JohnBs personal blog

So here are details of two bugs I’ve found so far;

In the Camera application in the bottom left corner is (I guess) your latest picture in your Camera Roll except the picture I’m being shown is about 6 pictures ago and not updating.

I sync my iPhone to my iMac at home but as is often the case when I arrive at the office my battery is flat so need to charge. Usually I’ll have listened to podcasts on the way into way, perhaps finishing some and perhaps part way through another, what I’m finding is that if i plugin to my MacBook to charge then the play position is being lost as well as the play counts on podcasts I may have already listened to so when I return home they are not being auto deleted as having been listened to.

Any one else found anything odd so far?

So chances are in the next few days you’ll be getting you mits on the iPhone 3.0 software. If you’re like me last week’s announcement of iPhone 3GS was pretty uninspiring and you’re going to stick with the current 3G model (unless of course you’ve got an iPhone 1.0 that’s due for upgrade) personally I’m not due an upgrade until April 2010 which will put me in a nice place for an iPhone 4.0 upgrade next year nor am I upset that o2 aren’t offering mid contract upgrades like they did for the release of iPhone 3G. For the majority of none hard core iPhone users they probably won’t notice any difference with iPhone 3.0 – it’s certainly more evolutionary rather than revolutionary (a term I’ve borrowed as I’ve heard it banded about recently).

So what’s new in the iPhone 3.0 software that as a phone user you’re actually going to find useful? Here’s some of the stuff I’ve found so far in no particular order:

Cut & Paste

Not a feature I’ve missed but now that I’ve got it I love it. The implementation is super simple, double tap in text, drag the selection dots around the text you want to clip and then tap either copy or cut. To paste, again double tap and select paste. What could be simpler? It’s implemented system wide so none Apple apps can benefit straight away. In Safari you’re also able to select blocks of text by holding your finger on the screen and moving it down the screen so a selection box appears (probably around the container elements) allowing you to copy the text.

MMS

MMS has been added at long last implemented tightly into the existing Message application – provided of course your carrier supports it (eh AT&T?). Once you have iPhone 3.0 software your o2 account will be updated – I received a number of messages saying I had to send a text to activate but didn’t bother and a few days after getting 3.0 I received an ‘All done. Picture messaging is ready to use’ MMS from o2.

SMS Forwarding

I knew this one was in the software but it was pretty well hidden and not something I really cared about. From the Messaging application enter a conversation thread tap the ‘Edit’ button and you’ll get the ability to select individual messages and choose forward – this just creates a new message with the selected messages as the body. Of course, with the new cut & paste feature you can achieve the same functionality by double tapping the text of a message and choosing copy, creating a new message, double tapping and clicking paste.

Shared Contacts

Contacts can be shared via email/mms, simply locate a contact and tap ‘Share Contact’ and select whether to share the contact by either email or MMS – still no bluetooth option here.

Calendar

A few cosmetic tweaks here and improved Exchange functionality with the ability to create meetings via Active Sync, invitees can be added to events and availability status set. Seems like the Day view has changed to to make it easier to move between days.

Autofill

Via Settings > Safari, Safari can autofill form fields using your selected contact as well as names and passwords – I presume they mean usernames here, anyhow it’s one less thing to be typing.

Spotlight

aka Search. Accessed by a left to right swipe of the home page or a single press of the bottom button, Spotlight provides search across contacts, audio, podcasts and probably a few more things. In the iPod menu dragging down the screen reveals a search box tucked away at the top to provide search within the application.

Tethering

The tethering menu is accessed from Settings > General > Network and requires additional subscriptions in order to activate. In the UK o2 (details here) want an extra £14.68 a month out of you for 3Gb and £29.36 for 10Gb of data. They advertise this as also giving you access to 5,000 ‘The Cloud’ wifi hot spots but I’m pretty sure iPhone users already get that.

iTunes

A new ‘Video’ tab has been added to allow the purchase of Films (and rent), TV Programmes and Music Videos has been added – bound to be handy just before you board a flight. Via the ‘More’ tab, options have been added to purchase Audiobooks and content (free?) from iTunes U.

