Entries tagged “iphone”

Interactive fiction has come to the iPhone with a great port of the Frotz Z-Machine player. It's free. To solve the problem of getting IF game files to the phone, Craig built an Internet-powered game file browser directly into the application. Very nice.

I don't mean to spoil anything by saying this out loud, but I wonder if this technically violates Apple's terms of service, which forbids language interpreters. I would presume that it would especially forbid interpreters that can evaluate code off of an arbitrary website. Of course, the definition of "interpreter" is debatably fuzzy, as any data-driven app could be considered an interpreter of the data. But Frotz is a straightforward example of an interpreter of code, and if the terms of service forbids interpreters for security reasons (Apple doesn't yet trust their own app sandboxing, or just doesn't trust app authors to do their own sandboxing), those concerns would apply to Frotz.

Macworld's live-blog of the iPhone SDK announcement. It sounds like everything we've been hoping for, except for the App Store intermediary, which was entirely expected, and not entirely undesirable. Most notably in that regard, App Store is no charge to use for free apps, so there will be free apps, and you'll be able to find them and download them from anywhere, even over EDGE. You can also install apps onto a physical iPhone using the app's source code and the SDK.

The SDK is available now as a free download, as is a beta release of the iPhone 2.0 OS that supports it. The final 2.0 OS release will be pushed to all iPhones (and available for iPod Touches) in June. I expect we'll see hundreds of install-via-the-SDK apps between now and June.

Macworld's article on the iPhone 1.1.3 update mentions a new feature that hasn't been advertised widely: the ability to manually drop content onto the iPhone. Now you can use multiple computers to add content to the iPhone as you can with the iPod. (You cannot copy files in the other direction, however.)

Also: The keyboard now supports two finger typing.

Gmail begins rolling out IMAP. IMAP means better support for other mail clients, including Outlook, Mac Mail, and the iPhone mail client. Specifically, it means you can switch between mail clients on a regular basis (Mac Mail, iPhone, Gmail's web interface) and always have an up-to-date view of your mail.

This comes just in time for the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard release, which has a new version of Mac Mail that might have tempted me away from Gmail. Now it doesn't have to: With IMAP, I can use Mac Mail with Gmail and get the best of both worlds.

5thirtyone.com has extended set-up instructions for the iPhone, including steps for setting up the server-side Drafts and Sent Mail folders.

The iTunes Wi-fi Store In Starbucks feature is now live in some Seattle Starbuckses, and presumably New York as well. It works as advertised. I notice it takes a moment for the phone to smell the special Starbucks-brand wireless access, and you have to reject the other wi-fi access points in the area first (including "tmobile," which may or may not be Starbucks' own for-pay T-Mobile hotspot). But then the iTunes Wi-fi Store has the Starbucks icon, and you can browse the last dozen songs played over the coffee shop's sound system, or other Starbucks-promoted albums, and purchase individual tracks or full albums and download them while you drink.

I notice that downloads and previews of Starbucks-featured music are surprisingly fast. I'm wondering if the data is coming straight off a server in the back room in those cases. I neglected to try other non-Starbucks parts of the iTunes Store, but that ought to work according to Apple's official description of the service.

I had to run and catch a bus in the middle of a download, and the phone did the right thing and paused the download. When I walked past another Starbucks, I had the opportunity to finish the download, though I had to re-enter my iTunes password to do it—which allays a privacy concern, since they could effectively know my whereabouts every time I walk past a Starbucks. When I got home, the songs copied back to my computer's iTunes library, and iTunes immediately did a follow-up download of the digital liner notes for the album.

The Starbucks home page says they're giving away a song a day via the iTWFS to promote the feature. I guess I was in too much of a hurry to notice.

Of course, Starbucks plays from their Hear Music label, which apparently specializes in super-safe established mega-artists, with tame new releases and re-releases from the back catalog: Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, and so forth. I guess there's some stuff there I might be interested in, but for the past few months I haven't been in a Starbucks that wasn't playing Ella Fitzgerald the entire time I was there. Fine to drink hot chocolate to, but not necessarily stuff I need to buy.

The Freakonomics blog on Apple's iPhone price reduction.

Daring Fireball: The Ringtones Racket. Laser-focused analysis from John Gruber, very well done.

