Howboring

So if the iPhone 5 gets a bigger 4inch screen I wonder if that means the keyboard will be able to accommodate a top number row?

Switching when typing passwords is an error prone annoyance.

I won’t say Facebook paid to much for Instagram because I really have no real idea of the machination of these crazy uber rich Silicon Valley tech mavens. 

But from where I’m standing the Instagram app is as much about cross-pollination as it is about the actual Instagram users and community. 

My Tumblr feed is polluted with people posting from Instagram. It’s the same on Twitter and Facebook. Instagram is just an easy way to share an image to multiple social services. Not all of my friends are on FaceBook. The snobbier tech people refuse to use FaceBook for some reason. So I cross pollinate. I have no loyalty to Instagram particularly. Most of the people I know on Instagram are on Facebook as well. Or Twitter. Or Tumblr.

The recent grand-standing deletion of Instagram accounts and migration to Path by some vocal member of the tehcnorati bemuses me. I just don’t understand the Facebook haters. These companies are all as bad as each other. Path only last month was sucking up your Address Book contacts with out a blink. 

As for Path: It’s a very nice UI and all that, but honestly, why the fuck do I want to press a button to record when I go to sleep and wake up? Seriously, why would you ever include a feature like that in your app? If you are using the Path app and doing this you need to put your iPhone down and call a friend or family member and have a real conversation. 

Sidenote: The longer I use Tumblr the more I like it. I wish more people I know used it instead of Twitter and Facebook. 

I’ve had to turn off Photo Stream and iTunes Match on my iPhone. 

All it seems to mean is:

1. Photos take up twice as much space on my iPhone. I think I want them uploaded to iCloud, but I don’t want the same ones then synched back down to my phone. I’ve only got a 32GB phone.
2. iTunes Match just seemed to fill up my phone until it was out of space. 

I’ve turned them both off. Hopefully my iPhone will become usable again. 

It seems to be that the whole point of a cloud service should be to free up local storage on constrained devices like an iPhone.

I hope Apple figure this out - iCloud isn’t doing intuitively what I expect it to do.

Photo Stream and iTunes Match seem slightly pointless at the moment.

Clear by Realmac Software is iPhone App of the Week!

Apple - $97.6 billion in cash and equivalents

So hey Apple, how about kicking some of those billion back to the developers that support the iOS platform and cut that 30% tax on App Sales?

It means little to Apple but a lot to small indie developers.

The all new and fully iOS native Wild Oak iPhone app is available in the App Store now! http://bit.ly/ys7c3Y (iOS 5 only)

Whilst Current Geek Me enjoyed writing this SELECT statement for mySQL

SELECT id, price, lesson AS l, CONCAT((DATE_FORMAT(start_date, ‘%a %D %b %Y : ‘)), IF(DATE_FORMAT(start_date, ‘%i’) = ‘00’, LOWER(DATE_FORMAT(start_date, ‘%l%p’)), LOWER(DATE_FORMAT(start_date, ‘%l:%i%p’))), ’ - ‘, IF(DATE_FORMAT(end_date, ‘%i’) = ‘00’, LOWER(DATE_FORMAT(end_date, ‘%l%p’)), LOWER(DATE_FORMAT(end_date, ‘%l:%i%p’))), ’ : $’, price) AS d, start_date AS sd, end_date AS ed, longdesc AS f FROM `cookingSchool` WHERE (start_date >= ‘2012-01-01 03:33:28’) ORDER BY start_date ASC

I’m sure Future Me is going to hate me when I have to change it.

Lazy coding: I know SQL better than I know how to chop up strings in Obj-C. 

My current approach with iOS coding is to just return some JSON with the strings just how I like so I have to do as little in Obj-C as possible. My justification is that the iOS device has limited processing power and my big chunky server has CPU cycles and disk to spare. I’ll just keep saying that until it isn’t true any longer. Probably around the time the iPhone 5 arrives.

Apple iPhone 4s a quarter of all smartphone sales in the four weeks to December 9

Good work Apple. But in my opinion they need to move on from the strategy of selling last-years phone as the cheaper model. The iPhone 3Gs is now ancient in smartphone-years, although still capable. 

The old iPhones are good, but just not as sexy and press-worthy as something new and shiny. My guess is that they will follow the iPod strategy with new models that fill all the slots on the rack. Making the 3Gs the new free phone isn’t a very exciting strategy for consumers, and however good the phone may be you’ll still feel like you are using an old device. 

“Oh, you have an iPhone. The new 4s?”

“No, the almost three year old 3Gs…”

“oh, well, never mind, maybe next time….”

Although given the strong sales of the iPhone 4s then maybe the cheaper models function as an incitement and it’s then an easy up-sell to the iPhone 4s.

Data Monday: Mobile App Usage

Fonts in iOS 5