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

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

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?!

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

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

The Genius feature wanted to spend 4 hours of my life (and 2GB of my RAM) capturing my Play data. And I didn’t find the new visualizations until prompted by a post. Despite all of this, I am now a lot happier with iTunes than I was yesterday. It took hours and I’m almost pleased. This is a new experience for me with Apple products; usually it’s the initial wow which blinds me to other obvious flaws. This time it’s the ‘perfection’ that hides the lack of new wow.

Don’t get me wrong; iTunes 8 isn’t perfect. It’s still nowhere near as fast as it could be on Windows Vista. I would also like to see some sort of attempt at use of Glass in it. I like Look-and-feel native applications. It’s what OSs are designed for.

The new iPod Nano 4G which has been much-rumored was released as expected. It’s a lot better-looking than I expected, although even some of the demonstration shots show Glare on the curved screen. Something that I would be hesitant to introduce! The new software looks gorgeous as ever, and may be tempting enough to push my fatty-nano out of my gym bag!

The $80 headphones announcement was a pleasant surprise and will definitely be finding their way in to an iPod incredibly near to me. That said, I use the wired hands-free for my iPhone a lot as it doubles as my headphones; I wonder if there will be a version of these with the in-line mic? (update: they all do)

I’m not surprised to not see a laptop or desktop line upgrade here; as I posted earlier, ‘Consumer’ is the key. Things that will drive immediate sales this Christmas, with no uncertainty or possibility of postponing purchasing for later features. We all know that Intel is releasing it’s new generation of processors in Jan / Feb which offer huge benefits for mobile computers. This is most likely what we’ll see in the next major revision of all Mac lines. Snow leopard too will not be making any more appearances until next year for the same reasons and I think Microsoft would be wise to take the same approach with Windows 7.

I am very pleasantly surprised by this round of Apple announcements; they show a brilliant matching of form AND function and will genuinely improve the experience of all users of Apple products (especially iTunes, iPod and iPhone).

I will forgo mentioning 2.1 iPhone firmware until Friday when it’s released.

I found out over on TUAW that the iPhone App Air Sharing is available free for the next week (ish). Air Sharing allows your iPhone (or Touch) to become a wireless drive for your PC / Macintosh.

I know that I for one am heading over to download it now.

(about 1 1/2 hours to go!)

Personally, I can’t wait to see what Apple come out with but there’s a lot of rumours and supposition.

iPod Nano 4G Sneak Peak

The iPod Touch is most likely going to retain it’s specs to allow for a price drop to compete with the subsidised iPhone.

A major version release of iTunes (iTunes 8) is expected bringing a few new features; among which is the ‘Genius’ feature to allow for smart playlist generation; perhaps a feature that could be more useful if iTunes ever adopt a subscription model. But most exciting is a rumour that I’ve heard (semi-reliable source) that suggests the newest version of iTunes will be coded to be truly Vista-compliant and not just an XP version that has been hacked together to work; i.e. no more rediculously slow operation!

There’s been lots of talk of Mac Book updates; I doubt we’ll see anything on the pro side, but an Air update is probably round about due now (unless they choose to wait for the new Intel processors next year beginning) and the Mac Book vanilla may see an update now in time for Xmas.

I think the key to remember is ‘Consumer’. This event will most likely be about the consumer ranges in order to drive excitement (read: sales) for Xmas.

More to come…

(photo courtesy of engadget)