Peter's Blog

I had a minor revelation in notetaking today: why not just web clip problems and solutions from web into my Evernote book? No need for me to type, just clip the forum post or whatever where someone describes my problem and then clip the best solution. Chuck it in Evernote and leave it for search to deal with. Et voilà, a database of problems I had and how they were overcome. If there are no solutions out there, solve it myself (it can happen) and blog it.

I also figured out why Evernote web keeps asking for me to log in, I bookmarked http://evernote.com but http://www.evernote.com/Home.action?login=true#Thumbs remembers me.

It turns out that Evernote has a nice iPhone web app, faster and more reliable than their native iPhone app. It is even possible to create a 'clip to evermote' bookmark and this works perfectly, even clipping selections. I created mine by making a bookmark on the iPhone and pasting the 'clip to evernote' link into the bookmark.

Since the iPhone app is slow to start up and hangs or crashes frequently, posting a quick note from the iPhone can be done in three ways:

1. via email (wish Evernote would delete auto-added sig)
2. quick note link on web app (hidden at bottom of list of posts but worth bookmarking)
3. clip to evernote has a notes box

The search on the web app is fast. There is little benefit with the iPhone app since it keeps notes online too ( unless you have the foresight to mark the ones you want offline as favourites).

No excuse for not getting organised

Kenken is my latest iPhone app craze. It's like Suduko (spelling?) but with sums instead of the cross patterns. The first beginners levels were taking me 20 seconds to solve but it gets trickier by the 33rd amateur level (below). Yes I did over 33 levels in a couple of hours, it smashes through the play-once-then-meh barrier.

I tried the new Space Invaders but it seems devoid of skill if I use the shoot-round-corners gun and the stuff between each level lasts longer than the levels themselves. Bejeweled 2 is either a total roll of the dice as to how many levels you go or I am just not getting it.

Found the TuneWiki app on the iPhone app store this morning and it's big fun. It's a music player that plays your iTunes library and shows the song lyric, Kareoke style (spelling?). Not all songs have lyrics but when they are available they are very well synchronised to the playback. I can rarely understand lyrics as sung and seeing them written down is often a revelation.

The tunewiki app lists songs in some random order but I found that since it is a front end for the iPod music player I can start a song from there and flip to tunewiki to sing along.

More than this, it does Internet streaming radio with lyrics too!

Tunewiki can also tell the world that someone in Ashford, Kent is listening to Mr Blue Sky. I better be careful what I listen to. Someone in Soton, Cambridgeshire is listening to Phil Collins

It as a free application but it keeps showing adverts for flirting websites so I'd better not show it to the wife.

I've been having one of my periodic reviews of note-taking software where I seek a nice notetaking platform, then can't be bothered to use it.

Reqall

I haven't played with this since they started charging for SMS messages. Now I can get free mms email on my iPhone I tried using this to send me reminders. It is quite convenient to schedule something, typing '7pm today emmerdale' and it will send a reminder. You can even speak it as it has voice recognition. However, in practise...(my emphasis):

from reQall
reply-to reQall
to peter@boogeddyboo.com
date Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:50 PM
subject Reminder for Jul 27, 2009 11:40 AM: 11:40 am today Is requall any good?...
mailed-by reqall.com

Reqall is more for single liner reminders than full note-taking but the problems in the scheduling put me off. It can automatically send memory joggers every day, kinda like your conscience sending you text messages. I soon learnt to ignore them.

Evernote

the evernote iPhone app either locks up or crashes and is too unreliable and annoying for jotting anything down quickly. For me the web app never seems to remember my login and I have to suppress a scream whenever I have to enter my name/password.

It suddenly occurred to me whether google mail isn't the best place to keep these notes? Lets see:

• with a decent HTML SMTP client it can handle formatting and graphics
• fast searching
• tagging
• 7G of free storage
• handles attachment files
• can be used with native iPhone app

Minuses:

• can't edit!

I could email notes to evernote/reqall but there's the hassle of deleting my sig every time.

--
Regards,
Peter

I'm not using the Iphone wordpress client any more. On more than one occasion it has lost a post that I spent precious time composing. If the communications aren't perfect when sending the post it vanishes.

I've beefed up my email submission stuff and am back to using iPhone email. The iPhone makes it difficult to edit posts by editing old email and sending it again, especially with embedded photos so this solution is still not ideal.

