I’ve been reading The Register for years. The biggest draw for me is that their idea of what’s interesting matches my own pretty closely, so the relevance is very high, and I don’t know any other sites/publications that provide timely coverage in roughly the same space.

Unfortunately, they’re clowns. They obviously don’t edit, and don’t fix obvious mistakes when pointed out. For a while they had opposing columnists, one claiming Intel was crushing AMD and another claiming AMD was crushing Intel — posting supposedly authoritative articles on the same days. My interpretation was that The Register doesn’t care whether they print stuff that’s flat wrong (obviously at least one of those columnists was, even if they were both personally convinced it was the other guy), so long as it draws traffic. This is one thing if labeled as editorial, but they’re not that sophisticated.

Their articles are confused or simply wrong often enough that a couple friends refuse to read anything they publish. I prefer the current facts enough that I am willing to overlook the absurd editorial.

They use FeedBurner, and downloading their articles over EDGE on the iPhone is slow. To aggravate matters, their CSS is screwed up; I have to wait for the page to download, then it resizes, then it pauses and downloads some more, then it reflows. It can take over a minute to get a readable article. The AV Club is even slower to download and reflow, which is one reason I read it less.

But recently The Register has started doing full-page ads before the articles. This is aggravating on a desktop, but completely unacceptable on an iPhone. I’ve removed their feed from NetNewsWire/NewsGator.

The other day I was lying on my side, trying to read a web page on the iPhone. I turned the iPhone 90° clockwise, but it obligingly re-rotated the text 90° counter-clockwise, leaving me again out of sync. I grumbled something about the irritation of being outmaneuvered by a handheld gadget. Amy’s brilliant suggestion: rotate it another 90° CCW. Since the iPhone doesn’t offer 180° rotation, this left the text rotated 90° in alighnment with my head.

Thanks, Amy!

This afternoon (morning in SF), Steve announced the excellent MacBook Air (which I don’t want), the iPhone 1.1.3 update (which I very much like and have already benefitted from), AppleTV “Take 2″ (which I will order if it can play MPEG2 from the TiVo easily), and iTunes movie rentals (which are useless for parents who watch half a movie at a time).

This afternoon, I went to NYsec, hosted by Ryan Naraine and Matasano Security. An interesting group with several good stories.

Update 2007/12/15: The iPod has two shuffle modes. I’d been going to the list of songs and hitting Shuffle, but this isn’t sticky. The trick is to 1) start playing a song, 2) tap on the cover area to get the track position slider, and 3) tap the shuffle icon on the right side. This is sticky, and I now have shuffle play by default! Still no shuffle by album, though…

The iPhone has a few very small features which show a surprising level of thought went into its design before launch.

The do not disturb switch. This has been a signature feature of Treos for years — completely disabling the speaker. Apple got smarter: the iPhone’s side switch mutes incoming calls, SMS notifcations, & calendar alerts. But the alarm clock and immediate actions on the phone, including speakerphone and iPod playback (with earphones disconnected) — still use the speaker. So Apple has evolved from “mute” to “do not disturb”, which is much more useful.

Keyboard key-up. Registering keys on finger lift allows correction without mistyping (if you’re paying attention) and provides some really handy tricks, like dragging from shift to I to get a capital I in one (long) tap instead of three — works for numbers & punctuation too.

iPod stop on earphone removal. When you unplug earphones, the iPhone stops music or video playback. I use this feature at least twice a day, when I get home or to work. If the iPhone is in a holster or bag, this saves the trouble of getting it out to stop playback. Apple could have opted to activate the speaker instead, but people unplug their earphones and stop using the iPod much more often than they switch from earphones to speakers.

Earphone remote behavior. When listening to music, it fades out if the phone rings; I thought this was silly, but it’s nice. When I hit the button on the remote, the phone answers; when I hit the button later to hang up, the music resumes. If I’m using the iPhone (in any app) and hit the earphone remote, music starts (or stops) playing; this saves me a few steps on switching into the iPod app and back to what I was doing. When watching video, it pauses and resumes. Between that, the double-click to skip to next track, and the volume controls on the side of the iPod (easily accessible in a belt holster), I don’t miss the 6-button iPod remote.

Unfortunately, it’s always alphabetical play of everything on the iPhone, so I have to switch to iPod and start Shuffle play the first time; then it stays in Shuffle mode until either a) the iPhone gets confused and stops playing, or b) I plug into a Mac; neither of these should switch me out of Shuffle mode, actually.

And that reminds me: What genius at Apple decided that iPhone users don’t want to shuffle by album? So much for “the best iPod ever”. Pfeh!

But overall, the iPhone is remarkably sophisticated. Perhaps Ive & Jobs and their 5 closest friends spent a year writing down all the things about cellphones that annoyed them, and brought that into the iPhone design discussions.

With thanks to Daring Fireball’s JotW.

I like The Register because they cover the stuff I’m interested in, and their leanings correlate reasonably well with my own. But they don’t edit their stuff, and have no shame about being wrong or just lost in left field. Today’s example:

Android: developer dream or Google cash machine?

By Phil Manchester

Published Friday 16th November 2007 18:49 GMT

However, it will take more than a $10 million “incentive” (http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=030002Y7BBKU) to truly galvanize people and generate a powerful and self-sustaining grassroots developer movement and ISV community. Some of the open source technologies changing today’s market, after all, built up critical mass because they were good, useful or employed a community friendly license - not because early developers got huge cash dongles.

