Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

Thank you for applying.

Best regards,

iPhone Developer Program

This makes me worried. Apple is not telling me whether or not I’m in the running to get selected. Also, they’re teasing me with this “free” SDK which allows me to waste time writing this app which may or may not be allowed to be on Apple’s iPhone store in June.

It’s discouraging. Yes, I completely understand that Apple’s overwhelmed with requests, but there should be some deciding factors in the selection:

Apple developer status Apple should give priority to those who are in, or were in the Apple developer program. At minimum, this costs $500 a year.

Past development work If you’ve written apps in the past, or in my case, since 1989, and Apple has recognized you as they did with several of my apps, they should let those people in first.

My biggest concern is not being able to get my app ready the day the iPhone app store is opened. As everyone knows, the internet is full of good ideas, and even though the first person to do something isn’t necessarily the best out there, it does give a serious advantage to that developer.

Apple is not communicating to the people that signed up if in fact they’ll be able to get their apps on the store in June, and that deflates my enthusiasm for the project.

Am I worrying about nothing? We won’t know until June, but in the meantime, I wish Apple would be more forthcoming about how they’re making selections.

EDIT: Soon after I wrote this post, I found this article on arstechnica.com:

Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight

This sentence sums up exactly what I conveyed in this post:

“Still, a letter like this complicates the decision to begin or continue developing an iPhone application.”

The $99 entry fee doesn’t bother me. I understand why Apple’s charging that much for it. You need a digital signature so that malicious code can be traced back to the owner, and technical support from Apple was never free. Also, Apple will be hosting the app for you.

The problems come with what the SDK is incapable of doing. You can’t interface with the dock connector, you can’t record audio, and you can’t record video. This is a serious detriment to what I wanted to develop, and I’m sure there are many people working on social networking apps such as seesmic and qik that are pretty ticked off about this as well. If you wanted to post audio to utterz, you have to use the dial-in method, but you still can’t post video. There’s also no GSM on the iPhone which makes geotagging impossible.

One other issue that bothers me is that when the phone rings, your app has to quit right then and there. Now, what if I don’t want to answer the phone? Granted, I don’t expect the iPhone to be running mission critical apps, but the user should decide if they want to answer the phone or not.

There’s one last issue that’s been gnawing at me. I signed up to be an iPhone developer a week ago. I have this app that I’ve been writing for Mac OS X using Cocoa which will port very easily to the iPhone. However, I haven’t heard back from Apple yet. Now, let’s say you’re an independent developer and want to write some freeware apps for the phone. You get all excited to write for it, you hunker down and start coding like a madman, and what if Apple thumbs their nose at you and says “sorry, you haven’t been selected”? So far, I don’t know anyone that’s been selected, but I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there that are expecting to be. This would be a serious slap in the face to the developer community and really needs to be addressed very soon. Apple needs to start sending out developer approvals 10 minutes ago.

Still, I feel bad for the developers that Apple refuses to make the iPhone more social media capable. Maybe iPhone 2.0 with 3G will be what we always wanted, but in the meantime, I’ll have to use my Nokia N95 for social media.

As for the iPhone vs. the N95, that’s a different post.

However, Microsoft recently announced their new Office 2008 Suite for Mac OS X. Since I bought Office 2004 back in, well, 2004, I used Word a handful of times, Excel maybe twice, and Powerpoint a total of zero times, if you don’t include the time I accidentally launched it by double-clicking on the wrong icon.

That leaves me in a tough spot. Do I drop the dough and buy the Office 2008 upgrade, continue to use the solid, but old Entourage 2004, or just abandon Entourage altogether and go with Apple’s Mail which comes with Mac OS X?

Microsoft’s biggest mistake right now is not having a trial version out there for people like me that are on the fence. I really don’t want to spend $230 when I know I’m only going to use Entourage. Microsoft should take a cue from Adobe – split up their apps. Adobe sells all their Creative Suite apps separately. I’ve bought Photoshop since version 6 and never buy or use any of the other apps. I don’t need them. Why can’t I just buy Entourage? Microsoft should realize that Mac users aren’t the same as Windows users, and Entourage would probably sell well on its own.

So, if anyone from Microsoft is reading this, think about unbundling Entourage and just sell it separately. Please?


"Rent and download your favorite movies with iTunes on your computer or directly to your living room on Apple TV. Enjoy rented movies in sizes up to 720p HD with surround sound on your Apple TV and sizes up to DVD-quality on your computer. Transfer your rented movies from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone and enjoy them on the go.


