Rubénerd!

Upon reading a few positive reviews, I decided to try the new AirMe iPhone application yesterday. I've been having lots of fun with it! AirMe is a free (cool!) iPhone and iPod Touch application that lets you upload screenshots and photos you've either taken with the built in camera or already have on your device to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket.

One really useful feature it has include being able to scale images down before transmitting which would be really useful if you're on a crappy 2G phone network or slow WiFi connection. You can also set it to only transfer images if you're on WiFi.

The buttons along the bottom of the screen could use some labels in my opinion to make them easier to figure out for first time users, but aside from that I think it's a fantastic application. And it's free!

In this post are the two shots I've uploaded directly to my Flickr account from my iPhone as of yesterday. The first that you can see above is a horribly out of focus shot of a pretty cup of coffee from the Boatdeck Cafe where I was sitting at the time. The second below is a screenshot of the iTunes application downloading an episode of Cranky Geeks which appears to be taking a while!

My computer could tell I was half asleep this afternoon and needed an energy boost, so upon plugging in my iPhone it presented me with the above error message. Yikes! Fortunately all I had to do was unplug it and plug it back in again and it worked fine, as if it knew I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Reminds me of this scary message I got back in April last year for my 5G iPod.

It's amazing how a well structured and sufficiently evil looking error message with a scary red exclamation mark stop sign icon can make your heart skip a beat, or perhaps that's just me. There's a joke in there about dating, hearts skipping beats and computer error messages in there somewhere, but it's just not coming to me.

Want to go on a date with me? What do you mean "access denied"? Bummer ^_^.

Just updated my iPhone to 2.2.1, even though I'm not Bill Kurtis. Can't say I can see any difference given I never sent any phone emails, but if it's free... ^_^

My iPhone with the original screen cover and my Palm Centro phone next to my original iPods.

I love my 16GiB iPhone 3G. it's the single greatest gadget I've ever used. I know as a supporter of free and open source software and open standards I'm not really supposed to like it, but it's just gorgeous and a real pleasure to use. The entire experience is fantastic.

This patent Apple has been rewarded scares me though. We need competition to keep Apple on their toes, and this will only hamper such efforts by scaring away potential competitors. I guess that's the whole point though right?

Before I was an iPhone guy I was a Palm guy; aside from Apple I think Palm have been the only folks who could design a usable mobile phone interface. I still have a Palm Centro I carry around with me too to put my Australian SIM card in when I'm in Singapore, or vica versa. I can't help but think Palm's design of a touch screen device with icons representing different applications taking up the whole home screen was done before Apple for some reason... say a decade before Apple?

I'm not Bill Kurtis.

The Optus iPhone advertisement page

It seems I've been doing a lot of these real world experience type of posts over the last few days. Eventually I'll have a positive one to report on!

Given I'm going to Singapore on Friday, I've been going through a check list of things to do. One of these things was to find out whether my iPhone was locked to Optus (my mobile phone company) and if so whether or not it was possible to unlock it before I left so I could swapin my SingTel SIM card when I get there.

The first thing I did was venture to an Optus store this morning and ask the above questions while I was in the city. I was told Optus does lock its handsets (crap) but fortunately because I'm on a post-paid plan it's free to unlock for the first six months. When I asked them to it for me though, the assistant hurried away and came back with a scrap of paper and a phone number. For some reason though they couldn't do it for me at the shop, I had to call this number and have it arranged. I was going to ask why they couldn't just do it at the shop, but I remembered the golden rule with dealing with phone companies: common sense isn't allowed to enter into your reasoning!

So this afternoon I got back home, sat down and called the number she had labelled as "Post Paid Customer support". I was presented not with a simple "Dial 1 for us to pretend to give a crap, Dial 2 for lip service" menu system or even a human being, but rather one of these new voice recognition systems. This is called "Progress"

Optus	Please say in a few words what you're calling about.
Me	Unlocking a handset
Optus	You're enquiring about a PIN Number. Is this correct?
Me	No
Optus	Please say in a few words what you're calling about.
Me	Unlocking a mobile phone
Optus	You're enquiring about a PIN Number. Is this correct?
Me	No
Optus	[Lip service ... condescending instructions on how to talk]
Me	Cancel cancel cancel grilled cheese sandwich
Optus	Are you calling about a mobile, landline or internet service?
Me	MOBILE!
Optus	You are calling about a mobile, is that correct?
Me	Yes, that is what I said!
Optus	Are you an existing customer or a new customer?
Me	EXISTING! If I were a new customer, you would have lost my business already with this stupid...
Optus	I'm sorry I didn't understand that. Are you an existing customer or a new customer?
Me	EXISTING!
Optus	Are you post paid or pre paid?
Me	POST PAID! (how long is this ordeal going to last?)
Optus	Are you calling from the line you're inquiring about?
Me	Unfortunately for me, yes
Optus	And what are you calling about? [presents 800 different options which you have to listen through]
Me	Technical support!
Optus	Please hold...
Me	Yeah, you'd like that wouldn't you

