Before I get to this blog post, I would like to say that it is sponsored by THIS playlist. That is some epic stuff right there for midnight blogging.

Anyway, let’s get right down to it. If you are a VFTQ listener, you probably already know what I like about my iPhone 4, and have a vague idea of what I don’t like. Well, I decided to get it all down on the blog, for future generations to read and enjoy, as they play with their iPhone 96. In no particular order:

1. Vibration. Yes, I know, it’s a petty thing to be pissed about. But seriously, the vibration on the iPhone 4 sucks. I can’t feel the thing vibrate when it is in my pocket, which totally removes the point of silent mode, IE allowing you know that your phone is ringing, silently. I don’t know why Apple decided to destroy the vibration strength. And it’s not just me! I voiced my concerns on twitter a week or so ago, and in general, people agree with me. The vibration on the iPhone 4 is pathetic!
2. Totally scratchproof harder then glass magic surface THAT TOTALLY SCRATCHES!?! I mean what the hell kids? I am famously anal about keeping all my expensive gadgets pristine. And in the two days that I didn’t have an InvisibleShield  on the thing, I managed to get a scratch on the screen, just next to the earpiece. (Technically not on the screen, but what the hell. Same material.) I kept this phone in a case, in a pocket with NOTHING else. I can’t understand how this (admittedly hairline) scratch got there. I never scratched my 3GS. The back is still perfect, thanks, and now that I have the InvisibleShield in place, I feel a bit dirty putting the phone in the same pocket as my keys.
3. FaceTime, a free feature of the phone, COSTING MONEY! So, remember FaceTime, that thing that was meant to be completely free (unless you phoned whomever you were FaceTime-ing before hand)? Well, turns out if you don’t live in the USA or the UK, you get charged for a background international text message when you first activate FaceTime. Sneaky? Fuck yes.
4. There seems to be a weird delay when it comes to opening any app that uses a camera. When you activate the camera function, the app just hangs for a couple of seconds, until the camera opens up. Why the hell does this happen? It should be instant, goddammit!

And of course, there have been well documented cases of the network that I’m on, Three, being shitholes to their customers. Thankfully that hasn’t really happened to me yet, with everybody I have been talking to at Three, both in their stores and on their customer support lines being quite helpful and able to answer questions.

So, I’m sure you have something you hate about the iPhone 4. Everybody does. What is it?

Tags: Apple, InvisibleShield, iPhone

Oxegen (one of the huge European music festivals) have released a free iPhone app. It’s currently number one in the Irish app charts, and seems to be instilled with the stuff of magic. Stuff that a few years ago, we were only dreaming would be possible.

Starting from the basics, this app provides a checklist of things to bring to the festival. You can tick things off as you pack them, which is a useful feature. moving to the slightly more complex, it incorporates artist twitter feeds and an RSS feed from the festival organizers. It also provides live traffic updates throughout the weekend, for those who aren’t camping. Then things become cool.

There is a fairly standard map built into the app. It can locate you using the phone’s GPS, and shows you where the stages, campsites, places to get your beers cooled and so on can be found, and direct you too them. You can turn your iPhone sideways, and see everything in Virtual Reality mode, for those you are useless at even iPhone assisted directions. You can also, in a blindingly simple yet stunningly obvious move, tag where your tent is, and your iPhone will show you the way, even late at night.

Another “Holy Shit It’s 2010″ feature is the Interactive Event Schedule. You tell it what bands you want to see, and it informs you of any overlapping performances. Sure, that’s ordinary enough. HOWEVER, just before the bands begin their set, it uses push notifications to inform you, and can then show you to the correct stage within the time needed to get there. That’s pretty awesome.

I have, however, saved the best for last.

Since Oxegen is such a huge place, it is very easy to loose your friends. The app can help out with that. Heading into the Settings area (strangely inside the app instead of in the iPhone settings area) you will notice an area to turn on “share my location”. If you do that, once the festival starts, it will show your friends (connected through facebook, at the moment, and you can choose only to show specific ones) exactly where you are on the festival site. Updated in real time. On the map. Now THAT’S magic. The one possible worry I have over this feature is that some smart thief somewhere might be able to work out where iPhone users have pitched their tent, and may have a night time visit. I’m not sure how well they protect the location data.