Um, no. People write free and cheap Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Google Maps, and (now) iPhone apps all the time. You don’t need to pay them $10,000,000 to do so.

Google’s Android agenda is far from clear, but it seems money is a driving factor, rather than a genuine desire to liberate developers and phone users from the nasty old telcos with an open platform. After all, Android’s backers include some of those very carriers that liked to lock you in (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html) and have proved nothing more than an anchor on software and service innovation, but who just happen to be lagging the US market leaders.

See, the logical fallacy here is more subtle, but still big enough to throw a phone through. Google has never claimed that money wasn’t a driving factor. There are lots of people who are interested in Android for primarily non-commercial reasons. Nobody who’s awake ever thought Google (or the other Open Handset Alliance members) were among them. It’s “Don’t be evil.”, not “Liberate developers.” Whether or not you think Google is evil (I think they’re scary and cool, but not evil), they never pretended Android wasn’t supposed to make much money. Is there anyone, aside from Phil Manchester, who didn’t know that Google likes to make money and is quite good at it?

Enlightened capitalism maybe - but capitalism just the same.

Duh.

A bizarre and perverse journey is completed. At 12:21am 2007/10/19, I reported my 1,500th documentable bug to Apple. I have actually reported a bunch more over the years, which have since been lost to the sands of history. I remember reporting bugs against eWorld and Newton beta software! But I can currently identify 1,500 bug reports against Apple’s products.

A few of these, of course, are bogus — there have been times I just made a mistake, and thought it was an Apple problem. Some of my mistakes indicate that Apple’s user interface needed clarification or improvement; others are simply my foolish mistakes.

Many of my reports are documentation issues. Right now, I’m looking at Apple’s thousands of pages of brand-new documentation on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” Server and sighing (repeatedly) — I don’t have time to read the half on topics that interest me — but as an admin, the documentation has to be correct. Rockefeller has an Apple Enterprise Support contract, but they are limited, expensive, and problematic to use. Most Mac admins have to make do with peer support, and Apple supports this because Apple only has to support (some of) the fora — not pay support staff. This means Mac admins need to be able to help ourselves through researching and the documentation. Ambiguous or simply incorrect documentation is bad. Fortunately Apple aspires to perfection (though they don’t always aspire very hard — the early Mac OS X manual pages were badly neglected).

Other reports are feature requests, handled slightly differently but through the same bug reporting system. For example, I want to use my iPhone as a secure password store, an offline web browser, and with a Bluetooth GPS. Feature requests are how I tell Apple my priorities for product development — sometimes they even pay attention! ;)

And lots of bug reports are bugs. This is a bittersweet time, as I recognize my reports behind a bunch of fixes in Leopard, but I also know I’m about to lose a lot of traction. Until very recently, Apple has been focused on perfecting Leopard — meaning things have been fluid and could be improved, and there was lots of pressure to fix bugs. Now that they have finalized 10.5.0 and are preparing to sell it, the developers are hoping they didn’t miss any hideous bugs and recovering. In a little while they’ll go back to the grindstone to start fixing and building 10.5.1, but 10.5 will never be as flexible again. It’s going to be a while before I can start pestering Apple about what to do for Mac OS 10.6, and various bugs or design flaws will be too large to build into a point release, meaning they are already baked into the 10.5.x series, not eligible for fixing during Leopard’s lifetime.

• Bug Hunting
• Bug Hunting II

Last night, the AppleCare phone rep assured me that Apple would replace or repair my iPhone free under AppleCare. At rubber vs. road time, however, the Apple “Genius” showed his sad face and explained that AppleCare only covers defects in manufacture (which would make it useless, as you’ll almost always find those within the 90-day warranty). My (second) replacement iPhone cost me $249 + tax (why do they charge tax for a service replacement??), or $279 today.

I also got a rubber shell to protect the iPhone, since I obviously can’t depend on AppleCare for any repairs in the future.

Unfortunately, all these protective wrappers make the iPhone larger (and less pretty). This wouldn’t matter so much if Steve Jobs hadn’t sold the svelte elegance of the iPhone so heavily. So the three iPhone holsters I bought (all problematic for one reason or another) won’t fit, and nobody should use them, since iPhones really need full-time protection (meaning a sleeve or hard case). I’ll stick with my $5 Treo (650) case, which is large enough for 2 iPhones, or one iPhone in an incase sleeve.

Regarding Apple Support: It’s nice to have good things to say, I am now a sad panda.

Update: See next post, “AppleCare let me down”.

This morning, when I tried to play music on my iPhone, it told me I had “No songs” on the iPhone. I couldn’t even use the bottom buttons to switch to video mode, but Settings:General:About told me I had “0 Songs” & “0 Videos”, even though I only had 420mb free on the iPhone. I keep 4gb of music on the phone, so they were obviously onboard, just not accessible. No problem, I figured — this is exactly what iPhone Restore is for.

Adding injury to insult, tonight I noticed that the iPhone kept raising the ringer volume spontaneously. I keep it in vibrate mode, so this isn’t such a problem, but I thought my new Luxmo case was bad. Alex has one that’s not quite right, so I got the other two models, and they’re both quite flawed — hard to get the iPhone out, and one presses on the power button — I keep taking the iPhone out and seeing the prompt to do a full shutdown. I now suspect my problem wasn’t the case, because I saw the iPhone’s metal shell itself is a bit bent, and the volume up button is stuck in. Hopefully a belt holster didn’t do that!

