Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

FaceBook Sync is the best program EVER!

Whilst playing with my iPhone, I thought that, as an experience, Facebook (on the iPhone) is quite nice… in a way that my Address Book isn’t… and thought how nice it would be if my Address Book was as pretty as the one in Facebook because pretty much everyone in Facebook adds a picture for themselves.

Then I got to thinking that it’d be great to write a script to go find my contacts and friends on Facebook and use their pictures. My address book is a mess, with double-entries, some with emails, some with telephone numbers, some with neither. It’s not that I’ve made it messy myself, various tools have made a complete mess of my contacts (my Phone, iSync, etc) and to be honest, having tidied it up many times I still have ten Andy’s and twelve Daves in my Address Book, some of whom are the same person more than once.

I thought I’d really like a tool that, in the same way as you persuade a shuffled deck of cards together, helped me unify the many messy but parallel Daves that exist in my universe.

And so, I thought I’d got it… The FaceBook Sync app has updated my Address Book with people’s images on my Mac. I’ve sync’ed my Mac with MobileMe, which if I’m honest still isn’t clear in my mind how and what it really is in terms of what I should do to make it “work”… And I’ve synced my iPhone. And still I don’t get pretty pictures in my iPhone’s Address Book. Where does iSync fit in any more? Why does iTunes sync my iPhone? Where does MobileMe fit in? Is Time-Machine part of this story?

It’s not just my Address Book that’s a mess.

I really think Apple should have called MobileMe… My Big iPhone in the Sky… which to my mind, is a better description of what it is, would create demand in terms of people wanting to experience the “real thing” after playing with the virtual version and also it trips of the tongue better… MobileMe? What an awful name… and one that still doesn’t explain what it does, and where in the process of trying to get pretty (well, sometimes not) pictures of people into my iPhone’s Address Book.

It’s a hard life for someone who is messy and anal at the same time.

As you may be aware, it’s taken a while for me to get hold of an iPhone. So long in fact that I’d totally lost interest and was trying to cancel my order (repeatedly) when they arrived and the little black box effect took over.

Given that the iPhone really is the best phone in the world, I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of being messed around by Carphone Warehouse but I’m genuinely underwhelmed.

In the olden days I used to email Steve Jobs direct with my undoubtedly highly valued usability rants (for System 9), nowadays, I imagine Steve just waits for my latest blog post.

Tom’s iPhone Gripes

• That “world” startup screen… ugh! Steve really is still in the 70’s isn’t he. And the map shows the US… which I find kinda creepy and ironic at the same time
• I really don’t like the big physical button for home because often that feels like abandoning your work, less like going to and more like bailing out. It’s also a “big click” for something you do all the time, unlike the swooshy-swooshy scroll stuff. The big physical home button really stands out when you are reading an email and you click a link to go to a web page… to get back to your email, you then have to click the big physical home button and go back into your mail. Luckily it does remember where you were, but apart from being a click to many (and a big one at that)… it feels like reversing out of the driveway (something bad will happen).
• Is it me? Why do I have to read Individual Mail accounts? Wouldn’t a combined view be better.
• The slidey-slidey interface for scrolling sure looks great but doesn’t do the job. I find it impossible to scan read a list of emails if they are going too fast and if I try to go slower it detects my finger as a click rather than a scroll. This feature was designed for demos, not real use.
• Downloading apps leaves you nowhere, in the iPhone Finder. This is kinda dead-end-ism at its worst. The iPhone needs Growl because I don’t want to sit and watch an application download, I want to be told when it’s ready.
• This one-app-at-a-time thing is a big bug in a way, because watching Twitter kind of defeats the object, in that Tweets are meant to be seen out the corner of your eye, putting them on centre stage is cruel. Again… iPhone needs Growl.
• The App Store has an application called “The Whoo button” but not a tube map. Which sort of says it all. I know it’s early days but I’m scared that the App Store QA checks will kill lots of developers desire to produce great tools (quickly).
• When I get a text or a mail, the phone vibrates, so I turn it on and have to go looking to find out what is new?
• Not all applications rotate… which means … well you can guess, it’s rubbish to click a link in an email, rotate to read, then back in email have to be vertical again. If nothing else, with my sweaty hands it increases the chances of me dropping the damn slippery soap-inspired form factor.
• I wonder why iTunes handles movies and music and apps but not photos?

Bigger iPhone Gripes

I have bigger worries than mere usability preferences. Andy told me tales of how Apple are aiming to totally controll the means of media delivery. There is no Flash player. This does worry me. For years I’ve held the fantasy that us Apple-heads are somehow in a minority, an elite, a crack squad of usability-inspired cool kids… finding out that we’ve become the Matrix would be a bit rubbish after all this time.

