Unlikely Words » iphone

Downgrading my iPhone 3G from iOS 4 to iOS 3.1.3

aaron cohen — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 21:23:50 +0000

In September, I made the mistake of upgrading my iPhone 3G from OS 3.1 to OS 4.0, making the phone a lot less useful and losing visual voicemail as a feature. (I had a big event coming up and Eventbrite told me their app would allow me to scan tickets with my phone. I said, "Really? It will work on a 3G running 3.0?" They said, yes, really. The event was looming and I needed to test the app ahead of time and so when it didn't work with 3.0, I upgraded to 4.0. Come to find out, the scanning didn't work on a 3G at all. Thank you, Eventbrite.) Since I upgraded, my 3G has been beset with some minor and major issues that make it much less useful than before. Some tasks, like browsing are usually OK, but Safari sometimes takes a while to load, other tasks like using Google Maps go from horribly slow to completely useless. Foursquare check ins can take minutes. The phone app stalls a lot when trying to make a call and, most importantly, visual voicemail does not work at all. I can still get voicemails, but there is no notification of their presence.

Yesterday, at Tim's suggestion I decided to try downgrading my phone. It did not go as planned. Recboot didn't work the way it was supposed to, and at one point, my phone was a brick for an hour. Immediately after downgrading to 3.1.3, I was left with a phone that didn't have any of my data, but did give me visual voicemail. The back up I made before starting was gone so I used a back up from 9/17 running 3.1.3.

The phone functions as it did then, much faster on Foursquare and Google Maps, and tethering works again. This would all be wonderful except I again don't have visual voicemail. I'm opposed to wiping it clean and starting over because I don't think I'll be able to download working versions of the apps I use.

I'm going to try to hang on for the iPhone 5, which will hopefully come out in July. Any ideas? Would jailbreaking the phone give me visual voicemail back?

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Update: Visual Voicemail is back after 4 months. After trying to reset the settings, I removed the AT&T Profile in the Profiles section of the Settings (I think Settings ---> Network Settings ----> Profiles). I restarted the phone after that and some test VMs I'd been leaving the last couple days showed up. I guess I don't have an excuse for not calling you back now.

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Facebook/iPhone Contact Sync

aaron cohen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 05:47:00 +0000

The latest update to Facebook's iPhone app offers push updates, which is nice. Also, the ability to sync your iPhone contacts with your Facebook contacts, which sounds nice, but ruh roh, what's this? "Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information." To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn't have minded sending the info to FB, but this warning is so sketchy as to be alarming. FB is now saying that you're not responsible for your privacy, your friends are. How does that make any sense? I wonder if this is an example of FB's last few privacy moves. Overreach inappropriately and then walk it back if there's an uproar. What do you think?

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iPhone runs Boston Marathon

aaron cohen — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:30:51 +0000

My buddy Jason ran the Boston Marathon dressed as an iPhone to create awareness for his iPhone app RunKeeper. He finished in just around 4 hours, has plantar fasciitis, and didn't do much training. Seems like a win to me.

Edited to add a comment to video I saw somewhere (can't remember where), "Finally an app that runs."

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Is Google Voice for Me?

aaron cohen — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:44:58 +0000

I don't get enough phone calls to need Google Voice, not that I don't want it, and Pogue makes me think I could get rid of my text messaging plan and text with impunity?

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Apple Gives You a New iPhone if Your Old One Breaks

aaron cohen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:11:07 +0000

I don't know what's more remarkable, how often I've heard of the 3G iPhones crapping out because of hardware issues or how easy it is to get a new phone from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store when it does. Seriously, this seems like the hidden story of the 3G phone. My guess is Apple knew very quickly that the 3Gs weren't ready for primetime and went against about 25 years of corporate policy to make it easy to replace a malfunctioning product. I just got a new one today and I'm psyched!

