Jeff Croft

Link // 07.13.2008 // 1:37 PM // 10 Comments
MobileMe doesn’t push from Mac to Me.com and handheld devices

Turns out, MobileMe doesn’t “push” changes to calendars and contacts made on your Mac to the Me.com web apps and your handheld devices. From an Apple Knowledgebase article:

> Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe “cloud” once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).

Changes to calendars and contacts made on Me.com or on your iPhone will be pushed to your Mac immediately, but the reverse is not true. Strange. From Apple’s MobileMe features page:

> MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date

Emphasis mine. For many people, including me, a 15 minute sync time is probably just fine in real-world usage. But, it definitely seems contrary to how the service was promoted and demoed at the WWDC keynote, and I can definitely understand why so many people are complaining about it on the MacRumors forums and across the Internet. This sort of reeks of deception.

A couple things worth pointing out about this, for those wondering why it’s a big deal:
1. It’s an especially big deal for laptop users, who are prone to opening their laptop, adding a calendar event or contact, and then closing it again. If MobileMe really “pushed” from Mac to the cloud, then this behavior would be fine — the update has already made it to the cloud by the time the laptop is closed. If a user has to sit there, laptop open, for at least 15 minutes, to ensure the sync takes place, that sucks.
2. MobileMe isn’t all about the iPhone. It’s supposed to keep all your devices instantly in sync, including multiple Macs. Someone who doesn’t have an iPhone but has two Macs might want to keep their laptop in sync with their desktop. The old .Mac did this at a 15 minute interval, and MobileMe was promoted as an improvement that made the sync near-instantaneous. In reality, for this user, MobileMac is not an improvement at all — and that also sucks.
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Blog entry // 07.11.2008 // 12:40 PM // 61 Comments
MobileMe doesn’t support calendar subscriptions

There are a lot of things to complain about when it comes to the launch of Apple’s MobileMe service, which is still in an on-again-off-again state more than 40 hours after it was supposed to be available. I’ve done my fair share of complaining, though, and I’m done bitching about the launch. For now, I’d like to move on and talk about the product itself. Overall, I’m pretty impressed, but it does have one missing feature that’s kind of killing me right now: calendar subscriptions.

If you’re a heavy iCal user, as I am, you are probably subscribed to several remote .ics calendars. At Blue Flavor, we use 37signals’ Backpack for several internal calendars, for schedules, holidays, meetings, and more. I also subscribe to several .ics calendars from social networking services like Upcoming and Dopplr.

A few days ago, before .Mac was turned off, these calendars synced to my iPhone without issue. Now, with MobileMe, they don’t.
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Link // 07.11.2008 // 8:10 AM // 0 Comments
Twitter users reporting problems with iPhone in-store activation

According to a growing number of people on Twitter, Apple is having problems with its in-store activation process. Couple this with the botched MobileMe rollout, and this launch isn’t looking good for Apple right now. Here’s hoping they get it all resolved in short order.

Update: Engadget on the activation problems.
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Link // 07.10.2008 // 8:10 PM // 14 Comments
.Mac migration to MobileMe hits some roadblocks

It’s now been 24 hours since the start of the six-hour downtown window Apple gave for the .Mac to MobileMe migration. I’m frustrated. A lot of people are frustrated. But a lot of other people, in forums around the Internet, are saying, “Oh, get over it. You’ve waited this long for MobileMe, you can wait another day or two.” Those people are missing the point. I pay for .Mac, and I rely upon its services (notably Sync, Back to My Mac, and iDisk). I’m not upset that MobileMe isn’t ready yet; I’m upset that Apple has taken away my .Mac services. MobileMe can take six months for all I care, but I need my syncing and iDisk.

Apple has another problem at play, too: a lot of the hype surrounding the new iPhone 3G is directly related to its integration with MobileMe. The iPhone went on sale hours ago on the other side of the world, and will go on sale in less than 10 hours here in America. If the push e-mail, contact, and calendar functionality Apple has been hyping for the past couple months isn’t available when these people get their iPhones home, the media is going to have a fucking field day — and RIM’s stock is going to look pretty darn good.

