All Articles Tagged gruber

Walt Mossberg noticed that a bunch of his iPod dock-connecting accessories have started to work, so it looks like dock compatibility was one of the things that Apple included in the update:

after I did the update, I was suddenly able to route the iPhone’s music output through my car iPod adapter, which the iPhone had previously recognized only as a charger, even though it acted as both a charger and an audio adapter for my iPod.

Apple has posted their first update to the iPhone. As has been expected, it’s a patch for the security issues mentioned previously, though there are five vulnerabilities patched in all. Apple’s security note is posted. You can download the patch via iTunes; the iPhone software will be at version 1.01 when all is finished. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, it’s probably worthwhile to restore, update, and then re-hack. It’s also probably worthwhile to figure out what iTunes doesn’t sync over, as you’re going to lose that data. [via, via]

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has posted a list of fonts that are available for CSS within iSafari. Elsewhere, your font choices are made: Helvetica and Marker Felt. He includes a list of typographic likes and dislikes with the iPhone font choices. Apple, are you looking for something to give him for his birthday? There are 4 big ticket items he strongly hints at: Futura, Gill Sans, Hoefler Text, and the head of Marker Felt.

I haven’t heard a peep out of Microsoft for quite some time; not really since Mossberg’s D5. Nonetheless, Microsoft is in the news today.

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This one mocks the New York Times and Verizon.

In an article at Daring Fireball, John Gruber discusses the possibility of positioning without a GPS chip on the iPhone. The long and short of it is that one can determine a general location by which cell tower it’s connected to; the process is called GSM localization.

Gruber wrote in a previous article discussing the third iPhone ad:

“The Maps app somehow knows where we are: my guess is that it’s like the Mac OS X Weather widget, with a preference setting for a default zip code. (Keep dreaming if you think Apple has secretly added GPS behind the FCC’s back.)”

He’s absolutely right about GPS and the FCC — Apple would have to re-certify the device via the FCC if they wanted to add GPS functionality to the iPhone, and we would find out about that when the FCC published their results.

My hope is that Apple made the Google Maps app GPS-capable, so I could use my bluetooth GPS device for mapping when I traveled. I don’t have it with me unless I’m in the car, though. So if the GSM localization rumor is true, well that’s just an added bonus.