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Readability

matt — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:06:24 +0000

Readability is the greatest thing ever. It's a little bookmarklet from Arc90 that strips away all of the clutter on a page, and just displays the text content in a nice, clean, readable format. I really like it for, say, reading a long article on the web, but where it really rocks is on the iPhone. Seriously, do yourself a favor: set up the bookmarklet (I use the "eBook" style, large text, narrow margins) in Safari and sync your bookmarks to your iPhone, and suddenly discover that you have the option to not make your eyes hurt anymore.

Via Kottke, where I learned about Readability, I see that some guy named Michael Donohoe objects and has created some anti-Readability JavaScript. His objections are both stupid: they boil down to (1) "Wah, you can't view my content in any other layout than the one I designed," and (2) "What about my precious ad revenue?" Objection 1 I think we can all agree is pretty pointless, since this is the web, and in a world with user stylesheets, mobile browsers, Greasemonkey, and lynx, you don't get to control how your readers experience your content. Get over it. Objection 2 skips over the fact that visitors to your site have to load your page first, ads and all, before they can wave Readability's magic wand over it, and honestly anyone sophisticated to install and use a bookmarklet isn't going to click on a banner ad anyway.

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Best iPhone App?

aaron cohen — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:36:29 +0000

I love the iPhone. I use mine incessantly. Mostly I use Mail, Safari, Google Apps, and Facebook. Maybe I'm just jaded, but most of the applications on the App store are garbage and don't do anything terribly exciting. The other morning I downloaded the AccuWeather GPS-enabled iPhone app, though, and wow. This is the weather App for which you've been waiting. It uses GPS to give you the temperature at your current location, plus a "feels like" temperature. Plus there's a radar section , finally. And to top it off a risk bar set up. It's not perfect, but it's the most perfect free weather App I've found. Also, it's one of the more useful applications. Anybody have thoughts on other useful applications? Leave them in the comments. (By the way, the working definition for useful is something like "Not a light saber, zippo, or glass of beer."

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Since writing this post a couple weeks ago, I've noticed a few quirks in the app that I would change if I was building the BEST iPhone app. If you're looking at the 5-day forecast and you switch to a day a couple days away, it goes back to today when you toggle between night and day. Also, you can't view today's forecast more than a few hours into the future? It would be good if you could hit 'next' and move forward. Fact remains, it's still more useful than all the others and I want to know what you're using.

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Update: Thanks to digiphile in the comments for pointing out my error in leaving out Pandora. I was remiss. I don't use it much, but that's a great app. Also, since iTunes started streaming podcasts, I appreciate it even more.

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BusRyda

aaron cohen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:48:55 +0000

BusRyda is a mobile web app that makes it super easy to find a bus to take you somewhere at sometime. There's even a trip planner, too. The website is designed specifically with the iPhone in mind, which makes having an iPhone even better. I think there are a lot of features that could be added to BusRyda, but it doesn't sound like the developer is close to done. We'll see how it grows.

(Via Bostonist)

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The iPhone Experience, or iPhonica!!!

aaron cohen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:22:34 +0000

We got iPhones last weekend and I thought I would note down some of my initial thoughts and questions. Some have been answered, and some I'll just put out there for the internets to answer if they can. After a week, I'm pretty pleased. Except for a few features, it hasn't completely blown my mind, but my expectations were higher than anything I've ever had expectations for.
Without further adieu, and in no particular order, my questions, observations, and experiences, with answers when found, are below the fold:

*Does the iPhone play AVIs? No.

*Wrong iTunes account set up on iPhone? When I got the iPhone, Oliva Schow's iTunes account was assigned to it. I'm not sure if this was because of the computer used to set up the phone, or if the phone had already been out on the street. Anyone else experience this?

*Porting the number? Someday I will write up the story of the 3 weeks I was without a phone when Sprint tried to port my number over from ATT 4 years ago. This time, I got a text message an hour after leaving the store saying that there was an issue porting my number. Needless to say, I was nervous. Apparently, however, the password had been entered incorrectly and the operator was able to get it going for me. The fact that they have an entire call center devoted to call porting was a refreshing change from 4 years ago, but it still took 16 hours or so for the port to complete.

