WordPress iPhone app launched
Congrats to the iPhone team at Automattic for the official launch of the WordPress app in the AppStore. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Download it now.
Posts Tagged ‘iphone’
Jul 22, 2008 (No Comments »)
WordPress for iPhone
I am posting this from the awesome WordPress iPhone application that’s coming out very soon.
Matt, Joseph and Ranaan and the rest of the team have created something pretty great with this tool.
I was quite amazed at the controls Apple places on iPhone application development. To just get an Xcode build of the app onto my iPhone took some serious permission granting and cert signing from Matt.
It will be in the AppStore soon so enjoy!
Jul 16, 2008 (No Comments »)
Tagged with: iphone, wordpress
Amazon S3, Steve Jobs and iPhone.. a random post
Amazon S3
I am a digital packrat. I have weird, unimportant data going back 15 years. Convinced that some day I will really want to see the terrible things I created in Photoshop when I was 21. At home I try to keep my data all safe on a 2TB RAID file server. This thing is so loud these days it gets booted up once a month and so I struggle to move enough data around during the times it’s not booted up to keep free space on my MacbookPro. No more. I ran the economics of S3, took Jeremy Zawodny’s advice and am now starting to use Amazon S3. So far so good. Some notes:
I used freedup to eliminate 26% of my storage before attempting to ship it all to Amazon
I use JetS3t to sync my data to and from S3. Great so far, only issue: When an S3 bucket already has 20k objects in it, and I am trying to synchronize a local directory of 10k objects, the resulting data sort must get monstrous and Java crashes (OutOfMemoryError - OK my box only has 256MB RAM so I can hardly blame jets3t)
Interesting things I am tracking on the S3 front: s3fuse and s3fs-fuse, Muck::FS..
Steve Jobs and the iPhone
Something I don’t buy is that Apple were “taken aback” by the outcry from early adopters (opinion held by many smart people, like Mr Gruber) when Apple dropped iPhone prices, causing Steve to offer this $100 coupon as an olive branch. I agree with Cringely that Steve probably had this $100 coupon in his back pocket all along, ready to use as a generous gesture not to mention an additional upside to get people to spend even more with Apple to try and use these coupons.
Now, onto the iPhone in general. I have had one for some time now and I have to say it’s been a mixed bag for me. I have had many issues with it, including the earpiece issue (no sound from earpiece, headset only.. needs fiddling to fix) which seems common. I have had strange battery life issues, where I take my (fully charged) iPhone out the charging dock in the morning and when I get to work 90mins later the battery is at 10% and yelling at me. Also, a few times, not being able to make any calls (in midtown Manhattan) even though I have full “bars” (this one could just as easily be our friends at ATT and the network they thrust on us, of course). In general it’s been a fun gadget and a great way to catch up on email on the train, but it’s not flawless of course.
Now… Let me preface this next, rambling and pointless piece with some context.
#1: I have not slept in 28 hours thanks to my cats and badly behaving applications at work
#2: I love Apple products and respect Apple Computer and it’s place in history . I depend on, use and love a great deal of the stuff Apple has made over the years.
However… Am I alone in wondering if Steve Jobs, and by implication, Apple itself, is too polished (read: soulless) these days? This will draw ire from some people (if anyone even reads this, of course) but watching the webcast of the last event, I couldn’t help but think that this charade of informal hippie-capitalist is now wearing thin. Bob Dylan and market-share decks on slick electronic gadgetry don’t mix, I’m sorry. The soul of music is gritty, the experience of good music is disorganized, the attraction of Rock n’ Roll is, in part, danger. There seems to be some complicity on the side of the “consumer” here, while we let huge companies homogenize our entertainment, and have us loving every minute of it. As evidenced by: Applause for new iPod commercials at these events and what always looks to me like the feeding of young up and coming artists to the room like the feeding of chickens to crocodiles.
My point? I’ll buy my Apple gadgets, I’ll organize my photos with Aperture and Lightroom, I’ll watch each Apple Keynote webcast with everyone else.. but don’t try and sell me with fake stock photos of your “trip to Mammoth” or the “convenience” of peddling your music to me in every Starbucks. The value is in the fun, or the business utility of these tools, not in some bland holistic lifestyle (and entertainment) organizational system you have figured out “for me”. These are products. You are a company. You want me to give you my money.
Also, art and music are not things that should be over organized, least of all by big corporations. They are chaotic by nature. Something about me listening to a Dead Kennedys song on my shiny new iPhone seems contradictory. But I do. And I like it.
I love Apple! Really. I am a capitalist. Really. I am no luddite. I am just feeling cranky this morning.
iPhone yes please
I am excited about the iPhone. But, realistically, who apart from the major shareholders of Motorola, RIMM, Palm and Nokia are not?
Obviously, one of the big advantages is the synergy of the phone and iPod. I always wonder when I am listening to Nina Simone on the train on the way in to the city, how many calls I am missing on my Treo. Usually, its at least 1. Sure the Treo has a music player, but the odd sized headphone jack needs a connector, and this means the sound drops off all the time. No good. The Treo just sucks in general.
But here is one drawback for me. I am not an iPod nano person, because I like to have 30GB of music in my pocket. I like to be able to be totally amazed at the whacky songs I have buried on my iPod, and this is not possible at 8GB. Its just not deep enough. We need 30GB flash drives.
I am also excited about writing widgets in Dashboard on the iPhone. SSH client. Wifi too. No 3G, though. That was obviously a storied decision, because Steve glossed over that very quickly in the keynote. No background on that one for us.
What would be very cool, is a fingerprint biometric reader in the touchscreen, to authenticate my finger to wake the phone up from sleep mode. All in all, I will be buying one as soon as they arrive for sure.