April 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from datapoohbah.com written in the month of April 2008.
Just in time for iPhone Development…
I received an email this evening informing me that my XML Data Feed account was now subject to new terms of service. In order to continue using it, I needed to log in and agree.
The big part that stands out for me is this:
“YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE TO CREATE WEATHER AND WEATHER-RELATED PRODUCTS TO BE DISPLAYED ON HANDHELD OR OTHER WIRELESS DEVICES”
Highlighted below for clarity… Nice…
So, I suppose I could still use this for weather display on my site, but who the hell wants that? Do you really care what the weather conditions are, on or around what ever web site your visiting?
If when I need weather data I know where to go look, weather.com being one of them.
Clearly they don’t want additional traffic that they can’t get revenue from?
That’s OK, I’d rather not publish or link to data that is usually wrong more than it’s right.
Written by datapoohbah on April 30th, 2008 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Commentary.
Yeah, we all need one of these French Fry Holders:
I’m told if you fold it properly you can keep your waffles in it too. Honestly if it was shaped to hold a Chipotle Burrito, I’d just have to get one.
This is why I love analysts. They state the obvious and people care…
According to Citi analysts the 3G iPhone will be announced on June 9th during Steve Job’s keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The conference is scheduled for June 9-13 in San Francisco.
That’s going out on a limb if you ask me. For what it’s worth, I predict the sun will rise in the east and set in the west on June 9th. (WTF).
Wordpress 2.5.1 is out… Fixes a bunch of stuff. It installed here without a hitch.
It was a slow weekend, what can I say?
Written by datapoohbah on April 28th, 2008 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Daily-Weekly Finds.
Most of the news that Apple is making the iPhone Enterprise ‘ready’ isn’t new. It’s been well documented. So I’ve spent the last two beta’s trying to use an iPhone as a BlackBerry replacement.
Granted the software is still beta, and I’ll try not to beat it up based upon that, but I will expose some of the issues that may or may not be a problem for switching from a CrackBerry to iPhone.
First some clear facts:
- Edge simply blows. It’s too slow for this. Things are good when on Wifi, but edge… Not good. (3G should fix this right?)
- The Microsoft Active Sync stuff leaves a little to be desired. If your organization really leverages the security and lock down aspects of Black Berry Enterprise server you may have a hard time convincing them to let you do this. (I’ve played with ActiveSync in the past with WinMobile phones and it’s been better than it currently is on the iPhone. Again, it’s still Beta so we’ll see).
- I have not tried to nuke the phone remotely from the Exchange console. I will try that later this week.
First things first, it works, or will work at some level. If you’ve totally been brainwashed into the BlackBerry messaging management then you probably aren’t going to like the way Apple, the iPhone, and ActiveSync work. Simply provide your account details, and viola, your contacts, cal and mail are synchronized as it should be.
Email:
Blackberry sort of consolidates all your inbox messages if you so choose (and I do). Meaning messages that are filtered and put into other folders by default are still in my messages application on the BlackBerry if I choose to sync those underlying folders. With ActiveSync you only get notified of new items in the inbox. This could be bad if you organize your inbox as I do.
If I wanted to know about new MGMT_Meeting emails which are filtered into that folder, I won’t know unless I look there. That folder isn’t initially sync’d until you open it.
Mail works and is beautifully rendered as you’d expect.
It doesn’t appear to support landscape mode which kind of sucks for some emails.
Beta Warning: So far email notification has been spotty at best. There are times I’ll open mail and the last updated time will be hours behind the actual time. The mail app hangs a lot. Generally 2-5x a day I’ll need to hard boot the phone. It handles some attachments well; Excel, Word, even Cisco Voice mail messages are playable, others, not so much. I have a couple attachments that will hang the phone in a really bad way, one is a pretty simple PDF.
Contacts:
Contacts work just as you’d expect them too. Create contacts in Outlook and they magically appear on the iPhone with full details including the photo.
This is the most stable part of all of it at this time. I have no complaints or issues to point out here.
Calendar:
This is where things get quite fugly. First, you end up with a second Calendar. One which can still by synchronized with iCal, and another that goes with ActiveSync. While you can turn off the iCal synchronization within iTunes I haven’t found a way to delete it from the phone. As a result you end up with two calendars without visual clue as to which one is which. You can pick which one is the default, but again, it’s not immediately clear which one is which.
- There is no week view.
- Meeting invites work provided you’re the one invited. Standard Exchange/Outlook responses are: Accept, Decline, Tentative. Apple however chose; Accept, Decline, Maybe…
- There’s no facility to invite someone when creating a meeting or scheduled item (I hope this gets fixed).
Last but not least is the keyboard. Nope, it’s not tactile, no you really can’t two-thumb type worth a damn (at least I can’t yet) and the predictive text will bite you when you least expect it but it’s pretty good otherwise. I suspect that a good portion of Blackberry users primarily ‘read’ and don’t respond to anything in detail. If you’re that type you will be just fine. It takes some getting used too and touch is a big thing. It took me quite a while to adjust to the Blackberry’s lack of touch screen when coming from a Palm even though it had a keyboard, I still used the touch screen a lot. After using the iPhone I again found myself wanting to touch the icons on the Blackberry. If there is an adaptation of Graffiti for the iPhone that would rock as well.
So all in all this looks very promising. The data speed has to improve, reliability has to improve. The email management will force me into a different email organization paradigm but I could probably work that out. It is a straight forward shift from the Blackberry to iPhone? No. But I think this will make a lot of people happy in the long run. As of now the Beta stuff is getting better, Beta 3 was more like Alpha 1 to me. It was completely unusable. Beta 4 is much better but still not usable enough. I still have to carry the Blackberry.
More later as things progress.
Written by datapoohbah on April 28th, 2008 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Commentary and The Truth Hurts.
Oh my, if this is the best designers can come up with, we’re all screwed.
Frickin pants with built in keyboard/mouse. Remember, someone spent money making this. (yanko design)
Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 is released into the wild.
new iPhone beta (5A258f) bricked my iPhone. I is not happy at the moment.
- Well that was a Pain the a$$, the direct update from the previous beta 3 fails miserably. iTunes would see it and offer to restore it to 1.1.4, that also failed after about 10 minutes. After finally reinstalling the previous beta, that worked. But then the phone wouldn’t activate (unsupported OS, please update). So we start over. That didn’t appear to go well again, as it would get to one state in the Organize and say ‘waiting for phone’, only the last time a second instance of a phone appeared in the organize. So I told that one to update as well while the other instance was ‘waiting’. We’re back, but that process sucked completely.
I’m allowing iTunes to restore it (data) I hope that doesn’t jack it up. The new OS contains two new apps/buttons. iTunes and App store 
Written by datapoohbah on April 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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I have no idea but I promise you it was chock full of good stuff.
LiveWritter seems to be doing something bad with my drafts…
Written by datapoohbah on April 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Daily-Weekly Finds.
Customize your Outlook Today Page with cut and paste html…
While there is no written rule, it’s generally accepted that you don’t release software on April Fools day.:
I would think a ’security’ company such as SonicWall would be sensitive to that.
OS X on a UMPC
Windows XP SP3 is released to manufacturing to be released on the 29th. So what exactly is there to manufacture?
Nice… Cracked LCD Wallpaper (via one mans blog)
(What can I say, it’s been a slow couple of days)
Written by datapoohbah on April 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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