I will be at Oxegen from this Thursday, so if you are going and want to say hello, feel free to track me down. Send me an email/comment or something.

Anyway, this app got me thinking. What other “The Future Is Now” things can we take for granted right now? Every time I see a 32gb my jaw drops. These things are about the size of your thumbnail, and look at how much data can fit on them! The Microsoft Courier was another of these Future Tech products, but sadly never got past the R&D stage. It would have blown the iPad out of the water.

Can you think of any other pieces of tech that make you feel like we are living in Star Trek?

Tags: app, festival, iPhone, Music festival, Oxegen

EDIT: Thanks to liamk on the O2 Forums, it seems that this trick could work for every single person who has a contract on O2. Check the link for full details.

EDIT 2: It worked! Hurrah! I can confirm that for me, at least, they were happy to let me go, without even trying to dissuade me.

So, let’s pretend that about a week ago, you signed up for an iPhone on O2, on their €100 plan. You are now tied in to 18 months of O2, but managed to get an iPhone for free. That’s a total of €1800 over 18 months, for a service that is miles below par against other European networks (for more on this, check out my other blog post, “The Irish iPhone 3GS ruined my hopes and dreams“).

Well, O2 just made a change to their terms and conditions. This counts as breaking the contract you had set up with them. Naughty, eh? And they were kind enough to notify customers on a totally out of the way page on their site, mentioned nowhere. And, you may notice, they have done this twice before. So no feeling sorry for them for what I am about to suggest.

Basically, since they have broken your contract, you have until July 12 to phone them up (on 1909), and tell them that under regulation 17 of the European Communities regulations 2003, you would like to cancel your contract. So you are off your contract now. Here comes the fun bit.

As part of the same regulation, you have the right to cancel without penalty. It is YOUR RIGHT to cancel your contract, but stay on as a monthly customer, on the exact same plan, just not tied for 18 months. Of course, from reports, it seems that different people are being told different things. Some are being told that they must leave the network (false), some are being told that they are simply not allowed do this (false). Just keep pushing, and you should get it all worked out.

An interesting factor in this is if you are allowed keep any upgrades that you may have in your account. For instance, if I wanted to take this opportunity to get out of my contract, would I then be able to resign a contract in September when my upgrade will come into fruition, and get a cheap iPhone 4? I don’t know. Some people are being told they can and some people are being told they can’t.

So, why would you want to do this? It is almost guaranteed that with Vodafone and 3 having iPhone 4 on their network, there is about to be a lot of competition in the market. This legal loophole allows you get out of your contract, and move to another provider, getting whatever deal they have going on the new iPhone. Or, if O2 steps up to the mark and provides the best option for iPhone 4 contracts (doubtful) you will be let resign and (hopefully) get a cheap ass iPhone. This, of course, all hinges on if they let you keep your upgrades or not.

Has anybody had any experience with this? I’m going to look into it some more and try it out tomorrow, recording the entire conversation. I will only go through with it if I can get spoken confirmation that I can keep my upgrade.

Tags: iPhone, O2

So, if you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a large number of tweets in the past few days about a broken iPhone.

Recently, my iPhone has been giving an error at seemingly random times. It reads “This accessory was not made to work with iPhone”. It started off just popping up whenever I plugged it into the Apple Charger (but not EVERY time) and then progressed to just happening in normal every day situations. Once this error message came up, the iPhone shut off audio to headphones and the internal speaker, which made it impossible to take phone calls or use the alarm clock app. As you may imagine, this was rather annoying.

AppleCare Phone Call #1

So, I call the AppleCare people, and end up with a lovely Indian man, down in Cork. He assured me that I would be able to get my iPhone replaced, and that if I put up a deposit of €400, I would be able to get the replacement iPhone before I even gave them my old one! Awesome, right? I thought so. So I asked if I could ring them again later, with a credit card number. He affirms that I can, and says he will email me a number which I can use to jump right back to the replacement process without having to go through all the questions about the water sensors and such. I hang up, happy.

I never get the email.