*Contact birthdays in iCal? I like to enter the birthdays of my contacts into the address book, but there didn't used to be an easy way to do it. Now it seems like there is, but I don't use iCal anymore. Can you do this with Google Calendar, or automagically on the iPhone.

*No video purchase off of the iTunes store? Nope.

*Battery came somewhat charged? The battery came about 75% charged, which meant I could play with it in the car on the way home. I liked that.

*No plastic caps on the USB cable. I'd heard Apple had try to environmentalize their packaging and one way they did it was by not including the caps for the USB cord that I always ended up losing anyway. Noted.

*Problems!!! 3 days after bringing the baby home, there was a total failure. I couldn't get the iPhone out of phone mode (an ironic problem to have), so I tried to reset it. It wouldn't get past the white apple screen, so I tried to restore it. I thought that did it, but there a VM indicator that wouldn't go away. I've had phones that perpetually showed a voice or text message indicator that was off, and these are not phones you want to use. Also, the date and time was seriously off. I could understand if the time zone was off, and one of my favorite sayings is, "It's X 'o clock somewhere," but let's be honest, there's no way it was 5:27 AM on May 9th, last Wednesday night at 8:43 PM. I reset again and again it wouldn't get past the white apple screen. I restored again, got it working, and made an appointment the next morning at the Apple Store. I sat with Jake at the Boylston St store at 8:50 AM and was steeling myself for battle. Jake was unfazed by the seeming software issues, so I twice went back to a minor issue with a button being too raised until he graciously gave me a new baby. So far, I haven't had any issues with this one.

*Double tap space bar for period. When sending a text message from my old phone, you literally needed 4 key strokes to get a question mark, so needing one key stroke to get to the punctuation on the iPhone wasn't an issue for me. But imagine my delight when I discovered, by accident, that you could double tap the space bar to get a period. Genius. And if you want the pure genius rating, Apple, add in some other key combinations to get the comma, question mark, and exclamation mark.

*Mail app does not go horizontal. It's so much easier to type in the horizontal mode, I wish the mail app would allow this.

*Pandora app is killer!

*Google Reader app really needs to allow for reading oldest first. Who reads their RSS newest first?

*Picture viewing is awesomely amazing! Just recently discovered this, looking at pictures on the iPhone is an incredible experience. The colors are brilliant, the details sharp... I can't say enough. I want to take more pictures just to look at them on the iPhone. Why would you ever print a photo again. Wow.

*Haven't used the iPod function too much, but what I've used has been fine.

Do you have one yet? What's your favorite app? What's the smartest way you use your iPhone? What do you wish it could do? What's your favorite feature?
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Edited to add:

*Yahoo StatTracker doesn't work on the iPhone. Booooo!
*Keep your finger pressed on "123." button and drag over the punctuation or number you want and go right back to the letters. Yay!

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Dr. Horrible

aaron cohen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:12:40 +0000

I heard Neil Patrick Harris on Fresh Air talking about his new web musical, Dr. Horrible and thought it sounded pretty funny. I wasn't going to say anything about it, just make it the first thing I add to my iPhone in a month or so (when I celebrate iPhonica), but now everyone's talking about it and I don't want to be left out anymore. If you've seen it, let me know what you think in the comments.

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FAIL

matt — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:10:34 +0000

Well, my iPhone is bricked.

Update: Finally working! Sheesh, what a screw-up.

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Let’s see…

matt — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:41:53 +0000

Can I post to my blog from my new iPhone? Yup! ###Possibly related posts:FAIL Best iPhone App? The Next iPhone ### Possibly related posts:

I Shake My Fist at the Apple Store

matt — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:23:31 +0000

(Welcome, visitors from ifoAppleStore! Glad you could come visit. I encourage you to take a look around, and read the comments before posting one of your own. Thanks!)

