iPhone Top Annoyances or why the world is not perfect Usability Shall Prevail

Support ethical iPhone 5 by supporting SumOfUs.org

2012-02-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

Sum Of Us campaign
Apple: Make the iPhone 5 ethically

The following has been taken from the awesome people at Sum Of Us.

Please support their efforts to make Apple responsible and finally create ethical products! Please, be part of the campaign. It is just a matter of minutes. You can make the change! Thanks!

Every day, tens of millions of people will swipe the screens of their iPhones to unlock them.

On the other side of the world, a young girl is also swiping those screens. In fact, every day, during her 12+ hour shifts, six days a week, she repetitively swipes tens of thousands of them. She spends those hours inhaling n-hexane, a potent neurotoxin used to clean iPhone glass, because it dries a few seconds faster than a safe alternative. After just a few years on the line, she will be fired because the neurological damage from the n-hexane and the repetitive stress injuries to her wrists and hands make her unable to continue performing up to standard.

Right now we have a huge opportunity as ethical consumers: The launch of the iPhone 5 later this year will be new Apple CEO Tim Cook’s first big product rollout, and he can’t afford for anything to go wrong — including negative publicity around how Apple’s suppliers treat their workers. That’s why we’re launching a campaign this week to get Apple to overhaul the way its suppliers treat their workers in time for the launch of the iPhone 5.

In many cases, people literally are dying while making Apple products. Reporters have documented cases of deadly explosions at iPad factories, and repeated instances of employees dying of exhaustion after working thirty to sixty hour shifts. In some of the factories Apple contracts with, so many employees have attempted suicide that management installed nets to prevent employees from dying while jumping off building ledges.

Can Apple do this? Absolutely. Apple is the richest company in the world, posting a profit margin for the last quarter of 42.4% yesterday. They’re sitting on $100 billion in the bank. According to an anonymous Apple executive quoted in the New York Times, all Apple has to do is demand it, and it’ll happen – “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Use the form to the right to sign the petition to Apple telling them to make the iPhone 5 ethically.

Click here to go to SumOfUs!

Thank You! btjunkie 2005-2012 R.I.P.

2012-02-06T14:53:00.001-08:00

"btjunkie
2005 - 2012
This is the end of the line my friends. The
decision does not come easy, but we've
decided to voluntarily shut down. We've
been fighting for years for your right to
communicate, but it's time to move on. It's
been an experience of a lifetime, we wish
you all the best!"

THANKS
FOR YOUR AWESOME WORK

***GOOD LUCK***

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 - RIP - Thank You Steve

2011-10-05T23:41:00.001-07:00

1955 - 2011

thank you steve

iOS 5: "PC-Free" what a an awesome feature, you have never seen before! IRONY

2011-06-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

I had just little time watching Steve Jobs and his other geniuses to present their new awesome revolutionary stuff, we will no longer be able to live without.

The #1 new feature, which struck me like a hurricane is PC-Free!

Imagine, they have even spent their artistic awesomeness to create a logo for that feature. Isn't it just beautiful? An Iphone USB cable getting cut by some scissors. Amazing!

After so many years, of annoying people with the crappiest piece of software ever made by Apple Inc., the most hated Itunes sync software, will no longer be needed to get a cellphone (e.g. an Iphone) or other mobile devices working! Wow!

But isn't that exactly what other companies were able so many years before? Couldn't I just plug in the SIM and power it up, to make all of my previous NOKIA phones up and running? Of course, this worked ever since.

But as Apple Inc. has mentioned to make their mobile devices PC-Free, does this no also mean, Mac-Free too??? Well, I guess this is included, but to offer this great new revolutionary awesome feature as Mac-Free, would certainly not be appreciated by all the Mac people working at Apple Inc.. So the rather use a somewhat derogatory term, which applies only to computing devices, not made by Apple Inc..

Thanks my dear Ubersteve, to finally not require me to use your f$cked $p Itunes crapware! But this new thing will certainly come at a price, which means that I have to use your new iCloud services to get a phone up and running.

F$ck Y$u ! No Offense just joking ... I certainly do love all of the wisdom, that you are willing to share among non-believers like myself. I am so grateful!

iTunes annoyances: Determining Gapless Playback Information

2011-06-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

I hate Itunes, there is no doubt about that. It is the most annoying software ever created by the morons at Apple Inc., the wonderful makers of Ipod, Iphone and Ipad. Wow! Steve Jobs is a billionaire, but don't expect that his geniuses are the best in the industry. This is more than evident whenever you have to deal with your Iphone using the Itunes.

What is my nightmare of today?

I just like to add some mp3 songs to my Iphone. Getting this done, is the way I like it, but I finally managed to get it done.

So I just tried it again, and got annoyed.

What was the problem?

It just would not start the actual syncing, so the Iphone would not tell me it is syncing, just nothing happened. Well, nothing I had in mind, but there was certainly something, something else happening.

Instead of syncing the Itunes had another wonderful plan, not my plan, to do something. And this is shown in the following image:

iTunes Dialog:
Determining Gapless Playback Information

Instead of the syncing (aka uploading/copying music) Itunes started a process to determine the gapless playback information. Whatever the purpose of this is, and there may be a reason to do it.

But it is NOT OK, NOT TO DO WHAT I WANT ITUNES TO DO!

