Once again, it’s time to play with Hipstamatic and my iPhone. I saw the reflection in my coffee cup this morning, and felt compelled to capture it. The coffee here is just ok — it’s no Jamaican Blue Mountain or Kona — but it seemed like it would be enhanced with a little “dirty” photo treatment in Hipstamatic. Enjoy!
I’m trying out a new application called Hipstamatic for my iPhone, and thought this would make a fun photo.
OK, so I usually love my iPhone. It’s days like today, though, that make me wanna chuck it in a conveniently located river from a conveniently well placed bridge.
As part of a small event I run monthly, I got an e-mail from someone yesterday with some large attachments — ended up being about 24mb altogether. My mail server had no problem with it, and Apple’s Mail application had no problem with it. However, when the iPhone got ahold of it…. Well, frustrating doesn’t hardly put the appropriately contorted face on it. I’d try to delete the e-mail, and Mail app on the phone would choke and die, even to the point of affecting the read/unread status of e-mails in other accounts that feed through my iPhone.
I tried sooooo many solutions, but here’s the solution I ran across that seemed to solve my problem. First, change the iPhone Mail settings to only display the last 25 items. That’s probably a pretty good setting for me most of the time anyway. Second, make sure that the mail account on the mail server is devoid of any new e-mail. And lastly, send myself 25 (or more) e-mails so that the only thing displayed are the new e-mails. That seemed to “scroll” the mongo e-mail off the screen, never to return…. so far.
This is a horrible behavior by the iPhone. There should be no acceptable mail behavior (meaning that the e-mail lives within standards) that should cause the mail app to behave this way.
Apple — this one hurts!
Well, today was the day — the new iPhone OS was released, and I’ve pulled it down, dumped it on my iPhone and iPod Touch…. and I’ll see whether it was worth the wait.
In a real quick spin through the screens, it doesn’t look or feel much different than the previous version. However, tomorrow will be my first real chance to see any differences, and it’ll be interesting to see what the real-world experience will be like.
In reality, I wish I could get one of the new iPhone 3Gs phones that’ll be released of Friday. After checking with AT&T today though, I’m not eligible for a discounted upgrade until August of next year, and that means a difference of $200 (plus an $18 upgrade fee). It’s a crying shame, as I’d really like the faster network, as well as the higher storage capacity. When I bought my iPod Touch and iPhone, I was moving from an 80GB iPod, and I wanted something with a high storage capacity. And getting away from a hard drive was a good thing. However, the iPhone was only available as big as 16GB, and that wasn’t gonna cut it.
Now, the iPhone 3Gs offers 32GB of storage, and that would allow me to do a little convergence of devices. But…. at $499, I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna be pulling the trigger on that right now!
I was thrilled to come home tonight to find that Software Update was bouncing, awaiting me with news of a new version of iTunes becoming available. And on the list of updates? Compatibility with the new iPhone 3.0 OS upgrade. But…. no 3.0 upgrade. Anywhere.
Dunno why I’m so excited about the promised new upgrades for my iPhone and iPod Touch, but for some reason, I’m kinda jazzed about it. I don’t develop on that platform, and I haven’t done enough research to have a real good reason to move to 3.0. But, I know I will, as soon as it’s available.
And I’ll probably find things to complain about. I know me well enough to understand my tendencies!
OK, so I’m probably the last guy on the planet to figure this out.
I’ve been struggling with a couple of mail-related issues with my iPhone. I had been connecting to the same mail account with my iPhone as I have with my home machine. Every now and then, the two mail clients would collide at the mail server, and make one or the other not very happy. Nothing fatal, but nothing wonderful either.
However, the bigger thing was that I was getting spammed to death on my iPhone. The OS X mail app does a pretty good job (augmented with a few rules of my own) at keeping the spam at bay, but the mail app on the iPhone lacks the anti-spam technology that my home mail client enjoys. For a long while, I was getting almost no spam on my iPhone, but there was a cost — I was blocking LOADS of country-specific domains and IP address ranges that I would never expect to get e-mail from. However, I recently ran into an issue with a developer whose mail was getting /dev/nulled at my mail server due to the broad nature of my spam swatting. Once I turned that off, my poor little iPhone was exposed to hundreds of available Russian singles, pharmaceuticals that I didn’t even know existed, and information from so many banks that I didn’t know I was affiliated with. In a word, spam.