I like Apple. I really do. Rachel and I have matching 15" Powerbook G4s, we each have an iPod, our house has two Airport Expresses, and I badly covet an iPhone. So it pains me to be filled with such boiling rage at a company that I admire.

My laptop died: these things happen. The hard drive croaked about six weeks ago, but I was able to resurrect it with the help of DiskWarrior, which totally rocks, and is much better than the useless crap the Apple guys tried. So I'm back up and running, and feeling pretty good about myself, until last night when I remembered that I'd turned off Spotlight indexing a while back for performance reasons, but then was irritated that I couldn't search my mail, and so turned it back on. Forty-five minutes later, blam-o. Hard drive dead again. This time, not even DiskWarrior could save it. (Edited to add: although DiskWarrior couldn't repair the drive this time, it was still able to access the files on the disk, and I was able to retrieve the few things that had changed since my last backup.)

So, I reluctantly schlepped my laptop into the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced. What I was nervous about is Apple's repair policy: they take my computer, take out the broken hard drive, put a new one in, and give me back the laptop. It takes about five days, and that's cool with me, since it's covered under Apple Care. But! They keep the old drive. I understand why they keep the old drive from an inventory perspective, but I wasn't crazy about the idea. I've got stuff on there! Personal stuff! Six years of email, not to mention 40 GB of photos, and all of my bank account numbers.

I asked the "genius" at the Apple Store what my options were. (And let me just say, if you're going to refer to your employees as "geniuses," you should expect some sarcastic quotation marks.) Could he, for instance, format the drive while I was there so I could have at least some confidence that my personal data wasn't going to be easy for someone else to get? Sorry, no such luck, as the drive wouldn't mount, and see above re: their crappy software. I was disappointed, but more or less resigned to the situation until I saw the release I had to sign before they'd replace the hard drive:

I acknowledge that service may be subject to a $100 USD diagnostic fee as described in the attached Repair Terms and Conditions, and agree that either I have made a backup copy of my data and removed any confidential, proprietary, or personal information and removable media such as floppy disks, CDs, or PC cards, or I have assumed the risk that such information or media may be lost, corrupted, or compromised during service and repair. I further acknowledge and agree that Apple cannot guarantee the safety, security or integrity of any data that remains on my computer while undergoing service or repair and that Apple shall not be liable for any loss, corruption or breach of such data, including any confidential, proprietary or personal information or removable data.

Emphasis added. Lack of serial commas: sic.

I understand why Apple doesn't want to guarantee the security of my data, but there's something really offensive about requiring me to sign a release that pretty much explicitly gives them permission to sell my credit card numbers to Ukranian mobsters.

But, if I didn't initial the box and sign the form, they wouldn't fix my computer. I asked how much it would cost for me to buy a replacement hard drive myself, and "genius" Brandon pretty much admitted that Apple jacks up the prices for parts they sell to the general public to encourage us to pay for the labor instead. But besides, I'd paid for Apple Care already. I was entitled to the free parts and labor, and I wanted it. So, being a chump and kinda broke, I signed the damn form.

This policy sucks even if, as Brandon from the Apple Store claims, it's industry standard. The industry standard is stupid. I don't expect the Apple Store to be able to do anything about a terrible corporate policy, but I would have liked a little more sympathy. I would have left feeling much better if Brandon had said, "For legal reasons, we can't make any guarantees, but we've never had any complaints about data being misused, and here are the privacy and security policies we have in place to prevent anything like that from happening." He didn't say anything like that, and I'd like to know if that's because he found me irritating, or because Apple has no such policies.

(I'm praying that just because I made a fuss over this policy, Brandon and his buddies don't "accidentally" step on my poor defenseless laptop, or check the "please ruin this guy's life" box on the work order. Please don't ruin my life just because I hate your policy!)

