<blockquote>
I used to jailbreak my iPhone, but haven’t felt the “need” in years, especially with iOS 5. Why do people continue to do this?
</blockquote>
Exactly.

Stephen Hackett

1.1 Million Jailbreaks

<blockquote>
There needs to be a way to make Version 1 no longer for sale, but still available for customers who already bought it. They should be able to re-download the version they bought at any time. Developers should still be able to release updates to that version.
Developers should be able to associate the new version of the app with the previous version. Some sort of logic in the App Store that says, “If you purchased previous version of ‘My Cool App’ then you can buy this version for ‘x’ amount” (where x is the discounted price). And if not, then you buy it for full price.
</blockquote>
Yours truly on Mac Appstorm about paid upgrades. Go read it all.

Mac App Store Paid Upgrades: How Apple Should Fix a Broken Model


Paid Upgrades

<a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/1166294/imessage_and_instant_messages_deserve_different_apps.html">Dan Moren argues that Apple is missing the boat</a> by integrating iMessage into it’s renamed IM app previously called iChat, now called Messages.
I really don’t know if it’s possible for me to disagree more. I think some of Apple’s current implementation leaves a little to be desired, but Messages for Mac is currently a beta so I have yet to level full criticism at Apple over implementation details. But Moren really wants two apps. Okay fine. I get that. But I disagree with it.
Here’s the deal. For those that have iMessage whom I communicate with IM style, Gtalk has been replaced by iMessage. We use it for instant message just fine. The implementation detail that bugs me just a little is that 50% of the time, my iPhone buzzes with each message <a href="#fn:imessageim1">1</a>.
But I actually love using iMessage for IM because the full conversation is present and synced on all my devices. I don’t care about status anymore, I haven’t for a long time. I used to fiddle with my away or available status, or tried for a while to have my Gtalk status reflect my Google Buzz status. But after a while, I went to an “always available” model. My phone was always logged in to Gtalk via BeejiveIM, my computer is was always logged in to Gtallk whenever it was on via iChat. If someone messaged me and didn’t get me, well it’s not the end of the world. So the iMessage always available thing doesn’t bother me, I treat it the same as IM: If I’m available and able, I answer, if I’m not I don’t.
And I certainly don’t want to manage two apps. I do still use Gtalk for my PC friends, or for those that are just not comfortable with iMessage but are doing just fine with IM.
And iMessage solves one major problem that I’ve always had with any IM network. IM is a status driven model. I have to log in and be connected to receive messages. But the problem is that I often get logged out of IM networks without knowing it. Gtalk has a stream error, or a transport error or some such nonsense. It was especially challenging for my communication with my wife. iChat would have an error and she wouldn’t see it. So she was often not available via IM and it was frustrating for both of us. Since we went to iMessage, we are able to communicate IM style much more often. And the bonus is she and I both get the messages on our Macs and our iPhones.
So, sorry Dan, but I disagree whole heartedly. I think Ben Brooks <a href="http://brooksreview.net/2012/04/imessage-message/">is mostly right in his take on this</a>.
<blockquote>
It’s an interesting problem, but I don’t think separating the two is the solution. iMessage is great and so is IM, and they are two very different communication methods, BUT one is the future and one is the past.
</blockquote>
Where I disagree is when he says that they are two very different communication methods. I have not found that to be the case in practice.
<hr>
<ol>
<li>If I’m active in the conversation, the iPhone doesn’t seem to “come alive” with alerts as much because the chat window on the Mac is active and messages are getting marked read immediately. <a href="#fnref:imessageim1">↩</a></li>
</ol>

iMessage or IM?

<blockquote>
These days, iTunes is simultaneously Apple’s most important and problematic product. It’s a music and video player. It’s a store, the gateway to buying music, videos, ringtones, and iOS apps. And of course, it’s a syncing system, connecting to Apple devices from iPhone to iPod to Apple TV.
Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul.
</blockquote>
Am I the only one in the world who simply doesn’t have any problems with iTunes and/or syncing?
As a matter of fact, one of the things I have loved about my iPhone from day one is the seamless syncing and ease of management through iTunes.
And these days, with automatic wi-fi syncing, it’s easier than ever. I have a smart playlist that syncs to my iPhone. This smart playlist contains any music in the genre “soundtrack” of which the rating is 3 stars or more. Recently, I added a soundtrack album to iTunes and rated it at 4 stars. Sometime later, I decided I wanted to listen to it in the car, so I brought up the Music app on my iPhone, and started playing it. I never had to verify it was on the iPhone, drag it over, or deal with sync issues. It just worked.
I don’t get what people’s problem is.

MacWorld

Syncing Ship?