I plugged the iPhone into my MBP, and it picked up the iPhone’s version, serial number, and phone number, but instead of 8gb, iTunes showed its capacity as “n/a”. I tried to do a full restore, and it failed:

The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (-18).

This was bad — I couldn’t get today’s photos or PIM updates off the iPhone, and I couldn’t restore it.

I reset all settings — avoiding the full wipe in case I wasn’t able to get data back onto the tabula rasa iPhone. I thought it might be a bad cable (unlikely — it was fine yesterday), or bad Dock port on the iPhone (damaged at the same time as the volume control, perhaps?). I tried the MBP’s other USB port, and Amy’s MacBook — still the same error -18.

I called Apple Educational Support, but they were closed. I called Apple iPhone support (800 my iPhone), which is open later (24 hours?), and spoke to a very nice fellow who couldn’t find error -18, but talked me through putting the iPhone into Restore mode:

1. Launch iTunes.
2. Turn iPhone off (hold down top power button & swipe when prompted).
3. Hold down Home button.
4. Plug iPhone into USB/Dock cable.
5. iPhone shows a picture of a Dock cable being plugged into the iTunes CD icon.
6. Release Home button.

The first time, this didn’t work — iTunes didn’t notice the iPhone. That was very worrisome, but the second time I tried, it restored the iPhone. Perhaps a full wipe (can be done with Home & Power on the iPhone, or from Settings:General:Reset) would have done it too.

I asked about the volume buttons, explaining the case is bent, and was told I can get a box and send it in, but return takes 5-7 days. My several PowerBook repairs have been consistently faster than the official time estimate, but this is still not a good option. The alternative is to bring it to an Apple Store and get it either replaced or repaired. They can provide a loaner “service iPhone” for $29, but this fee is waived as part of my AppleCare contract. Hopefully they won’t give me a hard time about what’s covered under AppleCare — Apple’s policies for what it covers are considerably more stringent than phone companies, who are very flexible about what they cover.

The AppleCare Protection Plan for iPhone Terms and Conditions includes the following:

b. Limitations The Plan does not cover:

…

(ii) Damage to the Covered Equipment caused by accident, abuse, neglect, misuse (including faulty installation, repair or maintenance by anyone other than Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider), unauthorized modification, extreme environment (including extreme temperature or humidity), extreme physical or electrical stress or interference, fluctuation or surges of electrical power, lightning, static electricity, fire, acts of God or other external causes;

…

(iv) Problems caused by a device that is not the Covered Equipment, including equipment that is not Apple-branded, whether or not purchased at the same time as the Covered Equipment;

…

(xiii) Except as specifically provided herein, any other damages that do not arise from defects in materials and workmanship or ordinary and customary usage of the Covered Equipment.

Unfortunately, the Apple “Genius Bar” always requires a significant wait, even with an appointment. The concierge site is currently down, but hopefully I’ll be able to minimize the wait by making an appointment before I head in http://concierge.apple.com/store/R095.

Restoring was complicated by the stuck volume button — it apparently kept registering during the restore, aborting the sync. I eventually got it all restored, though.

The iPhone makes heavy use of email. It’s the easiest way to send yourself a URL and the only way to get Notes out of the iPhone (for now, at least).

I generally try to filter as much as possible out of my INBOX, including mail from me (mostly replies to mailing lists I’m on, and I don’t need to read what I just wrote), but I want mail from my iPhone to stay in the INBOX where it’s easy to find. I was annoyed that my sieve filters apparently cannot match on the body of messages, only on headers, but the solution turns out to be very easy — I put this at the top of my sieve file, and now mail from my iPhone (but not my Macs) shows up in INBOX:

# personal short circuit
if allof
 (
  header :contains "From" "pepper@",
  header :contains "X-Mailer" "iPhone Mail"
 )
 { stop; }

iPhone zooming is complicated. When designing MobileSafari (the iPhone version of the Safari web browser), Apple opted to preserve the desktop Safari experience as closely as possible. This lets them talk about “the real web in your pocket”, and provides Apple an opportunity to sneer at competing handheld devices that present “the mobile web” instead. The reality, of course, is that there’s some value to the mobile web, or it wouldn’t exist. The issue is that the iPhone is quite limited compared to a Mac or PC ‘desktop’ (or laptop) computer, so mobile browsers have been making trade-offs for years to come as close as practical to the desktop experience, while accepting that there must be deficiencies.

One area where Apple’s desktop mimicry is particularly clear is in page rendering. MobileSafari appears to first calculate how desktop Safari would lay out a particular page, then compress it to fit on the iPod’s relatively tiny screen, and let you zoom around the page to read content of interest. This gives great demo, but begs the question: When I’m reading a web site on my iPhone, why would I care what it looks like on my desktop? My desktop has 4,224,000 pixels, a full keyboard, and a 5-button 2D scrolling mouse. My iPhone has 153,600 pixels (less than 1/27th as many) and 10 fat fingers. Denial of these differences is a neat trick, but can never completely succeed.

