I am going to try getting my hands on the full IPSW and try to upgrade that way.

Will keep you updated…

I just downloaded the beta of Messages for Mac (you can download it here) and I highly recommend that you do too! It’s now my go-to chat App with the added extra of being able to iMessage and Facetime those of your friends sensible enough to have an iPhone / iPad / iPod!

It’s the first decent-looking chat App for mac; I’ve been looking for an Adium replacement for a while and so-far-so-good.

Now… looking forward to playing with the rest of the iOS features brought across in the Mountain Lion beta!

Apps which have been pulled can be downloaded by going to your purchased history and finding the app in question – you can even go in to view the description and screen shots which is an interesting insight to how Apple keep the App listings. You can also share the app but attempting to access it from anywhere other than the Purchased screen will result in a cannot connect to app store.

Note: the iCarCheck app was deleted from one account and remade on another for legal reasons. Both are now available.

Only the new iCarCheck is available in the store:

Past (pulled) version appears in the ‘Purchased’ list:

We can view the description:

Installing….

Installed!!

Shared….

Fortunately… still not available through the standard path!

So – there you have it, get any old pulled Apps that you’d like quickly as they are going to HAVE to fix this!

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

Here is the first.

So you copied keynote then?

Congrats.

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

So, while it’s not a new major version, do you think that there is any chance they may finally fix that buggy, slow mis-fit of a UI with something that may accidentally follow one Aero UI guideline?

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

In order to install iTunes and the iPhone on x64 Windows 7 you need merely get source the Apple Mobile Device Center files from a Vista x64 install, copy them over and then run a registry script (i.e. the install that fails).

Head over here for the full guide; the files are now available in a rar file in one of the comments so just scroll down and save yourself an x64 Vista install.

That’s now all applications / hardware working fully on Windows 7 6801. Hang on for a production-system review soon!

Chris