Update: Media frenzy has begun. AP article on .Mac/MobileMe transition woes. And a new article on ComputerWord.
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Link // 07.10.2008 // 5:48 PM // 3 Comments
Where is the Native Brightkite iPhone App?

The Brightkite team says their native iPhone app will be out by the end of the month. Great news, because so far, I’m not very impressed with Loopt or Whrrl. Brightkite’s iPhone web version defeats both by a long, long longshot.
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Link // 07.10.2008 // 2:09 PM // 0 Comments
How to Get the iPhone 2.0 Upgrade Right Now

Ever since I tweeted that I have installed iPhone 2.0 and downloaded apps from the app store, I’ve gotten countless IM’s, DM’s, and e-mails asking me how. It’s been all over the Internet all morning, so it’s no secret, but Wired has now published a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that is probably the simplest to follow that I’ve seen. So, get on it.
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Link // 06.19.2008 // 11:33 AM // 0 Comments
iPhone Clone Battle: Which One Is the iPhoniest?

Short story: the Samsung Instinct on Sprint is the best “iPhone killer” made to date, and it also happens to b the cheapest (at just $129, after this week’s price reduction to compete with the iPhone 3G). Being from the Kansas City area (where Sprint is headquartered), I know a lot of people locked into Sprint contracts. While it’s still not an iPhone, the Instinct does seem like a solid buy for someone stuck on Sprint — especially at just $129.

All that having been said, I sort of suspect phones like the Nokia N95, Samsung Soul, and Garmin Nuviphone are more likely to take business away from the iPhone — even if they’re not as directly positioned to compete with it.
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Link // 06.16.2008 // 8:47 AM // 3 Comments
Daring Fireball: The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question

Gruber walks through the “should I upgrade to the new iPhone,” dilemma, one I’m currently having, myself. He correctly points out that the only real noteworthy advantages are faster networking and GPS. He doesn’t mention the flush headphone jack, which isn’t a big deal to me personally (I’ve already gone and bought V-Moda iPhone earbuds), but may be to some audiophiles who’ve been avoiding the iPhone because they can’t use their favorite headphones with them.

For me, I think it’s going to boil down to this: Will the location-based SDK apps work with the triangulation functionality of the original iPhone, or will they require GPS? And if they do work: how well? I’m excited about the location based services more than the 3G networking, myself. If these work reasonably well on the original iPhone, then I may not have much incentive to upgrade this time around.
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Link // 06.12.2008 // 3:55 PM // 0 Comments
Qik Video Streaming Finally Comes to iPhone

Qik, which is totally rad, is now on iPhone. It looks like it’s just a demo of an unofficial app for jailbroken iPhone, but it’s probably safe to assume a more “legit” version will be coming soon. Awesome.
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Link // 06.09.2008 // 5:28 PM // 0 Comments
Apple Says White Is Cool Again… But Is It?

I’ve been saying it all along: white rules! I never got the facination with the black MacBook, and all my iPods have been white. If I get the new iPhone (which I haven’t fully decided on, yet), it’ll be white. White FTW!
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Link // 06.09.2008 // 3:51 PM // 1 Comment
iPhone 3G must be activated in-store

There’s a lot of good news about the new iPhone today, but it’s not all gravy. One thing that saddens me is that you can no longer activate the iPhone using iTunes in the comfort of your own home, like you did with the first generation Jesus phone. You now have to activate in-store — a process which takes 10-15 minutes. Man, that launch day line is going to suck.
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Link // 06.09.2008 // 12:59 PM // 3 Comments
Sizing it up: iPhone 3G vs. the rest

According to Engadget, the new iPhone is slightly thicker than the old one. Now, we’re talking about .7mm, so it’s not something that is going to make a difference in real-world usage. I just think it’s interesting that it’s thicker, considering that Steve Jobs apparently said it was thinner during the keynote today, where it was introduced.
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Link // 06.06.2008 // 5:27 PM // 4 Comments
CNN thinks flash memory is owned by Adobe.

> Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos. Apple has said that Adobe’s flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn’t perform up to Apple’s standards for the iPhone.

