My Mobile Life

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.