Movable Type for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Also available with TypePad, Six Apart's hosted blog service. Freaking awesome.

I'm using it right now. One qualm: Once again, entries without titles get the shaft, and show up blank in the entry list. Otherwise, it's awesome.

iPhone iPod Shuffle and Random, and a Real On-the-Go Playlist Bug

It turns out my stupid iPhone iPod random play order problem is part legitimate bug, part user interface design issue, and I guess part user stupidity as well.

Earlier iPods have "shuffle" as a mode of operation: If it is on, tracks play in random order until you turn shuffle mode off from a preferences screen. Newer iPods also allow you to "shuffle" playlists as an action: While viewing a list, you can select to the "Shuffle" item at the bottom of the list and it would start playing the list in a shuffled order. Both methods are mostly out of the way, so they are difficult to select by accident. If either is active, the Now Playing screen has a shuffle icon at the top. Earlier iPods also have "repeat" as a mode, with a similar icon (though no "play this as repeated" action on a playlist).

The iPhone iPod application also has "shuffle" and "repeat" modes, as well as an explicit "shuffle" action on lists. However, the method to activate them is more subtle, and the icons that indicate you are in shuffle or repeat mode are not always on the screen. In fact, the icons and the buttons to turn on these modes are the same thing. To turn these modes on or off, or to see if the modes are on or off, tap the album art on the Now Playing screen to bring up the "scrubber" (the position indicator/widget). The repeat indicator/button is to the left of the scrubber, and the shuffle indicator/button is to the right.

There are several problems with this:

• For both shuffle and repeat, the indicator and the button are the same thing. The iPhone UI uses "everything is touchable" to save space, and it works in most cases. The convention isn't a complete failure here, except that the icons don't look particularly button-like. I've seen the scrubber dozens of times and never noticed these buttons were there.
• The shuffle and repeat button/indicators are not visible in the normal mode of operation. You have to bring up the panel explicitly to check or change the status of these modes.
• The shuffle and repeat button/indicators are not in an intuitive location. The main thing that comes up when you tap on the Now Playing screen is the track position indicator/widget, which describes the track being played. Shuffle and repeat are properties of the play order, and I would not expect to be able to affect the play order in the same UI mode as rewinding or fast-forwarding the track. The previous-track and next-track buttons are on the panel at the bottom of the screen, which is always visible.
• The only difference between the "on" and "off" states for the shuffle and repeat indicator/buttons is the foreground color. The color is consistent with other conventions in the phone UI: The Edit/Done button in an editable list, for example, is blue (as opposed to, uh, grey-blue) when in edit mode. But combined with the fact that they don't look like buttons, it's difficult to notice that the icon color represents a mode state.

I'm willing to admit that my not knowing they were there could also be simple cluelessness on my part. It did occur to me that the iPhone iPod might have modal shuffle, but I only knew to check the iPod app settings, which is where the mode selector was on older iPods. Without guidance from someone else, I would never have found the buttons on the pop-up panel with the scrubber.

Now that I know that I had shuffle mode on all this time, that also helps me narrow my On-the-Go playlist problem: When shuffle mode is on, under certain circumstances possibly related to my music files, On-the-Go playlists jump to random tracks on the iPhone, not just to shuffled tracks in the playlist. I'm still trying to figure out what those circumstances are. Thankfully, it's an easy to work around, since I never need to shuffle my OtG playlists.

Apple is giving $100 in store credit to all iPhone early adopters. If you bought your iPhone in the last 16 days (up to 14 days before the price cut), you're entitled to a $200 rebate per phone—and are not entitled to the $100 store credit on top of that.

This is a rather generous response to the backlash of iPhone owners upset about the $200 price reduction. Of course, there's a backlash to the backlash, but it's not hard to sympathize with those that would get upset that a supplier has reduced the price of a product, when considered in the right light.

When the iPhone debuted, everyone who wanted one, could afford one, and thought it was worth the price got one. Everyone who either didn't want one, couldn't afford one, or didn't think it was worth the price didn't get one. Then there are those in the third group, those who from a purely rational standpoint couldn't really afford one, didn't really think it was worth the price, or possibly didn't really want one, who through an irrational process convinced themselves they should buy an iPhone. This process may have been influenced by external factors, such as advertising, hype or peer pressure, or internal factors such as emotional well-being or simple fascination with the product.