Another friend was going to take his iPhone back because the Apple logo (at startup) has a crack in it. How we laughed (and took the piss). Take a look next time your iPhone boots.

Even Bigger iPhone Gripes

My biggest concern about the iPhone is about what it is for. I mean, it is a serious computer with a great screen, that fits in your pocket and you can’t DO ANYTHING. Yes you can read email, or browse web pages but about the only creative thing you is take pictures. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but where is a Bluetooth keyboard (I’d happily take an iPhone away for a week if I could take notes with a mini keyboard)… Where is the equivalent of Graffiti (that was on the Palm Pilot) which, once you’d got used to it was quite good for note jotting. The Newton had hand-writing recognition that despite the high-profile piss-taking was very good (once you’d learned how to write again).

The issue is this. Steve really doesn’t want you to do stuff with the iPhone, yet I know it could. Doing stuff has been de-moted. This is a consuming device.

I guess that pretty soon I’ll be learning How to Jail-Break my iPhone… if only to get ssh (see the Cydia Apps List - iPhone 3G | iPod touch Forums).

You see, the thing is, I don’t think Steve want us to be doing stuff, he just wants us to be buying stuff. And I think most people are quite happy with that. Jobs famously killed off HyperCard when returning to Apple and whilst there is some sense in stopping people from writing an iPhone virus and locking people into the AppStore, I still want to see people doing stuff with this new bit of kit.

Look at some of the applications on iPhone Planet and you can feel Steve gnashing his teeth in anger. These apps even look like old HyperCard stacks… that’s what user-generated software always looks like… pig ugly and I don’t know why, but I love it.

I really do think that the iPhone team have been directed to cripple doing in general. The iPhone doesn’t have a textual input method… hell, it could probably easily do OCR on a hand-written note in your notebook… that would be a start.

My Biggest iPhone Gripe

My iPhone doesn’t work in my Mum’s kitchen. It seems the collection of baking trays, organic vegetable and crystals keeps any new-fangled anything from ever working. It’s a radio black hole that only lets Terry Wogan through it’s arcane filters but at least the cakes are nice.

… when I should be having fun!

Been doing a shade too much geeky lately… It’s not good for me. I like dollops of geekery on the side… calling all collaborators! Are you out there? Let’s do something fun soon….

I made the mistake, the terrible mistake, of thinking I could fix a code problem in Django by “starting all over again”. I quite like the idea of “living off the SVN”, of benefiting from the latest bug fixes and improvements etc. I like the idea of being up-to-date (at times).

So, I updated Django, and it was a horrible experience. Not only did I find a million (well, at least 4) patches and changes that scared me, I noticed new features like a separate admin.py file that I just didn’t like. The thing that I really like about the way Django’s admin screens work currently is that, the code you add is right there with the code… Doing it in a separate file just makes it that much more harder.

I managed to flip back to a version of Django that worked, but I’m left with a vision of the future that I don’t like much… a bit like the Matrix only less so.

And I know, having to learn new stuff is always a bit of a hurdle and it’d be great if “living off the SVN” brought me less stuff to do, but years ago a similar thing happened when Zope went all Plone. DTML was bad enough, but Plone blew me out of the water because it was just too much to learn, to understand, it didn’t fit my simple model of the world. It was too big a hammer for my particular nuts. Ahem.

So now, struggling with my own code, I’m a bit concerned that by the next time I get round to updating Django, I won’t know what it is any more, like waking up in a

nightmare-ish future where the world is run by The Fascist Pythonista Party.

from people import All
All.hail( )

Actually, would that be a bad thing? Actually, isn’t that what Google is anyway?

Get your environment variables right as in your PATH or PYTHONPATH or whatever… Whatever ails your python code, almost half the time it’s not the code, it’s the environment the code lives in.

So there you go, it’s a top tip. If your python isn’t working blame something else.

How I found this out…. (apart from having found this out a million times before)…

I just had a major re-install and tried, like you do to do the “This time I am going to be clean and tidy about installing stuff“… A complete re-install is an opportunity to do a bit of house-keeping. Personally, I hate setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable because at any one time I can have 4 or 5 instances of django running, and to me it seems daft to rely on stuff outside python just to get something to “know where it is”… I’ve been using django-bootstrap.py lately to help in this.

Most notably, one of my favourite bits of code, Django Evolution, stopped working. I had an awful day. It was awful because I now rely on Django Evolution. What it allows you to do is change your database on-the-fly, which for someone like me, who designs-and-codes-on-the-fly is an absolutely essential tool.

