Back and Forth Forever

As if there weren’t enough people reviewing the iPhone 3G I thought I’d throw in my $.02.

In short, so far, it’s fantastic.  The speed of the internet is at worst 3x faster then the first gen iPhone, that alone makes the purchase worth it (to me).  The aGPS is surprisingly fast as can get a lock in about 10 seconds, much better then I expected.

With the 2.0 firmware comes the Apple Application Store, and I can say I’m very happy with most of the applications I’ve tried.  Though, not all applications live up to what they promise.  Here’s a few apps that I’ve installed that I now can’t live without.

Apple Remote:
Absolutely fantastic. Remotely controls iTunes or an AppleTV from anywhere on the same WiFi network.  This is great since I can control iTunes which plays through my AppleTV and thus my home stereo system.

Twitteriffic:
I miss Twinkle but this will do for now.  It does a decent job but it definitely lacks the features from the jailbreak-required app.

Facebook + Myspace:
Thankfully I’ll never have to go to myspace.com again after using the MySpace app.  The Facebook app is nice as well, but I think I’ll stick with the webapp version until they can match features on the native app.

Shazam:
Listens to what it can hear playing and tries (very well actually) to find the song, album, and artist.  I threw some tough music at it and it was about 80% accurate.  In normal circumstances I can see it being easily 100%.

Pandora + AOL Radio:
I like Pandora quite a bit and this is exactly what you’d expect from an application they offer.  Plays a personalized playlist of music they think you’d like, does a great job too.  AOL Radio really surprised me with the quality of the audio and selection of songs.  Both are a must since they’re free after all.

Last.FM:
And here’s where I start to get angry with Apple.  The Last.FM app is a direct continuation of c99koder’s work on MobileScrobbler missing one enormously important feature… scrobbling.  Apple has intentionally not allowed applications to run in the background thus crippling a number of applications that otherwise would have been fantastic.  Last.FM and IM applications are broken because of this.  This needs to be fixed, or I’ll be jailbreaking at the first opportunity.

Loopt + Whrrl:
Whrrl is utterly horrible from what I’ve seen so far.  Whrrl is a “where are your friends now, and where do they recommend” gone wrong.  It’s cumbersome and preforms poorly and it was excrutatingly difficult to add a friend.  Loopt seems to be a much better “where are your friends” app, but sadly I only have two friends who use it.  If you’re a Loopt member and I know you (even sort of) send me an invite (aaron period lake from Google’s fine mail service).

So far I’m very happy with the new iPhone, it’s almost all I could have expected.  Will Android beat the iPhone?  Time will tell.

One of the biggest features missing for me from Last.FM has to be notification of new album releases.  I don’t browse the new release section at Harmony House Amazon.com and if I did I’d see the popular releases like Coldplay, Emmylou Harris, Duffy, or Lil Wayne and not what I actually listen to.  Last.FM is great for fiding events in your area but for some reason they can’t find albums you might be missing in your library.

Thankfully behlert has came up with a solution, Soundamus.  Mashing Amazon Web Services new releases with any artist you’ve listened to 5 or more times you’re presented with a webpage and RSS feed of new releases tailored to you’re musical interest.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a hack and would be a lot better if Last.FM did this themselves but this is a good start.

I hate getting involved in Internet Drama.  I also hate it when startup-like companies take advantage of their employees and spin the truth to publicly defame employees they’ve previously taken advantage of.

I previously praised ATVPatch for concocting an easy solution for someone who does not have a Mac to mod an AppleTV to mount samba shares, play a majority of CODECs, and add in a few other wizz-bang features. In a nutshell, ATVPatch is a .iso file you copy to a USB thumbdrive and plug in to your AppleTV.  After rebooting, your ATV boots from the USB thumbdrive installs ssh-server, CODECs, and a bunch of applications.  It’s a very easy process, though probably illegal.

The core of the USB thumb drive has kernel extensions from a desktop/laptop Mac coupled with some shell scripts to push everything to the ATV device.  The not so illegal way to create a patchstick would be to take these extensions off a Mac that you own, and cut your own bootable USB thumb drive.  All the work done to get a patchstick created was done free of charge by a number of developers.  Unfortunately, companies like ATVPatch are taking advantage of these developers by charging for the hard work they’ve done and selling a ready to go solution by including the portion that you need to have a Mac for.

I know that most of the people that read my blog find it through planet.arslinux.com and mostly close friends and family (and spammers) are the rest of my regular visitors.  Being that Planet Ars generates a good majority of this traffic I’ll placate to Open Source types.  Imagine that all the hard work put in to Banshee by some very talented developers was taken by a company repackaged, reskinned, and sold for $20.  Outraged yet?  If not, I imagine you will be shortly.

From my understanding ATV4Windows, which became ATVPatch, was founded by CiscoTM and developer h3lbro.  They initially charged $15 for their patchstick and later upped the price to $20 for new subscribers.  As a subscriber you get a 35MB .img file which enables you to mod your AppleTV with very little effort.  H3lbro, who was the only developer on the project, put in a number of hours to create the ATVPatch-stick and package it up to make it easy for anyone to use.