If Itunes wants to help me in a certain way, which requires to do the gapless crap thing, then it should do it in a way, which does not disturb me. But the Apple Itunes wunderkids never pay much attention to this approach. Instead they usually consider the most primitive solution the best. In this case, Apple appearently never heard of a multitasking, a process, which allows de facto simultaneous execution of different task! So in this case Apple could do the gapless crap in the background, but could actually do the syncing in the foreground, which would deliver the results that I rquest. But it does not, and so I have to wait indefinitely until the gapless crap is finished, to get some songs synced.

This is just bad or actually no usability!

iTunes "Gorillaz" or "gorillaz" WTF? iTunes just sucks!

2011-06-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

After getting my Windows 7 back, to boot on my mainly Ubuntu machine, it also gave me horrible crappy iTunes back as well.

After syncing my iPhone with that rotten piece of crap, I am always in bad shape. This is such a ridiculous piece of software.

What kinda morons would ever like iTunes? WTF? Complete idiots!

Just see what my Iphone shows after
the syncing nightmare:

Iphone Ipod Artists selection
showing Gorillaz and gorillaz

OK, computers are damn stupid machines, so is software running on those stupid machines. Itunes does no know anything, so it may consider it is worth syncing files from a band called Gorillaz as Gorillaz and gorillaz. Wow, makes an extra band name in my artist list..

This is so ridiculous, but what can you expect from Apple, nothing except an ever changing terms of 52+ pages.

Why can't they just merge those two bands as one artist? Well, they can't, cause they are such a bunch of morons!

Itunes just suck$! Bad software.

Another Itunes usability nightmare, among a sea of such nightmare, in a later posting!

In dire need of ITunes - Reactivating Windows partition for Ubuntu / Linux Systems

2011-05-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

I am using Ubuntu aka Debian aka Linux as my main operating system. It is just great, easy to use, and looks as sexy as any other OS these days.

But as I have an iPhone, which annoys me regularly, I need a Windows partition on my notebook to host iTunes. Even though I do not like iTunes, I just need it to manage my iPhone. So it worked just fine over a long time, but recently I could not use iTunes anymore! The reason was very weird, suddenly Windows 7 disappeared from my GRUB2 operation system list. So there was no way to boot Windows 7 anymore, and therefore iTunes was gone as well. I could basically do little with my iPhone, in regard to uploading and changing my music on it. There are some other iTunes alternatives available on Ubuntu, but they are not too cool right now and to not deliver the same set of features, even though iTunes is really bad.

After accepting the fact, that I could not boot Windows 7 anymore, I tried to fix the problem. And this time I actually managed to fix it.

Apparently the current version of GRUB2 has some issues with mounting NTFS partitions, which make the auto detection of the Windows 7 partition impossible. As a short term remedy to the problem, we just need to tell GRUB2 about the Windows 7 partition manually, which is not that complicated.

First of all, you need to get some information about your hard disk and its partitions.

Download the Boot Info Script at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/

This is script, which delivers comprehensive partition of you hard disk. The output may look like this:

============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================

=> Grub 1.97 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive
in partition #2 for /boot/grub.
sda1: _________________________________________________________________________

File system:       swap
Boot sector type:  -
Boot sector info:

sda2: _________________________________________________________________________

File system:       ext4
Boot sector type:  -
Boot sector info:
Operating System:  Ubuntu 9.10
Boot files/dirs:   /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img

sda3: _________________________________________________________________________

File system:       ntfs
Boot sector type:  Windows Vista/7
Boot sector info:  No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Operating System:
Boot files/dirs:   /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /grldr /boot/grub/core.img

sda4: _________________________________________________________________________

File system:       ntfs
Boot sector type:  Windows Vista/7
Boot sector info:  No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Operating System:  Windows 7
Boot files/dirs:   /Windows/System32/winload.exe

=========================== Drive/Partition Info: =============================

Drive: sda ___________________ _____________________________________________________

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00026691

Partition  Boot         Start           End          Size  Id System

/dev/sda1                  63     9,992,429     9,992,367  82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2           9,992,430   209,985,614   199,993,185  83 Linux
/dev/sda3    *    209,987,584   210,192,383       204,800   7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4         210,192,384   824,387,583   614,195,200   7 HPFS/NTFS


blkid -c /dev/null: ____________________________________________________________

sda1: UUID="131ff342-2567-4916-a64b-13bca2a542c3" TYPE="swap"
sda2: UUID="f9f8bf18-b65a-4104-86d0-b9e7559784d2" TYPE="ext4"
sda3: UUID="76484BEE484BABA5" LABEL="Door systeem gereserveerd" TYPE="ntfs"
sda4: UUID="12EA518AEA516ACD" TYPE="ntfs"

=============================== "mount" output: ===============================

... tons of other lines ...

This is a lot of information, and there is no need to understand all the lines in this script output. Instead you just need to get the UUID, of the hard disk, which is used for booting Windows 7 or any other Windows version.

In this example, the UUID in charge of this, is 76484BEE484BABA5 . In your situation, the number will be completely different though, or may be very similar.

After you have found the UUID, it is only matter of minutes to get Windows up and running again. Be patient, we are almost there.

