Yeah, well, most of my free time has been spent trying to get through the campaigns of GTA IV – that has eaten into blogging time… writing anyway: I don’t have all that much to say these days, I guess. Oh, there are a few blog posts lurking in my head… just not in the mood to write them up, I guess. And reading blogs – the busy times at work has negated that as well! Nature of the business.
That said, GTA IV is more than enough to snag my attention for long periods of time – a rather engaging game and I look forward to the multi-player aspects of it…
True, it’s just a rumor. Yes, nothing is “known for certain” about the next generation iPhone. But 16 days after making a purchase, exactly two days after my window of return closes, I see this:
Fortune: When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy.
As I noted in an earlier post, I found a problem with Outlook->iPhone sync’ing for Appointment items that had a relatively large size. Tim Heuer mentioned that the same sync process had issues with specific types of Outlook Appointment items…
Based on his findings, I spent a little while in VBA and came up with a small for that addresses both issues, but I forewarn you: I’m not taking any responsibility for any data loss on this one… it’s pretty straightforward but if you’re like me, you have over 1000 calendar items and that’s a lot of data to do batch updates on.
If you’ve suffered from the combination of iTunes, Outlook, and iPhone, and don’t mind getting your hands rather dirty, please read on. Continue reading iPhone: Workaround #1→
As with all new technologies in my life, there’s always a period of transition. A chunk of time when you have to unlearn what you’re used to and re-learn things with new devices that are expected to be better than the original. I mentioned some of what I expected to have to give up – and new things that popped up that were unexpected – in my last iPhone post so the Concessions list has a foundation already… but this is different.
This is a bug: there’s a cap to how big a Calendar item’s body can be yet you’d never know about it until you hit the problem.
I have a Calendar item in Outlook that has 6903 characters. I didn’t create it but it’s in my Calendar just the same. Not an unreasonable size anyway. The bug here is what happens when this item is Sync’d to the iPhone: nothing. iTunes completely ignores it and your Calendar on the iPhone has open time for this slot. It doesn’t put in a stub or truncated item for you. It doesn’t tell you there was a problem. No error, no warning, no sync log file to investigate. And what’s maddening: no choice on how to handle it. Ideally there would be a “Sync items larger than blah” option. Apple didn’t include it and odds are it would be explained as “that’s a feature! Who likes error messages? It just works!”
Enter Concession #1: watching Calendar items sync and make sure the items are smaller than at least 6K of text or else I miss meetings.
Why? Because I recently bought one, and if past history has shown me anything, as soon as I buy something like there one of the following things happens: a new version is often released or a price drop is enacted. And always 48 hours after I can do anything about it. Since the iPhone has a 14 day return policy and I bought it yesterday, in another 15 days there should be a price drop or new model available.
Exchange support? Great, but from my phone reckoning, this is a two year old feature. Plugging holes in product line ups are good, but I, for one, wouldn’t celebrate them.
SDK? Looked really good. Native code? Interesting. What really hurt J2ME is that it was a sandbox environment. All of the cool stuff came from JAR’s which weren’t support on every phone. The iPhone SDK puts that to shame. Certification process? This is good, too. Some carriers lock down their phones for applications because of the crap people can put out. I like this as well. A free certification process, if you offer your app as freeware? Sweet! That is masterful. What really hurt BREW was that they had a required-certification process joined with carrier-based distribution; expensive and ugly. You could pass Verizon and not get supported by other networks. Apple has the right idea here too: 70% of the revenue goes to the Dev and you only have to pay for certification if you charge for the product: no ties to the carrier. Sure there will be some backlog in the certification process and I’m pretty sure paying customers get top seed in any queue, but still.
Charging for the iPod touch upgrade again?
Two steps forward, one step back, and I still can’t use an iPhone to voice-dial even though I could on my piece of crap phone from 2001.
I know I don’t use Google for search that much – like once every couple of weeks – but when did they start requiring CAPTCHA checks for searches? Continue reading I CAN HAS CAPTCHA?→
Congratulations on Apple’s fiscal report yesterday! It is truly great to be excited when the company you’ve pinned your hopes and dreams on has gathered more profit than they ever have in the history of the company; it’s certainly better than having to show a loss. However, I caution you to remember that just because Apple has posted big numbers that it means absolutely nothing financially if the they didn’t meet their current forecasted numbers and they felt that they should lower their forecast numbers for the next reporting period. Consequently, uh, you have nothing to really celebrate at this point. And yes, my portfolio reflects this with a whole lot of red numbers following a watch list line that starts with AAPL.
While it’s OK to be happy that the company has sold a lot of Macs, iPhones, and iPods, they have still screwed the pooch in the fiscal sense. Just thought that you lot in the fan base would want to know… assuming that you didn’t get your skivvies sticky already, it might save you some time doing laundry considering the somber message of the financial report.
I sat on this one for 24 hours because I wanted to make sure that the Jobs Distortion Field had dissipated before talking about a new Apple product.
I have to say that the design and the specs of the MacBook Air (MBA) are rather impressive on many levels. The big questions are “do I want one?” Well yeah, because it’s shiny. “Do I need one?” No, because I just got a brandy new T61p from Lenovo. “Will I buy one?” I don’t know.
Gizmodo: Apple iPhone Starbucks Ordering Screens Look Like the Real Thing, Precede Apple Patent
If this is the real deal, Apple may have a new iPhone customer.
Putting up with a touch screen device, shelling out $400 for a disposible device (as all phones are), transfering my numbers to at&t and paying more for service is all incidental for being able to cut yet another mammal out of my day to day life.
An interesting article… I mean most people would be jealous of BillG for his success and cash… after reading this, they’d have missed the target and hit the tree.
Either way, here’s proof that every proper Geek needs a really good woman to offset a digital lifestyle.