I’ve made a few attempts at this before (that have lasted less than a day each!), but for the past week I’ve begun teaching myself Objective-C and working on an App for submission to the App Store.

Objective C isn’t the easiest language to move to, despite what Apple seems to have droves of developers willing to testify – infact, it’s probably the most difficult language to ‘penetrate’ of all the high level languages. That said, the potential benefits and uses of being able to create applications to work on what will likely become one of the most ubiquitous platforms about are enormous.

So, I’ve now gotten to the stage of having a working Application on my iPhone (having payed for the Developer account) with it’s icon etc… It can run a sockets server, and connect to a sockets server. Hurrah.

Over the next 3 weeks (my aim for this app being to a stage where work will be polish and not interesting to write about), I will be posting most days about my progress  and letting you in on how the process of getting an App in to the App Store goes.

Wish me luck!
Chris

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

The problem with this system, is that when you don’t get it right, it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I was stuck for a year with 16GB £400 memory card / phone that I couldn’t use to ever share contact details with anyone else by any means other than email. ‘I’ll just text you their num….’, oh wait… there is absolutely no way to achieve this without a pen and paper. Really!?

The latest – navigating to an event with the location stored in the extensively marked-up ‘Location’ field in the event. There is no way to request that the iPhone show you how to get there from your current position (which it also knows). So.. in order to get to the ‘Location’ of an event, you have to edit the event, copy and paste the location. Close the event. Open Google Maps. Paste the location. Request that it kindly show you how to get there. This seems like a perfect place for another one of those context-driven buttons. ‘Directions to Event from here’. Yay!

Somebody replied to my tweet on this subject by saying ‘Location!=Address’ – and yes, congratulations, semantics have not defeated you on this occasion. I remember however, when I purchased Office 2000 (9 years ago!) and it began to underline text in emails that represent addresses. Moving closer to home, Mail in OS X does this very thing – they have the code!

Apple, I love my iPhone, but just because we have Copy and Paste now (finally) doesn’t mean that I want to start feeling like I’m using a WinMo device; I still want an intuitive experience, an Apple experience.

Can we please have directions to an event location?

Thanks,

Chris

It’s now been a couple of hours and the UK store is still down. I assumed maybe a secret quiet product launch, but the US sight is still up, and they tend to go down / up together for launches.

So.. what’s going on!?

Here’s silently hoping it really is a product launch :D

Most of the bugs listed in my original post are fixed :D.

Also, the folks over at the iPhone Dev Team have released a Jailbreak. This means that we can finally use unofficial tether applications (PDANet being my preferred) on the 3.0 OS.

In order to Jailbreak.. head on over to http://www.quickpwn.com/downloads and download the latest version. If you have an ‘activated’ contract iPhone, do not select ‘Activate’ in quickpwn or it will kill your baseband (you will get no signal).

Hope you guys enjoy as much as I am!

Chris

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes.

iPod: In podcasting, I am incapable of selecting the top item in any ‘listview’. This is rediculous and actually makes it impossible to listen to my most recent podcasts without going through other ones and track skipping. The alphabetically first podcast is inaccessible. Full Stop.

iPod: iPod will often freeze the playing progress bar while listening to music. It can also get stuck on play while not playing when using the controls on the ‘locked’ screen.

Send Contact Details: I’m happy to see the inclusion of sending contact details via MMS and Email. There is no reason that you can’t SMS someone somebody else’s phone number. Default layout being First Name Last Name Phone Number Email (if available). You can then ofcourse delete anything you don’t want, or select which phone number (if there are many) to send.

Safari: Besides the issues listed above under copy and paste, Safari now seems to randomly crash and close relatively often. I’m sure this will be sorted.

Safari: Copy/Paste seems to want to grab ‘elements’ as opposed to

The ‘Network’ pane in Settings takes an ‘age’ to load. Interestingly this is the pane that purportedly includes the tethering settings.

Phone: Phone would often freeze when beginning calls – prompting it to appear that it wasn’t calling, but actually be ringing. It also frequently crashes and closes when going to the ‘recent’ tab of the application.

Spotlight: Very excited about this one. I’m not sure that the UI is final; I for one would certainly like it to change. It’s a little sluggish getting accross to it, but I’m sure that’s for the reason above. It doesn’t index / search SMS. No SMS. Why no SMS? That would be one of my key items that I’d like to search! Hopefully they’ll add that!

Voice Notes: This is one of the slowest, and most horrid to use applications ever. Pressing the record button has quite a pause before it records, it doesn’t fit the iPhone UI at all… the meter looks stupid. It’s just really bad. The syncing is very good though! :)

Okay.. and just completed my downgrade to 2.2.1. It works and is easy; I’ll post a guide for that too!

Chris

Note – this also works for the current iOS 5 beta if you need or else you can use the activation trick here to upgrade to the iOS 5 beta without a development account.

After installing the iPhone 3.0 Beta you’ll find that you’re unable to sync your iPhone without having your iPhone’s UDID listed on an Apple Developer Connection account. The only problem is, if your UDID wasn’t previously listed, there’s no obvious way to find it with the 3.0 Beta software installed on your iPhone.

On OS X you can use XCODE’s iPhone browser window to get the UDID. On Window’s it almost as easy:

Windows XP: Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Apple Computer\Lockdown

Windows Vista: Browse to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\roaming\Apple Computer\Lockdown

The file found in that folder is entitled with your UDID. Enjoy 3.0 :D

Chris

Update: This can be found on OS X in the following directory: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups

Change the http:// at the beginning to https:// and the pages will load and provided you have an Apple Developer Membership you can d/l the SDK / Beta :)

so…. https://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Chris

update: this is now going a little slowly too!

update: ‘humbertog’ just posted on Twitter: “By installing iPhone 3.0 beta on your Test Devices, these devices are permanently “locked” into testing mode and cannot be restored!”

Does anyone know if this is true?!

Okay, so the Windows 7 Beta is out and it’s good. Great in fact! So I figured that I would migrate all of my systems to use Windows 7; and document the process while I’m at it!

So in the next couple days I’ll be publishing a quick guide and outlining my thoughts on installing Windows 7 on:

- Macbook Air – 32 bit build through BootCamp.

- Desktop – 64 bit build on a system designed as a Media PC

- Workstation – 64 bit build on a top end workstation machine. :)

All systems are up and running in good order, but occasionally the process wasn’t obvious.

Stay tuned….

Chris

Okay, this is a bit ‘niche’-ey. I have a US Macbook air with UK Keyboard layout and have spent a few months passively looking for the ‘hash’ key, whilst sort of admitting to myself that I’d probably bought a £1200 machine with no DVD drive, no changeable battery and NO HASH KEY.

But.. about that one, I was wrong… There is a hash key!

Anyone with a US Macbook Air on UK Layout : Ctrl-Alt-3

Finally!

Chris