Wow. Just, wow.
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Link // 06.06.2008 // 1:12 PM // 2 Comments
NYTimes: Those Intense iPhone Users

A handful of stats, according to Nielsen Mobile, about how iPhone owners use their phones. Most interesting bit to me? 33 percent said they use their iPhone for “instant messaging” — despite the fact there is no IM client on the phone. Weird. Or wrong.
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Link // 06.05.2008 // 7:45 AM // 0 Comments
Sprint Instinct Full Video Walkthrough

Gizmodo has some walkthrough videos of the Sprint Instinct, the company’s “iPhone Killer.” In watching them, I definitely feel like this is probably the second-best thing to an iPhone out there, UI-wise. It doesn’t look quite as simple, elegant, and sexy as the iPhone, but it is a pretty well-done copycat. And, it does have a few features the iPhone doesn’t (3G, GPS, text-to-speech). I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer, but it’s probably the closest thing to one made thus far. I wouldn’t blame a Sprint customer for buying this guy instead of paying $200 to switch to AT&T.
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Link // 06.02.2008 // 9:29 AM // 0 Comments
A Phone, an iPod, an Internet Communicator, and a Full-Featured Task Manager!

It’s great to hear that Cultured Code is working on an iPhone task management application — assuming Apple doesn’t do one themselves, this will no doubt be the single most-wanted type of application from third parites. Competition will be stiff, I’m sure. But, we know from Things that Cultured Code is able to do these things well. They have a great sense of UI design, and make things that are very Mac-like. However, like Things, if it doesn’t integrate with OS X’s system-wide to-do service, I’m going to have to consider it useless. I want to love Things, but I just can’t, in its current state. I hope the iPhone version doesn’t have the same limitation.
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Photo // 05.10.2008 // 5:49 PM // Seattle, WA // flickr

Sourjayne
Link // 04.17.2008 // 4:40 PM // 3 Comments
Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone

Gruber compares web clients for Twitter on the iPhone. Personally, I think Thincloud is pretty good (and my favorite of the bunch), but it still hasn’t been enough to make me give up Twitter over SMS. Gruber says Twitter over SMS is too annoying — I disagree. I find it to be perfect. It has all the feature John wants, works well, and has the most “iPhoney” interface of all.

All that having been said, I hope (and suspect) someone will create a killer native iPhone app for release after iPhone 2.0 is out.
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Link // 04.10.2008 // 11:08 AM // 3 Comments
Twinkle, iPhone Twitter Client, Adds Location Features

Very cool. I’m not going to jailbreak my iPhone for it, but I hope to see this app working under the official channels when they’re available. Twitter really need to figure out some way to automatically geocode Tweets. I know it’s a very difficult problem to solve, but it would be such a killer feature.
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Photo // 04.06.2008 // 6:42 PM // Portland, OR // flickr

Twitter, no doubt.
Photo // 03.19.2008 // 11:55 PM // Seattle, WA // flickr

Twittering at Refresh
Photo // 03.14.2008 // 1:29 AM // Austin, TX // flickr

MezzoPhone
Photo // 03.13.2008 // 11:29 PM // Austin, TX // flickr

Josh's message from the future.
Link // 01.11.2008 // 10:31 AM // 2 Comments
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

A nice story at Wired. Back when the iPhone was released, I said it was the most revolutionary device since 1984. I now believe that more than ever. It’s not because I believe in a couple years, everyone will have an iPhone (they might, but I doubt it) — it’s because of the way the iPhone has shaken up the mobile industry so much — already.
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Photo // 11.11.2007 // 2:19 AM // New York, NY // flickr

iPhoneLighter.com
Link // 10.17.2007 // 2:42 PM // 0 Comments
Apple to release iPhone/iPod touch SDK in February

With an official SDK in place, mark my words: Mac OS X mobile (or whatever you want to call it) is about to become the most significant platform in a long, long time.

Here’s hoping it’s pretty “open” to lots of developers.
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Photo // 10.16.2007 // 5:05 PM // Seattle, WA // flickr

I have a sound icon!
Link // 09.12.2007 // 10:22 AM // 0 Comments
D. Keith Robinson: Mobile User Experience

Fellow Blue Flavorite Keith addresses the part context plays in user experience on mobile devices, using our Leaflets as an example.
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Link // 09.11.2007 // 8:48 AM // 5 Comments
Apple: iPhone apps to go unchallenged

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of ipod marketing, has publicly stated that Apple is taking a neutral position on the subject of native third-party iPhone apps: Apple won’t support them at all, but it also won’t attempt to deter their development via legal means or via software updates that would break them.

