October 25, 2008
In Beta 2 of iPhone OS 2.2, developers are finding that the following cool features are present, but may or may not see the light of day with this release:
- Google Street View
- E-mailing of current location
- Downloading of Podcasts
The last one is what caught my eye the most. I would LOVE to be able to download my podcasts directly on the iPhone as I would have much less reason to ever dock as I already get mail, calendar, contact changes via IMAP or push (well, push-y sync).
This would be a great feature and I hope they ship 2.2 with all of this enabled soon…
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apple, iphone, rumor, software | 
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Posted by Waking Badger
September 10, 2008
Apple - Accessibility - iPod + iTunes - Vision
Spoken menus is quite a cool addition. I’m glad to see Apple is spending more time attending to universal access. This is an oft overlooked feature set that should be given solid attention. Now, it would be much more impressive if they added this functionality to more of the recent iPod/iPhone line, but one step at a time I guess…
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Posted by Waking Badger
August 17, 2008
ThreatDown - Killer iPhones | The Colbert Report | Comedy Central
I give you the iPhone of Stephen Colbert. He showed his beauty off while considering the revelation by Steve Jobs that the iPhone has a “kill” switch. Oh noes, who will be the first to fall victim to this sexy dangerous electronic gadget and is Steve just trying to take over the world? 
BTW - what’s the light green app icon in the lower right corner? I can’t read the name and the icon doesn’t seem familiar?
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apple, funny, iphone, tv | 
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Posted by Waking Badger
August 17, 2008
AppleInsider | Inside MobileMe: Web 3 and Web client-server apps [Page 2]
Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. The only real web pages MobileMe exchanges with the server are the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that make up the application, which have no need for SSL encryption following the initial user authentication. This has caused some unnecessary panic among web users who have equated their browser’s SSL lock icon with web security.
Interesting bit about why the typical SSL lock doesn’t come up in MobileMe. I can buy the rationale, but it does seem like it is ripe for confusion amongst the general populous…
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Posted by Waking Badger
August 3, 2008
Apple Dock Connector to USB Cable
$31.99 @ Circuit City
Apple Dock Connector to USB Cable
$19.00 @ Apple
If my math is correct, that is an ~168% markup assuming Apple sells it to Circuit City for $19 (which we all know isn’t the way it works). I don’t understand how they can get away with selling it for that kind of outrageous pricing. Well, actually, I know exactly how it works as most people buying computers and electronics are unfortunately sheep that don’t have the benefit of knowing what they should/shouldn’t pay and to whom. I wish there was a way to fix this, but I imagine they really will simply have to fix it for themselves by becoming educated consumers and avoiding this all together.
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Posted by Waking Badger
August 2, 2008
AT&T to Remain Sole US iPhone Carrier into 2010? - Mac Rumors
It looks like AT&T & Apple negotiated an extension of their exclusivity agreement in the US around the launch of the iPhone 3G. I’m not sure whether this is good news or not for anyone or not. I really can’t think of a US carrier that would treat us better as they all seem to be foul in their own special way. Verizon, Sprint, and Alltel (the first two of which I have tried) are based on CDMA which I dislike as it is US only. No one else is using it. However, as they switch to LTE in the future, maybe the value proposition will be better. T-Mobile is a non-starter as they don’t support much at all of NC and if anyone has a smaller 3G footprint than AT&T, it is T-Mobile. AT&T is the one GSM carrier left standing.
Now, if only they would learn to treat their paying customers better…
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Posted by Waking Badger
July 10, 2008
Wow, Apple’s MobileMe was live for about 10 minutes. I used the mail, calendar, and iDisk web UI’s. It is now down again, but seemed somewhat slick for the little bit of time I used it.
Web based files are still accessible so my blog is still working, but we’ll just have to wait and see what Apple does…
UPDATE: Seems to be working just fine, but I don’t know what the uptime has been like as the iPhone 2.0 had my attention 
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Posted by Waking Badger
July 10, 2008
Very cool…WordPress is planning on releasing their own iPhone app to blog on WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blogs. They’ve released a few screenshots and a video, but no release date as far as I can tell, but I expect it will likely be soon since their revealing it to the world now…
UPDATE: weird, the video link isn’t working…need to hit up wordpress.com support on that one…
UPDATE 2: Removed video due to the following answer from WordPress support:
And you also need to have purchased one of the Space upgrades on your blog to use our video player.
Not a solid idea at all. This wasn’t a video of mine, this was something posted by WordPress that I wanted to show off to those who read this blog. I can understand requiring that I pay for uploading videos, but to just use the player seems … questionable. Admittedly, I didn’t reply to support to dig further and they have always been nothing but nice, however, I doubt this is worth any more of my time as I can link to YouTube and Google so I can’t see myself using the WordPress video player. Also, I can always put “real” videos up on my MobileMe (had to edit that as I’m still calling it .Mac ) site: http://gallery.me.com/billvinson.
Oh well…
No Comments » | apple, iphone, news, video | Permalink
Posted by Waking Badger
July 9, 2008
As I posted a couple of days ago, Apple will be launching Mobile Me today and .Mac (the service it is replacing) will be down for a number of hours. Well, that will affect this blog as I host all of my images on my .Mac account. So, there will at least be a period of time where images are likely to be completely broken. Hopefully, if they maintain the mac.com address as an alternative to me.com (as they are with e-mail) all should work well when it is back online, however, there is the remote possibility the images will stay broken and I will have to do a lot of work to move the data
Sorry for the inconvenience, but I wanted to give everyone some warning…
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Posted by Waking Badger