You need to add the following lines to the /etc/grub.d/40_Custom file:

menuentry "Microsoft Windows 7" {
insmod ntfs
set root=(hd0,3)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 76484BEE484BABA5
drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
chainloader +1
}

But you need to change the UUID to your individual UUID number. You may also need to change the set root value.

After you have changed the existing file or have added the given lines, just do:

sudo update-grub

Your system will ask you for your root password.

This will update the grub information.

Then reboot and, you should see Windows 7 again in your GRUB2 boot menu.

Good luck!

Iphone Mail's latest feature: Does not pickup mails and likes to crash regularly

2011-05-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

I running iOS 4.2.1 on my iPhone. Except for giving me exciting features like folders aka directories, it basically gave me also a new iPhone Mail feature!

It just regularly does not pickup my mails from different mail accounts, and if it does so, it likes to crash regularly.

I pretty much rely on my iPhone and get tons of mails a day, so that it was very frequently quite weird to notice, that no mails have shown up on my iPhone for more than an hour. And I could not make any sense about it. So then I finally realized, that the damn iPhone has an issue about retrieving mails from my different mail accounts. Actually I have little more than just one mail account, but that should be pretty OK for the Wunderphone!

But somehow it is not!

Now it seems that the damn iPhone has an issue to retrieve mails. Starting the iPhone mail application will tell me, it is checking for new mails, but actually it is not. The little spinning circle next to my carrier logo, just does not appear, as it usually does when some data transfer is going on. So basically the iPhone mail application or the iPhone as a whole as an issue about this, and does not initiate any data transfer.

No data transfer occurs, so no mails will be downloaded, and no mails will show up in one of my mail accounts. The only way to get my mails, even in such a condition really s&cks. As there is no concept of restarting a rogue or crashed application, I need to find one of those annoying tricks to get that done!

Basically I should switch to another application. Safari is usually a good victim to do just that. Then I press double click on the home button to see the great multi tasking features of my iPhone, which is rather fake multi tasking! Then I see all other application currently running (sleeping more or less) on the iPhone. When I find the iPhone Mail application, I just terminate it.

After another restart of the iPhone Mail application, everything works just fine, before it will turn sour another time, and will not do as I want it to do!

Soooo annoying, even Mail does not work anymore. Maybe it is just a matter, that I have more than one mail account, which seems to much for the iPhone.

PS
My internet connection is not to blame. Safari just works fine. It is just the damn iPhone Mail application, that fails ....

PPS
Another new feature is the iPhone's Mail application continuous desire to crash all the time ...

Iphone 4 - no fixes - just the same old sh*t again

2010-09-20T17:24:00.001-07:00

I had the chance to check that next awesome revolutionary thing made by Apple Inc. .

And again there is nothing revolutionary in it. It is just the same old sh*t we had before.

I complaint about my Iphone not letting me chose how I can use the builtin memory. So like having all of my mails locally stored on the Iphone. But Ubersteve aka known as evil dictator Steve Jobs will not let me do that.

The Iphone 4 has also that ridiculous 200 limit per mail account, on the number of mails, which the Iphone can store locally. Everything else has to be loaded and reloaded and reloaded when you wantto read some old mails. I thing this is the most ridiculous of limitations on the Iphone ever.

200 mail max per mail account just god damn s_ck!

Iphone always upside down - I HATE THAT AUTOMATIC ORIENTATION CHANGE ESPECIALLY WHEN IT DOES NOT WORK

2010-09-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

You can hardly do anything with the Iphone not being annoyed by it.

One of the most annoying feature of the Iphone is its continues craving to change the screens orientation from potrait to landscape and back and forth.

It is especially ridiculous when you want to listen to the most excellent sound player integrated in the Iphone, which shows the Iphone is just an Ipod letting you make some phone calls. You may hardly move it, and all at once you see the soooo cool cover flow. Wow!

But you would not believe it, sometimes the damned thing does no care anything about your desires to make it switch the display orientation.

Some times, well almost continuously the Iphone needs power to work, so you should always have a wall socket or any other source of electricity around you. In such moments it may happen you have a much too short cable from you charger to your Iphone to be completely free to chose the orientation of the screen. So the cable may have to go to your left hand side of you, then the video on the Iphones built-in YouTube app may look like this ...

UPSIDE DOWN VIDE PLAYBACK ON
IPHONE YOUTUBE APP

And you have to enjoy your videos upside down.

Just pathetic!

From Collegehumor: The 7 Stages in the Life Cycle of Apple Earbuds

2010-08-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in a real life experience about Apple Inc. hardware quality, then this is really no news for you. Hardware sold by Apple, we know they do not make any stuff themselves anymore, is not sh*t but pretty close to it. And the price for this sh*t is insane!

Have fun with the photo series and visit the good people at www.collegehumor.com !

Thanks to the good people of www.collegehumor.com
for making this photo show
at sh&tty Apple Inc. hardware!

Nice to have multi language keyboard support - but stupid position of language switch key

2010-08-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

This is one of all day long annoyances of my Iphone. But as I recall, I think I have not complained here before. So after getting active with doing this, it's now the time to do so.

Ok, I can speak and write some different language. I guess the Apple Inc.'s KGB or GESTAPO already knows who I am, and what languages I can get along fine. But I will not let you know that. I know, at times I am really mean, when it comes telling anything about myself. I'd rather like to tell you about the bad usability Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Inc. has brought us.