Does anyone remember when the kinds folks at the Apple Store Genius Bar knew what they were talking about?
<blockquote>
Since the iOS 5.1 update, my iPhone 4S has had terrible battery life. I joked about it being related to the new “4G” label displayed on the phone. That joke stopped being funny to me when I needed to charge my phone three times a day.
Next, I noticed that the slide to unlock would occasionally stutter. At least once a day I observed app icons randomly displaying a loading progress bar when they were not being updated.
</blockquote>
…
<blockquote>
This is what Apple is training their Geniuses to tell people: It’s your fault. You’re using it wrong. Spend an entire day to reset the phone, install all of the apps again. Reconfigure them all. Place them all in folders and on home screens again. Kill your apps.
</blockquote>
Two things:
One, how is it possible that of the four iOS devices I have owned, and the multitude of iOS devices that my friends have, I have never once experienced, nor have I seen experienced one of the problems mentioned above. Never once has any iPhone ever offered to stutter on a slide to unlock. iOS 5.1 significantly improved my battery life. I have never EVER had an icon randomly display a loading progress bar unless an update was in progress.
Two, what is going on with the Geniuses? Did Apple have to hire too many too fast after the iOS device explosion and their training process just fell through the cracks? I remember when Geniuses were knowledgeable, extremely helpful, and not stupid. But I have to tell you, if you hear any Apple Genius tell you to kill all your apps in the multi-tasking tray, you should either turn around and walk out, or ask for a Genius who knows what he/she is talking about. iOS is not designed to work that way. Geniuses should know that. That they don’t is shameful.

MacDrifter

Genius Ignorance

<blockquote>
Apple just rejected my app which uses Dropbox.
Reason for rejection is the fact that if the user does not have Dropbox application installed then the linking authorization is done through Safari (as per latest SDK).
Once the user is in Safari it is possible for the user to click “Desktop version” and navigate to a place on Dropbox site where it is possible to purchase additional space.
Apple views this as “sending user to an additional purchase” which is against rules.
</blockquote>
See, I don’t think Apple is perfect. In fact this is just downright stupid of Apple. The word that I’m looking for I won’t use here since I try to keep it cleaner than most tech sites.
My friend, <a href="http://joeyvalenti.com/archive/dropbox-sdk-ios-apps-rejected">Joey Valenti linked to The Verge’s article on this</a> and quoted one of the comments:
<blockquote>
We have a raft of rejections over patently silly hypotheticals. Meanwhile, there was never any chance that existing companies like Amazon were going to give Apple a slice of their revenue stream just because they wanted an app on a phone. So this is a bad policy and Apple should be blasted for it, because it’s a stupid policy, not because it’s an evil policy.
</blockquote>
Yeah, pretty much.

