My Mobile Life : The iPhone blog

One of the cool new features that have come out with iPhone OS 3.0 is called “Find my iPhone”, which (when the conditions are just right) does just that. The first conditional is that you must be using Apple’s MobileMe service. IThe main reason for using this service to date has been that it provides a nice way to sync data (calendar, contacts, etc…) between a number of computers (it gets pretty tricky if u have more than 2). I’ve been using it for several months now and while the service has had it’s share of teething problems, I’ve found it to be a lot better in recent times.

Find my iPhone - push disabled

Given that the service cost about $99 per year it probably isn’t something that most Apple users have gone out and purchased but now that the service is required for the Find my iPhone application to work it’s attractiveness has definitely increased.

Speaking of the Find my iPhone service, I came across this great article the other day about a happy user experience in the US. While I had a somewhat less amusing experience on the weekend, I thought I’d mention it as it may save other users some frustration. Here’s what happened:

Saturday night I was up the coast staying with relatives and catching up with my father who’s over here for a visit when my phone slipped out of my pocket and lodged in the arm chair that I was sitting in.

Find my iPhone

I was vaguely aware that the phone wasn’t with me when I went to bed that night but I suspected it wasn’t too far away and that I’d find it in the morning. Well, morning came and after what I can only call a surfing attempt (I clearly need more practice) and brunch with the fam by the beach, it was time to head home. I had to be back in Brisbane for basketball practice so we were under some time pressure. Isn’t that always the way when you’re trying to find car keys or a wallet/phone, etc…

We rushed around the house calling the phone for a couple minutes before I remembered the Find my iPhone service and I quickly found a wall plug to connect the laptop (of course the battery was low). You can imagine my disappointment when I loggged into MobileMe and found that the service wouldn’t work because “Push” wasn’t turned on for the phone. Dang, so much for that idea.

Find my iPhone - push disabled

The next half hour was spent, returning to the pub we’d been at the previous evening and stressing out while sending messages to the phone and trying to bribe whoever might have it to return it to us. I also tried the messaging tool that comes with the Find my iPhone service (which plays a sound for 2 minutes while a message is sent to the phone even if the phone is in silent mode).

As luck would have it the phone was being held not by some opportunistic bar tender but by the couch at my relatives place and I have it safely back in my posession now as I write this post.

After enabling Push on the phone (there’s a few steps involved, see below), I finally received the message I had sent to my phone some two days earlier. Odd, I would’ve thought that a message could be sent without push being turned on, but I am happy to report that the service now picks up my phone when I use it from the MobileMe website. Let’s just hope there’s plenty of battery life in my phone when it comes time to use the service next.

1.) Turn on Push for your phone (Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data)

Enable push

2.) ensure you have your MobileMe mail account setup on your iphone

3.) Enable the Find my iPhone service under the MobileMe email account

Turn on Find my iPhone

Click Allow

It’s somewhat amusing to me that my last post on the blog was about the imminent release of OS 3.0 and this one is to announce that it has indeed finally launched. Obviously not quite as early as I was thinking, but then predicting release dates with Apple is a bit like trying to predict the second coming (okay, that’s in an “in” joke for all the other offspring of Envangelical parents).

In any case I think it is fairly well established that Apple like to keep their release dates quiet so as not to disappoint if they can’t deliver. A very sensible idea in my opinion.

Certainly I have been somewhat taken by surprise with the recent release of the new iPhone 3Gs in the US. In fact that other day I was at the dentist getting the old scale and clean, when the dental hygienist remarked that they were waiting for the new iPhone to be released. Between her persistent scrapings, I managed to ask if she was referring to the release of the new iPhone OS, to which she responded confidently, that “No, Apple are bringing out a new version of the iPhone”. Mind you, there was a lot of speculation about this but at this point there had been no announcement of the new product and it was before the screenshots from China had come out showing what was purported as the new iPhone back panel (in flat black).

Anyway, I didn’t contradict the hygienist or press her too much on the source of her information but was amused that it seemed to be “common knowledge” that Apple would be releasing a new version of the phone even though there was no “evidence” of the fact at that point.