After hours and hours of digging, setting environment variables and hacking I got it working… THEN someone told me there was a fix (here).

What I learned yesterday is that when something isn’t working, that I should ask the right people and get on with a pet project for a few hours, rather than banging my head against the wall…. then double-check my PATH again.

There is an unwritten rule that just when you say “Well at least things can’t get an worse” that the really bad shit happens.

I got a call from the lovely Barry at Carphone Warehouse to tell me that I may get my iPhone by the end of the month.. but then he then went on to talk about worst case scenarios… When anyone talks about worst case scenarios it’s code for “I don’t want to have to admit that this is the most likely outcome”.

And besides, this already is a few streets down the road from Worst Case Avenue past Cock-Up Mansions.

The problem is this… head office have a few thousands of the iPhones but they are floating in a cloud of ambiguity. My order is what is technically known as in the aether and has gone all quantum, in that it both is and isn’t at the same time. Both Barry and I are being kept in the dark…matter as Carphone Warehouse spend their time herding Schrodinger’s cats.

As someone who, as you know, doesn’t fall for the whole hype thing, ahem, I’ve managed to join the extremely popular “People who have an iPhone (but don’t and might not ever have one) Club”.

.

It gets worse than worse…. (see previous posts)…

So just now I phone the delightful Barry at Carphone Warehouse, who tells me… My iPhone(s) should have been delivered and that Carphone Warehouse have a few thousand on the stock databases, that keep going up and down but that they can’t touch… Mysteriously….

And head office isn’t answering the phone or releasing any information.

The delectable Barry apologizes profusely but can’t help me because head office think that it’s OK in the information age to just hide and hope.

It’d be great to think that heads will roll because of this, but given their track record so far, I’m not sure that heads-a-rolling would make a difference. There’s nothing in there remotely useful. They’re probably all busy shredding the backup of the database that shows who made the biggest arse up ever in what will be called iPhoneGate by the laziest of journos.

The worse part about all this, like all customer service nightmares, is that at the end of the day, you just feel stupid, helpless and more stupid.. Sure I could take this complaint and go looking for some sort of explanation or recompense, but to be honest, I’ve now lost all interest in iPhones and maybe, who knows, lost interest in excitement itself.

If they ever arrive, I’m tempted to just take them back and go shopping for my old friend, the Moleskine notebook, that have only ever disappointed me when I’ve sobered up and read what I wrote the previous night.

Who’d a thought? Time flies…

I bumped into two fellow iQueue-ers this week, one in York and one on the train from Leeds. Only one of us has an iPhone. Two of us are plotting.

It’s now the one week anniversary ( iPhone 3G One Week Anniversary Interview ) since I bought two iPhone and I still don’t have one which feels like I’ve got my hands on Sgt. Peppers just as Never Mind The Bollocks was released. Thank you Carphone Warehouse … Purveyors of the Zeitgeist.

It gets worse…

I just called Carphone Warehouse and asked where my lovely iPhones were (due to be delivered Monday) and they said that they don’t have the stock to fill the order. The said that someone must have entered the wrong amount in stock control.

So, they’ve taken my money, duped me into buying two iPhones (see earlier post How Not To Buy An iPhone) so that I can get them by last Monday and say they expect to have some by Friday… but when I asked how they knew that they said because other people at Carphone Warehouse said so. Other people at Carphone Warehouse said my iPhone was waiting to be delivered.

Is selling things you don’t have illegal in any way? What if I’d opened a store selling iPhones (I have a million imaginary ones in stock!) and I took orders for delivery the next week.. then simply waited until Apple send the next load over to the UK and delivered them month’s later? People could of course “have their money back”… some would ask, some wouldn’t… some very rich people with short memories might forgot where they made their order or lose their receipt…. and on the remaining idiots (like me) you’d make the commission.

It’s definitely a scam in that they’ve been sitting on my money for a week and I have nothing but a piece of paper, a load of excuses from Carphone Warehouse and a hangover on Saturday to show for it.

So, when the next big consumer hype wave rolls into town, expect me to open a shop and offer to sell it to you (I have millions of them in stock, whatever they are), but remember that my business model is based on The Carphone Warehouse Scam.

As I said earlier, I’m not a huge fan of hype but I was woken at 6:30AM by the rain so thought I’d go an see how many were queueing outside the York O2 store and see if I could get an iPhone.

I was astonished to see forty people in the queue! One guy had slept out all night (in the rain). Given that it was early and I had nothing better to do, I became the 41st sad geek inline. We were all men… what’s that say?

