MacLochlainns Weblog

For almost two years, I’ve loved my iPhone. That’s amazing, since I live where AT&T has never provided 3G coverage. The contract expires this summer.

Admittedly, business trips were refreshing because I generally always had a 3G connection. That is, until the last six months or so. During that period of time, I’ve been experiencing some random dropped calls. For example, AT&T dropped my 3G connections about 8 times in less than 30 minutes in April. All three calls went over 5 minutes before they were dropped, and they were made from a hotel in Anaheim, California (near Angels Stadium). Those drops certainly made it appear that their system couldn’t handle the volume of concurrent calls, but it could have been something else.

The final straw was AT&T’s unlimited data plan change announcement. Wow! It caught me by surprise. Their back peddling with a subsequent announcement of qualified renewed contracts doesn’t work for me. They’ve lost what little trust I had for them.

Fortunately, I’d deferred buying an iPad. I’d planned to order an iPad 3G model this last week, but now it will definitely be a Wi-Fi only device! I’m also deferring the purchase now to see if there’s another surprise in the wings.

When I compare the cost of my iPhone against the HTC EVO, the iPhone loses. I found Daniel Lyon’s article Phone Fight! interesting for many reasons. While his comparison of Microsoft versus Apple of yesteryear to Google versus Apple of today is interesting, this quote strikes me:

The mobile Wi-Fi hotspot means my iPad Wi-Fi works virtually anywhere. That alone is probably the single most important reason why I considered dropping my iPhone. Alas, I was disabused of the notion today by David Pogue (6/17/2010). The battery life is pathetic.

Let’s face it: the iPhone interface is AWESOME! Therefore, my idea of replacing my iPhone with an EVO will be a nearly forgotten memory, like my HP-25C of college days and Star Wars IV premiere gone by …

My son’s graduating with his B.S. in Computer Information Technology next month, moving on to his internship, and today released his first independent iPhone App – Chronos Stopwatch. This link takes you to his blog. He did an awesome job on writing the Bizarro iPhone App under contract, but I’m very happy he and Miles Ponson started writing their own software.

It was amazing seeing him sort through all the myriad issues in balancing analog clocks, the decaseconds refresh rates, and a lap counter. I’m sure a few swimming and track coaches will like this utility if they have an iPhone. Throughout his development cycle, the process has been fun to watch. He certainly loves Objective C.

Just as an aside, it has also been gratifying to know that he finally found major uses for the database, like set operators, inline views, and stored procedures. He once noted they weren’t too useful.

A colleague of mine just dropped by his new book on Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhone. He covers Dashcode, Xcode, JavaScript, and Objective-C. He also covers how to use WebView and native SQLite database access from the iPhone.

It looks interesting. By the way, his blog is here.

I played around with a friend’s Kindle and really had to wonder why would people would buy one of them. Since my books sell an electronic edition on Kindle, I hoped for a better solution.

Great news today, a better physical technology has arrived. You can now download a Kindle application for your iPhone! As a big iPhone fan, this is awesome. Naturally, I was curious how my last book looked.

I downloaded the sample chapter and it looked great on the iPhone. The images are well rendered and clear on the screen. I’m probably going to have to buy an e-copy (ouch) because they don’t provide authors with electronic copies.

Thanks a bunch to the team who ported it to the iPhone. Great job!

I wanted to have scrolling on my iPhone for code segments. It appeared simple. Change the style.css file by adding .code { overflow-x:scroll; }. I first tested it in Safari by setting User Agent to Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone, where it worked. Alas, it doesn’t work on my iPhone. A quick look at the iPhone simulator taught me it doesn’t work there either. It appears that horizontal scrolling is disabled on the iPhone.

That style sheet is found in the /public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wptouch/themes/default directory. I’d love to have missed something. If there’s a trick to do it, let me know.