AppleCare Phone Call #2

This time, I get a women called Ana, (whom it later transpires is convinced that my name is Ken McMan) who, because I don’t have that number I was promised, has to run through all the steps again to make sure that I’m not trying to rip them off. Which took a while. She had a fixation on the fact that I used a set of Logic3 Jivebox speakers with the iPhone (awesome, by the way) and it took me several attempts to pursuad her that they were not the issue. Then, after talking to several supervisors, she agreed to send me a replacement phone. It seemed that the cool get your iPhone in two days deal for a deposit had ended, instead, they wanted me to pay €29 for the service. Feck that! Went with the free service where they send me a box, I place the iPhone in the box which is taken back by the UPS guy, and I wait a few days (the weekend) and get a new one.

So this was going on, and at the same time I was organizing with Zagg to get a replacement InvisibleShield (as part of the warrenty you get a replacement one for free if it scratches or you have to replace the iPhone) which was a much smoother experience. Just went on their website, clicked a button, and posted the old shield.

Anyway, the iPhone arrived on the Monday, and it came in the most fecking awesome box ever. Seriously. Back in the day of the 3rd Generation iPod, you sent it for replacement and you just got it back in a plastic bag. For the iPhone, they bad designed a wonderful high quality box with protective foam and all. Take a look:

If you want to see yet more pictures of the iPhone replacement box, and the box that the box came in, head to My Flickr Account.

Anyway, I got the iPhone, and a few days later got the InvisibleShield. They have changed the application system! Comes with a really weird sponge, but was certainly easier to apply.

Tags: Apple, InvisibleShield, iPhone

So I watched about three live-blogs of the iPhone 4.0 reveal this week, all at once. You can watch it yourself if you so wish. Here are my thoughts on the new features offered by iPhone 4.0.

Multitasking – This isn’t really multitasking, now, is it? The apps themselves aren’t really running in the background, “services” are that the apps can use. This means that before an app can engage in “multitasking”, it has to be rewritten to take advantage of these services. And there are only seven types of things that apps can do in the background. One of which is NOT the ability to take part in Instant Message conversations, which means that I will have to stick to IM+’s push notification system. The seven services are:

1. Background Audio (allows applications play audio in the background and use the iPod controls)
2. VoIP which allows applications like Skype to accept calls in the background (now if only Skype would release their 3G version)
3. Location Services so that apps can use the GPS in the background
4. Fancier push notifications
5. Local notifications
6. Task completion (which allows apps complete tasks in the background, for instance, uploading a whole load of pictures to Flickr)
7. Fast App Switching (which allows applications open and close instantly)

UPDATE: Turns out that while I am technically correct in how this multitasking works, I am wrong about it being hugely limiting to devs, and was put right by the wonderful Steve Troughton-Smith, who knows a lot more about this kind of thing then I do. Basically, this is the same system that Android uses, and other then the IM dealio, offers all the benefits of multitasking except the ability to see two apps at once, which would be silly on an iPhone anyway. I could see that being useful on the iPad though. Think iTunes mini!

App Folders – This is something I called for in an earlier blog post. Basically, it allows you have folders of applications, with 9 apps in each folder. Great to clean up my games screen! The folder icon is made out of the icons for all the apps. I think that this is a feature that the iPhone was sorely lacking, and am glad that you can now keep something like 20,000 apps on an iPhone.

Fancier Mail – Hoohah. Single inbox. This is useful for me because I have about seven email accounts, and to check them all I need to go into each inbox separately. No longer! They have also included threaded messaging, which shall hopefully move over to Mac OS X soon, if they haven’t forgotten about the operating system.

iBooks – iBooks (the application for reading ebooks on the iPad) will make it’s way to the iPhone, and will sync with the iPad’s iBooks apps through iTunes so as you are always on the right page. Nice. If I had an iPad.

Enterprise – You probably don’t really care about this. Basically allows you distribute apps over a huge number of iPhones. Makes the lives of IT people easier.

Game Centre – This has been likened to Xbox Live. It is basically what the Plus+ network has been for a fair long time, just endorsed by Apple. I think this is the start of Apple moving into the social networking business.

So, those are the main features that Apple is toting. Pretty much all of them are things that have been on phones since the start of the smartphone craze, with only Game Centre being particularly innovative. However, there are another few little things that Apple have told us about. For instance, the iPhone now comes with inbuilt spellcheck, users can set their own wallpaper (like the iPad) and there is bluetooth keyboard support. For if you want to write your thesis in Notes, I would imagine.

So. What do you think about iPhone 4.0?

