Blogs

Sprint, you had me at “unlimited.” Then you lost me again with your fine-print. I was amazed how I could be turned from an interested new customer to taking a second look at carriers I swore-off years ago.

Here are five things you can do to become the premier carrier in the US and win my business when my new contract expires in two years.

Dear iCal,

Can we talk? I really appreciate that you will look in my e-mail and find new calendar events and invites. I get several every day from sources such as Meet Up (both personal & professional groups), work colleges and friends who use Google calendar to organize Dinner & Movie nights. Really. Because you check, I’m far less likely to miss one.

I’m still using the original 2G iPhone. This is still a viable model, but it has been getting more and more sluggish of late. Usually, this manifests as apps not responding to touches or taking forever to draw up the next screen. I could blame the four e-mail accounts and three calendars that it will sync in the background, apparently any time I bring it out of standby. You’d think iOS could deprioritize those to ensure the user experience is always fluid.

I just submitted a massive update to Stage Time with (official) iOS4 support.

The new version includes rotation support, local notifications, allows a range of time (say, 3 to 5 minutes with 30 seconds grace before and after), and counts down the last 30 seconds.

I'm pretty proud of it.

I was a big fan of my iPhone 2G when I first bought it.  At least part of that love came from having a stable mobile device, something the Treo 650 never could accomplish.  With WiFi and EDGE, the original iPhone was faster than the Treo and as an Apple device, it would sync cleanly with my Mac desktop.  Sadly, my love for it has diminished over the last two and half years, thanks in part to AT&T's dissing of it during their MMS rollout, AT&T's lackluster service, and the inevitable slowness a hardware device gets as its OS receives update after update.

Dear APC:

I love the idea of your Trade-UPS program. If only the pricing of the upgrade wasn't such a deal breaker.

Last night I finally tried an HD rental on my Apple TV. I've been meaning to do so for a while to see if the HD rentals are worthwhile. The answer is meh.

Let's look first at the nice bits of the experience.

If you are familiar with object-oriented programming, then you'll find Obejctive-C classes to be an easy concept to grasp. Each language has a different way of handling objects and object classes, any particular language may not support all features, but the base concepts are all similar.

Structure

Here is a basic Objective-C class definition that you would expect to find in a header file:

I uploaded a new version of Number Mnemonic today to Apple. I expect it will be available on the app store in a few days.

As I've mentioned in prior posts, I'm not very happy with AT&T as a carrier, and I'm starting to think the charm, ease of use, and feature richness of the iPhone are qualities the competition is aggressively trying to match. As my contract with AT&T ends in a month, I have the option of leaving AT&T for another phone on another carrier, an option I intend to seriously consider.