Well, here we are some 3 weeks later and sure enough there is a new version of the iPhone, the 3Gs (Apple says the “s” is for speed, though I can think of more exciting definitions ;-). While, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to purchase one of these new fangled devices, as they haven’t yet been released in Australia, it sounds to me like Apple have provided a much needed boost to a device which has both over and underwhelmed (somehow both are possible at once) the phone’s critics and supporters.

From a user’s point of view, the first generation iPhone while beautiful and aesthetically pleasing does suffer in the speed department. Most of these problems are well documented (albeit chiefly on blogs like this), for example the lag when trying to pull up contacts. I’ve also noticed more recently that bringing up an SMS message conversation can be quite slow which is annoying when you’ve just got to get in and send a quick text.

With any luck, this new version will live up to the hype and fulfill on the performance improvements that Apple have promised. Certainly it seems to be a smart move on Apple’s part, delivering a new version of the phone before the excitement surrounding the initial product release has had a chance to completely peter our.

The other important features of the new phone are the upgraded camera (going from 2 mega-pixels to 3) and the attendant auto-focus feature. An important addition, I think (particularly at night). While, there are software solutions to the problems of trying to focus the first generation camera on something (Darkroom in particularly is one app that comes to mind), particularly at night, I think a hardware solution is definitely the preferred approach. After all, Apple are loved for their ability to deliver solutions (both hardware and software) that just work, and unfortunately the first iPhone in many instances has failed to live up to that expectation on some of the more basic fronts.

Well, it looks like Apple are on track to meet the goal of releasing iPhone OS 3.0 (with many of the features we’ve all been waiting for) by the start of the North American summer which is now only about 2 weeks away.

The fifth version of the OS 3.0 Beta was released recently and looks to be nice and stable, certainly a lot better than the early betas which had various problems (running slowly, Google Maps crashing, etc…).

The latest beta also requires that you update iTunes to version 8.2 which has only been released to registered iPhone developers using the latest iPhone OS Beta. But the fact that iTunes has been indicates to me that Apple are probably very close to releasing the OS publicly.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you might have gathered, I’m not someone who typically watches a lot of TV. When I’m not running my web design business, working as a programmer (full time) or doing adventure races and various other sporting activities, I do manage to squeeze in the occasional TV show but it’s not that high on my list of priorities.

TV Guide listing automatically shows what

Recently however, in doing my part to stimulate the local economy (and partly thanks to K-Rudd’s handout) I decided to purchase a new LCD TV which has meant that I find myself more interested in finding out what’s on the box.

Popular show listing gives you an idea of what others are into

Thus I found myself on the train last night, browsing the App Store from my iPhone looking for an application that would provide a TV guide for Australian viewers. Initially I started my search looking for a “TV Guide” which turned up applications providing guides for numerous countries, mostly in North America and Europe. So eventually after narrowing this down to TV guides for Australia I found a couple which looked promising. There was a paid app which costs $1.19 and a free app called Ice TV which I had similar reviewer feedback so I decided to go with that application.

The upcoming screen shows you when your favourite shows are playing next

As it turns out IceTv is a fairly comprehensive application providing TV guides for Australian users.

Before you can use the application you have to register a user account on the IceTV website but it’s easy enough to do this directly from your iPhone using Safari. Once you have registered, log-in to the application with the username and password that you setup during the registration process. Yes, this may be annoying for some users, but it’s the applications way of keeping track of user preferences and settings (such as what area you’re in).

Favourite shows tab lists the shows you have marked as favourites

Once you have setup your account, it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there. The application provides an intuitive interface that lets you view what shows are on for upcoming timeslots on any available channel with relative ease.

From the website, you can manage your account to indicate which channels you’re interested in, allowing you to de-select non-digital channels (if you don’t have a digital TV for instance). You can also select favourite shows and view shows that are popular based on other users favorites.

The settings screen

For most users, I suspect IceTV will nicely fill the need for an iPhone based TV guide. If you’re wanting something more, you could consider a paid account with IceTV or one of a number of other paid TV guide services which are out there. After all, if TV viewers are willing to pay a couple of bucks a week just to get the paper with the TV guide in it, surely there must be those who would pay a couple of bucks (as a one off) for an iPhone app that will do the same thing for you, day in and day out.