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 4.0

These days, a huge swodge of blog reading is done on iPhones and other smartphones, and we all know how hard it can be to navigate a blog on one of these devices, flicking around the place to view pictures and such. So, if you are reading this blog post on YOUR smartphone, chances are you have noticed something about now. The Scodio Blog has magical inbuilt ability to completely transform itself to best fit whatever device you are reading it on! The same of course goes for www.ViewFromTheQuad.com, my podcast’s website. On the VFTQ site, there is even a way for iPhone users to stream episodes without having Safari open! (Hint: play an episode of VFTQ, and use the home button to exit out of Safari, not closing the Quicktime window that pops up.) Who says the iPhone can’t multitask?

First thing is first. It is important to recognise that this is actually quite an easy feat to accomplish. Like, crazy easy. It basically comes down to what plugins you use, and if you have a podcast, how you encode your media files.

Optimise site for iPhone and other Smartphones

First thing is first. You are going to want to make your site work with pretty much every smartphone out there. If you use WordPress, this is easily accomplished by installing the WPtouch plugin, developed by Brave New Code. They say this on the matter of the plugin: “WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.” It does all sorts of cool things, like formatting the site to Apple’s App Store design specs, allowing you to integrate your tweets, add one of those cool iPhone home screen iPhones for when people want to add your blog to their homescreen, like an actual app and it rescales your photographs and such. It’s wonderful! It even allows you to run Google Adsense, Google Analytics code and other custom code, and it works with 99% of WordPress apps that would be useful on a mobile device.

Get your media ready for background play on iPhones

If you are a podcaster using any kind of blog system which links to it’s media files directly in the posts (such as the wonderful and powerful Powerpress plugin for WordPress) that magical background playing I mentioned is probably already already working. If you aren’t linking to media files directly in your posts, start doing it. Now.

Note that you must be encoding your media in a format that iTunes recognises. So basically MP3 or AAC. But I don’t know of many podcasters who don’t encode in MP3 anyway, so you should be fine in this regard.

“But what if I don’t use WordPress, Cian?”

Well, I can offer a few ideas. If you use RapidWeaver, some themes such as many of those developed by NimbleHost come with cool inbuilt iPhone themes that make the website look wonderful on an iPhone and an Android based phone. For CMSes like Drupal, I took a quick look around but couldn’t find anything. If you handbuild your own sites, you probably don’t need this article.

Tags: android, blog, iPhone, plugins, smartphones, WPtouch

About three weeks ago, I stumbled upon an iPhone app called Sleep Cycle. This application promised to wake me at a time at which I was closest to a ‘waking state’, and thus leave me less sleepy and tired in the morning, something that I have a fair problem with which results in headaches and general grumpieness. It does this by measuring how much you are moving throughout the night, then waking you within a half hour time period that you set yourself, when it thinks you are sleeping lightest.

The Set-up

What you need to do while using this app sounds a bit dodgy at first. You run the app, choose your lovely sounding wakeup noise, set the latest time at which you would like to be woken, start the alarm and just put the iPhone face down on the mattress close to your head. Make sure not to power the phone down or put it on hold! The app powers down the screen, powering it back up if you pick it up to check the time. I rather like how it handles this, as it displays it in a nightime friendly way, that won’t burn out your retinas.

Next, you go to sleep.

Once you have done that successfully, the app sits on the side of your bed, dutifully recording all your movements, and compiling them into a chart what looks like this:

Sleepcycle - Stats

By use of this, you can try to work out at exactly what time you had that dream where you were swimming in a giant picklejar in the sky. The application also uses the data to work out at what time would be the best moment to wake you, so you feel least sleepy. Whether it works or not is in debate.

If we take a look at the App Store reviews, people are pretty damn sure that it works. We get the odd voice of descent, with Peter Dublin claiming that all it does is sound the alarm 10 minutes before you ask it too. I haven’t found this in my testing, but maybe there is some monkeywork going on behind the scenes.

In full, the app worked for me for three or so nights, but after that, it seemed to stop having an effect on how sleepy I was once I woke up. Maybe you will have different results, and if you have tried the app, let me know what you think in the comments! Some more screenshots are below, click them to view them bigger and get more information on each of the screens.

Tags: app, iPhone, ipod touch, sleep

I have always used Newsfire to read my hundred odd RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful UI, easy to use and is everything that I could ever want in a news reader. Well, almost everything.