So among other languages, I can certainly write English and I do adore the Chinese characters. I can write Chinese characters by hand and brush (not very artistic right now though) and I get along with what is called Pinyin.

Pinyin is basically Chinese writing using our western Alphabet. So I have installed two additional keyboards on my Iphone. These are the Chinese Handwriting and Pinyin keyboards for what is called Simplified Chinese.

Actually you could also call it Communist Chinese writing, as the communist party, lead by its leader Máo Zédōng 毛泽东, has required to create a simplified version of the chinese handwritiing, their great cultural achievement of the chinese people. But this is way too much information for the sake of another miserable Apple Iphone usability design flaw.

Anyway, I have those two extra keyboards installed. And the keyboards themselves work ok, even though there is some issues, but this is not topic of this posting right now.

Once you have installed another keyboard a little tiny globe will appear left of the space key on your Iphone keyboard. If you have only one keyboard installed, then this key will never show up, so you may not know at all of its existence.

Apple Iphone Keyboard shown in Notes App.
Left of the space key, you can see a little globe to switch to the next keyboard available.

So to show you my Chinese Handwriting keyboard, I have just pressed that little button.

Apple Iphone Keyboard shown in Notes App.
Shown is the Chinese Handwriting keyboard,
on which you can see the Chinese character zhong,
which basically means middle and also stands for China (the country of course).

So far the world seems perfectly right and now real reason to be annoyed again by the revolutionary awesome and outstanding product Iphone, you have bought from the masters of the universe, which some just call Apple Inc. .

Apple provides easily accessible keyboard variants for different languages, and can even deal with handwriting in Chinese. Wow, this is really more we should have ever dreamed of?

THE CHALLENGE

For this short presentation the whole multi keyboard feature on the Iphone works ok. But using the keyboard daily uncounted times, things can and usually get really annoying.

As you could see, Apple's top of the line usability experts had never better idea, than to position the change keyboard button (the little globe) near another keyboard, which has probably one of the highest frequency to be used. Yes, I would consider the space key, one of those keys that is used rather often.

As for myself and most people using an Iphone never have much time and are in constant stress, me and all of you, usually type quite fast, or at least try to do that. And so things get little out of hand, when you want to write that extra fast text message in seconds, and eventually I hit the little globe, instead of the space key.

RED ALERT!

What happens is obvious, the keyboard changes, in my case from English to Chinese. And so completing the text message may not work anymore with that keyboard. So you have to press a number of times on the little globe to get back to your main keyboard.

THE PROBLEM

People usually like to type fast. So as people (including myself) are not perfect, they hit buttons, which they did not like to hit. If you hit the H instead of the G its not really serious, as pushing on backspace, the little X with the arrow poiting to the left, can fix it easily. No sweat, and nothing to complain here.

But the process wth another completely different keyboard is cumbersome to deal with, and therefore highly annoying!

So putting the change of keyboard language button right next to the high frequency space button shows no intellect in the person doing so. It's braindead it's just pathetic and ridiculous and causes a lot of unnecessary usability headaches all the time.

Obviously there is the need for a procedure to allow the user to change the keyboard language in a rather easily accessible fashion, but doing it the way Apple has done it, is probably the worst way to do it!

THE SOLUTION (MY SOLUTION)

Hasn't Apple invented and of course registered a patent for gestures in user interfaces? I bet they have just done that, as they wanna make sure to cash in on their ideas and make others not copy their divine concepts.

So Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, why the f$%ck you do not use a gesture on the keyboard to make that switch from one language to another?

Hey, what's wrong with those geniuses that are living on those dungeons of yours in Cupertino? What are they doing?

They are not doing the right thing, that's for sure.

And I do know why. You have been praised over and over again bringing use excellent computers ever since, making your products so outstanding, but now it seems this is just a recap of a once glorious past.

Now it is all about profits, you are focused on, and how to rip the last dime out of your customers by requiring them and me to do this and that sh&t just to make sure. And so the enchantment of your person and of course all those products just disappeared.

You have created a great company in the beginning. But your unlimited GREED has turned now the once beloved Apple Computer Inc., well now called Apple Inc., to the evil side.

Ubersteve, you are god damn no better than that other guy called Bill Gates, who has embraced being evil from the very first moment.

THIS S&^*CKS!

OMG, why is Apple so stupid? Why you can't listen music and look your photos the same time?

2010-08-23T02:52:00.001-07:00

After some time out, I am now back. Sorry, the Iphone does not get better, but still there is new annoyances around. Amazing!

And this time it is really f*cked up.

Haven't we heard long time ago, that Ubersteve aka CEO Steve Jobs has kind of reinvented the electronic music world, by bringing us the great Ipods and Iphones? Well, sort of, and sort of NOT. I was always surprised how people would appraise Apple's wonderful concept of giving us music on the go with wonderful Itunes and sh*t.

But this bug, or is it just that typical Ubersteve features letting us know, we are just carpet crawlers and he is our lord?

THE SCENARIO

Imagine you want to listen to your favorite music with the not really so great Apple Iphone music player. Ok, let's assume you found your favorite tracks and now its about enjoying the music.

