Ed Smiley's Blog

It just so happens that I was recently looking for a way to get a calendar working on my Iphone with over the air sync.� I started out just by using the Google Calendar inside my Ical application using the CalDAV support set-up tool.� Basically, this puts my Google Calendar within the Ical app along with my other local calendars.� That way, I can use the very nice Apple Mail interface to add to Ical.�� (If you have not seen this, it is quite slick.� You can hover over a time and it will basically grab that date and allow you to make a calendar entry.)

This solves half of the issue; I have the events into Google Calendar, now I need them to go to the phone.� I looked at products like Spanning Sync, but $25/year or $65 one time was a bit too much for me to swallow.� If my calendar was integral in allowing me to function, then yes, Spanning Sync would be worth it.� I just need to keep track of the few things I need to go to or do.� Otherwise, I am a worrier and tend not to forget many meetings. � The other product that was quite interesting is Todo+Cal+Sync which is basically a whole new SyncML enabled Calendar for your Iphone that also supports ToDo lists.� Todo+Cal+Sync would allow me to sync with my job provided Oracle Calendar, which I do not use anyway.� This was probably overkill for my needs and it also costs $15 at the App Store (Itunes Link).� I also did not care for a whole other calendar on the phone, but it appears to be the only solution for SyncML on the Iphone.

What do I find today?� Google just released a beta version of their Sync application for the Iphone.� Basically what Google Sync does is create a Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync account to sync your mail (not available yet), contacts, and your calendar.

I was extremely excited to try this out today, but I was worried by this:

During Sync setup, the iPhone will delete your contacts and calendar information.

My only hesitation was that I do not have my contacts in Gmail, so I was worried that all my contacts would get wipes.� However, you can simply turn on what you need.� So I was able just to sync the calendar and not the contacts or mail.� So far, everything is working great.� I can create a contact on the desktop and it shows up on the phone almost instantaneously.� The best part, I can do this all for free

The only downside I can see is that it will not work if you already have an Exchange connection already setup since the Iphone can only support one Exchange account at a time.� However, if you have Exchange already, you probably don’t have many issues getting your calendar on your Iphone.

Oh, BTW Google Sync also supports BlackBerry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile Smart phones.

Browsing my RSS feeds yesterday, I found an excellent post on the SynJunkie Blog about Wardriving with WiFiFoFum.

As an aside, the whole SynJunkie site is worth a read.  There are some excellent stories demonstrating the penetration of a fictious company and about social engineering.

So I purchased WifiFoFum from the Itunes store ($2.99) and played around with it a little bit on the way to work this morning.  I turned the scanning rate to continuous and in a 30 minute ride to work this morning.  Just like any Iphone app, it will shut down once you close the program. However, it does appear to continue to scan and log if you lock the phone. It really heated up the phone (not surprising) and it found lots of access points (close to 300).  You might not think that is much, but I commute through a rather large rural area with lots of farmland.

Sample from Google Maps on the Iphone

The nice thing about the logs is that you can either view them on the built in Google maps application on the Iphone or email the KML file and use something like Google Earth.  The logs are stored on the Aspecto Software site and the word on the street is that they won’t be running out of storage space soon.  However, they suggest you download them as you need them in case the server changes.

So far, this app looks pretty awesome and will be fun to play with.  I will do another post once I have used it for a few days.  Stay tuned.

A while back I checked into IRC apps for the Iphone. Was not really much to choose from at the time. A conversation on ##mac-social on Freenode about mobile IRC clients made me look again. I was surprised to see that there are now many choices for IRC choices for the Iphone from free to $4.99. After reading some reviews and talking with some people on ##mac, I ended up buying Colloquy for only $1.99.

So far, so good. It works great over Edge, 3G, and Wifi. Works great in portrait or landscape mode. It allows you to do pretty much everything you need to do like identify your nick with a password, have a list of channels to auto-join, and you can even set the phone to vibrate when a keyword is mentioned (like your nick).

The bad part, and not really Colloguy’s fault, is the disconnect on exit or a call. Although it does stay connected on locking the phone and when SMS messages appear. Hopefully it will incorporate the push notification service, but some think some think this service is dead in the water. A nice addition is a built in web browser so that you do not have to exit the app when you click on a link.

Overall, I think it is a great app and look forward to any updates or features that come along. Some screenshots are below:

A while back I read about the native Podcaster app that was expected to be released to the App Store. However it never showed up. I dug a little further and found out that Podcaster was one of the many apps not getting past the Apple app check. Rather unfortunate since the reason for this is that it was denied because “it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes“. However, I have found the only thing it does that Itunes does is download Podcasts. Podcaster is so much more and is now available via Cydia on jailbroken iPhones for $5 (half the original price).

