Weblog of a “Switcher”

Daring Fireball linked to a survey report that shows that 24 percent of current iPhone owners switched from the Motorola RAZR. Whelp, I'm one of them. I had a RAZR before I bought my iPhone. I loved the RAZR due to it's size. It was small, metal so that if it was dropped it wouldn't crack the case, and quite thin.

Survey Claims 24 Percent of U.S. iPhone Owners Switched From a Razr

If it’s even vaguely close to accurate, that’s a remarkable number. It might also explain Motorola’s precipitous decline.

★ Sunday, 22 June 2008

[From Daring Fireball Linked List: Survey Claims 24 Percent of U.S. iPhone Owners Switched From a Razr]

My old RAZR is now being used by my wife. However, with the new iPhone just around the corner. I'm really considering getting the new iPhone. Mostly for the higher speed data connection. I use my iPhone about 4 or so hours a day checking mail, surfing the internet, reading tweet's on twitter, etc... Plus, the $300 price tag is pretty darn good to for the 16GB phone.

If I do get the new iPhone, I'll probably be giving my wife my current iPhone and then she will be switching from the RAZR to the iPhone.

So overall, I really believe the statistic and am not the least bit surprised.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, Switcher

So the WWDC keynote speech has come and gone. I have to say I was a little bored with this one. They seemed to spend way to much time talking about all the applications that are going to be on the phone. Especially the medical software.

They did announce the 3G iPhone, but it's not going to be ready until July 11th. If the folks that were selling their iPhones actually did sell them, they now have to wait a little over a month before they can get a new phone.

I wonder if this means that Apple isn't going to be selling iPhones until July 11th now. That seems like a really bad idea to lose a whole months worth of sales just because they came out with a new phone. Do they really think they are going to reach their 10 million units sold by not selling them for a month? Hmm...

One thing I am really looking forward to is MobileMe. That is going to be really great and make .Mac really worth having. It's basically Microsoft Exchange for the Mac as well as Windows. That's the coolest part about all that. MobileMac works with Outlook in Windows so that regular home users have the power of Exchange available to them on their home computers and iPhones.

So, this was definitely one of the less interesting keynotes I have heard, but some interesting things coming done the road for sure.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 3g, Apple, appstore, dotmac, iPhone, keynote, Wwdc

Lately, I've been reading about all these people selling their existing iPhones with the understanding that Apple is going to announce new 3G iPhones on Monday.

I would get the biggest laugh if Apple instead did not announce a new iPhone on Monday. There has been tons of speculation and rumors of a new 3G iPhone.

Now, I realize that in all likelihood, Apple will announce new iPhones. Why? Because you can't buy an iPhone now to save your life. There are very few stores that have iPhones in stock. Why is this? Everyones guess is that Apple is holding it's stock so that when they announce the new iPhones on Monday, they will ship those phones as well as the original iPhones to stores.

What makes me wonder though is why hold back the stock of the current generation of iPhones? I mean if they are going to have both 3G and GSM iPhones, why hold back the stock?

The only thing I can figure is that all the "sneak peak" pictures are real and they are redesigning the device. So the 2nd Gen iPhones will look different than the 1st Gen iPhones.

Ah well, It would be a pretty funny practical joke to play on iPhone owners who are selling their phones in anticipation of a new iPhone.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, Wwdc

So could someone please explain to me what is so great about Hahlo3 for the iPhone and Twitter? I have been trying to use this "web app" and it drives me crazy! In fact there have been literally hundreds of Tweets talking about how great this web app is.