This trick worked out just fine, according to the limits, restrictions and tons of other red tape Ubersteve has given to you. But now there is something else on your mind, and this really messes up the whole experience.

THE CHALLENGE

Music is running fine and smooth but now you just expect more. Why not enjoy some of your best photo shots WHILE listening to the music???

Easy, just start the photo album app and take a look at all of those great photos. Isn't it just great to have music and photos the same time?

Yeah, of course it is, well COULD BE.

THE COMPLETE FAILURE

Holy sh*t!

What happens? OMG, how ridiculous are those morons at Apple? They should not smoke that much grass all the time, or should not work 16h a day to fulfill weird Steve Jobs requirements to get us even more revolutionary sh*t from their labs. But what happens now is a complete and most ridiculous disaster!

Listening to music and enjoying your photos is fine, as long .... well as long as the photo is a photo and not a video. You know, the great revolutionary awesome super high definition camera build in your Iphone, can take all those awesome revolutionary extra crisp sharp photos, which make even look your stupid boss look so revolutionary better, but it can also record those awesome VIDEOS ... OMG, and this is where the trouble gets in!!!

As said, you listen to your favorite tracks. Then you enjoy the photos, you flip from photo to photo, life could not be better, and suddenly the photo viewer shows a video.

RED ALERT!

Iphone photo album presenting a video,
which will immediately end any audio playback,
even if video playback has not been requested
by tapping on little white triangle.

Well, it offers you to watch a video, but the video is not running already, as you have not requested the video playback as you have not tapped on the little triangle, but the Iphone music player will immediately shut down its music playback. So the good tracks are no more and now the Iphone is ready to launch video playback, even if you are not into watching that video.

As soon as a video shows up on the photo viewer, even though playback has not started, the damn Iphone stops music playback.

And even moving ahead in the photo album to an non video photo, will not automatically restart the music playback. As the lord aka Ubersteve aka CEO Steve Jobs requires from you, you have to go to the music player and start it there again, yourself!

RIDICULOUS

What are those hippie capitalists at Apple Inc. in lovely Cupertino ever "think"?

NOTHING OR B^LLSH^T!

This is one of the many usability nightmares we all have to endure on our Iphones, and they say they build the best user experience products?

Just bloody b&llsh&t! Steve Jobs main concern every minute is how much money he can squeeze out of some moron Apple product disciples.

He really does not think in good product usability anymore.

I CAN DO BETTER

To have a synchronized approach between different applications is fine, of it is done nicely. Audio playback may stop, if another playback is requested. Period. It should never stop before such another video playback is requested.

"Updating Library ... This may take a few minutes. " Another annoying message

2010-06-10T07:58:00.001-07:00

Finally I am back. I was little lazy recently, but I think there is tons of issues in regard to stupid and really bad Apple Iphone usability.

Maybe you have seen Ubersteve at the Apple WWDC in San Francisco. He has presented the new Iphone 4, and how could think that it is not awesome and revolutionary. But in may ways it is of course not really that revolutionary, as his troubles with Wi-Fi has shown. As there were tons of users using the conference Wi-Fi network, he could not log into that network to make the presentation. The websites could not download, and so he got one of those ugly and annoying modal dialog boxes. I will show you what modal dialog box he got, after I have found the file.

But today I want to bash another time the most hated program, which is of course iTune. iTune is basically your gateway to the Iphone to add music and other stuff. It has to go through that terrible and very confusing program.

But what's really annoying is the error message, that will be shown after you have uploaded some music or movies to you Iphone.

Updating Library ....
This may take a few minutes.

This is really confusing to me. Music and videos will be transferred using iTune. Ok. As this is the most sophisticated means to deal with the Iphone, should this process not also include the updating of the library? Wouldn't you expect, that this will happen right after the upload? Not really, instead iTunes seems to be a rather simple not to mention stupid application, which can only upload stuff. So the updating of the internal Iphone data structures for the music and video library is not included?!

I think this is really lame.

Little lazy recently ...Sorry, but I will be back!

2010-04-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

I am still pretty much an annoyaed Iphone user. As I have not made an update to the Iphone, it still s$cks in so many ways. But I was little busy doing other stuff, and I was cetainly also little lazy to write new articles.

Be patient, I will be back really soon. There is still tons of Apple Inc. Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs weirdness happening all around here. Amazing things have just happened and make me even more think that Steve Jobs is a mad man.

Secret Apple iPhone Developer Agreement Reveals Draconian Rules

2010-03-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

I found this information on Huffington Post, which really shows the weirdness of his evil Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs!

Following Article from Huffington Post:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, recently got its hands on Apple's hitherto secret iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

The 'draconian' document, to which developers must agree in order to win Apple's approval and see their apps make to the App Store, is Fight Club-like in its specificity and strictness.

Wired aptly notes, 'The first rule of the iPhone developer program is: You do not talk about the iPhone developer program.'

Wired (via the EFF) summarized the contents of the agreement:

A ban on public statements, forbidding developers to speak about the agreement.
Apps made with the iPhone software development kit can only be distributed through the App Store, meaning rejected apps can't be served through the underground app store Cydia, for instance.
Apple's liability is limited to $50, meaning that if a developer sues Apple, Apple's liability to the developer is limited to $50.
If Apple gets sued by a third party because of the developer's actions, then Apple could seek to recoup all amounts from the developer.
No reverse engineering, or enabling others to reverse-engineer, the iPhone SDK.
No messing with Apple products. That means no apps that enable modifying or hacking Apple products are allowed.
Apple can "revoke digital certification of any of Your Applications at any time." No surprise there: Your app can be pulled even if it's already been approved, which we've already seen happen a number of times.

