Apps

A couple of interesting free iPhone apps I've come across:

LeafSnap - take a picture of a leaf and get it identified. I haven't been able to test this much since we have no leaves yet! But I love the idea. Only some US trees so far but more promised.

Photosynth - helps you photograph panaramas, stitches them together, and lets you view them. From Microsoft.

A part of me would like to escape the Apple closed world, maybe buy an Android tablet instead of an iPad. But I really like the huge variety of apps. Some of them come out on Android as well, but not all of them.

iPhone Multi-tasking

A lot of people made a big thing about how the iPhone didn't have multi-tasking. But personally, I never saw any of the reasons as very compelling. Given limited cpu power and memory and a tiny screen, it made perfect sense to single task.

Sure, there are probably a few reasonable uses of multi-tasking. But there are way more potential abuses.

I look at my Windows machine, which is continually thrashing away when I'm not doing anything. Every piece of software I install wants to run stuff in the background. Just to check for updates once a week they want to have a process running constantly. That's not a benefit, that's abuse.

Two days after I installed iOS 4 with its long awaited multi-tasking, I went to use my iPhone in the morning and the battery was totally dead - it wouldn't even turn on. It had plenty of power the evening before. I can't be 100% sure of the culprit, but I assume it must have been some application left running by the new multi-tasking. I suspect it was a mapping app that I'd been playing with, probably running the GPS constantly or something like that.

On the other hand, according to Apple, most apps do not actually run in the background, they just get suspended and resumed. If that's really true in all cases, then I'm not sure what drained my battery overnight.

So now I find myself regularly "killing" all the active apps because I'm paranoid about this kind of scenario. Great, a "feature" has imposed a large manual overhead on me.

Hopefully the situation will improve once apps are updated to work better with the multi-tasking. But there will always be poorly behaving apps.

What I find strange is that Apple went from not allowing multi-tasking, to making it the default, with no way to switch it off. It seems like an option that you had to explicitly turn on (or at least some way to disable it) would have still silenced the critics, but wouldn't have imposed the cost on those of us that didn't want it.

Slow Gmail on iPhone

Lately Gmail on my iPhone has been really slow. (This is the web version, not the mail app.) The screen pops up right away, but it takes a long time to finish checking for new mail - maybe 30 seconds.

I don't have a lot of messages in my inbox, often none. And it happens with a good wifi connection.

I didn't really think too much about it, but I let my sister check her gmail and it was much faster. Very strange.

I searched on the internet but didn't find too much. Most of what I found was for the mail app.

So I just did the usual "kick the machine" - I cleared the history, cache, and cookies. That seemed to do the trick - it was fast again (less than 5 seconds).

So I wrote this blog post and then went back and tried it again and it was slow!!!

Next, I tried deleting the databases for gmail. Still slow.

Try again, delete the databases and this time also clear the history, caches, and cookies. Log back in and it's fast again. And it seems to be staying fast this time, although I'm not totally confident that it'll stay that way.

If you're having the same problem and want to try this, go to Settings > Safari, scroll down to the bottom. Click on Databases, then Edit, then delete any gmail entries. I always seem to have two entries which appear identical. Then go back to the Safari settings and click on Clear History, Clear Cookies, and Clear Cache (one at a time).

NOTE: Clearing cookies will log you out of sites, so don't do this if you don't have your passwords handy to log back in.

A Welcome iTunes Feature for the iPhone

For smaller iPod's like the Shuffle, iTunes has for a long time had an option to convert audio to lower quality to fit more on the device. But for some reason this feature was not available on the iPhone until recently.

As I accumulate more music, and at higher quality, and therefore larger files, my iPhone has been getting full, despite being a 32gb model. I have a few apps that take up more space, like Wikipedia and CoPilot Live but the majority of the space is audio.

Recently I noticed that this option had appeared for my iPhone. I think it probably came in the last update, but it may have been there for a while and I just missed it. It freed up over 10gb of space on my phone! Very nice. Audiophiles will no doubt disapprove, but in the places where I listen to music on my iPhone, I doubt I'll notice the difference.

NOTE: Because this requires updating all the music files on your phone, the next sync after setting this will take a while. Don't do it when you're short of time.

Apple Updates

It's been a busy couple of days for me with Apple updates.

First, Apple released Snow Leopard (the new version of OS X) ahead of schedule, while I was on holidays. The day after I got back was a holiday but I headed for London Drugs who I knew would still be open. Unfortunately, they were all sold out. The next day I tried a few more places including Neural Net (our local Apple oriented computer store). They were all sold out!

Obviously the demand for Snow Leopard was higher than expected, even though there are no really big new features.

In a way the delay turned out to have a positive side. While I was waiting I decided I might as well get the "Boxed Set" which includes the latest iLife and iWork. I'd been thinking about buying iWork anyway and my Mini had an old version of iLife, so it seemed like a good deal. Even better, Neural Net had the Boxed Set Family Pack in stock :-)

Although there were some people recommending waiting to upgrade in case of problems, most people seemed to say it was ok. I updated my MacBook first and when that went smoothly, went ahead and updated my iMac and Mini. So far I haven't had any problems, but I haven't done too much.