App Store

Nothing major here, a few cosmetic differences to how you browse screenshots for an application and now the ability to redeem iTunes gift cards and certificates so now there’s more than 5 tabs so a ‘more’ has been added to replace the usual ‘Updates’ tab.

iPod

Let’s not forget that the iPhone is still an iPod too. Something I’ve always wanted to see is speed control in podcasts just like in audiobooks and with 3.0 you can now listen to them at half and double speed as well as a 30 second review button which means I can listen to twice as many podcasts in the same amount of time!!! Another frustration with previous software versions was the ability to forward/rewind through audio via the scrubbing bar at the top, if you had ‘large’ fingers then it was a bit of a fiddle forwarding through those ads (ahem, Leo Laporte!). iPhone 3.0 now allows much more granular control over the playing position. By selecting the current position on the scrubbing bar and pulling your finger further down the screen you can ’scrub’ though the audio at high, half, quarter and fine speed by then moving your finger left or right – neat feature Apple!

Akin to the iPod nano, the iPhone now gets a ‘Shake to Shuffle’ option enabled by default, controlled via Settings > iPod.

Other random findings

Landscape keyboard now in Mail, Messages, Notes & Safari

Settings > Messages now let’s you control message preview and the repeat alert when text messages arrive so no embarassing messages flashing up on your screen.

Settings > Home gives you more options double tapping the home button and which content to include in Spotlight searches.

Settings > Mail ability to prevent loading of remote images

Settings > Safari Plugins switch (present in v2.0 software too) hmmm what plugins?

Voice Memos app – audio recording on the on the go and sync’ed via iTunes.

Notes can be sync’ed back to iTunes on desktop (iTunes 8.2)

YouTube application now allows you to sign in to your YouTube account to access your videos, subscriptions and playlists.

Phone recent screen shows icons to identify which number type you called a contact on, ie mobile, home, office etc

Stereo Bluetooth

Niggles

We’re still forced to endure the Yahoo Stocks (but it was ‘enhanced’ in 3.0- turn phone landscape) and Weather applications – why can’t we remove (or at least hide) them Apple?

So there you go, there’s everything I could spot different in iPhone 3.0 on the surface at least. If you find anything else then drop me a line.

Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting

Beginning next week Mosso (mosso.com) will be rebranding to ‘The Rackspace Cloud’ and retiring the ‘Mosso’ name. We (Monochrome) have now started using MossoRackspace Cloud Servers for a few clients now and are really finding them very good so if you’re in the market for scalable, on demand hosting then check them out!

Adobe have now released their next online service to labs named BrowserLab. As the name suggests it allows users to test the appearance of their website cross browsers support on both Windows and Mac OSX. The usual suspects are available to test, Firefox v2 and v3, but only IE6 and IE7 where I’d have hoped to see IE8 but can only assume that will be added at a later date. It’s pretty darn simple to use and what’s better it’s free at the moment – we’ll have to wait and see how long that lasts. Dreamweaver CS4 users can get a plugin to allow tests to be performed directly from the product itself.

Read more about BrowserLab

Try Adobe BrowserLab

When MAC folk want to dip their feet back into the Windows world to remind themselves of all the stuff they really aren’t missing then most people will turn to using something like Parallels Desktop or more recently VMWare Fusion. Both are great products, both pretty much do the same thing but both come with a price tag attached.

Sun VirtualBox offers pretty much all the same functionality expect it’s free! Granted, it can’t do some of the more advanced features like boot a bootcamp partition as VMWare Fusion can but for the most part, just running a Windows installation then it’s great – it even has a seamless mode so you don’t need to run it in chrome.

So if you’re in the market for running a host OS virtually then take a look at VirtualBox over the other commercial products.

So I’ve just experienced my first disappointment with OSX and I’m sorry but it’s backwards when it comes to copy operations.

