The iPhone SDK-OS is like the Palm OS -- and that's a good thing

When the SDK came out I was bemused to find similarities to the Palm OS world: No multitasking, data access limited to the application's data.

Since then we've learned that Apple's applications do multitask (if I actually owned an iPhone [2] I'd have noted that obvious fact, but I write these posts very quickly) and some iPhone partners (AOL, ?Adobe) will be allowed access to multitasking. For most developers though, developing for the iPhone OS X is rather like developing for Palm OS [1].

Fubo.org has made a persuasive case over the past few days that these are justified and measured constraints given the current state of iPhone development. The articles are well worth reading, but I particularly liked the fine way he concluded his last post:

furbo.org · More brain surgery…

...If you’re still unconvinced, let me ask you one final question: do you want to get IM notifications while you’re making a 911 call?

[1] One developer I read noted that the original Palm OS SDK had a more sophisticated 'wake me when an event matches my entry on the event registration queue' function than he found in the current iPhone SDK.

[2] Gordon's laws of acquisition mean I don't buy until my demands are met ...

iPhoto can't merge Libraries -- but neither can Aperture

What can I say?

Aperture: Merging Libraries confirms you ... can't merge Libraries.

You need to export project-by-project-by-project then import project-by-project-by ...

It's awe inspiring, really.

And now I own this sucker ...

Safari 3.1 STILL doesn't work properly - pasting into rich text fields

Safari 3.1 is out, and it's no better with rich text fields than Safari 3.0 was.

When I copy rich text to the clipboard, and paste into a Blogger rich text edit area, it frequently appears outside of the bounds of the text area. If I repeat the operation, it appears repeatedly "out of bounds".

There's no fix but to switch to HTML mode and paste into that text box.

Firefox/Camino don't have this problem.

Very annoying. I think Apple is going for force me to fire up my free developers account and file a bug report. Next time it happens I'll attack a screenshot to this post ...

Vote for the Google Calendar features you want ...

You can "vote" for the Google Calendar features you most want.

Go to Calendar Help Center and click on the "send suggestions" radio button.

On the next screen you can click "Suggest it" for the features you most want.

The one I want, a no-alarm default for appts and a kb shortcut to add/remove alerts, isn't on the list today. Lots of other good things are.

Vote once. Vote often.

Aperture is still slow

I've ordered Aperture 2.0, but my time with the trial version tells me Aperture is still slow.

It's not the old GPU/rendering story. That's not the problem.

The problem is that Aperture brings up the SBOD (spinning wheel) on very routine operations -- such as deleting images when in "P" (preview) mode. Thirty second timeouts are not uncommon.

These aren't operations that should push any machine. I assume they're related to threading issues with the underlying data storage mechanism.

There's still a lot of rework to be done on Aperture. The 1.0 code base must have been extremely problematic.

Visible Body - Internet Explorer Only

The Visible Body | 3D Human Anatomy sounded interesting -- but it's XP and IE only.

What a shame.

That's quite odd these days. Once upon a time insisting on IE and XP worked quite well, but I'm not sure that's true now.

Google Apps Calendar fix? Integrating identities.

Only last week I'd hit another snag in our family calendaring project:

Gordon's Tech: Calendar sharing bugs and limitations in Google Apps vs Google Standard

.... I'm running into design limitations and bugs with Google Calendar and Google Apps Calendars. At the moment they include:

• A Google Calendar has both a "Private Address" and a "Calendar Address". The Private Address enables sharing with a single individual. A Google Apps Calendar has a "Google App Domain Address" and a "Calendar Address". It's likely that Google re-purposed the "Private Address" function to enable "Domain sharing", but that means you can't privately share a Google Apps Calendar outside of a Google App domain.
• There's an bug in Google Apps Calendar. Under certain operations it gets stuck in a mode where it will only share busy/free information -- even if you enable public sharing at both the domain and calendar level....

Today the problems have resolved, and my Google Apps Calendar now shows the both a standard and a Public calendar address.

I hope Google's fixed the bug(s), but I suspect the unexpected resolution is due to slow propagation and completion of certain changes to Calendar settings. For now, anyway, I seem to have a fix.

Now that I'm moving forward again, I'll recap. This might be useful to someone.

I've described our family calendaring project previously. Using Google Apps to create our eNom administered family domain was easy. That gave each of us email and calendars.

Emily's email has lived on the Google Apps account for months, with IMAP sync from two our Macs and access via Google's Java client for the Blackberry. Her Google Apps Calendar also synchronizes with her Blackberry using an other Google Java app.

That left me as a problem. I'm waiting for the iPhone to meet my minimal demands, so I'm on my second Palm Tungsten E2. That devices syncs with Outlook at home (work is more complex, I'll omit it). Now that Outlook can sync with a Google Apps Calendar my home Outlook is synchronizing with my Google Apps Calendar every hour or so.

Only one problem remained.

I have two primary (and several secondary) Google/Google App identities. One is in the family domain, the other is much older and has a plain gmail.com address. The older one is bound to years of email, Google search results, blogger*, etc. Google now lets me keep a single Google App identity and a single Gmail identity running simultaneously so I can work with both, but it's a pain to have two calendars. Two emails are fine, but two calendars is no good.

Now that's fixed. Here's what I did:

1. Google Apps: In Domain Management set the limit on extra-domain sharing with authenticated users to maximally permissive.
2. In my Google Apps Calendar added my Gmail account with maximal control (this didn't used to work).
3. Set my Google Apps email to forward to my Gmail account -- so I get email reminders.
   
4. In my Gmail account cleaned out my Gmail Calendar and renamed it "Don't Use!"

Now I can sync my Google Apps Calendar to my Palm via Outlook, I can quickly add items to that Calendar from my regular Gmail account, and my wife can see my personal calendar and add items to it.

The only minor glitch is that my Gmail defaults to using my legacy Gmail Calendar for event creation, but it's not hard to switch target calendars in the drop down box. The name for my old calendar, "Don't Use", reminds me to switch.

So far, not too bad.

* Google Apps accounts can't join a Blogger blog btw.