above isn’t exactly reassuring.

And now I’ve downloaded all these ‘updates’, I still have the same version numbers of everything on the phone. All the app bundles are the same size. I’ve downloaded the exact same apps again, except that now iTunes isn’t prompting me to download updates any more.

Using the iPhone-based app store actually updates the app. Except that far fewer apps are listed in the iPhone app store than are listed in iTunes.

So, yes. Feels slightly rushed, this.

I tried Twittervision on the iPhone. And it’s quite pretty, in a hypnotic way. So I gave it my twitter username/password, to try it as a twittering interface. And it’s lousy. But ok, I have a twittering interface. I delete the app.

Today, I see a tweet from @davetroy. Who? I don’t know him. Turns out that he wrote Twittervision. And now I’m following him. Which means that (a) his app must have followed him on my behalf, because I didn’t do it, and (b) he can now see all my private tweets (because my twitterstream isn’t public).

Well, fuck you, Mr Dave Troy.

Recently, thanks to the useful Matt Patterson (Matt, have I paid you yet?) I acquired an Apple Wireless Keyboard.

We’d just moved to a new office, thus a new desk, and for the first time in ages I found myself uncomfortable when typing. For years now I’ve worked directly on the laptop screen and keyboard, resisting the urge to hang external keyboards and screens off it. It’s a laptop, it moves around, and I’ve always preferred to have the same environment everywhere, rather than having one screen/keyboard at work, and something different at home.

Also, I’ve always hated external keyboards. After typing on nothing but laptops for five years, I’ve become used to tiny amounts of key travel and no clickiness. I’ve lost the ability to press a real keyboard key all the way down, so my typing goes completely broken as soon as I try one.

The back pain dictated a change in this policy. So now the laptop sits on a pile of books, to elevate it to a sensible height, and the keyboard sits under it. Getting the Apple keyboard solved both my problems. It’s a disconnected Macbook keyboard - exactly the same layout as my real keyboard, so I don’t get upsetting layout changes, and the keys are laptop keys, so are easy to push and don’t travel very far. It’s the same width as my normal keyboard. Also, no wires. This is great in the same way that a wireless mouse is great.

The biggest surprise has been the new F-key positions. The volume controls have moved from F3/4/5 to F10/11/12, leaving space for Exposé keys, and naturally the backlight keys are missing. I thought this would annoy me, but actually the volume keys are now in much better places, and I get annoyed at the real laptop keyboard. I can find the volume keys without looking down now, by moving to the top-right of the keyboard, in the same way that I’ve always been able to get at the screen brightness keys by moving to the top-left. I don’t use the media control keys, though. I have Synergy for that.

Recently it’s going a little soggy, and I suspect battery failure. And the ‘down’ key needs pressing straight down to work, whereas I turn out to have been pressing the bottom edge of the key on the Macbook Pro. But these are trivial. I like it.

This morning I had to page back twice on twitter.com to read all the tweets that had come in overnight. I don’t normally do this, normally I just read whatever twiteriffic gives me, and ignore everything else, but I was looking for a specific one. But am I expected to have read them? Are people going to assume that I’ve seen everything they’ve twitered? I do enough catching up in the mornings already without having to remember what the most recent twitter I’ve seen was and paging back till I see it.

The new iPhone firmware geolocates all the photos you take. It asks your permission first, but not in a very good way - it’ll say something like ‘This app would like access to your location’. Say yes, and you’re putting your exact position into every photo you take. Put an incidental photo on flickr and everyone knows where you were and when (because there’s a timestamp in the upload as well). Sell something on eBay, using a photo you took in your house, and now everyone knows where you live.

Is this not a little creepy?

(True, Flickr don’t import geotagging information by default. But I can still get the EXIF tags from the original image if you allow me access to that)

Oh, also, an argument from the exact opposite direction. The camera app gives no indication of if it knows where you are, and how close, so if you want a geolocated photo, you never know if you’ve got a fix yet and it’s safe to take one. The camera roll doesn’t indicate which photos are geotagged. You can’t look at a photo on the iPhone (or in iPhoto for that matter) and see where you were when you took it. So to a normal user, the feature is totally unexposed, and to a power user, it’s totally unusable.

