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

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!

Google searches…

Java is Dead – 9990 results
PHP is Dead – 4430 results
Cobol is Dead – 996 results
ColdFusion is Dead – 683 results

Apparently oohgle is "Out of Home Google".

So there I was driving home from work tonight and saw a poster (billboard) at the side of the road. It was an entirely green poster and across it’s diagonal was a graphic of a browser search box (you know the thing top right of your browser window) with the usual magnifying glass and the letters ‘oohgle’ in it.

Perhaps it was the geek in me that reached out for my iPhone and punched the letters into my search box to find out what the heck it is. The search results (including paid advertising for the term just to be sure) take you to oohgle.com which describes ‘oohgling’ as:

"When you see an Out-of-Home ad and then follow it up online, you’re Oohgling. Out-of-Home advertising is great at creating interest and intrigue and that’s often followed up with an on-line search to find out more."

Well it certainly intrigued me in and I ‘oohgled’ for the first time – i’ve done it before but I didn’t know there was a name for it!

Anyhow, it appears just to be a marketing campaign for a company named PosterScope about some tool that analyses the relationship between OOH and Search. Interestingly enough using any search engine apart form Google doesn’t seem to return any results (at the time of writing) otherwise i guess it would be called oohyah or something perhaps?

But it’s interesting how such a simple poster which essentially gives nothing away about the brand/product (obviously) intrigues people and gets them to search for it when they get home – therefore creating the link between offline and online marketing – something that most traditional ‘marketeers’ have struggled to grasp especially in these times when getting a good ROI and being able to accurately measure a particular campaign is so important.

Can we expect more advertising just of search boxes with terms in them?

So just a quick post for now, but last week I was clicking around Aptana – which i’d encourage everyone to take a look at. Anyhow, I kept seeing these ‘Deploy to Cloud’ links so I figured I’d click one.

Anyhow, cutting a long story short I’ve now deployed my (WordPress) blog to the Aptana Cloud, I’ll cover more about it in a further blog post. But basically, it’s fully featured application hosting (currently PHP only) available straight from within Aptana and includes mySQL, Subversion, Staging/Private Servers starting from $0.04 an hour!

Perhaps more excitingly though is that in a survey of features users may want to see on Aptana Cloud is ColdFusion – so make sure you fill the survey in

http://www.aptana.com/cloud/wizard/other/platforms

I was listening to a recent episode of Security Now where the guys were talking about Click Jacking. It’s a relatively new threat to emerge, plus since it’s browser based it’s completely OS/Browser independent – in fact it even goes as far as affecting Flash (although the latest update has blocked the threat from occurring).

It’s a remarkably simple exploit – in simple terms by using a combination of CSS and iFrames a ‘layer’ is placed over a legitimate site and when you think you’re clicking on a button you’re actually clicking on something on this ‘layer’. Before Flash was patched the threat even allowed a website to enable your webcam by ‘popping under’ the ‘Do you wish to give Flash access to your webcam’.

The threat gets even worse by playing on what we all do when we browse the internet, the old ‘remember me’ tick box or ‘Do you want Firefox to remember your password’ because it’s using a browser, any site that you’re logged into could be loaded ‘invisibly’ – eg, Facebook, Ebay, MySpace etc (which all have buttons in well known positions) and then a new layer of fake buttons loaded onto the page – there’s an example of such an exploit here www.snipurl.com/clickjack (It’s safe to visit) – it uses MySpace to demonstrate the threat but it does so extremely clearly.

So what can you do about it? Well if you’re using IE, Safari, Chrome (as of the time of writing) then there’s not actually a lot you can do except being vigilant about the sites you’re accessing and not using persistent login sessions to websites. If you’re a Firefox user then you’re in luck because the recently updated NoScript plugin is able to blanket protect you (even if you have script enabled – cos the web just ain’t the same with script disable) and remember this isn’t a Javascript exploit! Once installed go into the options for NoScript and enable the ‘Forbid <IFRAME>’ option (and probably enable JS, Flash, Silverlight whilst you’re there)

Still labelled as ‘beta’ Microsoft Windows 2003 has made its debut on Amazon EC2 with prices ranging from $0.125 per hour up to $1.2 per hour for a plain Windows environment whilst Windows plus SQL servers ranges from $1.1 per hour up to $2.4 per hour.

More importantly Amazon EC2 has removed its beta label (for Linux) after 2 years of operation and a much required SLA has been provided with a 99.95% availability with service credits provided in the event of availability falling below this level.

They’re also talking about stuff that’s going to be coming in the future  – a management console, load balancing and auto scaling! Way cool!

More information here