So let me list off all the things I don't like about Hahlo3:

1. No paging: I can only see about 20 of the latest Tweets that come my way. With m.twitter.com, I see all the Tweets I want since it has a way of paging back and forward.
   Update: I should have stated that this is not Hahlo's fault but a limitation with the Twitter API that has not been corrected. All Twitter clients will have this problem in fact. Current desktop as well as native iPhone clients.
2. Taking a look at a link in a Tweet loses the place I was at when I return. Now, this may not be a fault of Hahlo3 since even m.twitter.com needs to reload thanks to Safari on the iPhone loosing the page almost all the time when looking at a new web page. However, m.twitter.com has less Tweets on a page so I can find the one I was at before leaving.
   Update: As Dean (a representative of Hahlo) has pointed out to me in the comments, this is a limitation of Mobile Safari. Apparently if a new webpage takes up too much memory, previous web pages caches are lost to make room for the currently displayed page. This is something Apple should fix for Mobile Safari so that more than one web page can be kept in memory (within reason). It seems a bit unreasonable right now.
3. Hahlo3 has options for putting replies and your tweets inline with the friends timeline. However, the options don't currently work. Dean has straightened me out on this gripe. I misread some text under the options in Hahlo's settings to basically read that they wouldn't work if the options were turned on. In fact, they work fine. I just don't have any recent replies that would appear in the list of recent tweets and my personal tweets did, in fact, appear inline with the rest of the tweets.
4. When I discover a new Twitter user I might want to follow, I can go to their profile and follow them, but I can't adjust the Device Updates for that user.
   Update: I get the impression from Dean that this is a bug in the way I was bringing up the profile of a Twitter user I was not following. If I am correct and it is a bug, I suspect it will get corrected quickly. Apparently, if you look at a profile of someone you are following, you will see two buttons, one to stop following them and another to change the status of Device Notifications.

These are just the four top things that turn me off to the web app. There are so many other Twitter web apps out there and a couple that I like way more than Hahlo3.

I just can't understand all the positive comments being spit out to Twitter.

Now, don't get me wrong, I see all the good things about it too. Knowing how many characters are in the text fields is very important, the interface is well designed, getting around in the web app is great.

But to say that a web app is better than a soon to be written native iPhone app? No, I don't buy it, not at all.

So, honestly, what am I missing here that makes Hahlo3 so fantastic? I'm listening...

---

Update: I must say, I have received a lot of traffic from this post. I obviously hit a nerve when I posted it. This was my goal really. I really wanted to find out what was so special about Hahlo 3 and from the responses I got including one from a representative of Hahlo, Dean, I was able to clear up some of my gripes.

Plus, by looking up the info for replies to the comments, I found way more features in Hahlo3 that I even knew were there. I suggested to Dean that a webpage be setup to act as documentation for the web app so that us "slower" users (or at least myself) would have a clearer picture of what all Hahlo 3 can do.

Thank you one and all for your help. I am really beginning to see why there is such a buzz for the Hahlo 3.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: hahlo3, Twitter, web app, webapp

During my usual news surfing today, I cam across an article that basically questioned Apple's wisdom in choosing Objective-C for the language to use for it's iPhone SDK

"Did Apple Make A Mistake Choosing Objective-C
For iPhone SDK?" at Simon’s Blog:
DID APPLE MAKE A MISTAKE CHOOSING OBJECTIVE-C
FOR IPHONE SDK?
...
Recently, Apple bowed to the inevitable, and has released an SDK for developer testing. The language they chose to base the SDK around is Objective-C. This wasn’t a complete surprise - after all, it’s the ‘native’ language of Mac OS X. However, while it’s not a surprise, I wonder if it’s not a major strategic error on Apple’s part. The point is this: the Mac is a niche platform, and is especially niche in terms of numbers of developers building applications in Objective-C.
...

Normally I don't even bother to read such articles. This one, for some reason, caught my attention and I just had to wonder why Simon even wondered this.

Apple has had some serious success with it's OS X operating system. So much so, that when it developed it's mobile phone, the iPhone, it choose to use a stripped down version of OS X to drive it. As we have seen, this was a very good decision. The iPhone's user interface is now a standard that other mobile phone manufacturers are striving to emulate. Something that seems to happen a lot in the consumer electronics sector with products that Apple also has in that sector. The iPod and Macintosh come to mind here.