I have been looking for an app that had the ability to download podcasts to my phone on the go. I sync my iPhone with my peronal laptop. When I am away from this computer and want to download an interesting podcast that, say comes up on Twitter, I have to sync my phone with that laptop. Very inconvenient to say the least. Along comes Podcaster to save the day.

With Podcaster, you can stream or download any podcast. Podcasts can easily set up to download via the built in search or by importing your opml, feed url, or Podcaster.fm account.

A nice thing with Podcaster is that you can open up the podcast within the application, or safari so you can do other things with your phone while you are listening. Also, Podcaster works great with Backgrounder which allows you to run apps in the background.

The program is quite stable and has only crashed once in about the week I have been using it. This is as opposed to the WordPress app, which has crashed twice while writing this post. Also, the developer seems to be very active in development and has fixed many bugs quickly.

The only two additions I would like to see would be the ability to play downloaded podcasts in safari ( can only stream) and a better download status as it is often blocked with long titled podcasts.

Now that Apple had taken away the developers way to approve ‘official’ installs, cydia and a jailbroken phone is the only way to get this app. So, if you meet this criteria, I highly recommend that you give Podcaster a try. You can try before you buy with a 14 day trial and watch a preview video on the developers site.

Be sure to keep an eye on the podcaster Twitter feed as he has given away numerous free activation codes and promises more.

UPDATE: The Developer added these comments:

Playing in safari from disk is not allowed by the sdk because Safari cannot read files from disk
I will put an option to play from disk for those that have a jailbroken iphone. There is an app (safari plugin) that allows for just this.

There is a new application out on Cydia that lets you run Iphone applications in the background. �It is called�Backgrounder�and it works pretty nice. �I have been testing it with AIM and sometimes multiples of the same message are delivered. �I can live with that! �Hopefully this project will continue to develop and work out any bugs that pop up. Check it out!�

Thanks to @iphonepodcaster for the tip

So, after discussing with Lisa, I decided to get the new Iphone 3G. Her Nokia N75 has incredibly battery life, suffers from random mic malfunctions (but speakerphone works), and has already been replaced because the outside LCD failed.

So Chris, Jeff and I figured we would head to lunch at the lovely [sic] Nittany Mall. Twitter was an excellent resource for keeping up with what was going on locally. First, Dan said he heard there were 75 people outside the AT&T store downtown. Also, it was Arts Fest which is why we decided to avoid that area all together. Later, to my dismay, I found out that the last Iphones at the Mall were sold to a PSU colleague Chris (damn you! ).

We decided to call around to see if we could find out anything. We initially began calling in the morning and found that stores would ring 2 to 4 times and just hang up. Called the Apple Store in Pittsburgh. They said they had some but their was a huge line and it was like a mob scene. Figuring I was not getting an Iphone 3g on Friday, we went to lunch. After lunch, we decided to call around again. I called the store in Altoona, they had one back 16gb left. Too bad we needed three. Finally, Chris got a hold of the DuBois store (pronounced Du-Boyz, no I am not kidding) and they had many 8gb’s, but 2 black and 2 white 16gb Iphone 3Gs. The store is about an hour and 15 minutes away so we debating on going. The sales rep told Chris that they have not had anyone buy an Iphone in over 2 hours, so our chances were good. Off we went.

After parking at the wrong end of the DuBois Mall, we wound our way through the oddly maze-like mall and landed at the AT&T store to find that they sold one of the black 16gb’s but had 1 black and 2 white left. We roshambo’ed for them and I ended up with a black one. You think that is the happy ending, not even close!

Jeff went first with his activation. One line conversion, easy 5 minute process. They also started Chris’ activation (even though the rep wanted the commission for it and wanted to do each one of us 1 at a time). Chris had a similar setup I had, family plan and “handing down” his old (hehe, less than a year old) Iphone to his other line. This seemed to be a huge problem as they could not do this with the family plan and the new $30 Iphone data add on. The process they figured out (after about 2.5 hours of calling and waiting on the phone) was to make the plan an individual plan, activate the new Iphone, then go back to the family plan and credit back roll-over. Fine, just get it working I thought! Jeff has been waiting with an activated phone for over 2 hours.