Whilst standing about, chatting about what we were going to get, a bloke walking past said to me, being at the back of the queue, “I work at Carphone Warehouse, we have a few in stock, and there’s only two people in line”. I followed him and now was number six in line for an iPhone. The rumour was the O2 only had 36 iPhones, so jumping ship seemed the right thing to do.

The right thing until the Carphone Warehouse people told us that all the phones they had in stock were “pre-ordered”, that people “had their names down”. I didn’t think you could do that… By now I’m starting to feel hype-shafted… The O2 website didn’t work, then it did, then they changed their minds and now some people were busy paying for their little black boxes.

Then a delivery van arrived, 5 minutes before the shop was due to open. We were all predicting a riot. Everyone is the queue was getting quite giddy by now. I was thinking that we should just mug the van driver…. but that would be wrong, that would be letting the hype get to you wouldn’t it.

When I got to the front of the queue… this happened.

The guy plonks an iPhone on the table, asks me my details and for a credit card number and we’re almost done. But I realise that I want a 16GB one. The choice is… I can have a 16GB one on Monday(ish) or an 8GB now, to take homw…. What would you do?

I decide to be sensible and wait for a bigger iPhone.

So we change my details and so now I’m about to buy a 16GB iPhone. But the phone guy says, “And your new number will be…”… What? I’m an upgrade customer (I did say)… Oh! He says… “That buggers things up”.

So now, my chioce is not to buy a 16GB iPhone (they have now ALL SOLD OUT) and go for the 8GB that I can take home now…. Except I now can’t. When I changed my mind (about 10 seconds earlier) the 8GB iPhone that I was about to take home has now been sold to someone else in the queue.

So now my choice is, cancel the 16GB and wait until they ship more into the UK…. or take the 8GB one and have it delivered on Monday. I didn’t want an 8GB one. I wanted a 16GB one… I’m in the middle of buying a 16GB but the SECOND I change my mind, it would go back on the system and it’d be gone.

Oh bugger.

So… if I wanted the 16GB one I had to buy it…. and get a new telephone number, which I really, really, really didn’t want to do.

Oh bugger. Oh bugger.

Then I had a brainwave. If I bought the 16BG one AND the 8GB one I could give one to Sophie (who really wants to get away from the horrible people at Orange). The only way I could be remotely close to getting what I wanted was to buy one as a gift.

So that’s what I had to do. After 3 hours in the Carphone Warehouse shop… I came out having bought two bloody iPhones!

“I’m not a huge fan of hype” my arse.

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As soon as ANYTHING becomes too popular I can’t help but finding myself dis-engaging. I would have hated The Beatles at the time, despite myself.

The iPhone 3G comes out tomorrow and yes I want one… but I don’t want to want one. The pre-registration site by o2 has been consistently pissing people off. If there’s one thing I hate more than following the crowd, it’s following them off a cliff. You’d think o2 could get this one right wouldn’t you? I may just wait until the hoo-ha dies down because if there’s one thing worse than hoo-ha it’s hoo-ha that doesn’t work… known as doo-doo-poo-pa!

Playing with the iPhone SDK is fun, like a virtual iPhone to play with. A telephonic tamagotchi that I can rotate and coo over. I might not actually NEED an iPhone, this little on-screen version may just be enough until I realise that The Kinks were better anyway.

Here’s a mad picture, if you think about it too long. Me checking what my blog looks like with my virtual iPhone, whilst writing about the iPhone, whilst playing with some iPhone demo code and twittering about the iPhone and using iTunes to watch the tutorials about developing for the iPhone.

Something that really niggles me about MacOS is the Application installation process. For example, Apple always seemed to play up the idea that… “All you have to do to install an Application is drag it to the Applications folder” (that in itself scratches another sore… see earlier post) as if it was the Acme in Ease-of-Use.

OK, you’ve dragged your Application into the folder and now you’d like to run it… If like me you have lots of Applications in there you now have to find it, and click it. Depending on how you have the folder sorted and more importantly, if you can remember the EXACT name of the app (I always forget if it’s iPages or Pages or if it’s in a folder called iWork or what …etc).

It gets worse when you use an Installer which doesn’t even have the grace (like Windows installers do) to ask after installing something if you’d like to run it. At very least the installer could show you where it was. I’ve just installed the iPhone SDK and now I have to play a guessing game to find out what and where everything was installed… in /Developer? in /Applications? … in /Somewhere_Else?

I’ve always wondered why standard “drag install” folders didn’t contain an AppleScript called “Install Application and Run”. That’s a simple task AppleScript could probably do well.

It may be a minor point, but then the rich tapestry of cognitive dissonance is woven with thin threads of uh?!

Thank you for listening.