One advantage of using email is that submission is near instant: I don't have to wait for a cron job to import the new post from Wordpress.

Frenzic is an iPhone game that I have been playing for a few weeks now. Any iPhone game that I play more than twice is worthy of a mention.

It is a simple game kinda like Tetris but with pie slices. Make up the circles and clear them kinda thing. Sometimes you get a slice like the 12o'clock slice and all the 12o'clocks slots are already taken and you get a few seconds to lament, then you lose a life. Complete a circle in one colour you get an extra life. The game boils down to prioritising between building single-colour circles and simply clearing circles.

This morning I woke at 5am, all hay fevery and insomial and had nothing better to do than play Frenzic. Hum, lifetime best score of 1600, beating prev best by 400. I'm off out for some high speed motorbiking, this tiredness being a killer thing must be more Health and Safety nanny state crap.

Guitar Toolkit is an iPhone app that I am finding really handy. It provides a number of guitar tools:

• fretboard reference with scales marked (below is pentatonic C major). The notes on the fretboard can be played although as an instrument it doesn't compare to a guitar.
• chord reference. Can strum the strings to hear the chord. Changing chord is too laborious for this to be useful for developing chord progressions. No tools to help with that.
• metronome for people with no innate rhythm
• tuner. This is cool, listens to the note you play and tells you what it is and how far out of key it is. I find this easier to use than the tuner in the line6 pocket pod although I use the pod's tuner if it is plugged in

Idoodle2 lite is a free version of an iPhone painting app. I installed it as I wanted to brainstorm a design for a graph in a user interface. It isn't a serious drawing app as there are no layers, no ability to tweek positions etc. It was good enough for me to go ahead and implement this graph. The picture itself is an interesting juxtaposition of the mathematical and the childlike. It needs a pickled sheep to represent the futility of everything but it's a bit too hard to draw a sheep with idoodle2.

I digress.

The iPhone is good for brainstorming, especially in starbucks.

I'm still waiting for igimp.

Being a keen fair weather motorcyclist I need a good iPhone app to warn me of the likelyhood of rain drops hitting me. Weathermap pro is pretty good, giving probability of rain every few hours through the day.

It claims to be localized to Ashford but I suspect it is actually a forecast for south east England. If I have any qualms I can use it to run a radar map of the last few hours and extrapolate whether the orange blobs are heading my way.

In terms of accuracy it is about as good as any weather forecast ie only usefully indicative on the day you are interested in.

Yesterdays weather forecast was pretty bad:

I think it might rain today:

I added an iPhone web-application interface to petersblogger using the iui javascript library. This is very easy to use, doing things like formatting unordered lists in the familiar iPhone fashion and wrapping up the Ajax involved in clicking on a list item and having the expanded link scroll horizontally into view. The interface is typically iPhone.

The iPhone interface is nice for me reviewing old entries but I'm hoping to find time to add the forms for writing new posts. This is almost working except it is reluctant to 'slide' in the saved version of a post, it keeps loading it into a new page.

While there are rails plugins available to wrap the iui library I decided iui was easy enough to use in itself without having an extra library layer to worry about. I simply added a new ‘iphone' controller to access the interface, no messing with subdomains, useragent strings or whatever.

The iPhone interface is here

One of the problems of iPhone ownership is the ease of making impulse buys on the app store. A recent example is a chess program called Shredder. It's a few years since I have played much chess. I was never a very strong player and most chess programs can thrash me on level 2.

Shredder was appealing because it will examine your play and estimate your Elo rating and can then adjust it's own playing level to give you a fair game. I've played it twice and it's put me at 1000 elo, ie when I start a game of chess I don't start looking for a dice. Apparently it is a championship winning program (in a non-iPhone manifestation presumably).

Shredder also comes with 1000 chess puzzles and these are quite appealing. They show a chess position and you have find White/black's best move. These are normally a mate or just winning some material. You get ten points if you solve it instantly down to zero if you makes a few wrong guesses, spent too long thinking or press the hint button a few times.

Right now I'm enjoying these puzzles although I succumb to the hint button far too much.

The only thing I don't like about shredder is the way it spins the board round with every move while doing the puzzles which is disconcerting and I can't find an option to disable it.

