Posts Tagged ‘iphone’
PCalc 2.2
July 30th, 2010 at 7:51 am
PCalc 2.2 for the iPhone just appeared in the App Store. It’s not a big upgrade, but it does have a few new features I like.
First is a new theme, called Flynn. I can’t imagine myself ever using it, but it’s definitely fun.
I’m thinking James Thomson should have timed the release of this theme closer to December 17, but what do I know about marketing? Maybe he can do some cross-promoting with the publisher of LightBike.
On a more substantive note, PCalc’s Key Click preference now allows you to set the volume of the click.
If you’re like me and need to have the phone’s main volume set high to hear the phone ringing in your pocket but don’t like the extra loud clicks when tapping keys, this option is most welcome. And Nigel Tufnel fans will appreciate what happens when you swipe the volume slider all the way to the right.
Finally, PCalc’s advanced settings now have an option, called Clear Memories On AC, that prevents mistaken taps on the AC button from clearing out the memory as well as the stack. This duplicates some functionality, but makes the app work better without messing up its aesthetics.
PCalc already had an SC button for clearing the stack only, but because it was on the “2nd” keyboard, it required two keypresses instead of one. Personally, I always thought the SC key should be on the primary keyboard because it’s less destructive, but I understood the value of having a familiar key as the default. With the new setting, we get the best of both worlds. (There’s an MC key on the secondary keyboard for clearing the memory.)
To me, this is the biggest and best change. I often find myself with a bunch of items on the stack that I’d like to blow away, and I’ve always had to think twice before clearing to make sure I didn’t also delete an important number in memory. With the new setting I can AC with impunity.
Yes, I’ve written an absurd number of posts on PCalc. I’m an engineer; calculators are important to me.
AT&T customer service again
July 25th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
This morning I found a text message and two emails from AT&T on my iPhone. The text message said
AT&T Msg : Youve [sic] used 65% of your data plan. Any overage bills @ $15/200MB. Tip: Data is unlimited over Wifi. Learn more at att.com/dataplans.
The emails both said
Our systems have detected that you are nearing your data plan limit. Your base plan has a monthly allowance of 200MB. Data usage which exceeds your plan allowance will be billed at $15 per each additional 200MB.
To check your data usage online and upgrade to a 2GB plan simply click here. For additional information about data plan requirements and tips on managing your data usage visit att.com/dataplans.
*Important: In general, domestic data usage will be reflected within 24 hours. In some cases it may take up to 72 hours to be reflected in our systems.
Thank you,
AT&T
This was a little disconcerting, as I’m only a few days into the current billing cycle. Had I been mistakenly watching YouTube videos of QI over 3G instead of WiFi?
I launched the myWireless app and navigated to the data usage screen,1 which said I’d used less than 12 MB.
Saying that 12 MB is 65% of 200 MB is an order of magnitude error, the kind of error Megan McArdle specializes in. It seems too far off, even for a company famous for considering a second of talking to be a full minute.
I also checked the data usage for the other phones on our account; they were similar to mine and nowhere near the monthly limit.
So after stewing for a couple of hours waiting for Customer Service hours to start, I called AT&T and talked to a very nice woman who confirmed the numbers I was getting from myWireless and then started talking to supervisors because she couldn’t explain the problem. Eventually, this explanation emerged:
- My data usage is, as myWireless says, nowhere near the limit.
- Because of this mixup, if my data use happens to go over 200 MB this month, they will call me and bump me up to the 2 GB plan automatically so I don’t get the hit with the high overage charges.
- They’ve seen warning messages like this before, typically when a user gets a new iPhone (my daughter got one yesterday and is on the family account) and 3G usage starts.2
Items one and two were nice to hear and were consistent with my usual experience with AT&T customer service reps: they dig in and try to solve my problem, whether it’s technical or billing. Unfortunately, item three is consistent with my usual experience with AT&T’s automated customer service: it’s buggy, slow, and gives inexplicable results. I get the sense that most of AT&T’s human customer service time is spent fixing mistakes made by its automated customer service infrastructure.
-
Now that I’m in a new billing cycle, myWireless will give me the data usage, something it wouldn’t do before. So that’s an improvement. On the other hand, in keeping with AT&T’s reputation for high quality software, myWireless typically crashes when I go to it via the fast app switcher. ↩
-
The jokes write themselves. a) AT&T’s network is so overburdened, they’re trying to scare you away from any 3G use. b) AT&T warns you away from their network because they’re afraid you’ll discover how crappy it is. c) “Someone’s trying to use our 3G! We must stop him!“ ↩
The iPhone panorama grip
July 17th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Now that I have a phone with a camera that focuses, I’ve been taken more cameraphone photos. I got the AutoStitch app and have tried to shoot a few panoramas. This involves taking a series of photos looking in different directions from the same point and having AutoStitch combine them into a single image. AutoStitch is good, but I’ve found that I can help it out by holding and rotating the phone in a particular way.