When I was finally put through to a human being, he was very friendly and pushed my paperwork through to get my handset unlocked so I could use it overseas. What I want to know is why I had to go through an electronic Mr Ed first. The number was also clearly not "Post Paid Customer Support", otherwise I wouldn't have been asked any of these questions in the first place!

Lift your game Optus. When you're in such a low position to start off with, it shouldn't be too hard to improve.

I figure if I put a photo of mine from Singapore of a J-Walk book here, people will see it on Google Reader and possibly their iPhone, thus satisfying every part of the title. And people call me stupid, can you believe it? Don't answer that.

Since my posts on Google Reader's new interface and my own subsequent installation of Greasemonkey scripts to make it usable again, I thought I'd share a couple more resources and observations in the hopes they may be useful. If you don't use Google Reader, you could always print out this page on paper and give it to your cat to shred. If you don't have a cat, give it to your chameleon, if you can find him camouflaged somewhere. Everybody's happy.

First observation is the iPhone Google Reader web application. While the new Blazing White with faint blue lines is somewhat less than usable without a few Greasemonkey scripts on the desktop, I think the iPhone Google Reader web application is a marked improvement. The grey gradients on the toolbar and the navigation buttons which never really worked on the iPhone's screen have been replaced by solid colour which makes it much easier to eat, especially when you're outdoors and battling lots of sunlinght.

ASIDE: Did I just say it's much easier to "eat"? I didn't mean to type that... but it works doesn't it? Can't you just picture someone eating some web feeds with their breakfast? Eating web feeds? Anyone? Okay, I guess I'll never be a poet after all.

That Google Reader is a very nice site,
Even if the new interface is an absolute blight.
I could even type nonsense in a tree,
But I really, really suck at poetry.

The new Google Reader iPhone web application (top part of the screen)

My other observation was that J-Walk recently blogged (J-Walk blogged something? No, really?) about Google Reader and had his own interface modifications to share complete with before and after photos which I assume he took with a very high resolution camera. I mean, those photos of his screen were perfect, no light distortion or anything. I was really impressed.

In a nutshell:

A few days ago I mentioned that Google made lots of style changes to their Google Reader site. I spent some time and tweaked the styles so it looks much better to me. Most of the stuff I don't use is hidden, and the overall look is much less cluttered.

I started with the file found here, and then modified it and added my own stuff to it.

If you use Google Reader with Firefox (and have the Stylish add-on installed) you can try out my tweaks. The new styles are in this text file: Google Reader Tweaks. It's not set up for one-click installation, so you'll need to create a new style and copy/paste. Or, install this one and replace the code with mine.

I've been reading J-Walk for a long time; I have fond memories of the last few years of high school in 2003-04 and when I got my first full time job in 2004 before I took off to university reading his material. Before my mum passed on I had got her reading it too.

Even if he does suggest you can be productive writing lists in Excel! Oh well, we can't all be Gnumeric list makers :).

The only downside to the new MobileSafari is the permanent Google search box stealing space from the main web address bar. It's not so bad in landscape mode.

The iPhone 2.2 update really has made this device I'm typing on now even more of a pleasure to use. Aside from the downright bizarre new layout for MobileSafari's toolbar, all the new features such as Google Street View (amazing), the podcast downloader (even if you are limited to 10MiB on a phone network connection) and a few helpful tweaks to the home button and to enable/disable auto correction are right on the money. You can listen to Rubenerd Show 257 to hear more about my experiences with the 2.2 update.

None of the features though are what I was most excited about, I was exited about what this update fixed.

At the risk of invoking Murphy's Law and forever jinxing this device, I can say that one of the primary advertised fixes bundled in the iPhone 2.2 update has worked. Since updating I've been able to use MobileSafari to browse all sorts of pages without it crashing at all. It has done wonders for my sanity.