For comparison, Plucker focuses on getting easy-to-read text onto a handheld device, with optional support for anti-aliased fonts and images up to the maximum display quality of the Palm’s screen. This means lines wrap wherever they fit, text is whatever size you choose (although the built-in set of fonts is quite limited), and web pages look nothing like they would on a full-sized computer. Plucker’s display model is quite popular, and very much “the mobile web” Steve Jobs scoffed at, although Plucker for offline web browsing — it predates the iPhone’s 802.11g and EDGE standards. A full-sized computer downloads web pages, reformats and compresses them for the Palm, and stores them for later downloading. The Palm part works even without a network connection — subways passengers, rejoice!

Similarly, one almost always wants to scroll a full page in a web browser and the Palm has physical keys for this, but the iPhone instead scrolls based on how far and fast you flick. I’d prefer an option (at least in MobileSafari) to always scroll by a page. This would save me both the effort of figuring out how far and fast to flick, and time finding my place after scrolling.

My initial reaction to MobileSafari was that the fonts were surprisingly fuzzy and hard to read. Naturally — they were designed for computers with more and larger pixels, being scaled down by the iPhone’s smaller pixels, and scaled again to fit on-screen. Sometimes fonts are scaled up, to make them easier to read. In contrast, Plucker never scales its fonts.

Craig Hockenberry’s furbo.org has several articles on the iPhone, including pointers for web designers on how to manage iPhone scaling. It doesn’t answer my question, though: How can I choose a particular font size, and get the iPhone to wrap text to fit? Unfortunately, I don’t think there is an answer right now.

MobileSafari scaling is complicated and occasionally buggy. I am aware of these scaling options:

When a page is loaded, the iPhone renders it as closely as it can to the way desktop Safari would — not at all based on the iPhone’s capabilities, but instead for a fictitious Mac. Then it shrinks everything down to fit the width of the iPhone’s screen (either 320 pixels in vertical mode, or 480 in horizontal mode).

I tried to duplicate the iPhone’s default scaling, and it was a pretty good match for a 684-pixel-wide by 695-pixel-high Mac Safari 3 window (475,380 total, over 3 times as many pixels as an iPhone has). At 72dpi that would be 9.5″ by 9.65″, or 13.54″ diagonal; on a 110dpi 15″ MacBook Pro it’s 6.22″ by 6.32″, or 8.86″ diagonal. In contrast, the iPhone screen displays the same text at 2″ wide by 3″ high, or 3.5″ diagonal. Tiny!!

If you tap twice on a column of text, the iPhone zooms to fit the column to the width of the screen. For pages that have no native width (plain HTML, no layout), tapping twice centers the tapped paragraph on-screen — very handy for scrolling, as you can just tap at the bottom of the screen each time you get to the end of the page. For pages with layout, tapping twice a second time zooms back out.

If you tap twice on an image, the iPhone zooms to fit the entire image on-screen. It does not work for all images, such Questionable Content — perhaps because QCs are too tall, and MobileSafari doesn’t even try to fit them.

If you place two fingers on the screen and pinch them together, the iPhone zooms out. If you “unpinch”, it zooms in. Unfortunately the iPhone does not reflow the text to fit edge-to-edge, so this is almost never convenient for reading — either space is wasted or text is off-screen.

That’s six different zoom options and I may be missing more. But none is the one I want (which would be easiest to read) because the iPhone’s browser always wraps text to match desktop Safari, and never to provide the most readable page on the iPhone.

In reality, I double-tap almost every page to zoom a column to full width, and then hope that I can read the text in either vertical or horizontal mode. Usually I can.

I find the whole subject disappointing. I had more readable web pages on the Treo 600 and 650 for years! Apple could make the iPhone a superior device for reading web sites and ebooks, but has instead gotten hung up on “the real web in your pocket” and pretending that iPhones are running desktop Safari.

Update 2007/10/26: Apple’s just-released “Safari on iPhone Part II: Optimization” video discloses that the iPhone renders everything to 980wx1091h, presumably calculated to be close to the usable area of a browser window on a 1280×1024 17″ LCD, after menu bar, Dock, and Safari controls. This leaves me wondering why 684w*695h was such a close match.

I’ve added a couple lines to a couple of my pages, and they improve iPhone presentation substantially (no, they aren’t new, but they do work):

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=.8">

The iPhone doesn’t support a start/home page. Every time you open a new Safari page (equivalent to a tab) it opens to a new page, unless you open it from another page with a "target" attribute. Fortunately, its MobileSafari browser is very smart about suggesting recently visited sites; typing one or two letters typically brings up the site I want as a suggestion. Email addressing works the same way — it appears to prioritize recently used addresses, so if you visit the same sites (or email the same correspondents) repeatedly, it’s usually right.

On the other hand, sometimes you want a “link farm” (bookmarks page). I keep one with a bunch of links, both for use on the iPhone itself and also for visiting on Macs for working with the iPhone: http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/iphone/. I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing on desktop computers (ever notice how, in relation to iPhones and other handheld computers, laptops become “desktops”?). On the iPhone, I prefer to keep my bookmark page open, and open new tabs off it. There’s a JavaScript bookmarklet to make every link open a new window, but it doesn’t do the trick for me.

Instead I keep my iPhone bookmarks on a simple page containing a few lists of links. Since this page changes frequently, I have a BBEdit GREP Pattern to do the necessary. It converts a plain URL, into a proper <a> tag with a unique target attribute (the hostname), and wraps the whole thing in a <li>/</li> pair; this gives me a readable and clickable link that opens in a new window. I tried target="_new" and target="_blank", but no joy. Here’s the pattern, to save time for future link farmers…

Search for: ^(https?://)([^/\r]+)(.*)$

Replace with: \t<li><a href="\1\2\3" target="\2">\1\2\3</a></li>

It’s worth pointing out that iPhones are not designed to be highly secure. Apple has quite deliberately designed and marketed them as consumer devices, declining to officially enter the “enterprise” market. This lets Apple ignore several of the thornier security features of devices like BlackBerries, such as remote erasure of data. A 4-digit PIN is obviously not intended for high security, and even that is awkward if you use the iPhone many times a day (as I do).

