The kid's iPhone - configuration and AT&T

I thought it would be simple to give my kid my old 3G. I knew it was AT&T locked, but the phone was out of contract.

Turns out the contract rules are much trickier than I'd thought. They are so tricky even AT&T reps violently disagree about the rules. As near as I can tell it didn't matter that I'd paid off the subsidy for my iPhone. I was getting a new iPhone 4 and a new contract, and that ended AT&T's interest in my particular phone.

What seems to be more important was that he didn't have a contract; he'd never had a subsidized phone. So putting his GSM card in my iPhone didn't trigger a mandatory data plan. So far. Grrr!

Thanks to AT&T managed account policies he can't use any data services. When he's in a WiFi setting he gets net access, outside the home he has texting and standalone apps. For very good reasons we've locked out Safari, YouTube and App Installs. He can't purchase music.

His synchronization setup is described in a separate post. We don't use MobileMe (so broken), his Calendar, Contacts and Mail connect via ActiveSync to our Google Apps family domain. I sync selected apps, music and television/movies from our family account. All of the apps, even the games, serve an educational purpose. So he can watch hours of TV, but it's all Blue Ocean documentary. There are good reasons for this.

He loves his iPhone. He's very careful with it, as he was with his prior phone. Obviously things will be trickier when school starts. It's not substantially more costly than many other phones, but it may have more theft appeal.

As a computer, his iPhone has one large advantage over his desktop accounts. On the desktop Apple and Google together have totally broken OS X Parental Controls (MobileMe is the worst). On the iPhone, once you remove Safari and YouTube, you have Wikipanion and and Wolfram Alpha and Google Earth and Public Radio.app and New York Times.app. It's an approach with a future.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: The multi-iPhone family - two approaches
• Gordon's Tech: Gordon’s idiosyncratic revenue-free iPhone 4 and iOS 4 review
• Gordon's Notes: Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are?

Update 8/5/10: Turns out the iPhone parental controls are as feeble as their OS X equivalents.

iOS 4 still has iOS 2 text truncation bug

This is an ancient bug, but it's not fixed in iOS 4.

Gordon's Notes: iPhone 2.2: Great phone. Great toy. Not for business (2008)

... Business people always stick travel itineraries into calendar item notes. I stick text versions of CVs into Contacts. The iPhone truncates the text display of my itinerary (what hotel?) and my contact note. It doesn't actually truncate the data, only the display....

I just tested on my iPhone 4. If anything it's worse. The calendar notes view shows only a part of the text. In edit view you see more when you scroll down, but it's truncated now.

Sad.

FileMaker Go for the iPhone

I'd given up on it, but FileMaker has now released a $20 FM Pro companion for the iPhone (and iPad!) -- FileMaker Go. It requires iOS 4. The available documentation is in a technical brief.

It does NOT support synchronization. You copy FM 7 (7!) or later files to the iPhone. It can be a client to a FM server database. From the tech brief it looks like it could be an application development environment (scripting).

It does NOT support encryption. Your data is only as protected as the phone itself; you can't assign a secure password to your password database, for example.

If it had encryption, I'd buy it.

Pairing an iPhone 4 with an Apple bluetooth keyboard

For the past two years I've been looking forward to using an external keyboard with my iPhone, much as we used to use an external kb with our Palm devices. I now have an iPhone 4, so I tried pairing it with my 27" iMac keyboard (already paired with the iMac).

I followed this user guide procedure, but it didn't work at first:

1. In Settings, choose General > Bluetooth.

2. If Bluetooth isn’t already turned on, tap the Bluetooth switch.

3. Press the power button on the Apple Wireless Keyboard to turn it on.

4. On iPhone, tap the entry for the keyboard under Devices.

Once the keyboard is paired with iPhone, it connects whenever the keyboard is within range (up to 30 feet). You can tell the keyboard is connected if the onscreen keyboard doesn’t appear when you tap in a text field.

The iPhone Bluetooth settings simply showed the spinning "wheel" next to "Devices" and the phrase "Now discoverable". I think the problem was that the keyboard was already paired to my iMac. My Bluetooth peripheral experience is limited, but this seems a sensible if inevitably confusing behavior.

It took a while to get things to work. At one point the iPhone said it found a "Wireless Keyboard" but not an "Apple Wireless Keyboard". I did the following (not all necessary I'm sure):

1. Went very far away from my iMac and down a flight of stairs. In my house Bluetooth really reaches.
2. Removed batteries from kb and reinserted.
3. Followed above procedures but pressed and held the power button until it went off.
4. Pressed the power button on the kb until it started blinking.