So now that they have OS X as a kernel for the iPhone, what language should they use for developing software for it? What else but the language that is used for OS X on their computers? Objective-C.

Since they choose Objective-C for the SDK a lot of library code used in OS X was able to be ported to the iPhone SDK so that Apple's developers could write applications for the iPhone very quickly. In fact, they use Xcode, Apple's free development environment, to develop applications for the iPhone. No need to create a new development environment, no need to create a new set of API calls. Everything was sitting around ready to be reused for the iPhone. Object Orientated programming at it's best.

Simon's point was that Objective-C isn't a very popular language compared to others being used for development. Now, he got his data from Tiobe Software, a company specializing in assessing and tracking the quality of software. Apparently, they index software development languages every month to see how they fair in the world of software development.

Based on this index for April 2008, Objective-C is 38. One behind BASH, a command-line shell scripting language.

Now, one thing that I have to wonder about this index is, who are they polling to get their data? Well, from what I can get from the site, it looks like they query search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo! as well as others and apply the results of the searches through normalization formulas to get the results they publish.

So, they are basing their index on how much people talk about a language. I wonder if they include posts about how bad a language is and the multitude of questions people as on the web for help with those languages.

He goes on to say that he doesn't feel that Objective-C is a bad language, he just feels that it's not popular. I have to wonder if he would feel better if Apple used (heaven forbid...) Java.

I have been spending time recently attempting to learn how to program the Macintosh, and possibly even the iPhone. I feel pretty comfortable with Objective-C at this point. There are still a few parts I need to understand before I start tackling the Mac and it's API What I have learned about Objective-C makes me really appreciate the language choice over many other languages they could have chosen. Let me give an example...

With Java, how many times have you gone to a web page that hosts a Java Applet and found it doesn't run due to an exception of some kind? It's not your fault, but it just died. Now, imagine you are on your iPhone and see a dialog pop-up that tells you that the program you are running threw a NULLPOINTER exception. How annoyed would you be?

With Objective-C, null pointer exceptions can't happen. Null pointers can be passed around, but the language pretty much just ignores them and moves on. No exception dialog, it just moves on. Now, this can be a bad thing if that null pointer was needed to perform a critical task. We all know that iPhone apps "crash". I have had Safari crash several times on me. The difference here is that the user doesn't know why it crashes, it just went away, and a simple touch of the icon will bring it back quite quickly.

Another very annoying issue with Java is it's garbage collection. Objective-C 2.0 can do garbage collection, but Apple has decided to disable the ability to use it with the iPhone. A very wise decision. The absolutely most annoying thing about Java is having to wait for the JVM to get around to cleaning up memory. Now this means that the iPhone could have a program that leaks memory in such a way that it uses up all the memory available for program execution. One the other hand, programs on the iPhone run very fast, way faster than any other mobile phone I have seen.

So, did Apple make a mistake choosing Objective-C to develop iPhone applications with? I have to say no, and I think Simon will see that I'm not the only one that feels that way when June comes and the iPhone Application store opens to show hundreds if not thousands of applications ready to download to iPhones.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, iPhone, objective-c, Sdk

Gruber has a post up on his site Daring Fireball about the new iPhone SDK and Apple's decision to not allow iPhone apps to run in the background...

Daring Fireball: The Flip Side of the Multitasking Argument:
"As I wrote this morning, I don’t think the ‘no background’ policy implies any spite or shortsightedness on Apple’s part. It’s simply the result of Apple’s decision to focus first and foremost on maximizing battery life and performance. Other mobile platforms, such as Android, may well have different priorities."

Now, I found out the hard way today that iPhone apps running in the background can kill the battery in a hurry. Apparently, an Apple application was running in the background for over 7 hours. I didn't know this and when I went to turn on my iPhone, I got nothing. I tried several ways to activate my phone only to get nothing.