Dropbox Forums

Dropbox Integrated App Rejection

I’m a big fan of Sparrow. In fact, it is my second favorite email client on the Mac. There are days when Sparrow is the only email client I use (most of the time I do use Apple Mail and like it just a tad better, though I wish I could merge the best features of both into one client).
As everyone is no doubt aware by now, Sparrow released their iOS app last week. I, like most good geeks ran out to buy and download the app. And it is superb. It is to me, what a good iOS app should be: well done, well polished, good looking, easy to use, nice visual cues, and not cluttered. I went an entire two days with iOS’s built in Mail disabled and used only Sparrow. It is a great app. But there is one major problem, and it is not Sparrow’s or the development team’s fault. There is no push of any kind, no push notifications, no background email loading, nothing. There is a reason for this. Apple has only a specific set of background APIs that developers can “legally” use. One of those APIs that Sparrow could have tapped into is Push notifications. Push does nothing for loading emails in the background, but it would at least notify you when you have a new email. Then you would have to open Sparrow and let it load in the new emails.
There are problems with the notification approach. There are two ways I can see that this could be implemented.
<ol>
<li>
The developers of Sparrow could run a server that would store your email login credentials and poll your mail provider at a set frequency to check for new mail. When there’s new mail, the Sparrow servers could send a push notification to your phone.
</li>
<li>
They could have the end user set up a forwarder to forward their email to a special Sparrow user address. Sparrows servers could send out a push notification then discard the email.
</li>
</ol>
There are problems with both of these approaches to solving push notifications. First of all there’s security. To many people, email security is a big deal. Allowing an intermediate server to store those credentials and log on to poll for new mail is not a good thing. The third party company would need to be pretty good at security. Then there’s the problem with the first option of polling from the Sparrow third party server that push notifications probably wouldn’t be instant because most mail servers don’t allow constant polling, that could overload the server. I suppose some form of IMAP IDLE could be implemented, but it’s all very complicated. The second option of forwarding is also complicated. And though if the email that is forwarded is discarded, there’s still security questions. There’s also the fact that setting up forwarding properly is asking a lot of many users, not to mention some email services don’t even support forwarding.
Then there’s cost. I don’t know how many users Sparrow has but it’s a lot. Running a third party server for push notifications would be very expensive for the developer. And the service would have to be reliable. It would have to always work. To me, there’s just way too many problems with this approach.
There is another background API that could be used. It’s the VOIP API. Apple provides a background API that allows an app to open a network connection and listen for incoming requests. They make this API available only to VOIP apps, but there’s no technical reason why it couldn’t work for all kinds of apps. The app itself (as far as I understand) will still go into a suspended state when in the background, and iOS keeps the connection open to listen for incoming requests. If a request comes in, the app is woken from suspension and allowed then to execute code in the background. Sparrow actually did implement usage of this API to open an IMAP IDLE connection to the IMAP server and listen for new emails. It’s not any more or less battery efficient than a VOIP app. Yet, because Apple has arbitrarily limited this background API to VOIP apps only, Apple rejected this implementation in Sparrow.
Don’t misunderstand me, I understand why Apple wants to keep this API limited. If they didn’t, developers would probably find all sorts of uses for this, which accumulated app by app would probably have a significant negative impact on battery life. But third party mail apps would seem to have a legitimate need for this functionality to me.
This is really all about choice. It’s not that I’m unhappy with Apple’s built in Mail client. But I do like Sparrow a little bit better, however because of the push issue, and the fact that Sparrow can’t even just check for email occasionally in the background, it is unusable as my primary iOS email client.
There is in fact one other issue that prevents me from doing it as well, and that is that iOS has no way to specify default applications for specific things. I can’t tell iOS that all mail should now be handled by Sparrow like I can on the Mac (the same goes for web browsers for that matter). It’s frustrating actually.
I propose that Apple allow both the background API usage for email clients, as well as allowing users to specify the default apps for things like email and web. It seems like there’s a lot more benefit than not to me.
If you would like to sign Sparrow’s petition to Apple to allow them to use the background API, <a href="http://www.sprw.me/push.php">click here</a>.

Sparrow Push

<blockquote>
Unlike any other tethering solution (unsupported or otherwise) out there, Tether’s new app is entirely web-based. You don’t need to buy the app in the App Store or the jailbreak Cydia store. It creates a wireless connection over AdHoc that any device can connect to.
</blockquote>
Go watch the video. This is an interesting use of HTML 5. I approve. I don’t need the HTML5 version right now though because I got the app while it was available for a short time from the app store and so am happy tethering over USB for now… Until Apple updates iOS in such a way that breaks compatibility with this app (since Apple pulled it and it won’t be able to receive updates).

Alex Heath writing on Cult of Mac

HTML5 Tether

<blockquote>
The Android platform is currently stuck in second gear because Google, their OEMs and the carriers can’t, won’t or simply have no incentive to get the installed base past the Android 2.x API set. There are better and more powerful APIs in Android 4, and there will be better ones again in the future, but developers can’t take advantage of them because almost nobody is running the latest OS.
</blockquote>
…
<blockquote>
With iOS, you get updates direct from the source. Apple ships updates to any device for the period in which they’re being supported. At the moment, this is usually three years or more for iOS devices: the iPhone 3GS from 2009, the 3rd generation iPod touch from 2009 and all iPads can currently run iOS 5.
The story so far on Android is quite different. Michael DeGusta’s well-known visualisation of Android phone updates paints a sorry picture. That post doesn’t address Android tablets but I judge platforms on their track record, not on vague promises that next time will be different.
</blockquote>
…
<blockquote>
Right now, the Android platform looks stalled in the marketplace at Android 2.x. Android 2, coupled with vague promises of future upgrades seems to ‘good enough’ for most carriers and OEM manufacturers. Even Sony just launched their Experia S phone with Android 2.3 and a promise to upgrade to Android 4 in Q2 2012 (we’ve heard that one before).
</blockquote>
Worth a read. A good and thoughtful take on what’s going wrong with Android.