So how to fix it? Well, fixing it at the mail server would be the best answer, but as I started getting into that, I started discovering just how little I understood about mail transport mechanisms, and how much I really didn’t care to learn that much about them. With that off the table, that left doing something at my home-based mail client that would somehow filter my mail before it hit the iPhone. There’s lots of folks out there doing circuitous sending and resending between their mail server, Google’s GMail, and then back to their home mail servers. That also had a bit of a learning curve, especially when doing it from the mail server.
My last idea was to let OS X’s mail app filter the mail, and after it’d passed the gauntlet of simple rules at the server, and complex rules at the client, it could be forwarded to a super-secret special mail account for the iPhone to hit to get a less spam-filled mail flow. That worked…. except that every e-mail looked as though it came from me, which was a less than stellar solution, especially if I wanted to respond to mail from my iPhone.
I was playing with my mail rules again, trying to set up some methods to figure out which of them were working the best, and I saw a little drop down on my rule to forward stuff to the iPhone’s mail account. In addition to forward there was a “redirect message” option that would send the message along to the iPhone’s account while preserving the look and feel of the message, making it seem like it was sent directly to my iPhone. Wunderbar!
And a side benefit of this approach is that my iPhone and OS X mail app are each banging away at different mail accounts, so there’s no collisions at the mail server for either one. I like my technogoodies to have a smile on their little electronic faces!
Just a test to see how iPhone photos show up on the blog…
Move along. Nothing to see here.
After reading sooooo many things indicating that I’d have to completely reset/reload my iPhone, I was building myself up for an evening’s worth of working on my iPhone. Until…
I found a comment to a blog post that pointed to a piece of code called DiskAid. This little piece of code lets you explore the filesystem on the iPhone (or iPod), and from there, I was able to resolve my issue without a long, tedious battle waged between iTunes and my iPhone.
So what did I do?
Well, I went into the file system, and deleted all the music subfolders in the /iTunes Control Folder/Music. Once I did that, I hard reset the iPhone, and then fired up the little dude, synced (syanc? syunc?) the iPhone, and suddenly, I had music, and a reasonable amount of “Other” space taken up on my iPhone (about 300MB).
I feel like I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!
Last night, I dropped my iPhone and iPod Touch into their little cradles… and began my descent through various layers of USB-based hell. This morning, I sat at my little workstation, getting my news and feeds to start my day, and found error messages on my screen indicating that my iPhone couldn’t be found by iTunes, and that my Wacom tablet was not alive.
Best as I can figure, the USB hub dropped it’s communication, which confused my tablet, and may have interrupted the sync process to my iPhone. Apparently that had caused everything that was once called “music” ok the device to now be called “other”… making that space untouchable and unmanageable. From what I’ve been able to gather from Da Goog, it appears that a full restore is in my future tonight.
Blecch!
Last night, the AppleStork came, and dropped off the latest addition to the Deauxmayne… a new 8GB iPhone. As Becky has pointed out, I now have one of each current iPod model. That wasn’t a plan, but it is interesting that it has happened.
I like the device — of course, it’s not that far different than the iPod Touch. It’s a little narrower and thicker, and has a more substantial feel in your hand than does the Touch. One funny I noticed is that the touchscreen “feels” different. I would’ve assumed the same glass was on both, but somehow, the glass on the Touch feels slicker. When I first drug my finger across the iPhone screen, I thought it was “sticky” by comparison to the Touch’s screen. Weird, huh?
The phone seems to work pretty well as compared to my HTC Mogul. For me though, the impressive piece is the internet access. It is so much nicer than the experience on Windows Mobile 6 on the Mogul. That’s not HTC’s fault; that’s Microsoft’s. What an amazing difference working through Safari instead of IE! And since I’m all Apple at home, the integration with my Macs is sweet, and the interface concepts are familiar.
Phydeaux is a happy camper!