This is terrific news. Apple took this stance with the Apple TV, and it worked wonderfully for them. This is what I needed to hear from Apple in order for me to consider installing third party apps on my iPhone. Now, all I need is a real killer app that gives me a reason to invest the time — I haven’t seen it, thus far.
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Link // 09.10.2007 // 4:46 PM // 0 Comments
MovableType adds an iPhone-optimized version of their administration area

I’m really curious to see if Six Apart gets a bunch of shit from the haters for doing browser detection and automatically sending folks to this version when they access it from an iPhone or iPod touch.
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Link // 09.07.2007 // 10:38 AM // 1 Comment
I, Cringely: The Pulpit . The Puppet Master

Cingely insists that Steve Jobs had the whole iPhone pricing thing planned from the start. That he intentionally over-priced the iPhone at launch, planned to drop it to the real price of $399, and planned to give users a $100 Apple Store credit if they complained. He notes that he has no inside info, so it’s all just speculation on his part.

I don’t really buy it, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
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Link // 08.20.2007 // 3:53 PM // 0 Comments
iPhone Central: The iPhone Hacking Kit, step by step

If you’ve got the balls for it, this looks like the most complete iPhone hacking guide around.
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Link // 08.18.2007 // 10:36 AM // 0 Comments
Django, running on an iPhone

Jacob Kaplan-Moss installed Django (and Python, obviously) on his iPhone. Then, he used Django’s database introspection tool to build Django models for the iPhone’s built-in call database. Then, he used DJango’s built-in admin tool to view/edit said call database. Then, he took a screenshot of it.
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Link // 08.17.2007 // 12:04 AM // 3 Comments
Wired Blogs: The IPhone [sic] Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again

From the e-mail exchanges I’ve had with Scott Gilbertson, he seems like a great guy — but I couldn’t disagree with him more on this one. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: iPhone-optimized websites are nothing to worry about, so long as one of the following is true:
1. There is a viable alternative version that works in all browsers.
2. The iPhone-optimized site doesn’t lock other browsers out, preventing their use (at their own peril, of course).
For example, our Leaflets passes both tests with flying colors. Each Leaflet simply provides iPhone-optimized versions of content that exists elsewhere on the web (flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org, etc.) and the app is open to all browsers.

And here’s the thing: I’ve still yet to see an iPhone-optimized site that doesn’t pass at least one of these two tests. Everyone is complaining about iPhone-only sites, but as far as I know, not a single one exists. Every one I’ve seen either provides an alternative version for other browser, or allows other browsers into the iPhone-optimized version (if not both). So really, what is all the fuss about?
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Link // 08.16.2007 // 6:37 PM // 0 Comments
Adam Polselli / iPhone Wallpapers

I’ve admired Adam’s photography for years, and his collection of 40 iPhone wallpapers lives up to his name, for sure.
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Link // 08.16.2007 // 11:56 AM // 0 Comments
AT&T crippling BlackBerry to appease Apple?

If AT&T; wasn’t already Steve Jobs’ bitch, they certainly are now.
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Link // 08.15.2007 // 10:43 AM // 0 Comments
Facebook for iPhone

The iPhone version of Facebook looks pretty damn nice. Check it out, if you’ve got an iPhone.
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Link // 08.14.2007 // 8:55 AM // 1 Comment
Blue Flavor: New Features and a New Leaflet!

Garrett outlines what’s new in the latest release of Leaflets. Some nice additions, here. If you’re an iPhone user, check it out!
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Link // 08.09.2007 // 9:30 AM // 1 Comment
Inman: Hacking the iPhone on an Intel Mac

Shaun gives the best instructions I’ve seen yet on how to do all sort of nifty hackery on your iPhone. And I say “your iPhone,” because I wouldn’t dare try it on mine.
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Photo // 07.28.2007 // 10:49 PM // Seattle, WA // flickr

The new home office.