I'll get my computer back in 5 days with a brand new hard drive, and that's great, but some of my love for this friendly corporate behemoth has been lost. Apple: try not to suck so hard in the future.

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iTunes Changes?

matt — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 05:33:58 +0000

I got the latest iTunes upgrade, even though I don't have an iPhone, and it seems like they've changed the alphabetization rules. I tend to have my library sorted by artist, and the very first song used to be 'N Sync's "Pop" (shut up) followed by a whole bunch of 10,000 Maniacs.

After the update, 'N Sync seems to be sorted under "N" (rather than the apostrophe) and 10,000 Maniacs seems to be at the very end -- numbers now are apparently sorted after letters and initial punctuation is now ignored. All in all, a much smarter scheme than the previous ASCII-based sort.

Anyway, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that the first thing to come up in Cover Flow is now the much hipper A.C. Newman.

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Back To School

matt — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:33:51 +0000

One of the benefits of spending ten hours a week in a car with a fundamentalist Christian is the opportunity to reflect seriously on the important things in life, like whether saving gas is really worth spending ten hours a week in a car with a fundamentalist Christian.

No, seriously, I really enjoyed many of the conversations we had in the carpool, especially when we were able to push beyond the surface disagreements to the underlying and sometimes unexamined beliefs that we hold strongly. In one memorable conversation, we ended up arguing about what was the measure of a good life. What, essentially, was the purpose of human existence? What is our destiny, as sentient and moral actors?

My carpool-mates agreed that this was an easy question: the goal of a good human life is to come to know and love Jesus Christ. Simple. It shouldn’t be shocking to you, dear readers, that I don't think it's quite that easy. Indeed, I argued that the essential goal of human life is to leave the world better than we found it – our duty as moral actors is to improve the world.

Comity was not reached, but it was a stimulating conversation. On reflection, though, it left me dissatisfied. Thinking it over later, I realized that if this is what I believe (and it is), then I’m not doing a very good job living up to it. I’ve spent ten years in a field that I’m pretty good at, and that has provided me with a very comfortable living, but was it helping to make the world a better place?

“Sure,” I could argue, “I work for a company that makes software that helps accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, development, and learning in engineering and science. This is a good thing.” And it is. Our products are used to design better and more efficient cars, communication systems, medical systems, and so on, but the truth is that my contribution is really too abstract and remote for me to take real pride in the positive outcomes. I write software that helps people write software that other people can use to do good things – that’s just too nuanced for me to take much comfort in.

As it happened, I’d been pretty down on my job anyway. It was becoming clear that my dissatisfaction was over more than my particular job at this particular company. The whole enterprise of writing software just wasn’t getting me out of bed in the morning. Maybe a decade of programming was all I could take.

What could I do instead? What flavor of do-gooder would I become? Medicine was right out, both because there's no way I'm going to go through medical school and because I pretty much faint at the sight of a needle. I wasn't going to go build houses in impoverished countries because, well, I don't really like the out-of-doors. I decided that I need to get into public service, in some capacity that involves mostly talking, writing, and thinking. And, if at all possible, sitting.

To that end, I'm excited and terrified to say that this fall I'm quitting my job to start working towards a Masters in Public Policy at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. Excited, because I'm going to be a grad student! At Brown! Terrified, because I'm quitting my job. Rachel (who functions as the CFO in our relationship) assures me that we'll still be able to live in our house and buy food, but we will have to institute a series of strict austerity measures. For instance, we might have to stop shopping at Whole Foods. And I probably won't be able to buy an iPhone. Talk about sacrifice.

I feel really good about this decision, and I feel especially good having the decision behind me since I'm sure my family and friends were getting tired of hearing me whine, "Should I go to grad school?" Of course, I still have to decide just what area of public policy I want to focus on, and what I want to do when I eventually get out of school, but I have some time to figure those things out. My dream job is to be Sam Seaborn from the West Wing, but I think I may need to find a slightly less ridiculous way to phrase that ambition.

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