Fraser Speirs

Frasier Speirs on Android

<blockquote>
I love Apple products and the Apple mindset in general. I devour Apple-centric content and I live in the Apple ecosystem. I can sum up my love for Apple with six words: their products dramatically improve my life. (Fun game: try that sentence with any company, and see if it rings true.)
But nobody’s perfect. Here are a couple of specific things I wish Apple products did better, that I haven’t really heard others discuss. (Maybe they just have the good manners not to whine in public? But I digress.)
</blockquote>
His first complaint, that iPhone does not gracefully switch data sources is right on in my experience as well.
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>Product: iPhone. Issue: Gracefully switching data sources. Example: I throw my bag over my shoulder, pop my headphones in, and fire up some streaming radio for the morning commute. As I leave my house, my 4S is still on my home wifi network. I walk downstairs and hit the sidewalk. Somewhere between ten steps and two blocks later, my streaming radio cuts out. If I look down at my phone, I see the wifi icon stubbornly holding on to one dot of coverage - coverage it doesn’t even sense anymore, but is reluctant to inform me about - and then, begrudgingly, the “3G” icon appears to take its place. Sometimes my stream restarts, sometimes it doesn’t.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
Yep. My iPhone will often stubbornly refuse to switch away from wi-fi even when I have far exceeded the range of wi-fi coverage. This has been an annoyance for me as well for some time.
I disagree with his fix though.
<blockquote>
My fix: A slider, in settings, letting me choose a preferred signal strength threshold when I have more than one data source available. If I have anything less than decent wifi, I want to be on 3G (or LTE, in the future). I don’t want to wait until every last morsel of my wifi connectivity is gone before I switch. In a perfect world, the threshold selector would allow for overlap, so that, beneath say 75%-strong wifi, the phone automatically started using 3G data to supplement the signal.
</blockquote>
This will never work in the real world. Having this setting available to most users would not be good. They would have no idea how to configure it. In fact, I don’t even want to fiddle with it. I just want Apple to make it work and switch gracefully all on it’s own.
He also goes on to talk about the problem have switching devices and using multiple devices. Good stuff.

M. Willis

Apple Can Do Better

Sometimes it’s the small things that I get excited about. One thing that has bugged me for many years, but was too small for me to blog about, or even mention on Twitter (at least I don’t think I ever mentioned it on Twitter), is the fact that when you open Safari on iOS and no windows are currently open (because you closed them all), then Safari would bring up the bookmarks list.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love that iCloud syncs all my bookmarks between iOS and OS X and it’s great to have access to all those, but I find that rarely when I open Mobile Safari do I want to access a bookmark. More often than not I want to type a URL into the URL bar OR do a Google search. But Safari (un)helpfully brings up the bookmarks instead, which I must them close, then I have to click in the URL entry area or the Google search area before I can start typing.
As I said, this is a minor annoyance but it sort of like death by a thousand cuts since I often perform this action multiple times a day. And most of the time I close Safari windows I don’t need anymore so Mobile Safari always has no windows open when I bring it up, therefore: bookmarks.
iOS 5.1 has brought a welcome change. I can of course still click my bookmarks as ever, but no longer does Safari bring up that bookmarks list automatically that I must close before I enter the URL. There is much rejoicing on my end believe me! This is one of those welcome refinements that Apple is always working on and honing.

iOS 5.1 Safari Behavior Welcome Change

Regardless of the stance you take on whether HSPA+ is truly 4G or not, whether you acknowledge the standards body’s waffling on the definition, whether you even care personally, it seems like Apple has indeed stirred a hornet’s next up by rebranding the 4S for AT&#x26;T with a 4G data indicator.
Well I have a way that Apple could have avoided the whole thing, how AT&#x26;T still could have called it 4G, and Apple wouldn’t have been in the middle. In fact, Apple already does it in one case. When an AT&#x26;T iPhone is on AT&#x26;T’s non-3G network (which is still alarmingly frequently for me), the data indicator displays “E”. E stands for EDGE. EDGE stands for Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution. Now, technically, this is a 3G technology, but AT&#x26;T never branded it as such because it is barely a 3G technology. Most people call it 2G, sometimes refer to it as 2.75G and on and on. Apple smartly avoided this by simply displaying “E” for EDGE. Most people didn’t and don’t know what this means and most don’t care. They just know that when their iPhone displays the “E” data symbol, things are going to be pretty slow.
So instead of getting involved in the firefight, why couldn’t Apple have replaced the 3G logo with the letter “H” when connected to AT&#x26;T’s HSPA network. Then “H+” for HSPA+. This avoids any firestorm and confusion. AT&#x26;T can tell their customers that when the phone says H+ it’s connected to a 4G network, and Apple isn’t involved with slimy marketing.
They could similarly use “L” or even “LTE” for LTE. And for Verizon EVDO (Verizon’s 3G) they could use EV. Plenty of other phone manufacturers do just that.
Now, I know that Apple probably would never do this, I’m surprised they even did it with EDGE (although I don’t know what else they would have done in that case). Apple doesn’t want the customer to care about the underlying technology. Most customers have been trained to look for how many “G” the phone has. But I submit that either way the customer doesn’t really know or care. They just learn to associate speed with whatever is displayed.

Posts tagged “iOS” from the blog