While there was, at some point, an iPhone version of the app in development, it never got finished. It is vaporware. (Now that I think of it, Newsfire itself hasn’t been updated in many months). With the arrival of the iPhone into my technological family, I have been looking for a way to get my news feeds onto the iPhone. Looking around a bit, it seemed that Google Reader was the best way to sync RSS feeds around multiple computers and devices, but I hated it’s web interface, and really disliked how NetNewsWire works, both on iPhone and on Mac.

So, I found Gruml, a client for Google Reader. I also found an iPhone app called Newsie, and it is these that I shall be talking about for the remainder of this blog post.

First, Gruml.

It is a fairly plainly set out RSS reader, with the feeds and folders listed down the left of the screen, and the rest split between a list of articles based on the folder or feed you are in, and of course, the article that you have selected. It allows you open links in it’s inbuilt browser if you wish, or just open them behind the application in your default browser, which is what I do. It allows you see much more information at once then Newsfire does, yet Newsfire just seems to be that slightly better app then Gruml. But I can forgive this, as Gruml has the ability, in a round about sort of way, to sync with my iPhone. And once Newsfire comes out with an iPhone version, I will be heading back to them in an instant.

So, what are the Pros of Gruml, minus any iPhone-y type things?

Firstly, it works with Google Reader, as I have mentioned. This allows you to view your feeds anywhere you are, and sync your feeds across many Macs and PCs, which is certainly very nice for when I’m bored at school and the computer room is open. Being connected to Google Reader, it also allows you share your “stared” articles with people you know, which is nice.

Another nice thing about Gruml is that it works fullscreen much better then Newsfire ever did. I don’t know why this is, but I am more comfortable with it fullscreen then I ever was with Newsfire. For things like browsers and high-information apps, I really do like to take up as much screen real-estate as I can, so as not to be distracted. It can also push Growl notifications, which is nice.

A fairly large con with Gruml is that everything you do is attached with a big of lag. Wanna check out a folder? You gotta wait for Gruml to get in contact with Google Reader, which takes a couple of miliseconds. Wanna read a feed? Be prepared to wait 1-3 seconds for it to load, as it doesn’t seem to be cached on the machine very well. Which is kind of odd. I never ran up against this problem in Newsfire, which loaded feeds like the bejaysus. This is, however, seemingly down to the whole nature of Google Reader. It is, of course, on the cloud.

Now, let’s talk about the iPhone Google Reader client, Newsie.

Click images to see gallery

Newsie is a fairly new iPhone app designed to let you read your feeds in peace, without having to load them all at once. It syncs with Google Reader, which is what makes it so very attractive to me. Take a look around the gallery above to check out some of what it looks like.

Other then the slight lag as it communicates with Google Reader, it works pretty much flawlessly. It integrates with both Tweetie and Twitteriffic (although it would be nice if it didn’t leave you to have to type out the headling that you are sharing – it only sends the link to the Twitter application), it remembers where you are in an article or list of articles if you close down the app, it allows you to view the original content in fullscreen and has this super speedy starring system so that you can just flick a headline to star it, which will both place it in your “Starred” folder, and cache the original webpage. This allows you to hunt down interesting things to read while you are waiting for the bus, and to read them on the bus where you may not be guaranteed 3G signal.

I would love it to have Push though, or a badge on the icon showing how many unread stories there are on your list. That would be seriously cool.

All in all, Newsie is a very capable app. I love how you can “lock” it’s screen, so that if you are reading the iPhone sideways, such as in bed, it won’t autorotate. I love how this feature is just a single tap away, no matter where you are in the app, and hides away when it’s not needed. I love it’s starring system, although I’m having some trouble deleting cached pages. Check it out at it’s site, and if you think it’s for you, try out the app!

How do you get your feeds? I have over 150 of them syncing away at any one moment, and always want to hear about how I can streamline my readers. Have you tried either of these apps?

Tags: google reader, iPhone, newsfire, newsie, RSS

UPDATE: Head to the bottom of this article to check out the CEO of McGraw-Hill totally outing Apple on their Tablet! It’s confirmed, people!

