iPhone Annoyances

There are many, many great things about the iPhone, but being a very cynical person I have decided to ignore them and compile a list of the most frustrating things I have discovered while using my iPhone for last few weeks.

The current list:

  • You can’t send or receive MMS messages: Why not, is it the year 2000? It’s all very well saying that “Oh, you can just check any picture messages sent to you online at your O2 account”, but following this, I would rather that any MMS messages sent to me go nowhere near the O2 website!
  • The camera is pretty damn poor and doesn’t support video: I’m not a keen photographer or anything but my phone was generally my most used camera, capturing hilarious pub/club incidents for me never to look at again. Sadly I tried to take a photo in a club using my iPhone and due to it’s lack of flash, the result was a black rectangle. Nice. The lack of video camera and the fact that the camera is only 2 megapixels (whether this matters for my crappy club-themed photography or not I would expect a few more megapixels for my money), are also strange ommisions for a top of the range phone. I’m pretty sure Nokia wouldn’t even consider putting out a high end phone in this day and age without these features.
  • You can’t use your own MP3’s/audio files as ringtones: I know there is a rather round about way to do this (something about making your own ringtone on your PC and then transferring it to your iPhone) but I’m not gonna waste my time doing that. Nearly every phone that I have owned in the last 5 years has allowed me to set any sound or piece of music I want as a ringtone so why not the iPhone? If I want to cheapen one of my favourite pieces of music (that I own) by setting it as a ringtone then I should be able to!
  • You can’t access the music on your iPhone from other computers: I don’t sync, I just don’t like the idea so I manually manage everything on my iPhone. Even though, when I try and connect my iPhone to my PC in work I am unable to play any of the music on it through iTunes as I am told that the iPhone is synced to my PC at home. No it isn’t, I disabled all the syncing didn’t I? I could use my iPod touch wherever I wanted and add/listen to music as I pleased. Not so with the iPhone it seems. Bollocks!

This list may grow in time and I should point out that if I was to compile a list of all the great things about the iPhone then it would be much longer. But I’m not going to.

The Umbraco Diaries: Day 2

Ok, so it’s been ages since I blogged about using the awesome open source CMS Umbraco.

This was mainly as I didn’t have a project to work on so my interest had kinda died. Thankfully however, my friend has asked me to build a basic website for his company (I’ll post the URL when it’s live) so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to put Umbraco to use.

I’ve been working on it for a few days now on and off and every day I’m learning more about Umbraco and every day I like it more!

Really, for me, simple things like allowing you to insert any page field from a drop down is a big time saver. The ease and speed with which you can get a site up and running is fantastic.

I have given up trying to load custom controls from a DLL and have started using user controls which work a treat. The control integration is great as well, all you do is build your control in Visual Studio, copy the DLL and ascx into the appropriate folders and away you go!

Tonight I found a gem, the umbraco.library class which contains a whole bunch of useful static methods to aid with your development. NiceUrl() is a favourite so far although I haven’t really looked at the rest yet.

Also, I should mention the forum. It seems very active and full of people willing and able to help newcomers with some of the basic questions which really stem from a lack of experience with the system. I can see me returning to that quite a bit in the future.

Umbraco.tv has also just launched which is a video based tutorial site (subscription required) the aim of which seems to be remedying what seems to be a long standing issue with Umbraco documentation. An interesting proposition but I think I would only subscribe if I was doing full time Umbraco development as I’m sure I can find most of the stuff I’ll need on the forum and other Umbraco themed sites.

More to come I’m sure (looking forward to Umbraco 4!), hopefully including some technical articles once I start to figure things out!

A Special Message for Alan

Dear Alan,

I appreciate your comments over the previous month regarding some of my blog posts. I also like the fact that you took the time to use Google’s translator to produce a message in Croatian.

But really, it’s time for you to stop. Find something else to do with your time. Why not start your own blog about your adventures in Glasgow’s night clubs, or perhaps about how you are responsible for the current difficulties that Morgan Stanley is facing?

I think you need an outlet to the world. You need to reach out to people, and for them to reach back to you.

I hope this message finds you well Alan Gadd.

Yours,

Robert

Weave me alone….

I’ve pretty much had enough of Mozilla’s Weave. It’s a real shame as it looked like a really good tool but it’s just so unreliable.

For the last week or so I have been unable to login and sync, consulting the activity log told me that my username and/or password were not recognised. Strange, as I have kept the same details saved ever since I started using the service.

Tonight I finally found a password reminder link on services.mozilla.com but to my utter annoyance, when I filled in my username I was told that my account did not exist! Excuse me?

So, apart from the fact that I can no longer sign in, I was getting pretty tired of the frustratingly slow sync times, especially when I just wanted to shut down my computer and get the hell out of the office!

With the news that Google have just launched their brand spanking new browser Chrome, it makes me wonder if Browser Sync was discontinued as a similar tool will be released for Chrome. Time will tell but I’m seriously tempted to just get rid of Weave and look at alternatives. Delicious seems like a reasonable option.

I wonder if anyone has made any progress on getting Browser Sync to work with Firefox 3 yet. Anyone know?

Web Accessibility in the Web 2.0 Age

I’m interested to hear peoples thoughts on the issue of website accessibility, which seems like a bit of a grey area these days. I’ve recently been carrying out some accessibility testing and as you would expect, my first port of call was the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published in 1999.