So what they don’t tell you up front is that you can’t watch the HD rentals with iTunes. What I’d like to know is: why the hell not? I have a Mac Pro capable of running HD content, especially the lower quality 720p which is what these HD rentals are formatted in, and I have a Macbook Pro which I can hook up to my home theater system using DVI and optical audio. So can someone tell me why Apple chose not to allow iTunes users to watch HD rentals? I’m not buying an Apple TV when I have a Macbook Pro that’s already perfect for the job.

By default, the first sharable folder is your public folder. Apple then adds three entries into the list of users that have access to it: you, with read and write access, and “Unknown” and “Everyone” with read-only access. You can remove “Unknown” and change the access for “Everyone” to “No Access”. That’s fine.

However, there’s an entire drive I wanted to share that only I had access to. So I added the drive, deleted “Unknown”, but when it came to removing access for “Everyone”, this is what I got:

That’s right. I can’t set it to “No Access”! I tried it using Guest access under Apple File Protocol and sure enough, I had full read-only access to my private data.This is completely unacceptable. Sure, I can get around it with file permissions, but that’s not the point. Apple put this in place with drop-down menus so that I have full, easy control over who sees what. Disallowing “No Access” to a shared folder is wrong, and Apple needs to fix this ASAP.

The solution? You need to do a “Get Info” on the drive. Then you get this dialog:

You click the lock to unlock the dialog, change the preferences there, close the Get Info dialog and then you’ll get this in the Sharing dialog:

Now everything is good.

I’m still worried that most user’s will either not notice this, or not know how to fix the problem. Worse, Apple gives a false sense of the ability to change this setting in the Sharing dialog by offering a drop-down menu for options the user can’t set from there.

Windows

I used BootCamp to install Windows on a dedicated 120GB Maxtor hard drive. Installation went well, except that it takes a long time for my Mac Pro to think about what it needs to do when it boots into Windows. It just hangs there with a white screen for 30-45 seconds before booting into Windows itself. I don’t remember that from beta.

It wouldn’t install the drivers for my iSight. The iSight worked fine in beta so I don’t know what the problem is here. I tried installing the drivers several different ways, and each time Windows said it didn’t have any drivers for that hardware.

Other than that, Windows runs fine on my Mac Pro.

Back to my Mac

This morning I left my Mac on at home in hopes of accessing it from my Mac at work. After verifying that my Mac at home was set up correctly, I went to see if it showed up on my Leopard machine at work. It didn’t. I tried several different networking tricks by accessing my router at home, but nothing did the trick. My mistake was not running a VNC server on my Mac at home to change anything there, or to use of of the suggestions of logging out and back into .Mac on the machine so I’ll have to report back on this tomorrow.

Overall, other than the need to boot into Tiger to run the firmware update, I haven’t had any trouble with Leopard at all. Renata and I will be recording episode 51 tomorrow so I’ll report back on how well recording went with Leopard and the 10.4.10 audio drivers from M-Audio.

Update: I created this post using Safari on Leopard and I’m still having editing issues. Carriage returns in WordPress, which should be converted to <p /> , are being ignored. I’m going to have to deal with this somehow. For now I have to use Firefox.

I’m installing Leopard on its own hard drive simply because I’m afraid that the drivers I need for my M-Audio Firewire Solo amp won’t work, and without them I have no mic and with no mic, no podcast.The installation’s being done MacPro 2x2GHz Core 2 Duo.

October 26, 2007 6:20pm

I pick up Leopard at the Apple store in Menlo Park, NJ. Very fast service. Only medium sized shirts though

9:00pm

The partition I want to use won’t work because I have to use Disk Utility and mark the whole drive as “GUID Partition Table”.

11:55pm

Finally backed everything up. Split the HD into two partitions for Leopard and whatever I can use later. Rebooted and installing Leopard.

October 27, 2007 12:27am

Installation done, reboot. Intro movie with no audio from my speakers.

I decided to transfer all I can from my Tiger partition: account, network settings, apps, documents.

1:45am

Transfer’s done!

1:47am

Leopard is up and FAST! It found my server immediately. All my files and apps are here.

Important note: Tiger would boot faster than it took to bring up its own network. Because of that, at random times I wouldn’t get my server share because there was no network connection at the time Tiger was booting. Now I’m guaranteed to get it at launch!

1:53am

Poking around at apps like iChat, Entourage, Twitteriffic, Skype. All work. My sound problem was Leopard picking my Firewire Solo output by default. Bad, Leopard, BAD!

Software Updates are available. Skipping for now.

iTunes works and found all my music and podcasts.

2:03am

Not digging the flat blue slate folders.

2:03am

I just noticed that the time was off and Leopard was not set to automatically get the time, so my clock was off by 7 minutes. Fixed.Safari works fine and remembered all my passwords.