In his analysis of the document, EFF's Fred von Lohmann describes Apple acting as a

'jealous and arbitrary feudal lord,'

who is 'putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads.'

He warns, 'If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition.'

Even before the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement was revealed, Apple had come under intense criticism and scrutiny for the controls it places on the applications in its App Store. Frustrated developers have complained of having their applications pulled without warning or what they feel is due cause.

Most recently, for example, Apple removed 5000 'sexy' apps, including apps that featured only bikinis or lingerie and no nudity, offering little explanation behind the move. Apple executive Phil Schiller told the New York Times that the company had received complaints from women and parents who objected to the content.

Yet as tech bloggers noted, the company was inconsistent in its app expulsion: Playboy and Sports Illustrated's swimsuit apps were untouched, while lesser-known developers had their salacious creations pulled.

German publishers are currently fighting Apple over its objection to a striptease app. The CEO of the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) complained, 'Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content.'

FIGHT

UBERSTEVE AKA STEVE JOBS

Huffington Post: You ain't better than all the other weird App developers (not to forget Apple Inc.) - WHY DO YOU ANNOY ME BY MODAL DIALOG BOXES?

2010-03-10T12:53:00.001-08:00

Every other major newspaper or other media company does not seem to be able to live without yet another of those absolutely useless Apple Iphone Apps! This is also true for the Huffington Post.

Ok, if you think an Apple Inc. Iphone App is the way of the future, then so the heck.

But why do you not seem to think a little more than all the millions of fully incompetent weirdos in the crazy Apple Inc. Iphone App universe? Most of the companies offering Apps, Facebook is just one example which does not, is strictly following to a b*llsh*t user interface methodology reinvented by Apple Inc. on the Iphone!

And this is the really useless and mainly annoying so called
"MODAL DIALOG BOX"

Huffington Post Apple Inc. Iphone App
displaying an annoying modal dialog box

Connection Failed
We're sorry, but the application was
unable to contact with the server.
OK

What is the Problem?

Actually to display information, which is not really of importance for the average user, and which is based on a temporary situation, which will also go away by itself, is useless!!!

Somehow the Huffington Post App was unable to talk to its web server to retrieve new web pages, images, or whatsoever. OK, such situations happen from time to time. Most interestingly this situation happened while the Iphone was connected to my own Wi-Fi and therefore broadband connection. I think the reason why the App could not talk to the Huffington Post server, is not based on a real network problem, but more a problem of the Iphone shutting down the Wi-Fi connection, for whatever strange reason.

The mentioned modal dialog box will be shown, once I have a running Huffington Post App, depending on whatever reason, every other minute, when I do nothing with my Iphone. So it is shown, when the Iphone is somehow idling.

Showing useless information is really stupid enough, but REQUIRING from the user some action to take, here by clicking on OK button, makes the whole thing even more futile!

But this seems to be the new paradigm in the wonderful world of Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple Inc. to show us his high level of experience in modern and good user interface design (some also call this user interface experience).

So did Huffington Post, or at least their App developers blindly follow this new trend in user interface design! Ouch!

The presented useless and annoying modal dialog box, which is only one among tons of others on the Iphone, happens to show up every other minute while running the Huffington Post App, while the Huffington Post is idling. It absolutely makes no sense to me to disturb or even annoy a user by such a message. There is no benefit at all.

Facebook can do better!

But below you can see a smiliar situation on the Facebook Iphone App. Actually it is so far the only App I have found to get along with such problem much smarter than all the other incompeten App developers!

Faceboom App using
no modal dialog box!

No Internet Connection

You can see that the Facebook has apparently no Internet Connection. Instead of blindly firing up a modal dialog box and then requiring from you to click somewhere, the Facebook App just draws the error message. It uses even a red background to make the message more visible. So far modal dialog boxes in the Iphone use a rather boring blue and with design, which is also not very good to get some attention from the user.

Anyway, the approach of the Facebook App is perfect! I really love it, as it shows there is people around that are still capable of thinking, just imagine that, when they develop an Iphone App. Great!

Bottom Line

What seems to be not understood by the mostly not very well trained user interface designers in the Apple Inc. App universe is the main and really useful intention of a modal dialog box.

Such dialog boxes can and should be used in cases when user interaction is required, as the system can not make major decisions by itself. Then it is absolutely OK to ask the user for example "Do you really like to delete all photos?". Such questions should always be answered by a user, and in this case a modal dialog box is accepted.

But in this case here it is so useless and a waste of time!

HUFFINGTON POST APP DEVELOPERS
Your App s*cks as it annoys me
with those useless modal dialog boxes.

BUT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE
TO FIX THIS IN A DAY,
I BET YOU WILL NOT FIX IT ...

Arianna fire those guys!

PS
During writing some correction on this posting,
there were 3 times when that useless modal dialog box was shown!
It's so pathetic!

Gagaphone even weirder than Apple Inc. Iphone

2010-03-05T15:34:00.000-08:00

Life is just too short to be without all the weirdness around us!

