FoxBoom!

It would be nice if the “Birthdays” calendar was updated independantly of iCal.

If I add a new contact with a birthday on my iPhone, that birthday doesn’t appear in Google Calendar (via BusySync) until I open iCal.

This is not the best.

Every month, the top two search phrases that people hit this blog with are “foxboom” and “westward bound”. I have no idea why people would be searching for the first, but I guess the second is down to kinky little buggers.

Another big one is a barrel of variants on “payment processing is temporarily unavailable”. which is thanks to Apple sucking at web services and having to take their credit card services offline for 23 hours out of the day and leaving us poor suckers to plead for help online. In fact, I even got two hits from “apple support sucks” last month. And “google calendar sucks on iphone” and “mobile me is down”, and “mobile me contacts disappeared” and “mobileme resize problem” and “fuck apple”… man, all this MobileMe hating!

Wow… I’m even the fifth result on Google for “fuck apple”.

And some things are just totally unpredictable. Like being on the first page of results for “norm abram icon”. Or being the top match for “orona fursuit”.

God, I love you guys!

Also, if you choose to access your Google calendar in iCal via CalDAV, you cannot edit that calendar’s events on your iPhone.

Poop.

I know I keep complaining about it, but I really don’t have anywhere else to go.

Really. $100/year doesn’t actually seem to buy any kind of customer support at all.

MobileMe has wiped all my phone’s contact details. All the support agents have gone home (don’t we outside the US pay for support too?), they don’t accept phone or e-mail support anymore, and the discussion boards are offline.

Seriously, who at Apple thinks this is acceptable?

MobileMe has deleted my iPhone’s contact details again.

The support team don’t accept e-mail requests any more, and all the live chat agents are busy.

MOBILEME REALLY FUCKING SUCKS, OKAY?

Since last night, MobileMe’s been pretty speedy. Could this be the end of the troubles? Am I terribly naive? When do I get my 30 day free credit?

Also, I’m posting this from the iPhone Wordpress app. This is a neat little interface!

Happy Friday everyone!

On my way home from work this afternoon, I was flicking through my contacts on my iPhone, when I noticed the little push spinner get to work in the title bar, and then…

All my contacts disappeared!

I figured I’d give the MobileMe servers a couple of minutes to sort themselves out. And, well…

…I’ve got names and birthdays, but no phone numbers or addresses.

HOLY FUCKING CRAP APPLE JUST REMOTE WIPED MY ADDRESS BOOK AND THIS IS AN AWESOME USER EXPERIENCE.

Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers. Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer. 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). [Apple KB article TS1155]

So yeah, don’t go editing any contacts or events right before you shut down your PC, because that change might not get pushed for a maximum of 15 minutes. The best bet seems to be to make changes through the MobileMe web apps or the iPhone.

Just when I thought the 2.0 software upgrade was working without a hitch… my iPhone’s playing The Polyphonic Spree instead of Meatloaf.

The GPS and everything is great and all, but this is why I need to upgrade.

I’ve been using Evernote for a few days now, and y’know? I think it’s a keeper.

There’s a great demo video on the site, and it’ll really show you everything you need to know, but I discovered something awesome last night, and now I’m totally sold; on the Mac, it installs itself into the “print to PDF” menu, so now I can send receipts straight into my library.

Keeping all my documents and receipts together now is such a no-brainer, and I can get at them from my iPhone, my Mac at home and my PC at work. If/when I hit the free service’s limits, it’s a dead cert I’ll get a premium account.

Fantastic!

You know what sucks about keeping a calendar?

On my iPhone, I prefer the native calendar application to the Google Calendar web application. On my laptop, I prefer the Google Calendar web application to iCal. I want to be able to create and edit events on the iPhone application when I’m on there, and in Google Calendar when I’m not. On top of that, I need my calendar to be published online so I can import it into my work calendar in the office, and so my housemate can see it.

So far, I’ve had to ditch Google Calendar, and just sync my iPhone with iCal, and have iCal automatically upload my calendar to a private server so my housemate and work can get to it. The problem is, I need to remember to open iCal every time I sync my iPhone, otherwise changes I’ve made on it don’t get uploaded immediately.

This is too much hassle. Like, way too much.

I’ve downloaded the trial version of BusyMac. I’m hoping to be able to use the iPhone native calendar and Google Calendar together, depending on where I’m logged in, use Google Calendar as the public version, and publish my calendar on my LAN via Bonjour.

Yep, that’s nice and simple… kinda. If it works!

On the iPhone’s calendar, a ‘dot’ on a day means there’s an event, right?

I’ve got an all-day event starting on March 28 and ending on April 3, but there’s a dot on April 4 too. If I move the end date back, the dot moves back… but there’s always a dot on the day after the event ends.

This isn’t right… right?

The last time I reported a bug to Apple, it turned out that I just misunderstood how the thing worked. I don’t want to make a boob of myself again, so I’ll ask you guys first.

If you want to help improve iPhone/iPod Touch location awareness accuracy, Skyhook Wireless have a form to fill in to add your wi-fi points to their database.

Go!

Last year, I ditched del.icio.us because I had to switch back to Safari from Firefox to synchronise my bookmarks with my iPhone.

However, since the 1.1.3 firmware update lets me put links right onto the home screen… it turns out I only use a handful of websites on the iPhone, so I’ve put them all on there and I haven’t touched my bookmarks since.

Which means I’m back in Firefox, and back on del.icio.us. Good stuff!

Dudes! Is this awesome? I think so!

The BBC’s iPlayer now works on the iPhone.

The website itself isn’t really iPhone-friendly for reading, but the videos are just simple H.264 streams which play full-screen. There’s an awesome blog post on the technical details if you’re interested.

I just followed these instructions to create a webclip icon for foxboom.com when you add the site to your iPhone/iPod Touch home screen. Cool!

For as long as I can remember Google being around, it’s been my favourite search engine. When I got my iPhone, I left its default engine to be just that.

This morning, whilst enduring an ad break during Deep Space Nine, I browsed through the settings on my phone, and found the “default search engine” page. Just for fun, I hit Yahoo!, and gave it a whirl.

For comparison, this is what a search for “Jon Eccleston” looks like in Google:

…and here’s the same search in Yahoo:

Wow! Look at that! Yahoo! has formatted the results for the iPhone, giving them a nice big, readable font, with iPhone-like list item separators.

Google, despite having the more accurate results (though I don’t mind my photo gallery being the top match) has to be zoomed to be useable. Yahoo! is useable as soon as it loads, and it looks great to boot.

Plus, you can’t tell from the photos, but Yahoo! lists the first few web matches, then also includes a few image matches, and any matching photos from Flickr. There’s a whole variety of results, presented in one simple, easy to read list.

Yahoo! oneSearch FTW!

Re Apple’s $100 rebate for people who bought an iPhone before the price cut, here’s Steve Jobs’ first ever apology letter.

Oh man! My bookmarking system is all wrong!

Okay, so, until a couple of nights ago, I was using Firefox and keeping all my bookmarks online with the del.icio.us plugin. But now I have iPhone, and iPhone synchronises its bookmarks with Safari. Not with del.icio.us.

I tried, but it didn’t work out. For an easy life, I’m going to shift all the bookmarks I really need out of del.icio.us and stick them in Safari, and any bookmarks I kept just to share will end up being blogged here.