07.03.07
Posted in iPhone Information at 10:10 pm by mc
AT&T has announced that they will be providing free access to their over 10,000 WiFi hot spots to their broadband customers.
Subscribers to AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Pro and Elite are eligible for the offer, as well as AT&T FastAccess Xtreme with either 3.0Mbps or 6.0Mbps. Customers can log on immediately to Wi-Fi hotspots using their broadband username and password.
Good news for me. I have the 6.0Mbps plan from AT&T and now I will have free access to all the WiFi points of AT&T that is excellent news for sure. That is what I call synergy.
You can find out where AT&T has WiFi HotSpots here.
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Posted in iPhone Information at 9:11 am by mc
Well I found out how many web browser windows you can have open on the iPhone at once. It is eight. As someone who has sometimes over 100 Firefox tabs open at any given time, I was sure to hit the limit on the iPhone sooner rather than later. 8 is still workable for the iPhone, but I didn’t even think about it having a limit to be honest, now I know what it is.
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07.02.07
Posted in iPhone Information at 7:49 pm by mc
Hot off the presses with the 1st Generation iPhone, now is the time to be heard. I do not have many issues, but the ones I do have I hope can eventually be addressed. So I came across this address where Apple is openly soliciting our feedback. I advise everyone to share their thoughts with Apple in an intelligent and level-headed manner, and let them know what they can do to improve the iPhone experience for you.
My list of issues right now are: 64-Bit Vista Support, and IMap folder support. I would love to be able to create IMap folders, and move e-mail into IMap folders. I also would like Message Filtering.
Apple iPhone Feedback Form
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Posted in iPhone Tips at 7:19 pm by mc
In case it has not been specifically said, one of my favorite features of the iPhone is its WiFi capabilities. So when I struggled with getting WiFi to work initially, I was bummed. You can read about what I did to fix it here. Regardless, now we move on and really start to see how WiFi is going to work with the iPhone. So Sunday morning I was going out to breakfast, and WiFi hits were popping up all over the neighborhood. I could see all the local routers. I even tried to attach to one unsecured network to see what would happen, but I got out of range too quickly.
Then today I was in the center of nearby McDonalds that offers WiFi, and noticed a pop-up for their network. I connected up, and in a few seconds I was browsing on their WiFi network. The great thing about this, though, is the iPhone remembers these things, so anytime I am in range of this WiFi in the future it will automatically switch over and use it. So anywhere you go where you can tap into a WiFi (that you are authorized to use), I recommend setting it up. Then in the future, even if you are not thinking about it, you can get all the benefits and speed from going through the WiFi network.
I am really pretty excited about this. I know a lot of people like to take about EV-DO and 3G and the rest, but honestly, the future of mobile communications is not going to be tied to cellular networks. It is going to be WiFi Maxi WiFi, Broadband WiFi and the rest.
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Posted in iPhone Information, iPhone Tips at 3:24 pm by mc
One of my last hurdles to overcome in fully utilizing my iPhone was setting up e-mail. I have been essentially dreading it as my set up has me getting a lot of mail every day, with a significant portion of it being spam. I have essentially been relying on Thunderbird to deal with SPAM which is not the best solution. After mulling it over for a day or so, I came upon a solution.
I decided I would try to utilize Gmail as a Spam filter for my E-mail. Then I would either pick it up from Gmail or forward it back. My original plan was wanting to forward it back to the same address. This is doable, but I would to muck around with my mail on the server, and my main mail account is actually hosted on a shared server that I do not own, not on one of my own servers. I attempted some half-hearted hacks with Cpanel, but suffice it to say it did not work how I wanted it.
So while still trying to crack the nut of having Gmail sending mail back to the same account that was forwarding to it in the first place, I decided to try the Gmail setup on the iPhone directly. You have to use POP3 with Gmail and the iPhone. This is fine, but the problem for me was that it does not honor the changed “From” field when sending mail. So when I sent mail even though I wanted it to show coming from “me @ mydomain.com” it showed coming from “Mynick @ gmail.com”. This simply was not workable as it made my e-mails potentially confusing to recipients. I really needed a solution that would allow me to send out mail and have the from and reply-to line set to what I wanted, so it would appear to be coming from my original address.
I finally settled on using a second email account. I just set up a second account on my server and had Gmail forward the mail to that account.
So to explain how it works:
Mail comes to my server at “me @ mydomain.com”
My server automatically forwards all mail for “me @ mydomain.com” to “mynick @ gmail.com”
Gmail takes all that mail runs it through their very good spam filtering, and then forwards the remaining messages to “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” and then also archives the messages on Gmail.
