August 2008: Monthly Archive

When Rene gave us a As the Turn-By-Turn Turns update yesterday, we got a very smart comment from somebody calling him/herself GoogleLicense:

TiPB ought to do some research on the why’s behind this and break the story since the iphone press seems to love reporting this topic.
It might be something like this: Apple licenses significant parts of their map stuff from Google. Google licenses significant parts of their map stuff from several other vendors. Each license has certain restrictions.
If you dig around in the bowels of Google’s developer site looking for info on required copyrights and license restrictions when using embeddable maps, you can get a lot of details of what is and isn’t allowed for what sets of data and who the original source is that is putting those restrictions…

Indeed, we know a good idea when we see it. After the break, a short history of map providers, their licenses, and why it seems like waiting for Turn-by-Turn directions within Google Maps on the iPhone isn’t a great idea.

Read on!

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“Marimba” shatters the early morning silence. Groggy, you fumble for your iPhone and “slide to unlock”, ending the alarm. A cloudy, gloomy day greets you as you skip the weather and start on your email. In the background, your iPhone begins to stream the morning news. Not all of it and not all from one source, just your favorites. Just what you’d previously setup in iTunes Podcast Creator.

Sports and local highlights — minus the crime news that’s too harsh for your morning mellow — flow one from the next, scraped while you slept from CNN, ABC, BBC, CBC, Comedy, and all the independent, niche podcasts you’d favorite’d. The fuzzy-logic of Apple’s servers matched your criteria as closely as possible while still filling the 60 min. time slot you’d set up. And once collected, assembled it and pushed it out to your iMac, where iTunes made it available immediately for streaming over WiFi right to your iPhone.

Today, however, you’re running late and don’t even have time to sync before heading out the door. But since your iPhone can access your iMac’s streaming, custom-podcasts over the blazingly fast 4G LTE network, you don’t even notice the transition from local to wide area network as your door closes and you hit the street. You just keep on listening as Jon Stewart makes fun of whos-that-president for the umpteenth time. And as you jump on the train, with a couple quick taps, your iMac is updated, your iTunes Podcast Creator is adjusted, Stewart is out of tomorrow’s mix, and iPhone lover Stephen Colbert is back in.

The good-looking passenger beside you comments on the awesome sounding custom podcast you’re rocking. Smiling, you tap another button and peer-to-peer it right on over, just as the train pulls out and the day starts to look ever so much brighter…

Sound more like a multi-media dream than current reality? Well, some of Apple’s newest patents look like they might be trying to make this particular dream come true. Read on for what just might be the future of iTunes and truly mobile media…

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Fail Me, iPhone firmware 2.0.2, apps, and your forum threads!

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Gotta love Steve Jobs and his blunt-force emails. This time, it’s a lucky AppleInsider reader who sent it on a complaint about crash-prone applications, a problem which has plagued the iPhone 2.0 pretty much since launch. And what did the drive-by-Steve’ing say?

This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September

Will that be the still-in-beta 2.1? Another hotfix like 2.0.2? Jobs, of course, didn’t elaborate. Smart money, however, would be on a 2.0.3 rev. so that Apple doesn’t have rush 2.1 out prematurely, with just more of the same issues.

I know my Apps experience the dreaded Home Screening of Death (HSOD) semi-regularly, especially the new/updated ones. What about you? Smooth sailing or lots of crashes? If the latter, how far away must September seem? (And is it just us, or is the unresolved bug list for 2.x pretty dang scary compared to the relatively stable 1.x?)

Following up on the earlier post about OpenClip, the new open-source framework for implementing a shared (i.e. cross-application) clipboard for the iPhone, the video above highlights developer Zac White’s presentation at iPhoneDevCamp2. Not enough for you? Okay, TiPb had another chance to talk with the innovative folks at Proximi (makers of MagicPad, the original proof-of-concept for this functionality), who were kind enough to share a few more details with our readers.

Check out he Q&A after the break!

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Ed Baig over at USA Today (via Daring Fireball) is reporting that:

Apple (AAPL) acknowledged Tuesday that a software update for the iPhone partly fixes the connection snags that have caused a global firestorm for the new iPhone 3G. Though mum on details, Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock said on Tuesday, “The software update improves communication with 3G networks.”

Really?

As I mentioned previously, yesterday in Downtown Montreal, it looked like I was unable to connect to the 3G network at all. Last night in the suburbs of Montreal, however, I was able to connect (though it took a while). Today, downtown again… nadda. Or so I thought. I switched back to WiFi and still couldn’t connect… to Gmail.

Yup. While I’d tested Gmail, MobileMe, ActiveSync, and MobileSafari yesterday, sometime since then I’d made the mistake of just hitting Gmail in MobileMail.app to see if a connection would pop up. Turns out that was really shoddy testing on my part. See, Gmail on iPhone says I haven’t had any messages since 6pm last night. Gmail on the desktop however, while continuously giving me “Server error: too many simultaneous connections (Failure)”, shows 50+ more, right up to this very minute. Now, I’ve Twittered nearly constantly about problems with Gmail IMAP lately, from invalid certificate errors, to server connection problems, to the mail outage they had a week or so back (not coincidentally the same time MobileMe was out… again).