In the end, they could not get the $20 old Iphone data plan to add to the handed-down Iphone on Chris’ account. On my account they could not get the new $30 Iphone added to mine line but was able to get the $20 added to Lisa’s line. So they had to fill out at ‘IT’ ticket. The rep told me to call back the next day and check on it. So we walked out with 1 complete working setup (lucky Jeff) and ours not working. Well, if you combine ours then we would have 1 working setup.

My big worry was getting data billed by the KB, but was assured I would be cleared of any of that if it exisited on my account. So I called AT&T on Saturday. The rep seemed fairly knowledgeable and after about 30 minutes on hold he said he was able to get the Iphone 3G data plan added. Great! He said the problem was that the check box was not clicked that I agreed to the terms and conditions. So I was feeling rather confident that was was finished. However, I started to feel worse when the rep launched into a story about not being able to install his printer because he did not put in the driver software CD!

So a few hours later I check my account to see if everything looked copacetic, and did not see that 3G data plan. Curious, I looked at Lisa’s line and sure enough, he removed her $20 Iphone data plan and added a $35 Iphone 3G plan with 1500 SMS. WTF! I went backwards from having 1 correct and 1 incorrect setup to having 2 incorrect setups.

Today, I call AT&T yet again. Found out the IT trouble tickets take 7 to 10 days to resolve. So I am sure at the end of the month I will have a $1000 bill from using a few gigs of data. However, was able to get Lisa’s $20 Iphone Data plan back. So after a ~4 hour process in store and over an hour on the phone, still have issues. Oh well, at least I have the new phone, right??

Interesting enough that the store manager was in a conference call with AT&T about the launch and he said AT&T told managers that this years launch was much better than last years. Somehow I have my doubts…

Found an interesting article over at Network World on the Iphone 3G playing Catch up and how most of the new Iphone features brings it into the year 2007. In it there are multiple points of contention (some well deserved) of the new features of the Iphone 3G, but others pretty much completely off the mark. I will not even dwell on the simple things missed in the post such as Bluetooth and VPN as noted by the comments. Some examples below:

Copy and Paste, from the people who brought you copy and paste. Wasn’t it the Mac and Lisa that brought the concept of cut/copy/paste out of the Xerox labs and into the hands of computer users all over the world? Thought so. How’d that get left off the iPhone 1.0 and 2.0 software versions. That one’s hard to fathom.

I do agree with this. Even though there might be a third party app to give this functionality, I feel that cut and paste is a fundamental part of the operating system and should be included directly from Apple. Who knows, 2.0 is not here, it still could be there when it is released.

ATT is still the only US authorized carrier. And ATT’s taking steps to help keep it that way (see below.) That’s like having a new pair of Nike shoes with the laces inseparably tied together. A limitation in Apple’s quest to sell 10m iPhones units this year. Bummer.

A lot of phone manufacturers do this, perhaps not as long as ATT has done it with Apple, but plenty only sell them with a particular carrier for some time before releasing them to other carriers. I mean this is a 3G technology, who else would sell it in the US, T-mobile?

A 32GB iPhone. When 16GBs just isn’t not enough. Can you say, memory hungry apps waiting gobble up your phone’s storage memory? Expect a repeat of what happened when the iPods supported video content – whoosh, where’d all that memory go? Time to shell out more dough to the Apple Store when our iPhone’s 8 and 16GB capacity isn’t enough. How’s that for planned obsolescence and more revenue for Apple.

Although there is a 32gb Ipod Touch, I think he is pushing it saying we need a 32gb Iphone. If anything they will come out with a 32gb Iphone down the road and bump the 8gb just like with the 16gb model. Quit crying for paying the early adopter tax. No one forces you to buy the phone.

Voice command interface. As much as Apple has raised the bar in the visual department, it’s severely lacking a voice command and voice record app interface. I happen to believe that voice interface is just as important or more so than visual interfaces for mobile devices. Try looking up a contact on the iPhone while driving down the highway at 75mph. On second thought, save several lives, and don’t. Wait until you have voice command and record interface for the iPhone

With 3rd party apps, I would be highly surprised if we did not see 3-5 voice dialing apps in the coming weeks. I really think you need to hedge judgement until the app store releases.

More closed, locked in hardware from Apple. Now there’s a guaranteed upgrade revenue stream for Jobs and more money out of our pockets for ya. And people complain about Microsoft soaking it to their customers. More reasons why Apple really is like 1984.

Again, no one has forced you to buy the first Iphone, no one is forcing you to buy the Iphone 3G, and no one is forcing you to buy the one after that. People want to buy these devices because there is no other like it in terms of operation, functionality, and style.