Gees, it’s been a while since I posted anything to this here blog. I do apologise for my silence. I haven’t given up on you all, just been a bit busy. What have I been doing you might ask? Well, I’ve been focusing on Adventure Racing. In the last couple weeks this has involved a couple of Rogaine races, one here in Brisbane where I’m based and another up in Cairns in Far North Queensland. 

On the iPhone front, I’ve found that OS 3.0 is improving. You may be relieved to hear this, particularly if you read my recent post in which I talked about rolling back to OS 2.2.1 after running into issues with OS 3.0 and turning my phone into a brick for about half a day. This reversion was somewhat short lived (as Apple have actually made sure that once you’ve installed OS 3.0 you can’t really roll back to 2.x and run it for any extended period of time). So after a couple of days when my phone flipped out and went back into recovery mode I installed the latest beta of OS 3.0 (version 3 at the time) which ironically came out shortly after my post - talking about how crap the previous revision was.

As it stands, we’re now up to OS 3.0 Beta 4 which I suspect will be quite stable and hopefully iron out some of the puzzling issues that cropped up in OS 3.0 Beta 3 (for example the call button on the phone dial screen going missing). Dang!

I’ll be installing the new beta tonight and will quite likely put up a further post on this when I find out a bit more about it but for now I’ll leave you with a funny little thing that happened the other day.

I got a call from my very excited fiancee telling me that she’d done something cool and asking me to guess what it was. I’d been having a busy day and wasn’t catching on to what she was trying to tell me, despite getting clues like “it’s technology related”. After a couple of guesses and a few minutes of suspense she eventually couldn’t contain herself any longer and burst out with “I’ve bought an iPhone”!

She’s had it for about a week now and is totally wrapped. While, not exactly at the front of the curve (doesn’t everyone you see these days sport an iPhone) it’s turning out to be a great choice for her. She’s even listening to audio lectures from her uni lecturer on the go. Quite a good use of the device I thought.

I happened to browse to the Apple website today and noticed a promotion that they’re running in the lead up to the 1 billionth download from the app store. Yes, that’s 1,000,000,000 downloads in less than 9 months. Pretty incredible if you ask me.

There’s a listing on the Appstore of the 20 most popular paid and free applications which users have downloaded to date. Many of these will be familiar to you (Facebook, Shazaam, Google Earth, etc…) and quite a few will probably be new to you, so go check them out.

1 billion download celebration

As part of the celebrations surrounding this momentous event Apple are offering a prize of USD$10,000 (to use in iTunes/the appstore), a MacBook Pro, a TimeCapsule (Apple Wireless Harddrive and router) and an iPod touch. Not bad for some lucky winner.

All you have to do to go into the draw to win is download an application from the appstore or fill out this form and you’re in the game. With some 18 million apps to go before the 1 billionth download, I’m guessing chances of winning are somewhat slimmer then the chance of winning Gold Lotto but hey, funny things do happen.

Well, after using the beta version of the new iPhone OS 3.0 and enjoying out the opportunity to test some of the new features that the OS supports (copy and paste in particular is great), I decided to revert to the current supported version OS 2.2.1.

Actually, that’s not quite right. I didn’t so much decide as did my phone. After driving up to Mt. Tamborine last weekend and going through areas with little or no Vodafone coverage (which generally sucks if you’re not in the city), my phone switched into Emergency only mode and then showed the dreaded “connect me to itunes” picture on screen. I did this when I got home and even after connecting to itunes I still couldn’t get my phone to come to life.

Another thing that had been an issue was using Google Maps on the iPhone. With the new OS Google Maps worked for some time but eventually a problem caused Google Maps to completely freeze and I was unable to use it again (this was a few weeks ago). Given that this is one of the apps I use most on the phone this represented a truly annoying issue.

Battery life also seemed to be a problem with OS 3.0, though there was some fore-warning of this as a result of the new push notification layer.

So given the circumstances I felt that the best thing to do was revert to the stable OS. Fortunately I found a relatively helpful article on Gizmodo that explained what to do step by step.

Some of the steps in the article I found to be somewhat un-necessary (in particular the bit about cracking your iPhone), so if you revert look at that part as optional. Though all the other instructions for the iPhone 3G appeared to be necessary.

Thankfully I can now say that my phone is working quite well again with OS 2.2.1 and I can use Google Maps. Battery performance has returned to normal and I’m looking forward to future releases of the iPhone OS 3.0 being a bit more stable.