As I mentioned in a previous post (Only problem so far with the iPhone: MobileSafari) before the iPhone 2.2 update MobileSafari would incessantly crash without warning, and it seemed to be getting worse. While it seemed to crash for no apparent reason sometimes, more often it would struggle with rendering larger pages or pages that used HTML forms or Ajax. Curiously it was the only iPhone application that ever crashed on me, and that includes all the third party apps I downloaded from the app store!

As I relegate more duties from my mammoth MacBook Pro to my iPhone, I'm finding myself using more tabs (or whatever they're called in this case) in MobileSafari to multitask. The relief I feel now that I can be confident MobileSafari won't crap out on me is overwhelming.

Thank you Apple for fixing this, it's a fantastic Yule present! Now if you folks could just allow another browser access to this device... say, oh I don't know... Opera then you've got my birthday covered too.

Sent from my iPhone

This post documents a simple little trick I learned by accident in the iPhone's and iPod Touch's Notes application. By default Notes uses the "Marker Felt" font for its interface which lends itself well to the illusion that you're writing on a notepad rather than typing on a computer screen, but the letters are quite thick and I've found they tend to run together outdoors when the screen is bathed in sunlight.

If you've enabled an East Asian script such as Japanese Katakana or Korean Hangul on your iPhone keyboard, if you tap on the little sphere button to change to it and add one character, the text on the note you're editing transforms into regular, clear, easy to read sans-serif font, including the heading when you return to the main Notes menu. Beautiful!

I suspect it has something to do with the character set changing that triggers this. For example bloggers know Lucida Grande on Mac OS X and Lucida Sans Unicode on Windows NT-derived systems have excellent support for regular Roman letters as well as Japanese characters. It's likely Marker Felt on the iPhone does not have such character support; and for good reason! I couldn't imagine trying to read East Asian characters in such a thick, fuzzy font.

The freak Aussie weather and iPhone 2.2 episode!

Freak weather in Australia (torrential storms in Brisbane, fluctuating temperatures in Adelaide, snow in Victoria a week before summer!); my cheesy slogan from primary school; my dad's plant designs in Pinkenba; the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.2 update (still no copy/paste, the amazing street view feature, the new weird MobileSafari layout); Toronto, Adelaide and Dublin; the IntoYourHead show; and utopian science fiction writers!

UPDATE: I referred to the CEO of Microsoft as Steve Jobs not Steve Ballmer! The blasphemy! Please forgive me!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 21:05 9.7MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

Google Reader is wildly convenient on the iPhone, but is also one of the sites that crashes the most. Might be sticking with the desktop version for now.

Those who read this blog will know that despite my initial skepticism, I finally bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 3G in September. Looking back at it now, it may have been one of the best decisions I've ever made; it really is a phenomenal device. Other phones may have more features, or have features with higher specifications, but none I have ever used even remotely come close to the iPhone in usability.

With such constant glowing reviews, you might be under the mistaken impression that I think the iPhone is absolutely perfect and that I am now a blubbering fanboy. The fact is I have been taking notes whenever something has irritated me with it in the hopes I could create a post taking about the iPhone's shortcomings and how it could be improved.

After a month, I feel it's time to let 'em rip, all one of them. And here it is: the MobileSafari web browser officially blows. It is the most crash prone, error riddled piece of s... oftware I've used in recent memory. It's a shame because no other applications have been able to crash this iPhone, and a serious shortcoming considering it was billed as a phone, music player and an internet communications device.

It's a shame, WebKit itself rocks.

Typically the scenario plays itself out like this: I'll browse to a web page, scroll down leisurely, perhaps pinch and wipe around a bit to increase or decrease the size of elements. Boom, crash, back to the home screen. It doesn't crash every single time, but I'd wager it crashes once for every time it works properly twice. A 33.3% reliability rate is hardly a glowing record.

Different activities seems to exacerbate the problem. If I enter any information into a field on a web form barring simple login screens, it will crash. If I scroll down a page too fast, it crashes. If I click a link, then click another link before the page finishes loading, it crashes. Generally the problem can be partially alleviated by restarting the phone every few days and making sure I don't have more than a few tabs open at any one time, but it's by no means a quick fix.

What I find interesting is that for every person on a web forum or blog post comment feed that complains about MobileSafari reliability, there are two or three that claim to have no problems at all with it. Here's hoping the next software update fixes this for everyone; I'd love to be able to use MobileSafari carefree on this phone. WebKit is still one of the best rendering engines.

Stay tuned for my real world scenario review of the iPhone that I compiled last week but still need to clean up. It really shows how you can use this thing to take over your life and how fantastic that is... provided you stick to applications other than MobileSafari for most of the time :).

Sent from my iPhone.