The ultimate weird phone is the
all new Gagaphone!

It is the nice black old school phone
wonderful Lady Gaga
is wearing on her nice head!

Lady Gaga on the BBC ONE / BBC HD
Jonathan Ross Show
with her weird black phone.

But there is a catch!

A phone has a earpiece and a mouthpiece.

The earpiece is for listening,
the mouthpiece is for speaking.

Usually the cord
(the thing your cell or Iphone does not have)
is at the mouthpiece, but Lady Gaga has her own idea of that.

There the cord aka cable is at the earpiece!

Wow!

It is original,
but not very comfortable,
as while using the handset,
the cable must go upward and not downward ...

I know this is not about the Iphone,
but
so what!

Apple Inc. Iphone does not support Apple Inc. Quicktime - No way to use the United States Patent Office (USPTO) Web Site from your Apple Inc. Iphone!

2010-02-28T16:45:00.000-08:00

My life with the Iphone is ongoing issue about tons of annoyances and severe Iphone malfunctions. But even after reaching the bottom once more, Apple Inc. and his most evil Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, can make me more and more disappointed of this Wunderphone.

What happened?

Well, the Iphone is part of my daily life, I use it over and over again to be at the cutting edge of up to date information around the world. So I bumped into that article explaining about the new Facebook Inc. patent. It is the patent of about the Facebook Inc. Newsfeed feature. This is said to be the most important and certainly also most valuable patent for those guys.

So my immediate idea was obvious, I just wanted to see all the details of the patent on the United States Patent Office web site. Actually that was easy, just go the USPTO web site and you get all the information you actually need to know.

So I got the following web page, showing all the details about this great patent. Wow! Life is so much easier right now with the most lovely Iphone ...

USPTO web site showing Facebook Inc. patent #7,669,123 on the Iphone.

But the USPTO web site only showed the textual information. No additional information as graphics and all the other stuff. So I clicked on the "Images" button on the previous web page, which would now show me all the stuff I was interested in! Exciting!

But as you can see, it just did not happen. It never showed any additional information, just some links and a big white void with a tiny blue square right in the center. It is one of those little tiny blue squares, that always tell you the content can not be displayed. Actually, here it means that the Iphone may not display a Quicktime file! You probably dod not know, but Quicktime is file format developed by Apple Inc. ! Ouch. Actually I was quite surprised to find out, that Quicktime can als be used as some sort of document file format. Quicktime is more known as a video file format.

USPTO web site showing incomplete information about the
Facebook Inc. patent #7,669,123 on the Iphone.

What is the problem?

I don't know, but you may have heard about the not so nice words Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs had about Adobe Inc. in regard to their Flash video program. He mainly complained that the Adobe Inc. product and software were so inferior and buggy, that it will not be supported on the Iphone.

I know the world is not perfect, especially in regard to Apple's own line of products, but Flash is not a video distribution and presentation system, it is the #1 system for this application around the world. I have to admint, but Flash is certainly as important for video distribution on the web, as the Iphone became the pivotal device for the internet in your pant's pockets. Without Flash, the video age of the internet may not have arrived at our doorsteps even today! No Flash would probably mean no Google YouTube web site either. Could you ever imagine that?

Well, Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs complained about poor software quality of an competitor around in the neighborhood. Ok, but what about Apple's own quality of software?

Obviously there is a yet another absolute ludicrous fact, Apple Inc. somehow seemed to be that impressive, that United States Patent Office would accept it as its file format for graphical information of a patent. And now the great Iphone is not capable of showing Quicktime content. On the other side, the Iphone can certainly display PDF files, which use Adobe Inc. technology! What is wrong here?

This makes absolutely no sense to me. How can a company, which has more and more a strong record of blatantly ignoring widely accepted standards, is not even supporting its own standard?

I guess, and this seems to be a common and severe malfunction of Apple Inc., the right hand has no glue what the other hand is doing!

So I guess, this situation is not some kind of buggy software, its more the lack of a directed and well thought approach to create a real good product. The Iphone product manager and developers, the best in their league around the world (Actually they think so!), probably do not know, that Quicktime can also be used as a non video, but more like a document file format, just we know from PDF for some much time around. This is really weird.

Why in the world is USPTO using Quicktime?

I have just no idea.

But it is not that important for me. As I never use Quicktime on my PC, it was obviously not installed. So I thought, give it try. Installing from the Firefox web browser did not work. So I had to do the manual installation process. Not very complicated either. So after Quicktime was supposed to run, I have tried to check the USPO once more.

And I did not work either this time. I used Firefox again. Then I tried Microsoft Inc. Internet Explorer, which I am lucky not use every other day, as there is no MS IE for Ubuntu ... :-) But trying the USPO did not show the Quicktime files there either. So far I have not relogged into my Windows XP, as I am writing this blog using Ubuntu right now.

So I do not know what the issue about Quicktime is, but regardless of it, it really s*cks a lot that the United States Patent Office uses Quicktime instead of a really widely accepted file format called PDF.

USPTO go with PDF the world wide leader in really good working portal document format technology! Yes, I bet Adobe Inc. can do much better than the Apple Inc., who are now in the business to create all kinds of electronic toys, and not to forget the Ipod.