So what’s going on? Are their network connection problems or is Gmail IMAP that really buggy (according to Twitter again, it’s buggy enough to make some iPhone developers abandon it entirely)? And has this been adding to, or merely confusing my 3G network connection problems?

My guess is the former. Intermittent 3G network connection errors, and Gmail IMAP still really isn’t ready for prime time. (And why that doesn’t get the blog-focus MobileMe gets, aside from the admittedly free nature of the beast, is a bit perplexing).

I plan to run more (and better) tests today, and hopefully get something of a less obscure picture.

Good news on the Facebook front: their native application is due to get an upgrade in September. The upgrade should actually make the app reach some sort of feature parity with the web-app version of Facebook, which right now is far superior to the native app.

New features include a revamped profiles view, viewing all notifications in the home tab, friend search and approval, the ability to view your full inbox, and more.

Joy!

Read: for iPhone’s Notes

So, this weekend I had a lot of problems connecting to the 3G network. Bars showed full. 3G icon was lit up. But email and web browsing — any type of network activity really — either took forever to resolve or timed out completely. Today was even worse. Couldn’t get on for most of the day. Zip. Zero. Zilch. And this was AFTER installing yesterday’s hot new 2.0.2 firmware (once I got it to download...). So what’s going on?

Are there carrier issues resulting from less mature 3G networks? Is there an Infineon 3G chipset hardware problem? Is Infineon dragging their heels about writing better drivers? Is something in Apple’s iPhone 3G software stack that’s just not connecting well, or timing out too quickly? Or is it a horrible confluence of all of the above, making it an especially tough — and frustrating — bug to squash?

Given the lack of any apparent, or at least successful, fix in 2.0.2, Engadget says Apple is “shooting in the dark” trying to resolve the 3G issues. I don’t think so. I think, as one of our commenters mentioned, 2.0.2 was scheduled to add support for the addition 20+ countries and carriers coming on line this week, and crammed in whatever minor improvements Apple had ready. Rewriting the 3G drivers, especially if Infineon isn’t moving at Apple-required speed, isn’t likely to happen before the rumored September 2.1 release (which, as mentioned in the post on turn-by-turn GPS, has already jettisoned Push Notification Server support, hopefully because Apple is laser-focused on delivering an actual, gosh-darn real stable release in 2.1).

I don’t know about you, but at this point, that’s the priority I want them to have moving forward. Do one thing at a time, do it very, very well, and then move on…

We always see (almost entirely incorrect) ‘outlines’ of keynotes in the runup to any Apple event, now we’re getting them before the runup starts. It’s a pretty safe be that Apple will be doing something in late September or October, they always try to have new iPod announcements before the holiday season. So go grab your salt shaker, pour out a few grains (actually, you might want to use them all), and take a gander at what Anonymous has told to expect in a “late September event,” after the break.

Our take on the list you’re about to read: real iPhone file access would be a godsend and it’s a natural next step for the platform. iTunes Unlimited Music Subscriptions have been oft-rumored but given how strident Jobs has been about people wanting to own music instead of subscribe to it, we’re still doubters. Then again, he did say the same thing about mobile video right before the iPod got video support. Basically, there’s nothing there that we really think is a lock.

Here’s a better question: what do you think Apple has in store for us this coming holiday season? Read the rest of this entry »

Running out of things to say about the ongoing (and ongoing, and ongoing, and ongoing) TomTom and general turn-by-turn GPS on the iPhone saga?

Lucky for us, MSNBC’s Suzanne Choney (via MacDailyNews) found out the big industry players certainly aren’t.

Says TomTom:

“We have made our navigation system run on the iPhone; it looks good and works very well. We will have to look more closely to Apple’s strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us.”

Says Garmin:

“We’re always looking at new phone platforms to expand into for Garmin Mobile, but we don’t have any announcements regarding the iPhone at this time.”

Says Magellan:

“[We do] not have immediate plans for this, but we are looking into it.”

Wow, could Garmin and Magellan sound any less enthusiastic? Sure, they have to play their cards close to their vest (though TomTom is obviously faster and looser in that regard), but how about a little hype-jacking?

No matter. Smart money says we should see turn-by-turn soon-ish. However, given how 3G network connectivity, MobileMe, and some other functionality has rolled out (never mind cut and paste!), turn-by-turn is something that Apple (or TomTom, or whomever provides it), really can’t afford to get wrong. 2.1 has already dropped push notification, so if turn-by-turn was even on the list, chances are it’s been bumped down again. No matter how “complicated” it may be, they have to nail it from launch, or people will be more than just inconvenienced.

That is, depending on how badly we still want turn-by-turn GPS? Dieter is all over it, of course, but how high is it on your iPhone firmware fix wish list?