Let me explain. I checked out the latest codebase for a site from git, I then aquired the latest code patch – the particular site runs MediaWiki and I extracted the zip and copied the contents and pasted it over the top of my checked out code (choosing replace from the dialog) only then to find that my folders that had code in them no longer had code in them. My checked out code had a folder called extensions in which had a number of subfolders/files in, whilst the patch has a vanilla extensions folder with simply a readme file in so after the operation I’m left with an extensions folder with just the readme file in whereas what I was actually expecting was the readme file to appear in the extensions folder along with the existing files.

Some digging reveals this is expected behaviour and suggests that I third party tool is used – how can this be? How to folk apply patches to code, sorry but it’s backwards!

So at Monochrome we’re loving Mosso Cloud Servers and the flexibility they offer. Mosso Cloud Servers are the outcome of Mosso purchasing Slicehost, in fact the reverse DNS for my Cloud Server shows as Slicehost.net.

One thing to watch out for (and something that I imagine will get ironed out shortly) are the price differentials between the two sites. The prices on Slicehost.net INCLUDE a bandwidth allocation depending on the package you choose where as the prices for Mosso Cloud Servers do not include bandwidth, with is charged at $0.22/GB out and $0.08 in. *BUT* overages on Slicehost are charged at a blanket $0.3/GB (from http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#buy-storage).

So comparing like for like;

Slicehost
512Mb, 20GB, 200GB = $38

Mosso CloudServers
512Mb, 20GB, 0GB = $21.90

So if say you used 200GB in and 10GB out you’d be charged $44.8 on top of $21.90 totalling, $66.70 a month so Mosso Cloud Servers actually cost more than SliceHost but in the long run Slicehost could end up costing you more if you go over the package allocation and you have to pay overages.  But there again if you use significantly less bandwidth than the packaged amount then Cloud Servers work out cheaper because you pay for what you’re using.

Just food for though…

UPDATE: Just had a word with some folks at Slicehost. They will continue to operate as a separate division of Rackspace. Slicehost slices are a different product than Mosso Cloud Servers and the reverse IP of the cloud servers will change in time.

Mosso (aka Rackspace) have at last launched their CloudServers (aka Slicehost) offering to the public.

Similar to Amazon EC2 various flavours of Linux are available which will cost from around $10pm (256Mb,10Gb) up to $690 (16Gb/620Gb) plus bandwidth costs at $0.22/GB out and $0.08/GB in. Like Amazon, instances are scalable on demand but unlike Amazon (and what I see as a significant benefit over Amazon) instance storage is persistent in that it persists across shutdowns, failures etc without having to perform any voodoo in setting up your virtual environment. Via their online management console you have DNS management which is hosted outside of your server as well as a recovery console if it all goes wrong and a js based ssh client.

Unlike Amazon though, you are charged if your instance is shutdown since they guarantee system resources, also each instance gets a public IP (none NAT) and a private IP for inter CloudServers transfers. There’s an article here which compares CloudServers to Amazon EC2 where you can read more about the differences and the fact that support costs don’t increase as your usage increases.

Oh and they have launched with an SLA too!

Yesterday when I got home I was shocked to find out that an order I placed with Next on Sunday night had been delivered – (fair play though, ordered Sunday night and delivered Monday) despite me selecting that I wanted the delivery next Saturday when I knew someone would be at home. This is now the second time this has happened from Next – what’s the point in being able to select a delivery day if that request is not honoured? – I guess I’m just lucky that the next door neighbours were in!!

And what’s with other companies that let you enter a ‘separate delivery address’ but then deliver it to the billing address? That happened to me this morning, ordered something, expecting it to be delivered to work and the door bell rang just as I was leaving this morning and a parcel handed to me.

Boo!

So here’s the current browser usage according to Stats Counter. It shows for the first time that a Firefox version has over taken an IE version, in particular Firefox 3 overtaking IE 6 with IE7 way out ahead at a pretty consistent 40% share.

The strange thing from this chart though is that the FF3 increase is exactly the inverse of the FF2 decrease which in itself is not strange as FF users seem to be quite loyal but no browser share has grown at the same rate that IE6 has declined (being that IE7 usage seems relatively flat) so if IE7 is constant, FF2 declining as FF3 increases at the same rate – then if IE6 is declining where are they going?