I finally held the power button down for a few seconds and found out that my battery was down to a very small percentage left. Definitely in the red.

Fortunately I was at home and could plug the phone in to charge it back up. If I had been out, I would have been screwed.

Update: I feel I should point out here that up until this incident, I have not had any problems with my charge. I usually run about 1 day before needing to recharge. Usually that is about 2 hours of usage and 18 hours of standby time. This was the first time in the almost 9 months I have had the phone that the charge of my phone had all but drained out in less than a day.

Back to the original post:
Now, I can appreciate Apple's reluctance to allow apps to run in the background. However, I think they need to take a note out of their own rule book and fix their own apps so that they don't run in the background draining the battery of the phone.

You see, I don't know what I had done to cause the battery to be drained so quickly, but looking at my usage time, I saw that it had been running for over 7 hours. Now I know I hadn't been running my phone for over 7 hours. It was fully charged at 7am, and when I went to use it at 4pm, it was all but dead. I would have been using the thing pretty much all day.

So, Apple, fix your own apps please. I really can't have my phone die on me if I'm on the road. It's the biggest reason I have a cell phone in the first place. For emergencies!

Update 2: One of the author's of Twitterific: Craig Hockenberry, has more insights into why multitasking on the iPhone is a really bad idea.

(Via Daring Fireball .)

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 9 Months, Apple, Apps, Battery Life, Daring Fireball, Flip Side, Gruber, Hurry, iPhone, Mobile Platforms, Multitasking, Power Button, Priorities, Reluctance, Sdk, Several Ways, Shortsightedness, Spite, Standby Time, Usage Time

Here they come...

Apple, Jobs, AT&T sued over iPhone price cut, rebates: "Apple Inc., along with its chief executive and exclusive U.S. iPhone wireless partner AT&T, have been hit with a new lawsuit from a disgruntled customer who charges the trio with a variety of offenses stemming from the recent iPhone price cut." (Via AppleInsider.)

So how many suits does that make now? 20, 30, more?

I mean really, suing because a company changed the price of something? That never happens! Plus, suing because she was forced into a 2 year contract with AT&T with a $175 fee for breaking the contract. No other cell phone carrier does that either! My God! Why are these people allowed to waste our (taxpayer) money! They should be placed in jail for wasting the courts time and taxpayer money!

Excuse me while I go bang my head on a concrete wall...

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Amp, Apple, Appleinsider, Cell Phone, Chief Executive, Concrete Wall, God, iPhone, Iphone Price, Jobs, Phone Carrier, Rebates, Suits, Taxpayer Money, Wireless Partner

I don't often agree with Mr. Gruber and Daring Fireball, but boy do I agree with him on this topic: The Ringtones Racket!

During Apple's press event introducing the new iPods, Steve Jobs told all the Apple Zombies in the audience that iTunes would sell ringtones for way less than other vendors. The audience went nuts, as it usually does when God (Mr. Jobs) says just about anything. Yes, you can buy ringtones from the iTunes Store for the low everyday cost of $1.98! Even if you already own the CD that the song you want to make a ringtone out of, you "have" to buy it from the iTunes Store in order to turn it into a ringtone. This is quite a racket indeed. First you bought a CD, then you have to spend 99¢ to buy the song again, so that you can then pay yet another 99¢ for the privilege of cropping out as much as 30 seconds of that song to make a ringtone.

Mr. Gruber says that we should feel no remorse in making our own ringtones and using tools like like MakeiPhoneRingtone or iToner to move the ringtones to the iPhone. I fully agree which is why I purchased iToner. I probably would have used the free MakeiPhoneRingtone tool, but it wasn't out when I purchased iToner. I don't really mind. Ambrosia Software did a great job with iToner and is well worth letting them know it buy giving them $15. Plus, I would much prefer giving $15 to Ambrosia Software then 99¢ to the RIAA!