Unfortunately, it also means Apple sees no need to provide strong security on the iPhone. At this point, the thing I miss most from my Treo is the Palm version of Web Confidential. One possibility is to create a web page of passwords, protecting it with SSL/TLS and a strong password (and likely IP restrictions to my home and work networks as well). For ease of adding/updating passwords, it could be a private wiki. Hopefully Web Confidential or something else will be available for iPhone (and Apple won’t effectively block it) before I find myself installing a wiki on www.reppep.com.

Since there’s no cryptographically protected keychain, I seem to be stuck without IM. Apollo IM, at least, stores the password in its binary configuration file, so Apollo IM is no longer on my iPhone. In addition, hahlo.com, itweet.net, & ipheedr.com all stored my password in plaintext in ~/Library/Cookies/cookies.plist on the iPhone. I deleted the cookies and won’t be going back to them. Fortunately twitter.comand m.newsgator.com at least avoid plaintext passwords in cookies…

One of the most important things the iPhone hacker groups provide (since I’m fine with AT&T service) is Nullriver’s AppTapp Installer.app, and two of the most important packages it provides are terminal emulators (I currently use Terminal-vt100 because it if you drag on the top of the screen it provides a donut with arrow keys and a few Control keys). I certainly hope AppTapp isn’t destroyed as collateral damage when Apple attacks the non-AT&T activation efforts.

Does anyone know how to get generic control keys out of any of the iPhone terminal emulators? Obviously Apple doesn’t provide a Control key on its stock keyboard layouts…

I was surfing around furbo.org and found Craig Hockenberry’s Hacking Quicker. I noticed it doesn’t match what I see, and realized this is apparently because earlier versions of the “OpenSSH” package installed by AppTapp were not actually OpenSSH. Now that this has been cleared up, the procedures for conveniently sshing into the iPhone are different than Craig described — note that you should not start by installing the OpenSSH package, as this makes your iPhone vulnerable to miscreants:

On the Mac

1. From the Mac, install AppTapp if necessary.
2. On the Mac (or Linux system, etc.), if you don’t already have an ssh keypair, create one with “ssh-keygen -t rsa” — this creates ~/.ssh/id_rsa & ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. For convenience, use anssh` keychain program to avoid re-entering your private key’s encryption passphrase on every use, such as SSHKeychain.

On the iPhone

1. From Installer (AppTapp), install a terminal program (I use Terminal-vt100).
2. Launch the terminal program.
3. In the terminal, type “passwd root“. Then enter the new password twice. If it doesn’t work, try again.
4. In the terminal, type “passwd mobile“. Then enter the new password twice. If it doesn’t work, try again. Note that you can use the same password for mobile and root.
5. From Installer, install OpenSSH now.
6. “ssh YourMacIPAddress“. Log into your Mac, and type “echo $SSH_CLIENT“; this is your iPhone’s IP address. Setting up your iPhone to get a consistent IP address is beyond the scope of this article, but makes connecting to it much easier. If that’s not feasible, you can either hit an unused URL and check the web server logs to find the client IP.

On the Mac

1. “ssh root@iphone” (substitute your iPhone’s IP address from the previous step for iphone). This will take a while the first time (~~35 seconds)
2. Enter the root password you set previously.

From the Mac keyboard, logged into the iPhone

1. Browse around the iPhone — isn’t it easier with a full keyboard, and Copy & Paste?
2. mkdir ~/.ssh
3. chmod go-w / ~
4. This one must be exactly right, or you could trash your sshd_config — note the double greater-than symbols: “echo AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys >> /etc/sshd_config“.

On the Mac (in a new Terminal window)

1. scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@iphone:.ssh/authorized_keys
2. ssh root@iphone

If everything worked right, this last command will provide a root shell on the iPhone based on your ssh keys, not your UNIX-style password on the iPhone (it can be difficult to tell the difference if you use the same passphrase for your ssh private key as for the iPhone’s root account). If you use an ssh keychain, you shouldn’t need to provide a password each time you ssh into the iPhone.

The iPhone comes with nice iPhone earphones, but they’re not ear-blocking like my old Shure E3cs or my Ultimate Ears. This makes hearing TV dialog of video on the subway significantly harder, and the UEs don’t fit the iPhone’s headset jack. Now, of course, there are many 3rd-party headsets with iPhone-style stereo + microphone connectors, but they were rare (nonexistent?) when I got the UEs for my birthday. Ouch!

I used the UEs with the Treo 650, using a $5 Radio Shack 2.5mm-3.5mm converter to connect the 3.5mm earphone plug with the Treo’s 2.5mm phone jack. Rather than un-wedge the UEs, plug in a standard single-ear-plus-microphone voice headset, make a phone call, then remove the phone headset in favor of the UEs, I just moved the connector from my iPod (for music) to my Treo with the adaptor (for video or voice). Now I wear one headset and it does everything without switching. This is good. It’s also nice that I can hit the mic bump on the cord to pause the music/video playback in favor of answering the cellphone, and when the call ends playback resumes.