The drama apparently started a few weeks ago when CiscoTM, founder, refused to pay h3lbro a fair sum for the amount of work he’d done.  H3lbro stated on his press release, “a simple calculation reveals that for our online members alone, the gross sum of $21,700 has been generated through the work of myself and CiscoTM.” H3lbro claims to have only made an initial payment of $250 and after much back and forth received a second payment in the amount of $750 and CiscoTM kept the rest.  According to h3lbro, he brought up his concerns to CiscoTM and was subsequently banned from ATVPatch.com.

I have no affiliation with either CiscoTM or h3lbro, but I would truly like to make this visable to anyone contemplating on using ATVPatch to mod their AppleTV.  I don’t have CiscoTMs side of the story other then a few poorly written posts on his private forum.  I have dealt with CiscoTM personally in the past and was more then a little taken aback at his rudeness.  Please, Digg this, or any other blogger who is taking about this.  I’m not going for page views (I don’t advertise on this site), I just want people to be made aware of the situation.

UPDATE: I spoke with CiscoTM via IM and it seems like 75% of what h3lbro said was incorrect.  Without playing Mr. Moderator it’s totally likely that everything I said above is incorrect as well.  I don’t know what’s going on with the situation.  I stand firm on my belief that little is being done to accomidate upstream developers and people that put hard work in patchstick.  It sounds like it all comes down to money and “what was said”.  Let this be a lesson kids, if you’re going to start a project with someone with the potential of making money… get something signed up front.  Whether h3lbro was a coding monster on the project or it was split 50/50 I can’t say.

One of my all time favorite comedians passed away yesterday.  Carlin was more then a comedian, he said it like it is, as the saying goes.  he was one of the few celebrities that spoke up and actually knew what the hell he was talking about.  I don’t give two cents about most celebrities or what they’re doing with their lives and can’t say I’d miss 95% of them, but Carlin was one of the few that made you think, if only for a minute.

This was a real comedian, not someone rehashing old jokes (Dane Cook) or using his heritage to fuel his one trick pony (Carlos Mencia).  Carlin was well spoken, well versed on problems with America, up front about his views on religion and it’s effects on society, and got you to laugh at it all.  Here’s one of my favorite segments of Carlin’s.  Enjoy.

Shit. Piss. Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.

This blog is looking more and more like an Apple fanboy site; is that what I’ve became?  Regardless, I’m going to talk about modding yet another Apple product today, the AppleTV.

Firstly, let me tell you why you’d want to mod an AppleTV.  The AppleTV does a few cool things out of the box that alone would make it worth the $229 retail price.  On a PC or Mac with iTunes you can select the AppleTV as a speaker output resulting in all your music being played on your device and out your home theater system instead of your desktop speakers (great for parties!).  Obviously the main functionality of the AppleTV is to play TV shows, movies, and music you downloaded from iTunes and it does this well.  However, it’s lacking the ability to play every other codec out there namely Xvid/Divx/WMV/x264/mkv.  I have an old first gen XBox which did exactly this with XBMC, but the smaller form factor and better processor of the AppleTV has caused me to make the switch.

Apple seems to have a knack for making their products so easy to mod or jailbreak that it wouldn’t surprise me if it was 100% intentional.  For one, early firmware versions of the first-gen iPhone were jailbreakable by going to a web page containing a malicious TIFF file (link is safe) causing a buffer overflow and then proceeded to install all the jailbreak utilities OTA.  Ever since then it’s taken various jailbreak teams a matter of days, if not hours to jailbreak each version of firmware thereafter.

The AppleTV is no harder to jailbreak or mod then its smaller cousin, the iPhone.  Earlier mods required you to take apart the device, pull out the hard drive, plug it in to a Mac, then copy some files over.  This works, from what I’ve read of forums, but that process takes a while.  Enter Patchstick.

The talented folks over at AwkwardTV have a fantastic wiki that details all the steps necessary to create your own Patchstick (requires a Mac) to mod your AppleTV without taking the device apart.  Patchstick is a bunch of files which you put on a USB thumbdrive then plug in to the USB port in the back of your AppleTV.  After rebooting the device Patchstick will go through the procedure of installing sshd, installing samba, installing a number of applications, install “missing” codecs, and more.  From this point you can ssh to the IP of your AppleTV as user frontrow, password frontrow and away you go.  I have all my music and movies backed up to a Linux box with samba installed so after mounting that samba share I was able to watch all my xvid backups on my TV in minutes.

There’s a bit of controversy over various Patchstick torrents floating around on the web or companies reselling prepackaged Patchstick .isos since they’re distributing portions of the OSX framework for cost or otherwise.  I actually used one of these, atvpatch.com, but I can’t attest for the legality of this.  After downloading their .iso ($19.99) I dd’ed the contents to a 2GB USB thumbstick and had my AppleTV modded in about 45 seconds.  ATV is a bit touchy about which USB thumbsticks work and which don’t.  The 2GB - Kingston DataTraveler worked perfectly for me.