OS X finally includes Java 6 :-) so I wondered if there'd be any glitches with Eclipse and jSuneido, but so far so good.

Coincidentally, iTunes 9 was released yesterday so I updated that on all my machines. iTunes finally has a Wish List :-) I always wondered why they didn't have this. Was it because they wanted people to buy right away? But then why would Amazon have a wish list?

The wish list is somewhat hidden. To add items you use the pull down menu attached to the Buy button. The annoying part about this design choice is that items that only have a Rent button (certain movies) can't be added to your wish list. To actually view the wish list, the only link I could find was at the very bottom of the iTunes home page under "Manage". The help describes a different location - under Quick Links on the right hand side - which seems like a better location. It's almost as if they still aren't sure about the feature so they're making it somewhat hidden.

Another major new feature in iTunes 9 is "Home Sharing" which lets you move your media between your different home computers. This should help me keep my living room Mini's music library up to date with purchases (which I mostly make on my main iMac).

You can only use Home Sharing between computers you have "authorized" for your iTunes account. (You're allowed to authorize up to 5 computers.) Originally authorization was for DRM protected music. Since I refused to buy any DRM protected music I never had to worry about authorization. Now I do. I find I have authorized 4 out of my allowance of 5 computers. At least one of those was a machine I no longer own (my old MacBook). I don't think there's any way to un-authorize a machine after the fact (you have to remember to do it before you get rid of the machine or reinstall the OS) As far as I know, the only solution Apple offers is that you can un-authorize all your machines, allowing you to re-authorize the ones you want. (But you can only do this once a year.)

After some searching I found the setting to automatically copy music purchased on other machines. I turned it on and waited. I knew I had purchased music since I last synced my library. Nothing seemed to be happening. I made sure iTunes was running on both machines. I left it for an hour in case it was a slow background task. Nope. I'm guessing that it only works for music you purchase after turning on this option. I guess it all depends how you interpret "automatic". No big deal, it was easy enough to view my iMac library, sort by date added, shift-select all the new stuff and drag it over. I'll have to wait till I purchase some new music to see if it actually syncs automatically then.

On top of all this, Apple released iPhone OS 3.1. I installed it, but there doesn't appear to be anything too exciting in it.

The other big announcement from Apple yesterday was the new version of the iPod Nano with video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio, and pedometer (!?). I was surprised that the camera was video only, but according to comments by Steve Jobs, this was due to size/space limitations. The FM radio even has a "pause" feature like DVR's. It was nice to see Steve back up on the stage after all his health problems.

The iPod Touch (I keep wanting to call it the iTouch) is now being targeted as a game machine. I would never have predicted that, but then again, I very rarely play games so I tend to forget what a big market it is.

Tethering iPhone to MacBook

It was so nice out today, after a less than stellar summer so far, that I decided to take my laptop and go sit outside somewhere for coffee. The spot I picked (Pacific Gallery & Cafe) doesn't have wireless so it seemed like a good time to figure out how to tether my MacBook (13" unibody) to my iPhone (3Gs) for internet access.

It didn't turn out to be so easy. First you have to enable bluetooth on both devices (I hadn't brought a cable or that might have been an easier approach). Then you pair the devices. This went ok other than a little searching to find the appropriate settings.

But after pairing successfully, you're still not connected. Pulling down the bluetooth menu from the menu bar showed the iPhone but Connect to Network was grayed out (disabled). My network preferences showed a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network) but it said the "cable" (!?) was disconnected. Not very helpful. In the Bluetooth preferences the tools menu (the "gear" at the bottom) had a Connect to Network that wasn't grayed out, but it also didn't seem to do anything.

If I picked the MacBook on the iPhone the Bluetooth preferences on the MacBook would switch to connected and then immediately switch back to unconnected.

Of course, I googled for the problem. A lot of the results were about how to get around AT&T not allowing tethering. But I was on Rogers (in Canada) and they supposedly do allow tethering.

Apart from the AT&T results, there seemed to be quite a few people with similar problems, but no real consensus on a solution. Some people claimed if you simultaneously hit connect on both the MacBook and the iPhone then it would work. It didn't for me. Some people suggested removing the bluetooth devices from both the MacBook and the iPhone and re-pairing. That didn't seem to help either.

Finally, one person said to restart the MacBook. That worked! I had to laugh because when people ask me about computer problems one of the first things I always suggest is to restart. But I don't expect to have to do that on Mac OS X.

The sad part is that even after I got it working it was too slow to be usable. I couldn't even bring up Gmail because it would time out. Pinging the name server was giving a response time of 4 seconds (4000 ms)! The iPhone was showing 5 bars and a 3G connection, but obviously I wasn't getting a good connection. Browsing on the iPhone was also very slow so it wasn't just the tethering.

I'll have to try it again when I've got a better 3G connection. I'm not sure if it's going to work easily in the future or not. Some of the people reporting problems had it working for a while and then it quit so I'm not totally optimistic. Maybe using a cable will be simpler. I wonder if the dedicated USB cell "modems" work better. (I would hope I'd be able to use my existing data plan?)