Recent updates to my iPhone notes post

I keep finding more good and bad iPhone features.

Other than the missing cut and paste (I'm sure it's hung up by patent fights), the current bizarre problems are search and long launch times ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone notes you won't read elsewhere:

...The Address Book was very slow to launch with 2.0 (4 secs on my phone), but Google Mobile search also searches the Address Book -- and it's fast. Apple 'improved' the launch time with version 2.1 by speeding address book launch and slowing down the launch time of every other iPhone app.

Search on the Address book is first and last name only. If you define a company name, search is on the company name only....

BBC mobile page for all and iPhone iPlayer for the UK

The BBC has a mobile page. Using the preferences link at page bottom you can experiment with various versions and bookmark the one you like. I have a version on my iPhone "home page" as an icon -- next to Google News mobile, the disappointing NYT reader, and the excellent Google Reader Mobile.

The BBC has also announced streaming audio support for the iPhone over WiFi only using their evil iPlayer service. This service allows only 7 days of access, in contrast to a far superior podcast alternatives that allows unlimited access after download. Evil, definitely.

Earlier versions of iPlayer were Flash based and wouldn't work on an iPhone, so they've had to concede to Apple's non-Flash policy.

The BBC announced this, but they don't say how to access iPlayer. If you go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer via a 3G connection from the US you get the Flash version -- it won't work. Comments point out that iPlayer service is UK only, so US users would need some kind of proxy service to test.

gPhone oops

On the one hand, Apple is giving geeks The Fear.

So we feel forbidden love. On the other hand ...

T-mobile G1: Android and T-Mobile G1's Five Most Obnoxious Flaws

Topping the list, it's tightly integrated with your Google account—so tightly that you can only use one Google account with the phone.

Last time I looked I had about six Google App accounts, two of which I use pretty regularly -- including on my iPhone.

Forbidden love - the open G1 gPhone

Apple's rejections of iPhone apps that "confuse" users by "duplicating" Apple functionality are now top secret.

So it's not surprising that we geek iPhone users feel the love that dare not speak its name ...

A First Look at Googles New Phone - Pogue’s Posts - New York Times Blog

... Android, and the G1, are open. Open, open, open, in ways that would make Steve Jobs cringe. You can unlock this phone after 90 days—that is, use any SIM card from any carrier in it. The operating system is free and open-source, meaning that any company can make changes without consulting or paying Google. The App store is completely open, too; T-Mobile and Google say they won’t censor programs that they don’t approve of, as Apple does with the iPhone store. Yes, even if someone writes a Skype-like program that lets people avoid using up T-Mobile cellular voice minutes.

Android is not as beautiful or engaging as the iPhone’s software, but it’s infinitely superior to Windows Mobile—and it’s open. The G1 is only the first phone to use it, the first of many; it’s going to be an exciting ride.

T-Mobile already supports VOIP over WiFi, so the Skype-like option isn't appealing. It comes with the phone.

T-Mobile and AT&T are both SIM based. The no-contract cost of the G1 is about the same as the contract-extension cost of the iPhone. So it might be iPhone-price competitive for a current AT&T customer to buy a G1 with T-Mobile, plug in the AT&T SIM card, and cancel the T-Mobile service.

Gee, you don't imagine they thought of that?

Go Google, Go.

(Alas, I wish I could say Apple will pay for their closed shop strategy, but I'm not prepared to bet against the tyranny of the mean.)

Sharepoint list or library corruption bug: Do not set the “required” value on any Sharepoint column

I don’t generally post on Sharepoint bugs, though I run into a lot of them at work. I’ll make an exception here because this is a nasty bug, and I wasn’t able to locate any descriptions of via Google. So if anyone else runs into it, this post might be helpful.

This bug manifested with a Sharepoint 2007 document library. This library had custom fields (columns, attributes, metadata, etc) like “group”, “tags”, “author” etc.

One day we were unable to see or edit those custom columns in the standard (web) view. It was as though they had vanished. We could see them in the Access/Excel-like “data sheet” view, so the data was there. We could even edit the values in that view.