It will be good when I replace these earphones with a louder/noise-blocking set, but in the meantime I’m appreciating the convenience, and using the mic bump to pause video playback whenever there’s loud subway noise or glare prevents me from seeing the screen.

Tuesday, I got a new SIM from an AT&T store (they’re all over — the AT&T rep on the phone apparently just randomly picked Fulton Street, rather than one nearby). The card didn’t help.

Then I went to the Apple Store, where they rushed me through (in only half an hour!) before I had to get back to a staff meeting (reorganizing our group, so I did not want to be late). Tuesday afternoon I activated my new iPhone via iTunes. After a brief period where it was configured with a brand-new 646 number, AT&T correctly assigned my cellular number to the iPhone.

Tuesday night I plugged it into my home Mac and restored my configuration & data. This missed a bunch of minor things it should have restored, including alarms, audio settings, time zone, and “Ask to join networks”, but these are all easy to fix.

Hooray!

Since I got the iPhone back on the Internet, I have concluded that all the established “Web 2.0″ social networking sites have put their existing work on hold to focus on iPhone (and more generally mobile) interfaces. Vineel countered with Facebook, but that appears to be a different group of mostly unknown people & projects trying to break through, using Facebook as a venue. Different than the iPhone-friendly sites like:

• http://m.newsgator.com/ (nicely optimized for iPhone)
• http://iphone.facebook.com/
• http://m.flickr.com/
• http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/iphone/ (my iPhone link farm)

It’s great that Facebook can automatically import ExtraPepperoni posts as news items, but why can’t it automatically pick up my status from Twitter (even with the Twitter app installed)? RFE filed @ Twitter.

I have been delighted to discover that after I moved all the web sites I regularly read from Safari on my Macs into NetNewsWire, and synched that with NewsGator, I can read news on a Mac or the iPhone, avoid reading stuff twice, and get more fresher content than Plucker. Plucker was much faster because all the content was already on the Treo, and it worked on the subway, but the Plucker project is not too active right now. Newsfeeds without full content are now quite annoying — I may look for full-content feeds with similar coverage (specifically a Register replacement — I really like their sense of what to write about, but The Register has many serious problems).

I really want Copy & Paste for responding to what I read on the iPhone!

I have been carrying a stylus daily since the Original MessagePad (Newton). I haven’t yet adjusted to doing without.

Saturday, AT&T told me (twice) that they would have iPhone activation back online by 4am. At 8am NYC time (5am Pacific) my iPhone still hadn’t activated. I called AT&T (this was my 4th call, and at least the 4th AT&T rep I have spoken to so far on this issue) today (Monday), and was told that it should have activated after 7am, but if it didn’t I need a new SIM. When I asked where, she suggested an AT&T store at Fulton St. I explained this is halfway across Manhattan, and not near my subway line, and asked if I could take it to the Apple Store where I bought the iPhone a week ago. Sure. So I made an appointment with the Mac Genius for 5:45, left work 15 minutes early (not having a cellphone or pager is a big problem), and got to the Apple Store at 5:30. They were “only running 8-15 minutes late” when I signed in to wait.

At 6:22, I finally spoke to an Apple iPod Genius, who listened to my 2-minute summary and told me I need an AT&T SIM. No, they don’t have any SIMs — they are supposed to get them from AT&T, but AT&T hasn’t delivered any. No, he doesn’t know where I can get one from AT&T. No, they can’t just replace my iPhone. He’ll lodge a complaint with AT&T, as they should not have sent me to Apple for a SIM.

At this point I’ve spent an hour or two troubleshooting the iPhone myself. I’ve called for support 4 times, speaking to 1 Apple rep and at least 4 AT&T reps (who have had little, or no, or wrong, information). These calls have been averaging about 45 minutes apiece — some are over an hour, so call that at least 3 hours on the phone. I’ve registered on a website for an appointment with the Apple iPod Genius, and waited 35 minutes past that appointment time, only to be sent away without anything to show for it, about an hour after I arrived.

I called AT&T tonight, but their customer service line is closed. I called Apple, but they know nothing about which AT&T locations might have SIMs.

“Fed up” doesn’t cover it. “Thoroughly disgusted” with incapable AT&T and impotent Apple is more like it. FUBAR, in the original sense.

Friday night, as I was getting home, I noticed the iPhone had no service. I waited a bit, turned it off (hold the power button, then swipe to confirm), then rebooted it a few times (hold down power & home buttons, but Settings:General:Reset All Settings would have been easier). Both before and after I let iTunes Restore everything, the iPhone failed to activate.

Activation is critical — without AT&T activation, the iPhone blocks access to most of its features. This is why people are so interested in non-AT&T activation hacks, and one reason the iPod touch is interesting for so many folks — lots of people asked for a non-AT&T iPhone, and due to AT&T’s 5-year exclusive contract for iPhones in the US, you can’t even (officially) use an iPhone’s non-cellular capabilities without paying AT&T. This is part of Apple’s contract with AT&T — there’s no reason you couldn’t do everything except voice calling & SMS purely over 802.11, and those could be managed through gateways and VoIP. This exclusive contract may also be why Apple has restricted the touch’s access to “iPhone” features like email — either due to restrictions on what communications features Apple is allowed to put in pocket-sized devices, or as a concession to AT&T while the touch cannibalizes some iPhone sales and AT&T revenues.