Why would this technology be any different than any other technology. The first computer I bought in 1996 for $2000, a Cyrix 120, would suck right about now. I did have to shell out money out of my pockets to buy a new one. You want new features, you have to pay for it. I again use my Blackberry as an example. I purchased a Blackberry 8700 to replace my 7100 to get EDGE network capability. No one expected RIM to give me a free upgrade phone, I had to ‘pay’ for the feature.

What Mr. Ashley is forgetting to mention is that this 2.0 update is free to current Iphone users. You know, the ones who have to shell “more money out of our pockets“. This update basically makes the phone very similar to 3G version for me since my hometown area will not have 3G (only lacking GPS). I see this post more of an anti-Apple rant rather than the Iphone playing catch up.

Today, Steve Jobs announced the newest piece of Apple technology, the Iphone 3G at WWDC set to go on sale July 11. The much anticipated Iphone has come to mixed reviews. I think that there are good and bad parts of the new Iphone, its cheaper price, and its new additions.

First, let me say that it came to me this morning that the new Iphone would not be available today (although I wanted it to be very much!). There was already a great amount of excitement surrounding WWDC, that Apple would be passing up a great PR opportunity by making it available today. Now it will get all the good press that it received last year at this time for the initial release of the Iphone. Well, after the announcement we now have a month to wait, contemplate, discuss, and dissect the new Iphone 3G.

The Good:

Price – The new Iphone 3G comes out at a somewhat surprising (but expected) price cut. The current 8G and 16gb Iphone is currently available for $399 and $499, respectively. The Iphone 3G comes in at $199 and $299. Both the current and 3G Iphones will require a 2 year agreement with AT&T (at least in the US).

3G Wireless – As expected, the new Iphone 3G comes with the next generation wireless technology, 3G. Speeds have been quoted to be 2.4 times faster than EDGE and slightly slower than Wi-Fi. AT&T currently offers 3G in 280 markets and expects to have it to 350 markets by the end of the year.

Integrated GPS – The Iphone 3G brings an integrated GPS (Global Positioning System). This opens the door for location aware applications and integration with the built-in Google Maps. I am sure that many more apps will come out in the new App Store (also debuting on July 11th). Geotagging photos is already built-in.

Flush headphone Jack – Finally, no special adapter to fit your favorite headphones. The headphone jack is flush mounted and still 3.5mm.

The Bad:

Data plan price – Although the price of the phone has dropped drastically, the Iphone 3G data plan is $10 more than EDGE, coming in at $30 per month. Calculated over the 2 year time, you will in fact pay more than the original Iphone with this new plan. Users will need to judge if the faster speed is worth it.

Not much of a difference from the current phone – Take the current generation Iphone, add Iphone 2.0 software, and you really are only getting the 3G speed and integrated GPS. If 3G is not available in your area yet, then you are only getting the GPS. After spending as much as $599 for a phone less than a year ago, will someone want to pay another $200 for a GPS?

Same Camera – The same 2MP camera available in the current Iphone is available in the Iphone 3G. Lots of people were predicting a 5MP camera, and some even a front-facing Video conference enabled camera. This is quite a disappointment for people expecting a better camera.

Dock sold separately – This really ticks me off with Apple. They always cut the accessories when they cut the price. Happened with the Ipod and the Dock, the notebooks with the Apple remote, and now the Iphone 3G and the dock. Estimated an extra $29 for the Dock. To top it off, Engadget reports that the current dock might not fit. Boo!!

Will I buy one?

The jury is still out. I doubt I will be waiting in line for one, but I am sure once I see someone else’s I will get one. Too bad the cheap price will probably drive the market for the old Iphones down. Funny my phone is 10 months old and I am calling it old!

Feel free to let me know what you think!

I was playing around on Apple’s Iphone WebApp site and found some pretty cool WebApps. The new January 08 software update that allows multiple home screens makes these even more interesting.

Twitter on ThinCloud: Nice interface for posting and browsing Twitter. This app is optimized for EDGE and is quite fast. The buttons are nice and big so it limits me from fat-fingering.

Podcaster: Often I find myself forgetting to sync my favorite podcasts. Now with Podcaster, I can import my Itunes podcast list and stream all my podcasts without having to download them to the phone. This will be great for people with limited space on their Iphone. The interface is quite nice and is very Itunes-esc.

FlyTunes: This webapp gives you access to quite a bit of streaming content such as musics, news, and sports. Two channels of interest to me if ESPN and BBC. The interface is laid out very well and is pretty useable over EDGE. Some channels take longer to buffer than others.