It wasn't easy for our IT group to figure out what had happened. It seems that under some circumstances setting a field as "required", when rows already exist with null values for the field, will corrupt a Sharepoint list.

It can only be repaired, with difficulty using, Sharepoint Designer.

There is no fix date from Microsoft this bug. For the time being the required attribute value should not be used in a Sharepoint list.

There are worse things about Sharepoint (the world’s most inane file share and document management system) but they’re design flaws, not bugs. Up to now this is the nastiest SP 2007 bug I’ve personally experienced.

Jacob uses Dappit to create a public RSS feed from my Google Shared Feed web page

Jacob takes pity on my frustrations with the unsharable Google Reader shared items feed.

He creates a Dappit feed from the shareable shared items web page version of the shared items.

Family Medicine Notes

... Poor John. He couldn't get an RSS feed out of google reader without a COOKIE. Enter Dappit Kinda nuts to get the RSS from what is essentially a screen-scrape of the HTML. Oh well .. in desperate times, we take desperate measures."

Lord, what a hack! My brain recoils from the horror.

I couldn't get the Dappit link to load on first test, but I'll try again tonight. Maybe this will embarrass Google?

At the least I'll have another Feed generator service to compare to the 2-3 like services I use to monitor Dyer's feedless page (version 2).

Let loose the geeks of tech war: Google on Android vs. Google on iPhone

I use my iPhone with Google Apps - not MobileMe.

I'd love to use MobileMe -- I'm not deterred by the cost. The problem is that MobileMe sucks. No public APIs. No calendar sharing. Exactly the same Notes and Tasks functionality as Google Apps (none).

Google Apps are simply vastly better than the MobileMe alternatives.

So my iPhone Mail.app syncs with Gmail. iPhone Calendar.app syncs, via my iCal/Spanning Sync desktop, with Google Calendar. My Notes and Tasks (Appigo Notebook and Tasks.app sync with Toodledo). Of course Maps.app works with Google Maps, Google Reader Mobile works with Google Reader, and Google.app search works with ...

You get the picture, as my son Ben would say.

Apple either doesn't get the picture, or they can't execute on the server.

Problem is, the picture's not complete. I can't, say, sync iPhone Calendar.app directly with Google Calendar. My wife's Blackberry Pearl can do that, thanks to Google software, but my iPhone can't. This is a big problem, and it's a problem owned by ... Apple.

Not good.

On the other hand, that won't be a problem for the Android ... (emphases mine):

Official Google Mobile Blog: Google on Android

At Google, we develop products that we love to use ourselves. For example, we're avid users of Search, Gmail, Maps, and many others. But for those of us in mobile, it's tough. Not all products work the same on all devices, and although we try and optimize for each device, we often run into challenges specific to certain mobile phone platforms. I, for one, used to carry three devices with me all day. I love my iPhone for its powerful browser and music player. I use my BlackBerry for Gmail and Calendar (and occasionally Brick Breaker), and I carry a Nokia N-series phone because of its camera and YouTube application.

The first Android-powered phone, announced today by T-Mobile, comes 'with Google'. The following Google applications are preloaded on the device: Search, Maps, Gmail with Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk, and YouTube. There are a few things I'm particularly excited about:

• Easy to use. It's never been easier to use Google on your phone. With single sign-in, you can log in to your Google account and have instant access to all your favorite Google products. No messing around with settings, your login never expires, and everything just works. If you don't have a Google account yet, you can set one up on your phone and be up and running in seconds.
• Fully synchronized. Your emails, contacts, calendar entries, Google Talk chats are fully synchronized with Gmail and Calendar on the web. New events are pushed in real-time to your phone and any changes you make on-the-go are immediately available on the web. If you ever lose or break your phone, all your data is safe and secure in the cloud.
• Designed to work together. Search is now available as a feature in many applications, including non-Google ones, such as the music player. While you're listening to a song -- like something from Depeche Mode -- just 'long-press' the artist's name. You'll see a menu pop up that let's you search Google for the Depeche Mode Wikipedia entry, or search YouTube for the music video. The contact application lets you see your friend's IM status, view his address on a map, and communicate with him using Gmail or Google Talk. And, of course, you can call or text him as well.