I receive the messages at “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” with IMAP both through Thunderbird, and through my iPhone.
So far it has been working excellently. There is no filtering or ability to create new folders on the iPhone, so I have to do all that on Thunderbird, but it has not been a big deal so far. Gmail has been doing an amazing job filtering out the spam, leaving me with a reasonable inflow of mail that can be effectively used on the iPhone. I will ocassionally go to Thunderbird and run my mail filters, but I can access the same mail from both locations now.
The only thing I had to change on the iPhone was what some of my default boxes were. For Trash and Sent boxes, I had to choose the ones I was using on Thunderbird, to sync them up. When people get messages from me it shows as coming from my original address and replies get sent back to the same address.
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Posted in iPhone Information at 9:12 am by mc
One thing I completely forgot about was when I was at the Apple Store getting my phone last Friday, one of the Apple employees told us that Applecare would be available in July. He did not tell us what it would cost, but other people have said they were told it will be $60.
So expect to be able to purchase AppleCare for your iPhone in July for $60.00 if you so desire.
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07.01.07
Posted in iPhone Software at 4:32 pm by mc
MacMost has released 3 games on their website to work with the iPhone. If you visit their site on a regular computer you will see everything is oversized. This is a good thing as when you bring it up on the iPhone it is the perfect size. That makes me think I need an iPhone skin for this blog. So any skin designers out there, please let me know.
As for the games you have iPhone Match 3. It took me a minute to know what I was supposed to be trying to do, but it works. I also found there was enough space to get the individual objects for the most part.
The second game is Collapsing Blocks. I did not even try zooming in, but just at a normal viewing I found it impossible to select blocks with any accuracy. I was essentially just mashing the screen waiting for something to happen.
The third game is Suduko. You get a choice of playing on Easy, Medium, or Hard settings. I will be honest I don’t really understand Sudoko, but I did play around with it. It again looks like it will be a problem with the size of the blocks on the screen, but playing it, I was able to accurately pick the squares and choose a number with few mistakes.
All in all I say a good start for the iPhone web application community. I am very pleased to already see stuff coming out. I think this only means more good things to come. You can check out the MacMost games here.
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Posted in iPhone Tips at 3:00 pm by mc
I have seen a few people complain about their Visual Voicemail not working on their iPhone. In some cases people reported it was because their account was still tagged with their old data plan. In one case someone said their Blackberry plan was still active and it was blocking Visual Voicemail from working. Someone else here, reported that is was not set up properly. It could have potentially been the same reason and they just fixed. Regardless if you are experiencing this problem you should contact AT&T and have them take care of it for you.
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Posted in iPhone Tips at 9:02 am by mc
Since this is a blog and a blog about iPhone, it stands to reckon that I would eventually try to write a blog entry on my iPhone. I was not sure how it would go and how well the latest revision of Wordpress would work. So I was in a parking lot away from home dutifully on the EDGE network when I decided to give it a go.
It was easy enough to log in to Word Press and choose “Write Post”. The problem came, however when entering my post. My Wordpress defaults to the visual editor, which is great when using my computer, but I soon found out that with the iPhone, at least on the edge network. Apparently it is redrawning the entire text box with every key stroke. This makes sense as it is a WYSIWYG editor. The problem on the iPhone is after pretty much every keystroke the focus flies all over the page and makes it virtually impossible to type anything in.
Fortunately I did not struggle with it for too long and I was able to switch to the Code setting and was good to go right away. I did not have any fancy formating, images or anything else, so it maybe a bit more of a challenge if you want to do anything beyond basic text. There is always old-fashioned HTML in the Code window. If anyone figures out how to overcome the issue in the Visual editor on the EDGE network please let me know. Otherwise it is completely possible and relatively easy to blog from the iPhone.
My first iPhone posted blog was about it not supporting 64-bit Windows OSes.
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Posted in iPhone Information at 8:38 am by mc
It is not exactly like I have been hating the iPhone since I have had it, but the reality is with any new toy, there is a bit of a glow after getting it and basking in the “Wow that is cool” to where it either becomes something you keep using or something that ends up in a drawer. My iPhone is not going to end up in the drawer. The first thing I did when I woke up is grab my iPhone, check my e-mail and then go browse one of my favorite iPhone forums at MacRumors. I got my e-mail set up last night after some trepidation. This is something I will write more extensively about later on. Anyways, the point is I was able to grab my iPhone and have it be used in a productive manner, and this will continue.
I essentially had a Eureka moment where I said, “This is very cool and very useful.” It is likely going to do impact my life in a way I had only hoped 40 hours ago.
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