Anyway, I wondered how both cellular and 802.11 radios could have gone out at the same time — I normally have 5/5 bars for AT&T + E for EDGE and 3/3 for WiFi in our apartment, and now I had “No Service” in the wireless status area. I couldn’t figure out how this could happen. It couldn’t be a software problem, because a fresh Restore of the same 1.0.2 image I activated on Monday night was not working. Reading about “No Service”, I discovered the 802.11 radio is disabled because the phone isn’t activated.

I called AT&T Customer Service Saturday morning. They transferred me to Apple (automatically, for iPhone support), and the Apple rep told me AT&T’s activation server was down. Apparently they knew about this, but did not have an ETA for it coming back up. He suggested I call AT&T, and I declined. So the Apple rep called AT&T, and failed to get an ETA for repairs.

I called AT&T again Saturday afternoon, and spoke to 2 AT&T reps. The first was quite nice, but quite surprised their “activation server” was down, and that she hadn’t heard about it. She tried to walk me through downloading Apple’s Activation QuickTime movie, telling me to click “Go Pro” to get QuickTime Pro, etc. I explained that I didn’t need a tutorial on how to activate (I had already done this — the only thing for to do at this point was plug it into the Mac) and asked her to call Apple to find out what was wrong with the activation server (since they seemed to have a handle on the problem, if not a timeframe for resolution). After a while, instead of conferencing in Apple, she transferred me to a second AT&T rep.

The second rep was also nice, but no better informed. She did call Apple, but didn’t really understand what was going on. From what she relayed to me, I believe all iPhones are activated by iTunes (which would make sense — it shouldn’t be substantially tougher than DRMing AAC tracks). Obviously the iTunes system needs to tie into an AT&T database to access the customer records, since AT&T handles billing, phone numbers, porting, etc. Apparently AT&T scheduled some downtime starting on Friday afternoon, and was caught unprepared when they discovered that Apple was depending on this unavailable service to process iPhone activations. I was told AT&T expected it to be back up by 4am Monday morning. It took me a while to understand why the AT&T rep kept telling me that a) activations are handled by Apple, and b) AT&T (as opposed to Apple) expected to have the systems back online by 4am.

She asked if I had gotten email from AT&T, saying I might have gotten a manual activation procedure via email. I explained that I’d gotten a few emails welcoming me to AT&T, and telling me my number started with 347 (that was true for less than 24 hours — I got the phone Monday evening and got my RU cellular number ported Tuesday afternoon) and one offering me a free ringtone through AT&T MEdia Net (which the iPhone cannot use). There was also a message from “Cingular” in my spam folder, but it wasn’t about activation. She then told me she’s just confirmed I never got any manual activation message, and wasn’t going to.

The sad irony here is that a wipe and reinstall is supposed to be the guaranteed fix. In this case, due to the way Apple implemented their exclusivity clause, the “fix” created an officially insurmountable problem — nobody at Apple or AT&T can activate my phone right now, and the various third-party efforts are likely to be blocked in the future and might fall afoul of the DMCA (although I believe the cellular companies managed to disgust the US government enough to earn a special exemption for cellphone unlockers).

I definitely had a strange (non-activation) problem Friday night, but at this point my iPhone could be perfectly fine and useless because activation (AT&T’s equivalent of copy protection) is broken. I probably won’t know until Monday — hopefully I won’t have to get the iPhone replaced at an Apple Store.

On a side note, I’m displeased that Nullriver’s excellent AppTapp Installer.app and all its packages are now missing after Restore from iTunes. I don’t know if my configuration changes are there, just not the software. Since I’m likely to have to wipe the iPhone again, it’s not worth re-hacking & re-configuring the iPhone yet — and it’s pretty useless without network connectivity.

I realized that I want to be able to watch videos all the time, without always adding an iPod to the cellphone on my belt.

I realized that I wanted the smarter phone offered by the iPhone.

I realized that another 8gb is important (8gb on the iPhone is tight for me), but less valuable than cellular service, SMS service, data service (EDGE seems faster than my Treo 650’s 1x RTT), Bluetooth (probably missing from the touch), and one less device to carry. Aside from that additional 8gb and some irrelevant size/weight discrepancies, the iPhone doesn’t seem to have any disadvantages compared to the iPod touch.

I realized that the iPod touch appears artificially limited. If it’s got WiFi and Safari, why not Mail?

I cancelled my iPod touch and picked up an iPhone at the Apple Store. I hadn’t been to their 5th Avenue location — it’s really cool architecture. The people there were very nice, including Giovanni who came by the long line asking if we were all paying by credit card. When I said I was getting an iPhone, he pulled me out of line, grabbed an iPhone, and did the whole thing on a Symbol handheld — with an embedded barcode reader, running Palm OS (they ran on Newtons until Apple dropped them). It would have been slightly faster than the (excellently run) cash register line, except the time it took for them to finally decide there is no educational discount on AppleCare for iPhone

That was an irony — Apple actually thought I was a Newton VAR for a while. I still have VHS tapes of the conference they brought us to at Cupertino, including me in the audience. We have no VCR, and I never watched the tapes, except perhaps once to verify I was visible in the audience…

The porting process was not too bad, although there were a few steps:

1. Talk to Telecom.
2. Send email to IT office manager.
3. IT office manager sends approval to Telecom.
4. Telecom calls Verizon to release number.
5. Telecom, Verizon, and AT&T agree to port the number.
6. Telecom calls me with AT&T on the phone. Telecom hangs up.
7. AT&T rep tells me we’re ready, and transfers me to another AT&T rep.
8. Second AT&T rep asks me if RU has a password on he account.
9. I say “I certainly hope so, but I don’t know it. Didn’t you guys get this during the setup?”
10. She says she has no password, but we can hope it goes through. Submits the port request, and starts explaining that my number will be in limbo for a while during the port, due to finish within 3 hours. Reminds me to clear my voicemail.
11. She gets approval — I can now make calls from my iPhone using my own number.
12. She asks if they can help with anything else. I ask about my SMS email address, and get transferred to a 3rd AT&T rep in Customer Service.
13. While waiting, I attempt to send an SMS from my iPhone to my email address. This is how I discovered my Verizon SMS email gateway address, which we use for Systems Admin paging (very important!). This doesn’t work — the iPhone doesn’t allow ‘@’ in SMS recipients, only numbers and limited punctuation.
14. I ask AT&T rep #3, who tells me it’s my 10-digit number followed by @txt.att.net (nice short address).
15. I explain that I had a custom alias (@vtext.net) for the Treo, and ask how I can set this up with AT&T.
16. The rep suggests http://www.cingularme.com/, a pre-merger Cingular site for setting these aliases up. Service is down, and it’s pre-merger anyway, so wouldn’t be likely to work.
17. He starts surfing through the AT&T Wireless website, attempting to find the new location of the stray webapp.
18. After a few fruitless minutes, and some conversations with his co-workers, the (very nice) rep apologizes for my wait and says he’s going to need some more time. We agree he will call me back.
19. A few minutes later, he calls to tell me that the Cingular site was taken down (supposedly in response to a security problem) even before the merger, and although people are still asking for this service, he has no information about if or when it will return. Apparently the forwarding is working fine, but there is no interface to change these forwards.
20. I explain that I was getting a significant amount of spam to my old Verizon address, so I really want to be able to use a changeable address — not my cellular number, which has been stable for years, and hopefully will remain so.
21. He understands, but doesn’t seem able to do anything about it.

Altogether, it took about an hour and half, during which I got a phone call and a few questions from co-workers (I spent much of it on hold), and conducted a brief iChat (video) session to show off the iPhone, and fixed an email account.

Anyway, my number is ported, Visual Voicemail is nice, and I set up a sieve rule to forward page emails from work and family to my cellular address.

I’m pleased to note that when I get a longer message, AT&T breaks it up into 2 SMSes. This is in contrast to Verizon, where I often only got the headers and very beginning of SMS emails, leaving me wondering what was wrong. Of course, I had unlimited SMS with Verizon, while each such message counts as 2 (or more) for my 200/month SMS service. It should be fine…

Since I haven’t had time to get an iPhone case yet, I’m carrying it around in my Treo beltcase. It swims! I think I could keep 3 iPhones snugly in this case!

Walking to work this morning (in the rain), my new iPhone asked if I wanted to join a network. When I looked, it offered me 4 pages of networks. Note that this was not in an apartment building — I was under an overpass on E 61st Street, between 1st & 2nd Avenues. A new kind of urban density…

I then turned this feature off — it’s too distracting when walking around. Instead the iPhone uses my home network or Rockefeller’s public network (iPhones cannot handle WPA Enterprise, so it cannot join the IT Staff WLAN).

I reversed over 10 years of history today, moving my Eudora Folder off my iPod. I’ve been carrying my email around with me for a long long time.

I will now reply upon IMAP to keep my mail in sync (as many people do — this is much of the purpose of IMAP). Two main issues kept me carrying around my email after I switched Eudora from POP (which it does wonderfully) to IMAP (which it does less well):

1. Message Status. I know there are messages I have read and marked as such in Eudora, but where the server has the messages marked as unread. I suspect in some cases this is because Eudora lost connectivity to the server and was unable to update the read/unread status immediately, but I’ve been shielded from this by carrying my mail (and the ToC files where Eudora keeps read/unread status) with me on disk for years.
2. I use open Eudora messages as a To Do list, and each copy of Eudora will keep its own independent list of open windows. I don’t know if I’ll use saved searches or how I’ll keep track of messages that require attention yet.

I have (and needed!) several reasons to make the switch:

1. I no longer have to carry around an iPod all the time. To and from work isn’t too bad, since I was often listening to it, and the iPod is much less obtrusive on a belt clip than my VST 10gb 2.5″ FireWire drive was, but it’s still something else to carry/remember/worry about losing.
2. I can now once again use my iPod. Previously it was really only available when travelling, because the rest of the time the iPod was plugged into a Mac in FireWire Disk Mode. To take and use the iPod required first quitting Eudora and unmounting the iPod, and later plugging it in and letting Eudora relaunch and open all its windows.
3. I am getting an iPhone (rather than the iPod touch I ordered last week), and don’t want to give up 1.5gb of its 8gb for email.
4. I cannot leave my iPhone tethered to a computer in disk mode when I walk away from my desk.
5. I can now easily run Eudora on my work laptop (the iPod was always plugged into my work desktop). I actually started doing this a while ago, and my head did not explode due to IMAP sync discrepancies.
6. Moving my laptop around our apartment will be more convenient — I won’t have to carry the iPod around (plugged in) on top of the keyboard as I walk up and down stairs.

This is a BFD for me.