Then the iPhone found the keyboard. I tapped the entry and was asked to enter a code on the keyboard.

They then paired.

Once the two are paired the iPhone's keyboard no longer appears when the kb is in range. I turned off Bluetooth to get it back.

To repair the kb to my iMac I again held the power button until it powered down. Then I held it until it restarted and began blinking. It then reconnected.

This was trickier than I'd expected, but now I know it works. I'll be looking for an iPhone specific bluetooth keyboard that includes a cradle to hold the iphone, an iPhone-touch-screen compatible stylus to facilitate interaction with a mounted device, a form fact that is more compact than Apple's kb, and an optional charger.

Update: A bit more on unpairing from Apple's excellent iPhone iOS4 user guide (it's on my Reader.app bookshelf in my iPhone and it's a default shortcut in Safari on new installs):

Once the keyboard is paired with iPhone, it connects whenever the keyboard is within range (up to 30 feet). You can tell the keyboard is connected if the onscreen keyboard doesn’t appear when you tap in a text field.

Switch the language when using a hardware keyboard: Press and hold the Command key, then tap the space bar to display a list of available languages. Tap the space bar again to choose a different language.

Disconnect a wireless keyboard from iPhone: Press and hold the power button on the keyboard until the green light goes off.

iPhone disconnects the keyboard when it’s out of range.

Unpair a wireless keyboard from iPhone: In Settings, choose General > Bluetooth and tap the entry for the keyboard under Devices, then tap “Forget this Device.”

iOS 3 bug with recurring Exchange meetings changed in iOS 4.

Apple just can't manage to get this one right. I tested an old iOS Exchange Server calendaring bug with Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007.

In iOS 3 if you declined an instance of a recurring meeting you removed all the meetings from your calendar.

In iOS 4 if you decline an instance of a recurring meeting you remove it from your iPhone calendar (good) but not from your Outlook calendar (very bad).

Fail.

Deep sigh. Apple does not deserve its reputation for "quality". Design yes, quality no.

I'll retest with iOS 4.1 when it's out.

Annals of Adobe evil - writing into track 0

I found this occult discussion when searching about encyrption utilities (TrueCrypt in this case) and drive repair (Spinrite) ...

STEVE [GIBSON]:  It turns out that another Adobe utility - I don't know what it is with Adobe and track 0.  But it turns out that he's learned that their acrotray.exe utility, which is some sort of something that lives down in the tray of Windows, is also writing into track 0 and wiped out TrueCrypt.  He rebooted, and he typed in his password.  Nothing happened.  And he said he saw his life pass before his eyes.  Then he realized, wait a minute, I've got that CD.  So he booted from the CD.  It was able to, of course, restore that track and the boot track, and he was able to get back into Windows.  And again, by juggling back and forth a little bit, he figured out what it was that was causing the problem.  And so this is two different things now from Adobe relative to, I guess to Macromedia.  Or I think Macromedia was the other one.  And so it's something DRMish that Adobe is doing is really causing problems.  And he did do some browsing around and confirmed that lots of other people are having the same problem with Adobe's software and its collision with the TrueCrypt bootloader.

Writing to track 0 as part of a DRM process is really nasty.

This is the sort of thing that makes geeks want Adobe to go away.

Take Control of Permissions in Snow Leopard

I really wanted this book about six months ago, when I was fighting a losing battle with OS X permissions (they suck) - Take Control of Permissions in Snow Leopard by Brian Tanaka.

It has sentences like this (emphases mine) ...

When a new file or sub- folder is created, the ACL of the enclosing folder is inspected for rules (ACEs) that are marked to be inherited, and those rules are added to the ACL of the new file or folder. ACL inheritance is static—it happens only when the file or folder is created. If the ACL of the enclosing folder changes, the ACLs of items already in the folder will not reflect those changes: only new child items will inherit the new rules.

Permissions are the weakest aspect of OS X. The default framework was archaic in the 90s, and the only slightly less archaic "modern" ACL framework has no GUI tools. All Mac geeks need this book.

It's normally $10, but I got it for $5 since TidBITS is promoting their new customer management system. (Sale ends 8/3, sorry.)

If you're a former TidBITS user you need to do a password reset to get your new password.

The details are in an email you probably deleted. I had a devil of time figuring out how to Login, turns out the "Login" text in top right is not a description for the neighboring navigation drop down, it's an atypical button. Really, they needed to make it either a true button or a true link, not bold formatted text. I love TibBITS, but really guys ...

Anyway, you need the book.

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