UPDATE: after a ropey start this is more like it:

I installed wordpress on my server to act as a formal staging post between the iPhone wordpress client and petersblogger. I tried installing the ubuntu package but the instructions were vague as the thing had been debianised and /use/share/doc/wordpress/README.debian assumed I already knew what i was doing.

I gave up on the ubuntu packsge and downloaded wordpress directly from wordpress.org and followed the ‘five minute install' and indeed had it running in five minutes.

Previously I had been using a free blog on wordpress.com but I decided to install it on my own server for three reasons:

• it won't be upgraded outside my knowledge and break the rss feed
• I can hit the rss feed every five minutes from cron without guilt
• ultimately I can bypass the rss and hit the database directly

One problem with the iPhone wordpress app: haven't found a way to delete a post.

I've had my iPhone for over a month and we are totally inseperable. Previous mobiles were left in my coat when I got home from work but never the iPhone. We are a single entity apart from shower time, where the idea of moisture touching it is too terrible to contemplate.

But what do i use it for? After the five minute wonders have fallen into neglect, what is left?

• phone. Well duh
• texting
• email, google mail via IMAP to be precise. I do some blog posts with this, the ones where I have a v's instead ofvspaces.
• google reader. I spend most time here.
• app store. When I run out of rss I browse the app store for new toys. Most only amuse for a few minutes. I still haven't found any compelling games.
• Twitter. I use twitterific lite as it does all I need and the ads don't bother me. GPRS is plenty good enough for Twitter.
• iPod/iplayer/last.fm, although not that often as I'm always watching the battery level which spoils it. A full battery might give me two hours of iplayer, although the stream will probably freeze after 30 minutes.
• wikipedia: another app I have simplifies the formatting for iPhone very nicely.
• camera, although the pictures are usually disappointing: blurry or noisy.

One of the great mysteries of the world is why the iPhone does not support emailing in landscape mode. You see, in landscape mode the keyboard is twice as wide which makes it easier to hit the right key.

There are a couple of apps available to fix this and today I noticed that one of them, EasyWriter, was free (for a limited time) so I am giving it a try. Yes I am using it to type this very blog post, using two forefingers as it happens which is a bit less RSI prone than using two thumbs. It certainly is faster although the iPhone could still use a shortcut for deleting the last word.

The application has a two finger pinch resize to get more text on screen which is useful.

The app can only send email which is good enough for me to compose blog posts. While it may be useful to compose SMS message in landscape mode I find portrait mode is good enough for my twitterings. If apple don't make the landscape keyboard more ubiquitous in the next update then they really aren't trying any more, even with the first googlephone having a proper keyboard.

iPhone tip: press the two main buttons to do a screenshot.

How the site looks on an iPhone

If you can read this then I can do Moblog posts direct to petersblog (not blogger) from my iPhone via email. I have done similar things on the past but my previous phones were quite painful to compose messages with. The ways things are at the moment with protracted putting-kids-to-bed duties, this will make it possible for me to post more.

Blogging from iPhone

An example of the iphones mediocre camera.

My Sony-Ericsson k850 had given me a taste for mobile Internet yet I yearned for more. I was somewhat tempted by an asus eee901 but decided a smart phone would be much more portable. After some research on the capabilities of the iPhone I had to have one.

I can summarize it easily: I love it. Calling it a phone detracts from just how flexible it is. I'm not normally a design freak but I like it's slabbiness, one button on the front, another on the top, a volume control and a small switch to turn the ringer (easy to work in my pocket). Speaking of pockets, it is sleek and quite flat and is very comfortable there. Slips out a bit too easily when I sit down. The case has very few markings, just a shiny mirrored apple and my Elizabeth, not yet two could name the brand. It feels very solid.

I'll go through the things I have been doing with it:

phone

well der. Good call quality and (for me) better reception than my old network when sitting at my desk at work. My phone is pay-as-you-go so the calls are 25p a minute: unless I use the truphone voip app I downloaded and pay 3p a minute. I could have settled for an ipod touch which does most things an iPhone can but I hated the thought of carrying more than one gadget.

text messaging

the touch keyboard is better than a normal mobile, not sure about a blackbery though. Texts are displayed in 'threaded' conversations (to/from same caller on one page) which is cool and the whole thread can be deleted in one go. No way of forwarding a message though. No support for SMS messaging at all (except via applications, not real SMS).

email

nice email client, supports gmail out the box. It is supposed to support push email with yahoo but apparently this has always been temperamental.

wifi

I use this all the time, my phone is always doing something or other Internet related. Connects quickly and solidly too. I downloaded am application to list available networks and signal strengths and it makes a great wifi reception diagnostic tool at work.

