iPhone OS 2.1

Saturday, 13th September, 2008

Apple released version 2.1 of the OS for iPhone yesterday, which I duly installed last night. The update promised a LOT of bug fixes, and whilst I hadn’t been experiencing the behaviour that some users were complaining of (dropped calls for example), I did occasionally have some random crashes of third party applications, and very poor response when typing SMS messages (which is what I do 90% of the time with my phone).

After installing the update, there were three things that I noticed immediately:

it’s a lot “snappier” to use – the Contacts application now loads almost immediately (used to be a very noticeable time lag), and the poor response in the SMS application is gone, it’s very speedy when typing now;
syncing with my Mac is now a LOT quicker. Backing up the phone and syncing used to take about ten minutes or so, now it takes about two minutes;
notification of a new incoming text message has been changed (and in my opinion, not for the good)

Let me just expand on point three a bit more. Apple have altered two things about the way your phone tells you a new text message has been received. Previously, when a new text message arrived, your phone would play your selected alert sound, and would display a visual notification. You had two choices for visual notification display: display a preview of the message on screen (along with the name of the sender); or simply display the name of the sender and the line ‘Text Message’). This was fine. I can’t imagine many people were happy to have the preview of the message showing up on the screen of their phone, so most would have used the option to go into the settings and turn off the message preview.

Using this set up, if I got a text message, my phone would make the alert sound, and I could glance at the screen and see the alert which would say that I had just received a text message and who had sent it. I was then able to decide if that was a text I had to read right then, or if I could just ignore it and continue doing whatever it was I was doing.

Now, Apple have added a couple of changes. When a new text message is received, the phone plays the alert sound. If I do nothing about this (i.e. don’t read the message), after five minutes the phone plays the alert message again. And after a further five minutes, it plays it again! In addition to this, the first time the alert is played (when the message arrives) the on-screen notification appears. However, it now simply says ‘New Text Message’. It doesn’t tell me who sent it any more. For me to know who sent me a message, I would have to turn on the message preview, which is something I don’t want.

It seems to me that these new ‘features’ that have been added to the SMS application are missing some settings; we are able to turn off the message preview, so we should also be able to turn off the audio alert repeating nonsense. And if the message preview is off, we should be given the choice of still being able to display the name of the person sending the message on the alert screen.

One final ‘feature’ Apple has added in this update has me totally baffled. If you have turned on the Passcode feature of your phone, you have to enter this passcode every time you want to use the phone. This passcode is four digits long, and can be any four digits from 0000-9999, resulting in 10,000 possible numbers. Apple has added the ability to turn on an option that will erase the entire contents of the phone if the passcode is entered incorrectly ten times in a row.

So if you did lose your iPhone and it was passcode protected, the finder would have a 0.1% chance of guessing the correct pin code and getting access to your data. That’s a pretty slim chance.

So to me, this ‘feature’ is basically a way for me to grab some unsuspecting person’s iPhone (perhaps a work colleage) and to quickly tap ‘1111′ ten times in a row when it asks me for their passcode in the hope that they’ve been stupid enough to enable this feature, and then hand back their phone which is now without data.

Crazy feature. Who came up with that one?

2 Comments

10

Sep

iTunes 8.0

Wednesday, 10th September, 2008

So, new iPods were announced by Apple yesterday, which is all very nice. However, I bought an iPhone in November last year (when they were released in the UK) and part of my justification for spending the £269 on that phone was that I also needed a new iPod, and the iPhone provided me with that too.

As well as the new iPods, Apple also released iTunes 8 yesterday. I’ve been using it since yesterday evening, and it’s pretty good. I’ve not yet tried out the new ‘Genius’ feature, but I’ve read some good stuff about it already, and as the data available to help generate these Genius playlists grows, this feature can really only get better and better.

My favourite feature of iTunes 8 has to be the new Visualiser though (they call it Visualizer, but I can’t bring myself to use a ‘z’ when an ’s’ is the correct choice). I’ve just ‘watched’ about half a dozen songs on my MacBook Pro, and the effects are quite simply stunning.

1 Comment

29

Mar

What’s the score?

Saturday, 29th March, 2008

For the World Cup in 2006, I ran an online game where players had to guess the scores for the matches played in the group stages. It’s a game that I’m sure goes on in many workplaces; it just gives a little extra interest to the competition, especially as Scotland failed to qualify.

We certainly had played it before at my workplace (it was Euro 2004), but it was ran by one of my workmates, all done on paper. We were each given a sheet with a list of the group stage matches, and we had to fill in our guesses at what the scores would be and then give the sheets back to him (keeping a copy obviously). As the matches were played, the guy running the game had to manually check everyone’s score sheets and award points appropriately, and then produce a new leaderboard sheet to post up on the notice boards in the building, so that everyone playing knew where they stood in the points table.

For the World Cup in 2006, I decided that I would run the game (the guy that did it in 2004 had since left), but I didn’t fancy all the work of manually checking everybody’s scores and awarding points etc. So I decided that I’d write an online version, where players could register and input their scores online, and as the results of the group stage matches were known all I had to do was enter them in an administrator interface, and my software would run through the database checking the result against everybody’s scores and awarding points automatically. I ended up with 60 registered players* and once a result was known, the leaderboard and awarded points were automatically updated in seconds.

I was quite happy with how the game went, the software was pretty stable, and the only reasonably difficult part was the scoring algorithm to award the points (there where three possible outcomes for points – 0, 1 or 3). My one problem was that the game was limited in who was able to play: in order to play, you had to pay a £2 entry fee, and this was the issue. The fact that you had to somehow get your £2 physically to me meant that you had to know me personally; or know someone that knew me personally. I’ll just say now that all of the money taken as entry fees was used as prize money – I didn’t make a penny out of running the game.

So, I’m thinking of running the game again for the Euro 2008 tournament, but I’d like to offer an online payment option, so that people could play without actually having a connection to me. I’m not sure how feasible this is, but hopefully it’s an option available to me. I’m just about to start writing the code for the game (much of it I will be able to re-use from 2006, but some of it I want to write differently), so I’ll see what options are available to me.

*There were 60 registered players on the site, but some people were registered more than once to have a better chance.