Now, let’s first ignore the fact that these guidelines are pretty much out of date (version 2.0 should hopefully become a W3C Recommendation later this year) and focus on the fact that these are pretty much the only recognised “standard” for developing accessible websites (that I know of).

I think it’s great that these guidelines do exist, and am all for developing sites that can be accessed by as many people as possible, but is there not a danger of simply ticking the boxes here?

I think there needs to be more guidance available to developers rather than just ticking boxes (and some of the guidelines can be quite vague), especially now in the era of Web 2.0 with JavaScript all over the web and users demanding more and more from the sites they use.

Case in point, try and update Twitter from your browser with JavaScript disabled. It doesn’t work. They must know this but obviously, for whatever reason, they need to use JavaScript. One of the most hyped sites on the Internet fails this simple rule of website accessibility.

How can companies develop sites that stand out from the rest, make use of the latest and greatest trends and technologies in web development and also maintain an acceptable level of accessbility? This requires time, effort and money, something which a lot of small web companies have precious little of. In essence you may have to build two versions of the same site. Who’s got the time to do that?

I for one feel that there is a lack of understanding about what makes a website accessible. It’s more than just having “skip to content” links, using alt text and having alternatives to JavaScript. The web has moved on considerably in the 9+ years since the initial WCAG were accepted as a W3C Recommendation and peoples ideas about accessible websites in the Web 2.0 world need to change as well.

Don’t Believe The Hype

The Internet has given us some fantastic things over the last 10+ years. A change in how music and film is distributed. 24/7, accessible communications. Access to vast amounts of important information, cheap shopping, cheap travel, blogging, the free sharing of ideas accross the world, new ways to distribute software etc etc.

A picture of an overweight cat with the caption “I can has cheezburger?” is not one of those things.

Which is why I find an article in the Observer with the headline “The 20-year-old at the heart of the web’s most anarchic and influencial site” so ridiculous.

The article is a profile about the the forum 4chan.org whose most notworthy “attacks” on the establishment to date seem to include the aforementioned cat pictures (and a whole range of “subversive” cat pictures called LOLcats), the art of “rickrolling” and getting the swastika to the top of Google’s Hot Trends. Wow, if the system isn’t smashed yet then it surely can’t have long to go…..

It’s an obvious choice for an article about the Internet. A young guy starts up a site which becomes massively popular and is then hailed as some kind of Internet god (see Napster, Facebook, Twitter). But really, what is this forum contributing to the world other than even more pointless ways for people to waste time on the Internet?

I really wish I could see more articles in the mainstream media about the Internet other than what Google is up to or what new site is the next big thing. What about the threat of Internet collapse due to the vastly increased volume of traffic over outdated communicaions systems (spurred on by the likes of 4chan). Ridiculous breaches of privacy by companies like O2 or the potential of cloud computing.

Instead what grabs the headlines are flash in the pan sites like 4chan which basically enable people to be less productive and feel cool about it.

I can think 4chan is a pile of shite.

The Umbraco Diaries: Day 1

Wow. I’ve decided that I had to look at Umbraco. I’ve heard such positive things about it. My company was going to adopt it as our in-house CMS but decided at the last minute not to do so and I’ve never really continued any investigation since.

However, after a short MSN discussion with a friend earlier today I decided to download the bad boy and have a look at what it can do.

I’ll tell you what it can do!! After roughly an hour (including download and installation) I now have a pretty much fully functioning (if basic) CM website. That includes a master page, two templates (for home and a general standard page), rough CSS, main, sub and breadcrumb navigation and a sitemap. Awesome.

Really, it’s sooooooo intuitive to use. OK, I’m a web developer so maybe I found it easier than an average user would but really, I love it already.

Final task for tonight, integrate an RSS reader I built a while ago into this fresh site. I may be speaking too soon but I bet this will go smoothly!

Umbraco: Love at first sight!

Thanks Apple. No Seriously You Shouldn’t Have.

Oh great. After paying £5.99 for the latest software update for my iPod Touch I find out that when I install I’ll lose all my music. Bonus!

I mean FFS, is it really that hard to preserve my music library when I’m installing the new software. What bullshit. At least Microsoft updates are free.

Kinda Breaking Browser Sync News!!! It’s Now Open Source.

Article on Google Open Source Blog.

Mozilla Weave Please Work!

I’m trying I really am. I want to give it the benefit of the doubt because I think it could turn into quite a good tool but man, Mozilla’s Weave is soooooooooooooo slow!

On the rare occasion when it actually makes a connection to the Mozilla server it takes forever to sync. The most infuriating part is when you close Firefox and a dialog appears saying that a “Sync is in progress”. This sync lasts forever until you finally just give up and close the window.

A good example of the problems is my nice freshly installed laptop which I flattened on Sunday. I put a copy of XP Pro on it, then installed Firefox and Weave.

THREE days later it finally synced with my Mozilla account and I got my bookmarks. I don’t think it has synced since.

I know, I know, it’s still in a beta (or alpha) test phase but I don’t know how it can make so difficult what Google Browser Sync made so easy!

I reckon the problems are partly due to a vast increase in demand now that Browser Sync is kaput for Firefox 3 so I’m gonna hang in there and see how it develops.