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the RIAA needs to get their act together. If they don't I get the feeling that they are going to lose more and more musicians over time to produce and promote their own music rather than selling their soul to the RIAA. At least that is what I personally hope will happen.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple Press, Audience, Daring Fireball, God, iPhone, Itoner, Job, Mr Gruber, Musicians, New Ipods, Nuts, Own Music, Privilege, Remorse, Riaa, Ringtone, Ringtones, Steve Jobs, Using Tools, Zombies

So, thanks to a bunch of "early adopters" complaining about the price drop of the iPhone, Steve Jobs decided to give the "early adopters" a $100 store credit for helping sell the product that they decided to lower the price of.

Sure, it's not the difference that the price dropped, but it's at least something. I'm OK with that. I wouldn't mind $200, but the $100 will go towards the Leopard Family Pack when it comes out at the end of October. (Yes, I know it's supposed to come out "sometime" in October. But really, when has Apple ever put out something earlier than the very end of the month when they label a month as the release date?)

From what I have seen around the blogs I read, it looks like the $100 was a good price point.

Amusingly, I still see a few people complaining that the 4GB iPhone is now dead since they dropped that size from what they are selling. Arguments are that when new software updates come out, that the 4GB iPhone will be left in the dark. I seriously doubt that the 4GB iPhone will stop getting updates. I fully expect to see updates and games on my 4GB iPhone for quite some time to come. If not, well, I guess I'll have to get the newer phone and use the 4GB for hacking which I am still scared to death to try. (I really don't expect to be doing this anytime soon.)

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 4gb Iphone, Apple, Blogs, Early Adopters, Games, iPhone, New Software, Quite Some Time, Release Date, Software Updates, Steve Jobs

I've been pretty happy with Apple since I made the switch last year. However, that has since changed... A little.

I'm OK with Apple selling ring tones for 99¢ above the 99¢ that a song costs. I think they are making a mistake that will cost them some support, but hey if people actually are stupid enough to pay $2.50 for a 30 second snippet of music to put on their cell phone, they will be thrilled to only have to pay $1.98!

Ambrosia Software must be just dancing in their offices right now though. They come out with a nice little program to send ringtones to the iPhone for $15. iToner. iPhone and Apple blogs all over start wondering if Ambrosia software is off their rocker since Apple is bound to have ringtones in iTunes that will all but kill any demand for iToner. Then today, Apple makes their announcement and the first thing I do is jump over to Ambrosia Software to download and buy iToner.

Look, I have absolutely no problem with Apple here. It's the record labels telling us what we can and can't do with our CD's and downloaded music that we paid good money for. I don't make it a habit of paying twice or 3 times for anything else, why should I do it for music/ringtones.

Anyway, my gripe is with Apple dropping the price of the iPhone only 2 months after releasing it. I know that price drops happen. I expected it at some point. Just not 2 months after it's release. My year old MacBook cost me the same amount as the current MacBooks being sold. Mind you, it's a little slower and that's fine. However, new MacBooks are still $1,100. They are not $800.

There is some speculation that Apple is going to release a 16GB iPhone for the $499 or $599 price point. Maybe. It's a pretty good bet since the iPod Touch comes in 8GB and 16GB sizes and it's basically an iPhone without the phone.

Also, from what I am reading on the different Apple blogs I read, it sounds like there are a few bloggers/readers out there that are a little unhappy too.

Now, would I have waited 2 months to buy an iPhone knowing that the price would drop $200 in 2 months? Hmm... I really don't know. I probably would have because my wife would really have killed me if I had bought one for $500 knowing that in 2 months I would be able to buy one for $300.

Ah well, them's tha breaks.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 16gb Iphone, Apple, Bet, Bound, Cell Phone, Gripe, Habit, iPhone, Ipod Touch, Itoner, iTunes, Mistake, Money, Music, New Macbooks, Ring Tones, Snippet, Speculation