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Grumpy bastard roaming free! 
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June 26, 2009

Mobistar & de iPhone - de reservaties

Op een gegeven moment - na de langverwachte, officiële aankondiging van Mobistar - de iPhone reserveren bij één van de 7 Mobistar winkels in België. Na succesvolle registratie kon je je iPhone dan gaan afhalen op 26 juni tussen 7h30 en 8h 's morgens, vergezeld van een bescheiden ontbijt (croissant en drankje) op kosten van Mobistar.


De mail die diende als bewijs van de registratie, zit echter vol eigenaardigheden. Ofwel hebben de ontwikkelaars bij Mobistar een vreemd gevoel voor humor, ofwel hebben ze een heel aantal steken laten vallen.

Het begint al allemaal met een joekel van een schrijffout in de naam van de afzender: "Mobistar IPone launch".

iPone

Tweede eigenaardigheid: Gmail laadt standaard de foto's in mails niet. Hierdoor kreeg je het onderstaande te zien. Wat is in hemelsnaam "camping De Onbegrensde Zomer"? Edit: blijkbaar is dit een actie van Mobistar. Meer informatie vind je op http://www.onbegrensdezomer.be/nl/.

camping De Onbegrensde Zomer

In bovenstaande screenshot zie je trouwens nog een aantal kemels:
  • iPhone is met een kleine "i", niet met hoofdletter
  • In Antwerpen is er voor zover ik weet geen straat die Keyzerlei heet, wel ééntje met de naam Keyserlei.
Klikken we bovenaan op de link webversie, dan komen we op onderstaande url terecht. Toch wel een beetje vreemd niet? Vooral als het userid gewoon deel uitmaakt van de url?


Misschien nog een privacy probleempje: de userid parameter kan je zelf manipuleren om zo te weten te komen wie er allemaal een iPhone gereserveerd heeft. Mooi staaltje van privacy inbreuk, niet? Gelukkig is enkel de naam te zien, geen andere gegevens.

Al bij al lijkt het erop of Mobistar allesbehalve klaar was voor de lancering van de iPhone in België: een persconferentie slechts 2 dagen voor de lancering, winkels die op eigen houtje pre-order lijsten begonnen aan te leggen om nadien teruggefloten te worden door het hoofdkantoor, flaters in de reservatie e-mails... Een echt succesvolle operatie kan je dat toch niet noemen. Misschien moet Apple toch nog maar eens met Proximus gaan praten?

Filed under  //   Belgium   fail   iphone  

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June 18, 2009

It's not just copy and paste - What's new in OS 3.0

There's much ado about the iPhone / iPod Touch's latest firmware upgrade. I'm not even going to try and copy everything that's spread out over the net the last few days. Instead, I'll give you the most interesting links I've found in the meantime, so you can have a look for yourself.

And although it's doesn't really belong in the list of articles above, the iPhone user manual for OS 3.0 is also available for download.

Filed under  //   iphone  

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May 20, 2009

Latest App Store purchase: Air Sharing Pro

History

Probably long after everyone else heard about it, I got wind that Air Sharing Pro had been released by the good people at Avatron. I've always preferred Air Sharing (the regular version), feeling that other file sharing applications just fell short. 

Take for instance File Magnet: this is one of the first apps of this kind (correct me if I'm mistaken), but it made the error of forcing the end-user to install a desktop program to be able to send and retrieve documents to/from the iPhone. When the product was just released only a Mac client was available. In my opinion, Air Sharing felt the most robust of all. 

What's new?
The only problem I had with the regular version is that it used the built-in iPhone PDF viewer, which is clearly not designed to open large, resource-intensive PDF files. Product manuals weighing several megabytes caused a few problems from time to time. Not so with the Pro version: Avatron has created an in-house developed PDF version, which can easily handle such documents (although there's only so much it can do with a limited amount of memory of course). But that's far from the only change between the regular and the Pro version. Here's a small list of things that are new or have been improved:
  • Email files (uploads to free drop.io server)
  • Print documents
  • Basic file operations (rename, delete, create folder, ...)
  • Access to remote volumes (MobileMe iDisk, FilesAnywhere, MyDisk.se, Generic WebDAV servers)
  • Zipping and unzipping of files
  • Supports password-protected and encrypted PDFs
  • Advanced auto-detection of character encoding in text files
  • Easy file sharing between Air Sharing users on the same WiFi network
Nobody's perfect
Everyone makes mistakes, and bugs are prone to happen. Such is the case with version 2.0, where I've been able to spot two bugs:
  1. PDFs are rendered incorrectly if the first page of your PDF has different dimensions than the rest of your document (e.g. the book's cover as an image). This can be solved by removing the first page.
  2. The "Sort by kind" setting in the File Browser is ignored.
The bugs have already been reported to the developers and a fix should be available in the next release.

Pro version? Why?
Some users are a bit upset that they have to pay twice to get the additional features that differentiate the Pro from the regular version. CEO Dave Howell has been kind enough to explain the reasoning behind it:

We love our early adopters, whether they got Air Sharing for free, as over 80% did, or bought it. You guys are awesome! And your suggestions and enhancement requests are extremely valuable, which is why we have this suggestions forum. 

Soon after releasing Air Sharing, we planned to have two versions: Air Sharing and Air Sharing Pro. Air Sharing would feature a file server and a file viewer. Pro would add Printing, Emailing, access to remote file servers, a custom PDF viewer, zip & unzip, and a host of other features. And we planned to price them at $5 and $10. 

But we also wanted to offer a $5 paid upgrade for Air Sharing users. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet added a mechanism for paid upgrades to the App Store. So we decided to simulate such a mechanism, by offering Air Sharing Pro for only $5 for a brief period. It's something of a blunt instrument, this method, because we have to offer everybody the $5 price, not just current Air Sharing users. But that's okay. If a universal discount is what it takes to reward our customers, that's what we're doing! 

So in effect, if you bought Air Sharing for $5, you can get Air Sharing Pro for $10, which is its regular price. If you got the classic version for free, you get Pro for $5, a Right Bargain. If you bought Air Sharing for $7, you'll have paid a total of $12 for Pro. 

I hope this clarifies things. One other point: we also fixed some bugs in Air Sharing Pro that we do plan to fix in Air Sharing. For example, we made enhancements to the UI, made the PDF viewer much more stable, added support for viewing iWork '09 documents (as long as they're saved With Preview), Our intent is NOT to make people pay for bug fixes. We absolutely plan to roll those bug fixes back into the classic version of Air Sharing as soon as possible. This would already have happened had we not gotten ensnared by the sudden requirement to support iPhone OS 3.0 before Apple will approve apps. But it will happen soon. 

Best regards, and thanks for your support.

Dave Howell 
Avatron Software, Inc.

Conclusion
It's great. 'Nuff said ;-)

Filed under  //   app store   iphone  

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May 11, 2009

Latest App Store purchase: PCalc (on sale!)

Created by James Thomson, PCalc is a calculator on steroids. James describes it in a more professional way:


PCalc1.5Main.png

PCalc is ideal for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature-rich calculator for the iPhone or iPod Touch. 

It includes an extensive set of unit conversions, a paper tape, an RPN mode, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal and binary calculations.

If you're a cheapskate like me, you're in luck: PCalc is available now for half the regular price! And if that isn't enough to convince you, try PCalc Lite. It's completely free of charge (for now) and has many useful features. Great for a testdrive.

Why are you still reading this? Get over to the App Store  and buy this gem!



Filed under  //   app store   iphone  

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