DinnerSpinner

If you’re someone like me who regularly goes to the web for recipe ideas you’ve probably come across allrecipes.com, one of the best sites on the web for finding recipes. The site offers free (and paid) memberships and helps you find recipes, searching by meal type, ingredients or time to prepare and now they have released an iPhone app called DinnerSpinner which provides many of these same features all from your mobile phone. An Australian version of the site is also available at AllRecipes.com.au

Spin to find a random recipe

What’s also cool is that you can randomise your recipe search by shaking the phone which spins the three search lines (Dish Type, ingredients and Ready in) to give you a collection of matching recipes that match all three selections. A rather ingenious way of using the iPhone’s built in accelerometer I thought. In testing I found that this is probably not a terribly practical way to pick a meal (i.e. I got cookie recipes from my first 4 searches but I eventually realised that varying the amount you shake the phone produces more random results).

Mmm, Pumpkin Cookies

The app lets you mark recipes as favourites or search for specific recipes by name and also provides a set of search filters allowing you to specify preferences (i.e. for vegan or low fat foods for example). The Featured recipes tab also lets you browse recipes which are currently featured on the recipe site, though it does take some time to load up if you’re not using WiFi.

Recipe Filters

Interestingly this is one of the few iPhone apps to have a Help screen which I find vaguely impressive for some reason, at least it goes some way towards demonstrating the professionalism of the apps developers.

One of the new features that will be available in the iPhone OS 3.0 is the ability to use Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) bluetooth to stream audio out to a car or wireless headset for example. It’s taken a couple of weeks but it looks some guys in the US from Cars.com have put together a little video showing how easy it is to use.

Hmm, having a bluetooth enabled vehicle is looking more and more attractive.

One of the things I love about having an iPhone is that I can use internet banking on it. I’ve been using PDA phones for quite a few years now and this is the first phone I’ve had where internet banking has worked in my mobile browser. That said, there is still plenty of room for improvement in this area (i.e. sometimes getting onto internet banking in Safari) is painfully slow and I wish there was a bank specific application that would be faster and easier to use.

Westpac iPhone app icon

No wonder then that I was pretty interested when I heard that NAB had just such an application out for the iPhone. Regrettably (because I bank with NAB) I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this application on the app store. I have however found that Westpac have been first off the mark with an iPhone application, though at this stage it is pretty much limited to being a branch locator application, which in itself is probably quite useful (especially considering that ATM providers have recently been given the right, through Australian legislation, to charge the customer whatever they want for their use).

The Westpac iPhone functions

For internet banking use, Westpac customers still have to use Safari just like us lowly NAB customers, though I have to say that the Westpac Internet Banking is quite a bit quicker than NABs (yes, I have accounts at both banks though most of my banking is still done with NAB - how ironic that this particular bank has chosen a name whose definition* is to “snatch or steal”.

Find a Westpac ATM

Anyway, back to the subject, the Westpac iPhone application helps you to locate branches or ATMs within your vicinity, allowing you to search by either your current location or a suburb/postcode if you prefer.

Local ATM listings

Other functions which are included in Westpac’s iPhone app are a quick link to the Westpac Online banking page (taking you directly there instead of having to go to the homepage and navigate some tiny drop down menu to get there) and a quick contact feature which gives you the contact phone numbers you’re likely to want in a hurry.

Westpac Contact numbers

While browsing around on the web for other banking iPhone applications I discovered that the only other bank in the Australasia region which seems to offer one is ANZ in New Zealand, which is good news if you’re a kiwi, not so good news if you’re a mainlander (damn it, not only do they get all the good sheep…).

Another thing I came across was the fact that Westpac have actually customised their website so that iPhone (and other mobile) users automatically see a customised screen designed for mobile browsers that shows you the main links you want to see. Regrettably most of these links just take you to normal pages on the Westpac website, but hey it’s a darn sight better than what the rest of the banks are providing. Come on guys, get with the program. Oh well, I’m sure we’ll see a few more of these custom applications as companies (in particular banks) look for ways to differentiate themselves from other players in these “tough” economic times. God, I never though I’d hear myself join the media chorus on that one. What can I say, maybe I’m getting brainwashed.

Westpac.com.au iPhone homepage

*definition source: www.dictionary.com