As we all know, tomorrow Apple is having a keynote. They are, as usual, keeping totally tight lipped as to what will be announced, but we are all pretty damn sure that it will be tablet hardware. However, hopefully they will do some software refreshes as well, and the following is what I want to see.

iPhone

Let’s be honest, here, people. The iPhone home screen is pretty difficult to get around. If you have lots of pages of apps, chances are you have to go flipping and flipping and flipping to find the one that you want. For instance, if I want to find one of my most used apps, “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application”, I need to flick to page 5 of my apps. And this takes time, time which might make my classy little joke a little late. And NOBODY want’s to make a joke late, right? This is what I’m thinking. You know Exposé on your Mac? I want to be able to do that for iPhone pages. If you are on any home screen, I want to be able to use three fingers to flip up or down, and then a 3 x 3 grid of homescreens will be displayed. I tap which one I want to head into, and boom. Easy access to “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application” along with all my other apps. Of course, if you had any more then 6 home screens, you could scroll down to see them. But if you have more then 6 home screens, you might need to get checked out. That’s 54 apps you have there.

[EDIT: Holy Crap, somebody pointed out that Steven Troughton-Smith, mentioned further down in the article, has developed THIS EXACT THING for Jailbroken iPhones! Apple! HIRE THIS MAN!]

While I’m on the subject of apps, I want some sort of auto-sort for apps I download. I want to say that homescreen 5 is my games screen, and have any games I download sent there automatically. Of course, this may get difficult when I fill up that screen, but it could then give me the option to dedicate another screen to games, which would be inserted, pushing screen 6 to screen 7 and creating a new blank screen 6, ready and waiting to receive my new game.
I want multitasking. Or if I don’t get multitasking, I want some sort of inbuilt push system. I want my RSS feeds to automatically update in Newsie, dammit! (More coming on Newsie in a later blog post.) While I’m at it, I want the Notes application to be able to sync over the air, like all the other MobileMe Push apps on the iPhone.

How about stacks? You know, those things that nobody I know uses that Mac OS X people can use on the dock? Basically, you click on it and a big drawer opens up, allowing you to place any application or document in it for easy access. Let’s have that on the iPhone! I want to be able to put a stack on the bottom bar of my iPhone, (a “cool games” one, for instance) and then just tap it so it springs open, allowing me open any app with ease. That would be nice. In fact, an Irish developer called Steven Troughton-Smith has developed a Stacks application for Jailbroken iPhones which is pretty much perfect. Apple! Buy it off him!

You know what would be really cool? I have my iPhone sitting here, next to my Macbook Pro. It’s on the same Wi-fi network, and has bluetooth. It can connect wirelessly in these two manors. How about I can send a text message from my Macbook Pro and have it routed through the iPhone to be sent? Hell, how about the laptop doesn’t even need to be on the same wifi network, but sends it over the internet to be sent, Push style, to the iPhone, which will then send it on. That would be spiffy.

iWork

There is one thing that pisses me off about iWork.com, Apple’s cloud document service. You can’t edit from the cloud. Take a look at the likes of Google Docs, and I imagine that Apple could bite a fairly huge chunk of this market from Google if they were to give cloud editing a shot. In fact, how about when you buy iWork and own MobileMe, we get iWork webapps? Online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that integrate into your offline version. Sure, they might not be able to pull all the fancy moves that the desktop applications can, but it would be pretty damn useful! Every time I save a document, I want iWork to, in the backround, update the cloud version of the file, and visa versa. You can even use my MobileMe space, if you want! There is a Documents folder in there for something, after all!

A big problem with iWork is that the documents are not easily viewable by people who are on Windows, or Mac users who haven’t bought iWork. Of course, you can always do a little jiggling about with the file and fish out a PDF (more on this rather cool process at TUAW.com) but I want something more. Apple, after all, like their stuff to “Just Work”. So how about, when the file is opened on a computer which doesn’t have iWork or is a Windows machine, a really barebones integrated PDF viewer is opened instead, and opens up this PDF file? Sure, there is no editing ability, but it allows me to send files to anybody, and have them viewed by anybody! Perfect cross-platform document sharing!

MobileMe

MobileMe doesn’t have a huge number of problems. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to sync Notes.app over the air.