Depeche Mode? Shades of my ancient Quebecer (eng) past.

Emily's Blackberry isn't the greatest. I'd like to get something better. It has to work well with our family Google Apps. Could be she'll be getting an Android.

Apple needs to get their *** in sync. They need to either match Google on the server side (impossible) or fully support Google Apps as competitors to Mobile Me.

Or my next phone, won't be an iPhone. I may not be the only one ...

Thanks Google. I love these bloodless tech wars.

How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes?

Google Reader provides all kinds of nice feeds from your "folders" (tags) and your shared items. Most of 'em can be managed by any feed reader, including Yahoo Pipes.

Except for the Shared Items Feed. That one requires a cookie corresponding to a Google Gmail account. I'd like to be able to share manipulate that feed, so I've posted a question on the Google Reader Group:

Share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process in Yahoo Pipes - How Do I? | Google Groups

Public Google Reader folders (tags) have feeds. They don't require authentication; I can manage them in Yahoo Pipes, anyone can see them.

Things are different from the Google Reader Shared Items (and probably starred items too). They have a feed, but it requires a Google (Gmail?) account to be read.

For example, here's the Atom feed for my shared items:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/06457543619879090746/state/com.google/reading-list

I think anyone with a Google account can view it (may have to log in) this feed using Google Reader.

I can't add it to Bloglines though, and Yahoo Pipes can't process it.

I do realize that anyone can view the web version of this:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06457543619879090746

but that's not what I want to share. I want to be able to publicly share and process the shared items feed including sharing it with people who don't have a Gmail account.

Is there a way to do this (short of using a feed proxy)?

I doubt there's a solution today, but maybe Google will rethink this requirement ...

Update 2/2/09: I find a fix from a different angle.

Don't throw out those OS 9 apps just yet ...

Sooner or later I suspect there will be an OS 9 emulator that can run some of those Classic apps. So keep the CDs around, and a copy of Classic too ...

MacWindows: The web site for Macintosh-Windows integration:

... the development of both of those emulators has veered in that direction [running OS 9 in Leopard]. I think that Mac users have more interest in the emulators now....

Appigo and Toodledo: running into sync problems

Synchronization, which includes messages between distinct data models [1], is heck.

I really appreciate my iPhone's ToDo.app and my Firefox-rendered ToodleDo task list. Problem is, they've stopped playing nice together. From a post I wrote to the Appigo Todo Google Group:

I sync Appigo ToDo.app with Toodledo.

Recently, I'm having problems. They're nasty because I can tolerate a lot of bugs, but I can't tolerate sync bugs that cost me data.

The details of my current problems aren't all that important to this post. I'm seeing items on ToDo.app fail to move to Toodledo, and I'm seeing changes made to Toodledo be reversed on sync with ToDo.app

That's bad, but the real problem is -- who owns these problems?

They could be Appigo bugs, Toodledo bugs, or emergent bugs shared between the two. I wouldn't be surprised if the problems I'm seeing are all three!

I'm a paying customer for both Appigo and Toodledo -- but I don't want to file two bug reports.

My gut sense, and I have some experience in my real job to support this, that sync is very hard when one vendor controls both ends of the transaction. It's damned near impossible when two vendors are involved.

Real soon now we're going to have to get to a situation where one vendor is responsible for the end-to-end transaction -- or Appigo is going to have to get extremely close to either ToodleDo or RTM.

In the meantime, who will own these problems?

This is what could kill Appigo's superb iPhone apps. If Apple ever produces a task tool, even if it's much inferior to Appigo's product, they'll have the huge advantage of controlling the MobileMe, iCal and iPhone data models and the message model.

I'm hoping Appigo finds a solution, but it's a damned tough problem. This has broken many a company.

[1] See HL-7.

Lessons from the messages of hapdaniel

I've been trying to use Yahoo Pipes to create new streams from my Google Reader feeds.