Yesterday’s WWDC announcement of the new 3G iPhone was a bit of a letdown.  Everyone knew that Apple was releasing a 3G version of their popular, but expensive, iPhone.  The first incarnation of the iPhone was like most Apple products; a pretty easy to use product that lacked a number of features.  Historically the next version of an Apple product is an evolutionary step up from it’s predecessor.  iPhone 3G obviously uses the speedy 3G network instead of outdated EDGE for Internet connectivity.  Along with this unsurprising news is more of what you can expect from any current-gen phone, aGPS.  aGPS is GPS that uses WiFi and tower triangulation to assist with the standard satellite GPS.  Most phones today have both, if not one, of these features.  ActiveSync for Exchange and MobileMe “for everyone else”, a mechanism to sync contacts, email, and appointments to one location has been on Windows Mobile for years.

Everything mentioned above was, and should be, expected of a current gen “smart phone”.  So why is this a Letdown?  Apple commander-in-chief, Steve Jobs, didn’t make a single mention of any improvements or changes to the restrictive Bluetooth implementation, the camera is still sorely behind the competition at 2 mega pixel, no video conferencing, no video recording mentioned, no improvements to MMS, no mention of file browsing or document saving… and the list could go on.  The $199 starting price tag is a huge improvement and there’s still rumors of AT&T offering discounts to even further reduce the price.  Still, with Windows Mobile 7 on the horizon and Nokia phones which have always been above par it looks like Apple is hoping the Application store and Safari can carry them through to the third generation iPhone which will most likely have all these missing features.

I’ll stay on the Apple bandwagon and upgrade, but I can’t say I won’t be doing so without keeping an eye on the competition for the next 31 days.

When I did freelance work a few years ago I managed my time with Excel spreadsheets and Notepad.  This method works but it’s by no means an elegant way to track time.  Adobe’s AIR runtime has given developers a quick and easy way to write a slew of new apps; some useful, some not so useful.

One that I’ve found extremely useful lately is Klok.  For all projects I’m working on at work I’m required to track my time and what I was doing.  I used to hate this type of micromanagement but understood the need for billing purposes.

With Klok you create a project (metallikop.com for example), then create sub projects (Design, Blogging, PR, Marketing) and you’re all set.  You can set a contact name, email address and phone number for your client create and/or comments for each line item.  Once everything is set up you select the project and sub-project from the drop down menu in the title and the clock starts ticking away on the selected project.  Klok will export the time sheet to Excel by dragging the project off to the desktop.  Honestly, this application makes time tracking considerably easier.

I’ve seen a lot more of these lately as the “launch date” for the new iPhone draws closer.  I came across Derek Powazek’s list and I couldn’t agree less and felt it was my duty to make a better, more accurate list.

The Likelies

• Thicker, heavier, faster, more storage.  I’m okay with this even though it’ll make some people cry.  I’d rather have a larger battery, GPS, and improved camera then a slimmer lighter phone.  I used to carry a blackberry brick and an HTC 8925, the iPhone is light in comparison.
• 3G.  It’s crazy that a phone with all those fancy internets needs to rely on WiFi to make use of the product.
• Hardware design tweaks.  I don’t care much really.  Fix the headphone input please, otherwise it’s fine.
• Better battery life.  I’ve become accustomed to plugging my phone in every night but a few extra hours wouldn’t hurt.

The Hopefullies

• Onboard GPS Receiver.  Every phone has one these days, the iPhone needs one and it’ll be complete.
• Exchange ActiveSync.  I miss this more then anything else on my 8925, it’s necessary for any business user and sometimes I just can’t disconnect.
• Uncrippled Bluetooth.  I’d like to go to GMaps, find a location, sync it to my GPS device and go, or sync with my computer, or a number of other things.  Don’t break my bluetooth please.
• Push Email.   I’m pretty sure they’ll add this with all the recent rumors of .mac being upgraded.  This will be a huge plus.
• Fix the camera. I agree with Derek on this, “More resolution, better image quality, faster shutter”, but I don’t need a hardware shutter button, and it won’t happen anyways.

The Who Caresies

• Video recording.  I don’t care.  I guess it’d be nice but I’d never use it.
• Rubbery grip.  Sorry, not with you on this one.  I like the design as is, if I want a rubbery grip I’ll buy a case that has one.
• Better earbuds.  Apple earbuds have always sucked, I’m sure the new ones will too which is fine since I’ve dropped a good amount of money on picking up some very nice earbuds.

I’ve been Twitting far more then blogging.  If you’re a Twitter user send me a message. (metallikop)

So, my companion of 6 years seems to finally have succeeded in his numerous attempts to escape my loving embrace.  Kit, who has been there through much vanished last night and is out having exciting adventures without me.  I must not have noticed him slink out when Pepper, my dog, let me know she had to go potty.  It’s been about 24 hours so I’m still hopeful he’ll get bored of chasing birds and beating up other neighborhood cats and decide it’s time to come home where life is a lot less stressful.

Kit, if you’re managed to learn how to read and use the internet (cats can do a lot these days) it’s safe to come home now.