Serious panorama photographers use a tripod with a head that rotates the camera about its lens’s entrance pupil to eliminate parallax. That’s obviously not a possibility with the iPhone, but it can be roughly approximated by gripping the phone with the thumb and index finger above and below the lens, holding that hand steady, and rotating the phone about the axis that runs between the two fingers.
This works better than standing in one spot and rotating your body around as you shoot because it minimizes the parallax that AutoStitch has to deal with. You probably won’t see much difference if you’re taking a panorama in which everything is about the same distance from the camera. But if you’re taking a panorama with distinct foreground and background objects, the difference can be striking.
Here’s a panorama with a foreground object, stitched together from five photos taken by rotating my body.
And here’s the same subject matter, stitched together from photos taken by rotating about the two-finger grip.
Note the nasty ghost image of the foam finger in the first panorama, the result of parallax that AutoStitch just couldn’t compensate for. The ghost is gone in the second panorama. The two-finger grip certainly can’t eliminate parallax, but it can reduce it to a point where AutoStitch can handle it.
There’s certainly nothing new about what I’m doing here, but apps like AutoStitch are bringing panorama photography to people who’ve never done it before (like me), so I thought it was worth a mention.
You can click on the images to see larger versions. I apologize for the poor lighting, but I didn’t have a well-lit example.
Left-handed iPhoning
July 12th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Far too often for comfort, I hear or read something that makes me feel like a complete outsider to the human race. Today it was the renewed flurry over the iPhone 4’s reception issue, prompted by a Consumer Reports blog post.
You know the story: holding the iPhone 4 in your left hand while calling is likely to cover that black gap between the antennas and lower the signal strength. What I find weird about this is the interpretation that this is especially bad for left-handed people.
I’m right-handed and typically hold the phone in my left hand. I’ve always assumed that everyone tends to hold their phone in their non-dominant hand because they dial with their dominant hand. Also, holding the phone in the non-dominant hand is the only way most of us can talk on the phone and take notes at the same time. Now I learn—again—that I’m something of a freak.
Well, in this case I’m proud to be a freak. You “normals” must switch your phones from hand an awful lot: every time you run into an automated operator and have to push buttons; every time someone gives you directions or a phone number or an appointment time. No wonder you drop your phones so often.
Update 7/12/10
Early returns from Twitter suggest that I’m not alone.
Maybe it’s the reporters who are freaks.
iPhone crash reports
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:14 pm
I’ve seen some indications on Twitter that the latest version of TaskPaper for iPhone—version 1.2.3, first available today—is crashing on launch. The developer, Jesse Grosjean, has asked users who are having this problem to send him crash reports.
I’m still running the previous version of TaskPaper and have decided not to upgrade just yet. I’m not worried about the possibility of crashing—because it’s a holiday weekend, I could live without TaskPaper for a few days. But, also because it’s a holiday weekend, I won’t be at the computer to which I sync my iPhone for a few days; if I get any crashes, I won’t be able to get the crash reports and send them to Jesse until next week.
Crash reports for your iPhone are kept in the
Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<device name>/
folder in your home directory. Replace <device name> with whatever your phone is named in iTunes. Inside that folder are a bunch of files, most of which are named according to the app that crashed and the time at which the crash occurred.
These are the files the developer would like to see when you complain about a bug. Just attach the files that correspond in time to the problem you’re having to your bug report.
PS: Sorry about the crappy screenshot above. I captured it from my work computer via screensharing and did a poor job of cropping.
An iOS 4 disappointment
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
My biggest disappointment with iOS 4 isn’t the somewhat clumsy double-click required to use fast app switching, it’s the lack of a decent monospaced font.
Monospaced fonts are usually thought of as programmers’ fonts, but they’re helpful any time you need vertical alignment of plain text. Many of the files I keep in Simplenote are tables of information, and although I’ve come up with a half-assed way of getting the columns to nearly align, things would be so much easier—and more portable—if I could just switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, iOS 4, like its predecessors, does have a couple of monospaced fonts: Courier and Courier New. But no one really wants to use such ugly fonts. When Apple introduced Menlo with the release of Snow Leopard, I was really hoping it would be included in the next iPhone OS release. Unless the Fonts app is lying to me, that didn’t happen.
Back in the days when Inside Macintosh ruled the Apple programming world, there was a way for developers to ensure that certain fonts were available for their applications: they could include them in the resource fork of the app. I don’t know if a similar thing is possible with iPhone apps, but I’d jump to a note-taking app that had easy online syncing and a decent monospaced font.