HOWEVER, one huge problem that MobileMe has is iDisk. Let’s not mince our words. In comparison to services like Dropbox, it is utterly shite. It stalls all the time and it takes ages to update. It stops working for no given reason and, most suprisingly for a product that is supposed to be “embedded into the core of the operating system”, we can’t share files directly from the finder. Dropbox, on the other hand, is utter perfection. Seriously Apple. Buy Dropbox, or develop something that is even almost equal to it. If you do, iDisk will become perfect, and much more useful. Hell, what would also be nice is Apple giving us unlimited storage (with a MobileMe subscription, of course) and making some sort of cloud based Time Machine. The likes of Mozy would NOT be happy with that, but we are already paying more for MobileMe then for an unlimited Mozy account, so I suspect that Apple can afford it. Sure, limit the amount of non backups we can keep, but unlimited backups (for, say, a 30 day period) over iDisk would be lovely. And make it real easy to order a complete restore. Maybe send it out on a USB harddrive or something. In fact, just copy Backblaze for the restore process.

iLife

I have no idea what I would want in an iLife refresh. Much much faster iPhoto loading, maybe. Oh! Since I have already requested unlimited MobileMe space, how about all my iPhoto pictures automatically get sent to the MobileMe cloud? Build in some social network ability, and BOOM! Apple have just knocked Flickr out of the market, when it comes to Macs, anyway. The MobileMe iPhoto gallery is cute, but not really good for sharing with friends.

While I’m on a “Move Everything to the Cloud” rant, how about putting our iTunes libraries up there? You just bought Lala, a serious contender in music streaming, so you have the tools in front of you. Why not allow me listen to my iTunes Library wherever I am?

So, in general, I want Apple to cloudify everything. Of course, this would make most of the Mac population totally kill their bandwidth (I only get 100gb up/down each month) so that would have to be sorted out.

What do YOU want to see announced tomorrow?

UPDATE Some silly CEO has outed Apple on their tablet. Oh-Oh…

Tags: Apple, apps, dropbox, iLife, iPhone, iWork, MobileMe, mozy, Software, stacks

You may remember, a couple of months ago I blogged twice about the iPhone. First came “Am I impressed with the new iPhone?“, which resulted in the fact that Yes, I did in fact want an iPhone. 8 days later came “The Irish iPhone Ruined My Hopes and Dreams“, in which I explained how the Irish iPhone was a total waste of money, claiming that it “might make your face fall off”. No idea why.

So I acquired one anyway, being the active consumer that I am, and have had it for about a month and a half now. I stick by my statement that the lack of Visual Voicemail is an extreme pity, and reduces the value of the iPhone as a whole, and the fact that the price plans are defiantly a bit high for what they include (€45 for 100 minutes, 100 texts and 1gb of data?) are still a sore point. However, I need to show some SERIOUS respect for the people behind the Talk2O2 Twitter page and Support Forum.

I have had the odd problem and question with the iPhone so far. One with Billing cycles (there was something odd showing up with the Bill.), one with people not getting MMS that I send them and another with Text Bundles and how they work when you cancel them.

I spoke to them in the private area about the Billing Cycle question, and Daryll and Paddy made short work of explaining that which I didn’t understand, fully communicating at each stage of trying to work out what was going on, offering to send me both hard and email copies of the bill in question, and generally being very very helpful.

As for the MMS problem, I at first tried emailing O2 with the problem, and despite O2 continuously reassuring me that their support center was “O2 ‘CCMA Contact Centre of the Year 2008′”, the person at the other end of the email just seemed to be copy-pasting out of a script that had next to nothing to do with my Problem. On complaining about this on Twitter, the @Talk2O2 people came to ME and asked what the problem was! We did a bit of DM-troubleshooting, and worked out that it wasn’t my phone, but the other people’s. So not something that I can change, really.

The third problem was dealt with in about half an hour, over Twitter. I had asked if, when a Text Bundle was cancelled, I would loose any remaining texts from the bundle. Whoever was on the other end of the account got back to me within half an hour to tell me that I would loose them all, but then went beyond the field of wonderful and offered to cancel the bundle for me automatically the second that it was due to renew, which would let me finish using the messages, but wouldn’t keep me subscribed for the next billing cycle!

So what have we learnt today then? I still think that the O2 price plans are a little bit mad, all things considered, and the O2 Email support was pretty dire in my experience. However, the Talk2O2 people are top class friendly fellows who know what they are doing and how to get it done professionally and well. Hats off to you two, Dayrll and Paddy! You win this week’s “Scodio Phone Network Support Crew Of The Week!”.

Tags: iPhone, O2