Lee Packham

This video is just a nice cartoon of Darth Vader calling up Apple about the problems with his new iPhone. It’s rather comical.

They claim it’s a software problem – but lab testing has proved that the phone really does have an antenna problem:

I’m sorry Apple, but this isn’t good enough. The release of this phone was premature and the significant lack of QA is really quite concerning. At least you can’t delete my blog post like you can all the forum posts on your own forums detailing the problem. The pending software fix will make it look like you have more bars. You’ll still drop calls though – so don’t believe the fix is a proper fix. Also – if a case fixes the problem I reckon Apple should provide them free of charge. Consumers in the UK have the right to have bought a working product after all.

Really, at the moment, it is just an expensive iPod with a great screen. I mean that, the device is stunning to hold and use… it just needs a serious defect addressing.

As linked to by John Gruber’s blog DaringFireball, this video is a great proof that iOS 4 is just one big ‘told you so’ – and this is without multitasking:

Wow, well that sucks a bit. Let’s look at the main headline features:

• Multitasking
• Desktop Folders
• Unified Inbox
• Better data encryption/security

Other than Desktop Folders, the public have been crying out for these features on the iPhone – especially as other Mobile OSs (read: Android and Blackberry) implement most of the features so readily.

Well – the public got what they asked for. Proof that the customer isn’t always right and companies shouldn’t be so ready to give into demands. All these features are now slowing your device to a crawl – hope you’re enjoying them!

And yes, it effects your games too – as things like encryption run constantly in the background on the device. Other blogs are complaining iPad is no longer as secure as the iPhone – I hope it stays that way for a long long time yet.

Too funny to ignore… that is all!

Turns out when I thought I fixed it, I hadn’t. The weekend saw the planned engineering work not appearing properly on the iPhone application. Thankfully I noticed this while I was working on the Android port.

This was fixed last night (bit late again, sorry about that). Sorry for any inconvenience caused by that. At least it’s fixed now I guess. I also noticed that the last_updated date of the DLR status wasn’t updating, even though the status itself was updating – that is now also fixed.

Yesterday I updated the Tube Status server to deal with the new page structure over on the Tfl website. I haven’t been using the app recently and didn’t realise it wasn’t updating. Thanks to Tony, a driver on the H&C/Circle lines for pointing out the problem. I owe him a beer! Sorry for it being down – but it proves that e-mailing for support from iTunes does work.

I wonder how many other tube workers use the app.

It’s taken me a little longer than expected to get around to it – but if you load up Tube Notify on your iPhone now (no update to the application is required) you’ll see the DLR status has now appeared. Sorry it’s taken so long!

This is fantastic news!

Apple has just sent out an e-mail to registered iPhone developers informing them that In App Purchasing, previously restricted to paid applications, is now also permitted in free applications.

The only issue is that setting up in app purchase can be a pain. The pay off is worth it however as apps are less likely to be pirated as the extra components are downloaded after the app is installed from the app store as part of the bolt on purchase.

Roll on more usage of this feature.

Apple Opens Up In App Purchasing for Free iPhone Applications – Mac Rumors.

There’s a few questions about whether this should be allowed, or not. I’m of the mindset that, providing it is detailed in the license agreement for the software, it’s ok. Yes yes, no one reads them – but is that the vendor’s problem?

Anyway, taken from Ars Technica is this little gem:

CFShow([[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"SBFormattedPhoneNumber"]);

You can also browse quite a bit more of this dict.:

NSString *path = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist"];
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:path];
CFShow(dict);

Enjoy… But use responsibly.

When the 3GS came out, I bought an iPhone 3G. What!? Why on Earth would I do that as a developer? Simple…

I wanted to make sure I got my hands on the machine that had the smallest amount of RAM and the slower CPU. All developers should really do the same. The problem with the 3GS, just like the Pentium processor when it first appeared, and the advent of DDR/DDR2 and DDR3 – it makes developers lazy.

When I started out doing software development, you had CPUs measured in Hz and RAM measured in Bytes. You had to make sure you used the system wisely to make sure your application ran properly. That meant optimising your code and ensuring you didn’t have any leaks in the code.

Fast forward to the modern day. Who cares if my application uses that extra 1 Megabyte of RAM? Well I do. RAM and CPU are precious resources and that is so true on small UNIX devices such as the iPhone. You’re competing against other processes such as the Phone.app, Messaging, iPod and Safari which all run in the background.

On the older 2G/3G devices, this leaves you with <10MB of RAM. On the 3GS you get left with 70+MB! What should you code for? Well the fact that there are still so many 2G/3G devices out there, your iPhone application MUST work in the <10MB scenario. You can’t get lazy just because you’re debugging in the simulator or on the 3GS where you have ample resources.

To get maximum exposure for a non-game app, I put the following rules in place for myself:

• Must use < 10MB of RAM
• CPU usage should be as close to 0 and not over 30% during loading
• Any network traffic should be compressed and minimal so that GPRS transfers are still feasible
• Don’t use splash screens, use the Apple guidelines for the startup PNG file (i.e. your UI!)

Is that so unreasonable? Ok, so if you need RAM, the iPhone can kill things in the background, granted – but that slows YOUR application down while it does it. Also, when the user presses the Home button to leave, the wizzy animation doesn’t work.

You’re making a first impression on your user that just, maybe, paid money for your application. Being slow to start, or even appearing slow to start, is going to get you lots 1 star reviews very quickly. Hardly fantastic marketing is it? There are lots of examples of this all over the App Store – including some of the ‘Top Paid’ apps. They end up recommending people reboot their phone before using their app!? What? Really? That’s insane.

Optimise, debug, make sure you use asynchronous network communications and most of all, test your application on a SLOWER device. Keep those iPhone 3G devices to hand and use them as your primary debug phones.