It's the people in this third group that feel betrayed by the price reduction. It's reasonable to assume that Apple had planned the price reduction prior to the iPhone debut, and from the customer's perspective, it feels like the intent of Apple's plan was to exploit the emotional, irrational factors that contributed to their purchasing decisions to get an "extra" $200 per customer. The suddenness and amount of the price reduction kicked at the shaky scaffolding of emotional rationalization many iPhone owners used to justify the original purchase. A less sudden or less dramatic price reduction would have made it easier for early adopters to reinforce whatever emotional structure they used to remain satisfied.

It's important to recognize that the irrationality of shopping applies to all of us. It's difficult to imagine that anybody made a truly rational purchasing decision about a super-hyped $600 product that nobody had ever seen before, even if its feature list did somehow correspond to a well-considered list of needs. Even those of us in the "it was worth $600, no regrets" camp can't legitimately claim that we were able to assess a personal value and corresponding price through a well-considered rational process. The most we can say is, "I'm comfortable with the decision I made, as irrational as it may have been," for whatever reasons that may make it comfortable.

The problem for Apple is that buyer's remorse, as irrational as it may be, is a major part of the customer experience. If customers are going to feel disappointed with having purchased Apple products after price changes and new product releases, they'll buy fewer of them. So while Apple isn't strictly obligated to offer a two-week price guarantee or a $100 one-time store credit to early adopters (and that's debatable), it's in Apple's best interest to manage this aspect of the customer experience.

Apple's iPod/iPhone announcements from yesterday: new video Nano, 160GB iPod "Classic," new iPod Touch that's like an iPhone without the phone—with with wi-fi and a web browser, wi-fi iTunes store for iPod Touch and iPhone, plans for a cute Starbucks feature, and the ability to make iPhone ringtones out of some—but not all—iTunes music store purchases.

And a $200 price cut on the 8GB iPhone. $399.

If you bought an 8GB iPhone within the last 2 weeks, you are eligible for a refund down to the new price as part of Apple's "price protection" feature. If you bought it from Apple, call Apple Sales at 1-800-676-2775, or take a receipt into an Apple Store. If you bought it at an AT&T store, you might want to wait a day or so. As of this writing, stores are still awaiting instructions on how to handle price-protected refunds.

They've discontinued the 4GB model, which is now selling for $299 while supplies last (and they may be all gone by the time this entry gets posted).

Art on the Nike+iPod web site has been updated with the new Nano. I didn't expect them to obsolete the Sport Kit, but it's nice to have confirmation that it works.

Argh! The other day, I mentioned that my iPhone's On-the-Go playlist feature wasn't working. When I add podcasts to my On-the-Go playlist then start playing the first item, the first item plays, but then one of two things happens: It plays the first track again, or it plays a random track. If I select other items from the playlist, they immediately skip to a random track. This is not related to "shuffle" play and cannot be mistaken for a feature: It clearly says it's going to play one track, then the display jumps and starts playing another track. It's a bug.

This problem seems to be limited to podcasts: OtG playlists seem to work for music.

This seems to be limited to my iPhone. OtG playlists work with podcasts on at least one other person's phone (sync'd to their own iTunes library), and I haven't found mentions of this problem on the web.

I did a full restore through iTunes. No change.

I suspected that the problem might not be with the iPhone, but with the indexes iTunes generated for the iPhone. So I moved my music and podcast files to another hard drive, obliterated my iTunes library and index files, opened iTunes to create an empty library, sync'd the iPhone to clear its memory and indexes, then manually copied the music and podcast files back to iTunes and sync'd again. No change.

I'm deeply skeptical that getting a replacement phone will fix the problem, but at this point the only other thing I have to try is to sync a clean phone with my iTunes and see if the problem persists. I guess I'll have to drag my computer and iPhone down to the Apple store and give this a go.

If anyone else has seen this problem, or if anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.

Shure's iPhone headphone adapter is supposedly now available at some Apple Stores. Amazon still says the release date is November 14th. $40 is the Amazon price, which seems like a lot for a headphone cable, though it does include the in-cable control button. It also looks like a lot of cable, when all I really want is something to escape the recessed jack. Something other than Belkin's grotesque grey thing.

