Posted by lorenb on Jan 6, 2009 in
gnome,
linux I use Linux 90% of the time on my comptuers. Obviously for iPhone development I have to use a Mac and some of my consulting clients require Windows so I have that in VMs.
Since GNOME 2.24, I’ve been having problems with my Epiphany web browser. When I download text files or PDF it tries to open them in OpenOffice.org or Gimp instead of respecting my chosen default applications (GEdit and Evince).
It’s fine on the desktop with other applications. Not sure why only Epiphany exibits this behaviour.
This is further compounded by web sites try and prevent direct downloads. For example, the iTunes site when I download financial reports for my iPhone apps, you can’t right and say download. I just get some HTML instead of the file.
I’m tired of this happening. I can’t standing having to go into /tmp find the files I was trying to download, copy to my desktop, fix the permissions and then open finally.
Not sure if this is Epiphany or something with Mozilla/Gecko. Hopefully when Epiphany switches to WebKit this will get fixed.
Posted by lorenb on Jan 5, 2009 in
business,
iphone Been re-writing and cleaning up the MMA Tracker code base. I believe the issues with slow/sluggish performance are fixed now. I’ve also been working on some Quartz-based views rather than using a webview. I’m hoping to wrap up v2.0 shortly and submit to Apple for approval.
In other news, we’ve been working on new applications as well. Our 2nd app a technical reference for IT professionals. I’ll have more details on that soon.
The next apps will likely be games/entertainment based. Apple seems to really be pushing the iPhone in this space so it makes sense to try our hand at it.
Posted by lorenb on Dec 28, 2008 in
business,
iphone I picked up a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and it’s been a very good book. It’s definitely filled in lots of details about why things work a certain way. Definitely better than just experimenting with the iPhone SDK.
I’ve got lots of ideas for improvemens to MMA tracker and ideas for more applications. More details on that will be coming soon.
Posted by lorenb on Dec 26, 2008 in
linux I saw that the Linux Kernel 2.6.28 was released on Christmas. I’ve been waiting for that as I wanted to try out ext4.
I was going to try it out on desktop and/or laptop first but there were some issues with my onboard Intel video after the 2.6.28 upgrade. So that was a no go. Decided to try on a server first. The process was easy and other than the long fsck it worked well.
No problems so far. Hopefully none occur until some LiveCDs are released with ext4 support otherwise that could be a problem.
Posted by lorenb on Nov 7, 2008 in
business,
iphone Moved our mobile apps site to a new server today. It has much more bandwidth than our existing setup. Users of MMA Tracker should see a noticable improvement in performance. The original plan was to move our corporate site over at the same time, but our web designers dropped the ball on us.
Also any day now MMA Tracker 1.2 should be approved by Apple. Just some minor bugfixes in this release. Probably will show up on Sunday or Monday. Watch for it.
Posted by lorenb on Oct 28, 2008 in
business,
iphone Got a message from Apple today about their new Apple Developer Forums. It’s in “beta” and sadly I can’t login right now because “a serious error has occurred in the system”. I’ll have to try again later.
Also noticed that my carrier almost doubled it’s profit on iPhone sales. Maybe they could spend some of that on training their staff to not be so useless.
Posted by lorenb on Oct 25, 2008 in
business,
iphone Yesterday while I was doing some errands I dropped my iPhone. I had it in an acrylic case but the impact on the sidewalk still cracked the glass screen pretty bad. The phone worked but I didn’t need any glass in my ears. I had to get a new one.
I set out to buy a replacement. I went to see my carrier at one of their local stores. I asked to buy a replacement. They told me that wasn’t possible. They offered to cancel my contract for $400, sign me up again and change my phone number (that I’ve had for 10 years). Said there was no way they could sell me an iPhone any other way. They claimed it was Apple forcing them to do business like this. Then they offered me other brands of phones.
I talked to 3 people at the store, 2 or 3 more on the phone and all of them had this same crap story. They called the Apple Store in Toronto and they said they don’t do repairs. You’d think I was the first person in Canada to have a broken iPhone.
All this non-sense pissed me off. I end up firing off an email to Steve Jobs with an email address I found from Google. I told him what had happened and that in my opinion his company/partners sucked. I called them out on screwing me over and told him it would never happen again.
A few minutes later he replied saying that I indeed I could buy a new iPhone and that I was given the wrong information. He CC’d the COO, Tim Cook too.
Inspired by Steve, I tried my carrier again. I called up one of their call centers and kept escalting. After an hour I finally found a manager who would let me purchase a replacement iPhone without all the extra fees and weirdness. They did push my contract date up though, so it started over again yesterday. They are mailing the new phone to me and said I would have it by the latest Nov 13th.
Later on that night I heard from the director of iPhone support at Apple. He offered to help me deal with my carrier if they were still giving me problems.
Seems the stories on the Internet are true. Steve does read/respond to emails from random customers.