I've run into a parsing problem (Pipes may not support parsing feeds that require cookies) and a limitation of Pipes' Boolean logic (All A not In B).

I both cases "hapdaniel" answered my questions, though my problems are not yet solved.

Which led me to look at all messages by hapdaniel.

I've looked at the Pipes documentation. This message stream is more useful.

There's a lesson here, that I'm slowly learning. Whenever you receive a useful response on a message board, you ought to mine all related messages. Most forums allow one to see all messages of a member, almost all allow one to search for a string. These are valuable information streams.

So who is hapdaniel? A hobbyist with deep technical knowledge? A Pipes developer moonlighting in the forums? A covert tech support person? I think we see all 3 in these settings.

In some cases, it might be worth adding these information streams to a Google Custom Search engine.

iPhone app bypasses phone trees

via a Jacob Reider share:

Direct Line Saves iPhone Users From Automated Call Hell

... Add this to your list of must have iPhone applications. Direct Line (iTunes link) is a service that helps you automatically navigate phone trees to get right to an operator (exactly what companies don’t want you to do).

Install the application, browse of search the included companies, and select the one you want. Direct Line then calls the number and preselects the appropriate choices to get you to an actual person...

Costs $1. I'll try it. Jacob also links to Fonolo, a web site that does even more.

I don't mind smart, fast, well structured phone trees. It's just that they're quite rare...

Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes

[Update: I thought this was working, but it turned out I was using the wrong feed. When I substituted my true Shared Item feeds Yahoo Pipes was unable to parse it. I'll see if i can fix things up, but I'll leave the post as an example of what I'd like to do with Pipes.]

I love my Google Reader shares, as can be seen on our family news page. I particularly appreciate being able to "star" and "share" items using Google Reader Mobile.

 Of course there's always room for improvement. Google lets me tag blogs and share by tag ("folder"), but I can't sum blogs and I can't filter, for example, all my shared items save those that belong to the tag "politics".

The politics is the problem. I am, shall we say, not enthused with the GOP. Now it is true that all my friends feel pretty much the same way, but that is not true of my colleagues. If I give them my Google shared items feed address they'll find it a mixed blessing.

 That's where Yahoo Pipes come in. Yahoo Pipes can be used to filter out, say, iPhone posts. Pipe are cool, even Googlers like 'em. I was hoping I could create a Pipe of form [All A not in B] where A is my Google Reader shared item feed and B is my Google Reader politics feed, but I don't think that's supported. On other hand I can filter out posts containing Cheney, Bush, McCain, Palin and even Obama.

That's not optimal of course. It will eliminate many news stories, and some horticulture. I'll see what else I can do, but in the meantime I'll test pipes.yahoo.com/jfaughnan/lesspolitics. I've added it to my Google Reader shares, so I suppose I can now create recursive shares ..


Update 2/2/09: I find a fix from a different angle.

Apple's ads lie. Who knew?

I don't watch TV, so I never saw Apple's iPhone ads until I watched this hilarious video comparing real world performance to Apple's iPhone ads

iPhone 3G Owners Are Using Less Internet Than AT&T Expected: Blame Crappy Service (AAPL, T)

... In the meantime, we remind you of this video, which accurately shows the difference between Apple's pretend 3G iPhone experience and the real thing."

The ads are ridiculous -- a quad core desktop with a GB/sec fiber connection doesn't surf that quickly -- the servers aren't that responsive.

I enjoy using my 3G iPhone to surf the web, but it ain't nothin' like the commercials. Just as well I never saw them.

So are there are any legal limits to this sort of thing?

Web site for swap of defective 3G iPhone USB power supply

If your tiny 3G iPhone USB power supply doesn't have a green dot, you need to go to this web site to order a replacement: Apple - Support - Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program.

It takes just a minute, you need to know your Apple store account and you need your phone to look up the serial number.

Apple will send a replacement - same size and form, but with a green dot. We're supposed to return the defective unit, rather than, say, keep it and have two.

Tough call, but honesty will doubtless force me to return mine in the prepaid mailer.