Someone noticed this cute little thing that used to come with the iPod Shuffle Sport Case works great, and now small vendors are taking up the slack with similar products. See also eBay.

Macworld: First Look: iPhone fixes we want to see.

It seems like there are counterarguments to many of these popular wishlist items for the iPhone, though I suppose some of them are as speculative as the items themselves. Nevertheless:

• 3G. Apple says "battery life." If it were a choice, I'd pick battery. EDGE/3G hybrid with network selection would be a different story, especially with a modem feature, but I still need to be able to go a whole day of heavy use without charging.
• Selectable text. Strongly desired, but how would the interface work? Apple can probably figure it out, but it's not obvious.
• Plain text email. Yeah, but real estate for preferences is hard to come by. On the other hand, suppressing image downloads is a key security feature of Mac Mail and other readers, so yes please.
• Sync notes. To where? Everyone is saying this is inevitable because Leopard Mail will have a notes feature—but that notes feature stores notes on mail servers. Is that how iPhone Notes should work? Even if my only mail account is a Gmail account? Even if I don't want to set up a mail account on my phone? Would iPhone notes sync to Mail then propagate to my mail server on sync? If they sync to iTunes, does iTunes need its own built-in notes feature? I'd take syncing to a directory of plaintext files any day, but that doesn't sound like an Apple feature.
• Disk mode. Unlike the iPod, you can pull the iPhone out of its cradle at a moment's notice, such as to answer a phone call. If the iPhone were mounted as a disk, you couldn't do this safely. Disk mode is like continuous sync'ing, and is a process that has to be stopped by unmounting the disk, which takes a painful 10 seconds or so with an iPod (painful when you're running to catch a bus, anyway). Disk mode is essential for the iPod, especially since I don't want to mirror all 80 GB of music and video data on my laptop's hard drive all the time. It's also a nice Notes solution. But it seems like not being able to answer calls quickly is a deal breaker.
• Adobe Flash support in Safari. Again, battery and implementation quality might be the issue, and if I had to choose, I'd pick battery. So far, I haven't missed Flash at all on the iPhone, and I'm starting to think I should disable it on my main computer.

I mean, a magic device similar to the iPhone with all of those features would be great, but if Apple is going to work on anything for its next release, it should be fixing all the damned bugs.

I'm surprised Macworld didn't mention spam filtering for mail. They mostly focused on the ability to delete lots of messages fast, which is sorely needed even with spam filtering. But I'm back to Gmail just for its spam filter, with the consequence of having all mailing list mail sent to my phone.

iPhone bug I just gotta vent about: On-the-Go playlists used to work for me, but something changed on my phone and now it's completely broken. The first track in the playlist repeats itself, and manually selecting tracks from the list after this mistaken repeat causes it to jump to other tracks not on the list according to some kind of pattern I haven't fully investigated. I loved OtG playlists, and I'm desperate for a fix.

Alas, this has nothing to do with the 1.01 iPhone update Apple just deployed. The bug existed before the update, and persists afterward. Rebooting doesn't fully resolve the problem.

Belfry SciCalc, a scientific calculator for the iPhone. Nice looking with decent features, but very slow to respond on my iPhone, too slow to use. Is it as fast as it could be? Does this mean that the built-in calculator will always have an advantage by being a built-in app?

W2, a little wiki optimized for iPhone.

Anil reminds MT4 users with iPhones that MT4 has RSS feeds throughout its administrative interface, which is awesome.

Will It Blend? - iPhone. The latest in the ever-popular Will It Blend? series from Blendtec, makers of the blender used in the films. Never gets old.

iUI, a JavaScript library for the iPhone, including a method for detecting the screen orientation.

Remote Firebug for iPhone. "Basically, it is a little Python web server which acts as a bridge between your iPhone and the Firebug console running in the browser on your computer. When you call console.log() on the phone it sends your log message to the server, which reflects it back to Firefox (or Safari or whatever), which displays it in your nice big Firebug console. You can also enter JavaScript commands in the command line in Firefox and have them sent to the phone, evaluated, and sent back to Firefox. It all works surprisingly well!" Yay!