2:07am

Safari isn’t getting along with WordPress. I started this post on my Macbook Pro and had no problems. With Leopard’s Safari, it wasn’t keeping the formatting of the page properly. Carriage returns were ignored and my text is Times when it should be Verdana. Moving to Firefox helped a little, but it’s not perfect.

2:10am

A friend of mine asked if folders worked in the dock now. They do and don’t. The dock is split into two parts: the left side holds the apps, the right side holds the folders. You can’t put a folder anywhere like you could before. Now you have to put it on the right side.

When you put a folder in the dock, you have three options: view as fan, grid, or automatic. Automatic will go to grid if you have too many items for a fan view. Clicking the folder will open it as the selected format. If you want to open it with the Finder, right-click on it and select “Open”.

2:13am

GarageBand tells me there’s a 4.1 update and I ignore it. It’s now hanging.

Force-quit it, relaunch. Now it’s OK, but the Firewire Solo amp from M-Audio doesn’t work (as expected).

Turns out the M-Audio software does see my audio input.

2:20am

Updated Garageband to 4.1. Taking forever to initialize. Should I pass out now? Force-quitting and restarting the app isn’t working. Going to reboot. See you on the flip side.

2:29am

Reboot and GarageBand relaunch successful!

2:41am

Still poking around to make sure everything works. I want to try Back to my Mac but I can’t at the moment.

2:44am

You can still put folders in the sidebar.

I can use Time Machine on a different partition of the same disk where Leopard boots from, but Apple asks if I really want to do that. Good point.

Printing to my Canon i950 works.

2:57am

I noticed that when you copy your settings from another hard drive, you don’t get the new apps that Apple would normally put into the dock. Spaces is not there. I had almost forgotten about it.

3:05

Bed. Late.

10:50

Back at it. Trying coverflow on my wallpapers folder. It’s amazingly fast and much more handy than anything the OS had built-in before. Some pictures load faster than others which means I have to wait a bit, but it’s still better than before.

Trying to move stuff around so that I can try out Time Machine.

I noticed the popup menus in Leopard are rounded. That’s good because I was tired of cutting myself.

Trying to change my Downloads folder to point to a hard drive without using symbolic links.

11:04am

The Downloads folder is where apps can store files downloaded from the internet. You can change this location in Safari, for example, but you can’t say “Downloads points to here” using the OS. Maybe there’s a defaults command for it.

11:16

Can’t use BootCamp until I upgrade my firmware.

11:40

For some reason, I couldn’t update my firmware using Leopard so I had to revert to Tiger to do it. I’d get the flashing lights on the MacPro, the long beep, and the firmware update status bar would only show for a split second and then the Mac would reboot. Anyway, I’m upgraded and I can use BootCamp but I have to do even more data swapping on my hard drives for it to work. I’ll do that later.

11:57am

Taking a break to rearrange my hard drives again. Posting this and will continue later.

Thank. God.

My biggest gripe with this whole iPhone ringtones thing is that Apple forced you to buy ringtones through their iTunes Store for 99 cents on top of the cost of the song itself. I’m not making apologies for Apple, but they are in the music business now and I’ll bet they were forced into asking users for the 99 cents for the ringtone. It’s considered a “public performance license” which I personally think is a way of the RIAA grabbing money from users. That’s a rant for another time. My point is, what if I already have the CD of the track I want to use? Let’s say I’ll hunker down and tell Apple “OK, you can have my 99 cents to make this into a ringtone, but I have the CD already”. I can live with that, but there’s no mechanism to check if I own the CD already. Even if there was, who’s to say that I can’t burn a CD of a track I downloaded for free? The system is flawed.

So now I can take the tracks I paid for and turn them into ringtones, just like I could on the last three phones I owned. I don’t care about unlocking the phone, I just want to hear my Final Fantasy X Victory Theme when someone calls.

I thought for sure we’d never see the day when Apple opened up their iPhone to third party developers. And yet, I suppose the hackers and their trebuchets, lobbying flaming rocks at the cold walls of Apple have finally won.

Yes, Virginia, there will be a true iPhone SDK.

As a developer, I’m thrilled about this. Having access to this kind of device means I can perhaps write something that grabs data for the podcast and give it to users, or someone can write a better RSS reader, or a Skype client (or maybe not), or some other wicked cool app that takes advantage of the iPhone. Or a game!

Apple stated that they’re looking at Nokia’s system of allowing apps on the phone if and only if it has a digital signature that traces back to the developer that made it. I’m all for that. You don’t want malicious code running around the cell networks. I think this is a wonderful idea so long as there’s a minimal cost in getting a signature made in the first place. I’m not a corporation, so I’m not going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a digital signature.

I’m looking forward to February.