November 7, 2008

iPhone under VMWare: still a pain

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:

I’ve spent the last few hours trying to update the firmware on my iPhone to version 2.1 as most of the applications in the Apps Store are starting to require it.

First a bit of background info: I’ve been a passionate Linux user for the last 4 years and I don’t see why I should switch to Windows just to sync my iPhone (which btw. isn’t working as my Thinkpad T400 has successfully blocked as the Windows installation crashes with a BSOD) and I don’t see why Apple can’t support Linux too.

So I was thrilled when I heard that I could use VMWare Workstation v6.5.0 to sync my iPhone and all worked well for a while. But then I thought “why not try a firmware update?”, and all hell broke loose. After waiting for iTunes for more than an hour to give me back an absolutely generic failure message I gave up on my first attempt. Today on my second attempt I got a little bit farther. I now realize that it has something to do with the updater disconnecting the device and then waiting for it to reappear (why that is, I have no idea) but instead of the iTunes updater to respond to the device in recovery mode, it is Linux jumping in as it should and thus invalidating the update.

It’s getting really annoying by now, and resetting (15 seconds holding both home and power and then holding 2 seconds the power button, for those like me who can’t remember how) isn’t too nice…

When will Apple finally learn that there is a huge market for their devices if they’d only open up a little bit or provide us with the tools to use them under Linux?

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January 15, 2008

Google for iPhone gets a make over

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
When checking Google for iPhone earlier today and, surprise, it was heavily improved. The new Gmail interface is incredibly intuitive to use and just feels right. The only thing that isn’t perfect is the way you access tags and folders through the “menu”-button on the top which is a bit couterintuitive, the rest is just fine.
Another major improvement is that now you can bookmark the tab you are in, so now we jump right into gmail or the reader application, bypassing the search screen which is pretty useless for iPhones anyway because they have a search bar next to the address field.
The reader hasn’t changed too much and my wish hasn’t been granted: images still aren’t resized to fit the screen size so big images still break the layout.
The calendar now is nice too. The day and month view are perfect to get a quick overview of tasks and appointments, but why oh why can’t I add or edit entries? It wouldnt have been that hard to add that feature, would it?

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December 4, 2007

Getting touchy

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

iPod TouchI got myself an iPod Touch, and I’m in love!

Now, some of you might remember that I’m not a huge fan of Apple Products, or better to say their users that far too often become Apple-Apostles, but even I have to admit that the new iPod is a masterpiece of usability and beauty (once you have unlocked it). Yes, that’s right, I had no other choice than to ask a friend of mine to unlock it, since it was impossible to do so on my Linux machine. Then I had to hack it to get it working with Linux, since the connector cable won’t work either. The only solution I have found so far involves jailbreaking, installing the SSH server and then use sshfs to mount the iPod’s Disk to my Linux box. It’s really a shame that Apple keeps ignoring the needs of so many of it’s customers! And why, oh why don’t they just put the VPN client and Mail client on the iPod…???

Enough of the rants, let’s get on with the good stuff: the browser, the Youtube app really kick ass and I’m happy that I can use some of my favorite webapps:

  • Todoist: the best task tracker there is.
  • Gmail: do I even have to tell you why?
  • Facebook: Getting social on the way
  • and being able to read the slides of my upcoming lections while not even getting up from bed is nice too :)

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