3g

internet is slow over 3g and coverage in my area is patchy. Enabling 3g drains the battery noticably faster. With 3g off and wifi on I need to charge every day but I play with the phone all evening.

spirit level

the iPhone has an accelerometer which is used to detect portrait/landscape orientation in the web browser but is sensitive enough to make a spirit level. Many of the games available use this in surprisingly inventive ways.

web browser

I thought the tv adverts on tv looked faked but it really is that easy to surf, much better than my old phone. Safari does crash now and then which makes me swear. iPhone web apps are essentially web pages tuned for the iPhone. I use one to post to Twitter.

note taker

I have an application called reqall where I can speak notes and the recordings are converted to text on a website I get free texts to remind me what I've invariably forgotten. I'm composing this blog entry on the notetaking app but the iPhone totally lacks cut and paste so I can only put it on the blog by emailing it to my desktop. Composing this in safari would have been too painful, the note utility is full screen and I can save drafts regularly. It is RSI-city, my knuckles are burning.

radio

the last.fm application streams the back catalogs of every artist I can think of in random order for free and I'm still not sure what the catch is. It's great for acts I didn't fancy investing in a cd for.

ibluesky

a mind-map brainstorming app.

mobile memory

the 'air share' app allows me to copy files to and from the iPhone over wifi using bog standard Internet explorer. The app included a file viewer.

tv

plays BBC iplayer and YouTube Just fine. The screen is very nice, good contrast and resolution, small but perfectly formed. I had a seminal moment watching Stephen fry in America when he pulled out his iPhone to show a picture. His iPhone was perfectly framed within mine.

iPod

nuff said? Can buy music wirelessly with built on iTunes app but it doesn't handle podcasts or videos without iTunes on a pc/mac.

camera

the camera is very basic after a Sony-Ericsson and has no settings to tween at all. There is no flash and indoors it is pretty much useless. It can't record video at all, not even poorly like other phones.

app store

the only way to install apps is through the app store. There are many good things there either free or as low as 59p. Very hard to say no to punting 59p for a silly toy to amuse the kids for five minutes (koi pond, face melter, chalky).

remote control

'mymote' can control my mythtv from anywhere I am in the house. If it could schedule recordings it would be perfect. There is a free apple app to control iTunes on a mac/of.

ssh terminal

touchterm is a nice little ssh terminal capable of light transcontinental server maintenance. I tried a vnc app but couldn't figure out how the mouse was supposed to work. Command lines are infinitely more powerful for server stuff than guis anyway.

gps

location to within about 50 yards, maybe less. Built in google maps complete with satellite photo's. Can tag photos with location, should I ever want any weirdos stalking my daughters.

I've done all this and I've only had it three weeks. As I said earlier, I love it. It does more than this: I'm not one of those people that thinks wandering around wearing a Bluetooth headset is cool.

Downsides:

• battery life isn't great, a charge a day but I use it a lot and it can charge from USB on an ubuntu hardy box without installing silly modem drivers (ahem Sony).
• it is commoditized, restricted and closed. I'm not free to write apps for it unless I buy a mac (tempting). Google android sounds very nice open, non-proprietary and in a year or two I may well have an android phone. It might be as good as what I have NOW.
• apps crash too much, especially safari web browser. The phone has never locked up, you just get taken back to the desktop, no errors or apologies.
• limited multi-tasking: listening to last.fm, if I switch to something else the music stops. It does the old palm thing of not giving much control over processes. Windows mobile is similar but there are innumerable task manager apps. Apple lock down what is available on the app store so there is nothing like that. Apart from air-sharing the apps have limited support for concepts like files, probably worse than palm in that respect. Palm had a database rather than a file system, this thing has a bsd core and files shouldn't be an alien concept.
• the touch screen is much nicer than a stylus but spelling corrections are frequent and tactile feedback would be nice. It can do a key click but that is a bit loud. I think all the good keyboard data entry ideas have been patented.