This geotagging feature is completely half-arsed.

The iPhone / iPod music player volume widget behaves like this - you have to start your finger drag on the little round nubbin. You then drag it left or right. Dragging your finger up or down off the slider doesn’t adjust the volume, but doesn’t cancel the adjustment either, and I’ve found this to be a nice way of adjusting the volume a tiny amount - dragging diagonally increases the distance that you have to move your finger to effect the same change in volume, so it’s more precise.

If you put your finger anywhere else on the volume widget, nothing happens. If you drag your finger onto the nubbin from somewhere else you don’t start changing the volume.

The video player and YouTube volume widgets work the same way.

The iTunes Remote volume widget works like this - the volume will snap to wherever on the slider you put your finger down. Once you’ve done this, dragging the slider works as in the local music player. It looks identical to the slider in the music player app.

A slider control put into a blank view in Interface Builder works like the remote application - the slider position snaps to where you touch the slider. But it looks different from the volume control slider - the IB slider has a matte, concave look, wheras the volume control has a shiny nubbin.

The ‘Brightness’ control in the settings app is a slider that looks and behaves like the Interface Builder slider.

On the whole, I prefer the behaviour of the remote app, with the snap. And I prefer the appearance of the Brightness slider. But it’s odd that there are already three different slider widgets on the iPhone.

Update a week later: I realised this morning that there's another slider type as well, sort of. The seek bar in the media player also has a shiny nubbin that slides along a groove. It behaves like the first music player volume slider - no jump to tap position, you hasve to grab the nubbin where it is and pull. I assume this is to avoid accidental seeks?

Have you noticed how elegant yet obvious Skitch screenshots have become? For instance. I see them everywhere, and you can always tell it came from Skitch. Used to be that I’d have to open a blank web browser or something to serve as a backdrop for screenshots. Now I just need to make sure my wallpaper is suffficiently classy. Which is fine, I haven’t seen my desktop wallpaper in months, I always have windows open.

Skitch still needs a ‘blur’ tool for anonymizing stuff, though..

I like the improvements made to the 2.0 iPhone calendar app. Mostly that the calendars are now copied across as individual calendars with their own colours. But Shawn Blank says that they come across with the same colours as their desktop counterparts, and I’m not finding that to be the case - all my phone calendars are different colours. It’s really really confusing to have utterly different event colours on the phone.

Which is pathetic. Already, I’m now finding things that are utterly trivial to be annoying. On any other platform, I’d be astonished that the calendar application worked, let alone that it can keep track of 15 different calendars, sync them perfectly in 2 directions, etc (ok, so maybe I use too many linux handhelds). On the iPhone, I get annoyed that things are a different colour.

Update: From playing with over-the-air sync and mobileme, colours seem to be synched properly if you’re using mobileme but not if you’re using iTunes to do the sync. Weird.

Next/previous controls.

Only the web browser has these buttons, not ‘real’ apps. Jumping between form fields is sometimes tricky. I miss them.

A guide to writing iPhone applications in Python. Seems to apply to the jailbreak SDK rather than the real one (though this isn’t very clear) and is undated (I hate it when people don’t put dates on things) so I have no idea if it’s still relevant. But nevertheless.

http://www.saurik.com/id/5

The Golden Ratio. Again, from the iPhone 3G video.

The key feature of “scalability” that most people care about is actually the ability of a system to efficiently convert money to increased capacity

Almost any small web service could have $10,000 thrown at it and get faster. A new server. More memory! A better load balancer. But you won’t see ten times the benefit if you throw $100,000 at it. What would you get? Lots more memory? You’ll just bottleneck somewhere else. Ten more servers? Your database won’t take the increased load. Maybe it’s the salary of another developer. But that won’t get you a x10 speedup either.