Calvin and Hobbes ties with Bloom County as my all-time favorite strip cartoon. Two Xmas’ ago, my friends bought me the fancy collected edition and I spent a week pouring over it. Killer imagination. Killer.
And while notorious recluse and rights reserver Bill Watterson would probably unleash all kinds of fury at the Apple-based, real-world intruding, Silicon Valley send-up, Calvin and Jobs, for those who follow the tech industry, it’s unique combination of nostalgia and “inside baseball” humor is compelling.
(Via Gizmodo)
This is fun. It’s like a game of cat and mouse between Apple firmware and the jailbreaking community, Apple launches an update and the iPhone-dev team works feverishly to jailbreak said update. This time, they are said to be putting the finishing touches on PwnageTool 2.0.2 which will be able to jailbreak the “snappier” 2.0.1.
Excited much? Well, there still won’t be Installer.app because Installer 4 isn’t ready for the primetime yet but a new version of Cydia will be there so you can still get some apps. There still is a lot of catching up to do on developing jailbroken apps and it still won’t unlock the iPhone 3G, but all in due time. We’ll follow up with a link to PwnageTool 2.0.2 when it is released.
ReadVia
We told you when iPhone 2.0.1 dropped, we asked you how 2.0.1 was doing for you? And we warned iPwners to stay away. Turns out people running on Vodafone (in the 10 countries they currently supply) might want to consider staying away for now as well. TUAW reports on the problems:
Specifically, users who paid to have their 3G iPhones unlocked by Vodafone* are unable to re-connect to the service following the update, and instead receive a “0xE8000001″ error message. How helpful. It seems to happen on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Another problem, via iPhoneAtlas, occurs when users try to upgrade when in the radio-silent Airplane Mode:
Having Airplane mode turned on can result in a non-functional phone when the update is applied. You may receive the error message: “Information for activation cannot be obtained from the iPhone” Fortunately, you can disable Airplane mode from the emergency screen if your iPhone is put into an inactivated state by a problematic update.
If you do get 2.0.1 installed (and I confess, mine installed quickly and flawlessly), what will you find under the hood?
Apple said “bug fixes”, which seems to include fixes to sluggish interface animations/transitions and app launches in general (especially Contacts and SMS). Some are claiming faster backups, more stable App Store app behavior, and better or more accurate cell strength and GPS placement. And others have even joked that, like a placebo, we’ll see any update as a general purpose cure-all for what’s been aggravating us.
Have you noticed any specific, repeatable improvements? Keep pounding away and let us know what you find!
Om Malik says Apple is clueless about scaling MobileMe:
There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios. Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else. There’s no unified monitoring system. They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover. Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.
John Gruber retorts, with the US’ #1 online music retailer firmly in his corner:
But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.
The crazy thing is, MobileMe should have been an iTunes-learned breeze for Apple in terms of meeting service levels, given their pedigree. But then iTunes uses WebObjects (which I believe is old school Java-based) and MobileMe uses SproutCore (which is all dressed up in Ajax-y 2.0 objectivity), and the pretty much disastrous July 11th launch, which took down both iTunes iPhone activation, and slammed the MobileMe servers into weeks of problems, show something clearly is different with the new kit on the block.
Hopefully Cue will bring some of the iTunes luster to MobileMe, but only time will tell. What do you think? Which blog wins this round?
As Rene just mentioned in the previous post, we’re getting sales numbers for various iPhone apps and these sales numbers are very, very promising. John Casasanta of development house Tap Tap Tap hit us up on our tip line about his article on the sales figures at the App Store.
Early on, folks in the Blogosphere were able to get a handle on sales figures simply by checking the download count at the bottom of each page. Apple apparently decided that developers might just want to keep some of that info private, so that was taken down around the same time that Apple started actually delivering real sales numbers to developers. Many of these developers, as Rene mentioned, are just going ahead and publishing these sales numbers despite, as Casasanta says, traditional business instincts to hide exact numbers because they don’t want to seem to be bragging or (if things aren’t going well), failing.
But these numbers are news because of their sheer size — it’s almost as if developers are compelled to share in the same way we might if we’d, say, won the lottery. “Look, I know it’s not nice to brag, but Holy Crap Look At This.”
Read the rest of this entry »
The iPhone App Store Avalanche continues, with seemingly dozens of new Apps popping up every day (though no word yet on NetShare or Box Office!), but as busy as things look out front, they’re just as busy behind the scenes.
So what’s going on? Business. It’s booming. (At least if your customers aren’t getting error codes -4 or 5002 when trying to access iTunes!) Apple began to report download stats to developers, and some developers have begun to share those stats with the blogsphere.
What do they say? Read on to find out!
Read the rest of this entry »
So it’s been a day since 2.0.1 was made available and we at TiPb would like to know how it’s been running on your iPhone. Did this bug-fixer of an update actually fix any bugs? Or are we all getting suckered into believing that the update has made things snappier? Pains in the update process? Backups faster? Apps Crashing? Or are things just less sucky? Maybe you completely avoided the update..anything and everything, we want to know!
Personally, things have “felt” a little bit smoother. Contacts load noticeably quicker but my SMS is still a good couple of seconds too long. No crashes to report yet but I did have one ginormously big hiccup after updating: the mail app crashed on launch. I had to completely restore and set up my iPhone as a new iPhone which was more than mildly annoying, to put it lightly. So other than that, YAY 2.0.1. Woot.
So TiPb faithful, how is 2.0.1 treating you?
Ars Technica’s crack ninja infiltration squad somehow snuck into the Jobspod and snatched up a copy of the full email his Steveness sent out to Apple last night.
Team,
The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:
– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.
– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.
– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.
We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.
The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.
Steve
That’s not a timeline that makes us happy, but the fact that it’s at least a bit more realistic does inspire some confidence.
While most of us have installed the 2.0.1 update (or, ahem, are still waiting for a backup we started last night to finish so we can install it), there’s a key group of folks that should stay away: Jailbreakers and unlockers. As is always the case when a new update comes out, our advice to these users is to wait and see how the iPhone hacking community responds. Right now, according to iphone-dev [via Engadget Mobile], they appear to be responding with a teensy bit of bravado:
We don’t see any major problems with the release that Apple made, but we have not released an update for PwnageTool for it as yet and therefore PwnageTool 2.0.1 will currently not work!
Their advice is pretty sound and mirrors ours: if you never intend on leaving your carrier, feel free to update away whenever if you don’t mind losing jailbroken apps. If you do (or already have), stay the heck away from updates until things clear up.
What about you? Are you law-abiding and currently enjoying a bug-free existence? Jailbreaker glancing longingly at 2.0.1’s reportedly better keyboard response? Unlocker living on the periphery of the cell phone ‘Verse, staring into the black and in danger of becoming a Reaver? Let us know!
While David G. seems to have forgotten his pledge to update us on MobileMe’s status late last week, following what can only be called a disasterous launch, Steve Jobs seems to have just dropped the BOOM! on MobileMe’s status within Apple.
Ars Technica claims to have seen an email sent out late last night in which Jobs admits:
It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.
Instead of dropping MobileMe on/around July 11th, Jobs believes a staggered approach would have been better, where features and WebApps were rolled out one by one, each with considerably more testing. Saying MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s standards”, Jobs also said “The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
How so?
Eddy Cue, former VP of iTunes, adds MobileMe and AppStore to his portfolio, and now reports directly to jobs as VP of Internet Services.
