Category Archives: iPhone

Get on the Bjango Wagon

Marc Edwards over at Bjango is an extremely knowledgable and talented app designer and developer. If you make apps and you’re not reading his blog, you’re missing out on a great education. Last year he wrote a phenomenally helpful article on “pixel-perfect vector nudging” in Photoshop that was probably the single most useful tip I read anywhere in 2011. These articles are free, but I’d pay real money for them, just as I paid for his excellent Skala Preview, a Mac OS X desktop application and iOS app that lets you send real-time previews of your Photoshop work to your iPad or iPhone. It’s simple, elegant and awesome. This morning he also updated his shockingly comprehensive iOS Photoshop Actions and Workflows to version 1.2, with some minor tweaks and support for Photoshop CS6 (already!). In short, Marc is making incredible contributions to the field; give him a bit of your attention and, if Skala Preview strikes your fancy, a bit of your money. You’ll be well rewarded.

Continue Reading …

+

The Miracle of WD-40

WD-40An apparently common problem that many iPhone users encounter is that, after many months of use, the home button — the sole physical button on the device’s face — starts to lose its responsiveness, sometimes precipitously. When this happens, it may take several presses, or a prolonged press, to get the button to produce any results. And sometimes where one press of the button is intended, the device registers two. Very annoying.

I was surprised to discover from a friend that Apple technicians diagnosed this problem on her phone as software related, which struck me as counter-inuitive, as it seemed to me to be very much a hardware problem. There has also been talk of the button needing software recalibration. I don’t know if that approach works or not, but I’ll tell you what worked for me: the miracle “water-displacing spray” WD-40.

Continue Reading …

+

The Wayback Machine for Apps

Mobile and tablet apps change all the time, but there is no public record of the way an app’s user interface evolves with each new revision. What we need is a version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for apps, but unfortunately because of the siloed nature of this class of software, it’s not possible to simply deploy bots to create one for us.

It occurred to me that one viable alternative would be to crowdsource something similar to the Wayback Machine by creating an app that would let any user upload screen grabs to a central archive on the Web. That sounds much more manual than the Internet Archive’s approach, l know, but in fact I think it could actually be fairly well automated.

Continue Reading …

+

Verizon Monologue

Over the past dozen years or so, I’ve used mobile phones on the AT&T, Sprint and Verizon networks. Of them all, AT&T’s service has been the worst, but it’s much better now than when I first tried it in 1998. By no means am I completely satisfied with AT&T, but I spend little time lamenting its shortcomings.

On the other hand, my experience with Verizon’s customer support — in the years just before the iPhone debuted — was by far the worst of any of the three carriers. The worst. I found them unhelpful, often rude and sometimes even hostile. They also seemed to operate under a set of corporate rules that seemed decidedly unfriendly to customers. I disliked every minute of my time with Verizon, and I was glad to be rid of them.

So I just hope people who have been anxiously awaiting the now-real Verizon iPhone are greeted with a revamped customer service experience, that Verizon has turned a leaf and found a new focus on making life easier for their customers. In any event, I’m going to stay with AT&T.

Continue Reading …

+

iPhones for the Under-Two Set

My fourteen month-old daughter Thuy (who is completely adorable, by the way) adores few material objects in this world more than she does my iPhone. Among all of the toys that we’ve given her, and even among all of the things that she’s turned into toys, the iPhone is the one that consistently grabs her attention in almost any situation.

She’s at an age though where she doesn’t really use the phone so much as she just randomly handles it, pushing buttons on the screen here and there, turning it around, even holding it up to her ear (often backwards or upside down) to babble a conversation to some imaginary friend on the other end of the line. Mostly she’s just imitating what she sees her mother and me do when we use our iPhones, but it doesn’t change the fact that it can command her attention for ten or twenty minutes at a time — and for a parent of a young child, that’s gold.

Continue Reading …

+