Google Gizmo5 guys and poor software quality - or what is a white-space, trim, ltrim, rtrim ?

2010-02-22T14:00:00.001-08:00

This time I do not bash Apple Inc. and the Iphone, which has tons of malfunctions and annoyances of any kind, but it is Google Inc. or Google Gizmo5!

I can not make another blog for every other issue in regard to good usability, so I take my Iphone blog for this matter. This is good news for all Apple fan-boys ... this time it is the new acrch-nemesis of Apple Inc., which is Google Inc. since they have started to get into the cell phone business ... Let's wait for Apple Inc. to strike back with their very own search engine. Apple Inc. can do that!

Gizmo5 is/was a company, which offered VoIP (Voice over IP) services. As Google is working on its Google Voice product to add new features, they have just acquired Gizmo5 in November 2009. I guess it is much cheaper for Google to acquire any company, than to develop all the stuff they need for their own services themselves. Just imagine all the perks they have to pay to their #1 best of the world employees, such as the 5 star free food and free laundry service ... Wow! This is not good for the Google ROI!

Ok. Get back to business now and explain what I do not like about Gizmo5. It's not a big deal, but I think it really shows an attitude of people doing their business, who do not know their business very good!

As Gizmo5 has closed its service for new users, they offer interested web site visitors to be informed after they have relaunched their service. Just give them your email address, and they will inform you some time about their relaunch.

So I tried to register my own address, but how else could it be, I was annoyed by yet another most hated modal dialog box. Now, this time Apple Inc. is not to be blamed.

http://www.google.com
Please enter a valid email address
(Using a fake email address steve@apple.com)

Ok, this time the masters at Google Inc. have messed it up!

What happened?

I have entered my email address, and by chance I have added an extra "space" character at the very end. And this really confused the stupidly programmed email address syntax checker to produce the stupid modal dialog box, even though the entered fake email address steve@apple.com is all at least syntactically valid!

How to avoid it?

No problem! If you work in UI (User Interface) software development, never forget about the first word, which is "User". And always consider what users usually do. Well, users usually mess up things. And to be a good UI (User Interface) software developer means to understand exactly and foremost that, and always think how to circumvent those stupid little annoyances for b*llsh*tting users.

This time it is the effect of those stray white-spaces that may get into the users data entry. Sometimes it happens, that users may somehow touch the huge space key on their keyboards, that will create those white-space characters. They are white-space, so sometimes users can not realized that they have entered such characters! And never blame the user, this has also happened to yourself!

And from my own experience as a software developer, in different programming languages, I therefore always performed a trim (sometimes also called rtrim) and ltrim treatment to the any kind of user data input. trim basically chops off all white-spaces at the end of a string. ltrim chops off all preceding white-spaces. So after doing that, you get the clear string of user input, and then you may apply further processing to it.

Google Gizmo5 User Interface Software Quality

Ok, the guys at Google Gizmo5 obviously do not know such best-practice approaches to good and high quality software development. And I think this really tells a lot of the problem, which we may face in the days to come. As we rely more and more on any kind of compiterized services, especially services also provided by Google Inc., we will get bad results just because of such slips are integrated into mission critical software.

This kind of slip, may cause that certain results of data may never be found, as data may be inserted into a database with e.g. preceding white-spaces, which will never be found if data is searched without those white-spaces.

Just imagine, any law enforcement data system would store names in such a raw format, it could mean that a criminal could not be found during a police check. And this could mean that a bad guy may do stupid things just 5 minutes after not being apprehend by the police, because data was not found.

To avoid this kind of errors, a process called data base and data normalization is essential. The target is a systematic way of ensuring that a database structure is suitable for general-purpose querying and free of certain undesirable characteristics. (Have stolen part of this sentence from Wikipedia ...)

Some Help for Google Gizmo Guys

You would not believe it, but Wikipedia may also help the Google Gizmo5 guys this time!

Just check the Wikipedia page for Trim (programming). It will tell you everything you need to know about this. And there is tons of reference of trim for any kind of programming language. And best of all, if trim is not part of a programming language standard, then there is example implemetations. Get it! It's free.

JavaScript Trim Function - String.prototype.trim

Google Analytics can not be used with the Iphone

2010-02-19T08:12:00.000-08:00

Google Analytics is a very nice tool to get information about the visitors of a website. I guess it is one the most successful tools around the world. What is very good with Google Analytics is its very good and very easily understandable user interface. Nice!

I am also using Google Analytics for this blog, it helps me to track my visitors and is a very good feedback mechanism for me.

But don't worry, Google Analytics will not tell me anything about your identity.

I get basically information,

what content visitors are looking,
how the come to the blog (direct, referred from another website or a search engine),
how long they use my blog
and some geographic information.

But take it easy,
I will never get any personal information about you!!!

Just recenty I have tried to login to Google Analytics from my Iphone. Basically logging in works fine. The Google Analytics page is not optimized for the Iphone, so it is a little uncomfortable to use.

Google Analytics On Iphone Dashboard

After you have sucessfully logged in, there is a big problem with actually using Google Analytics. By default Google Analytics will have the last month (actually the last somewhat 30 days) as the default period of time for its results. This is fine, as long as you like to get information about that period.

But once you like to change that, let's say you are interested what happened just yesterday, you are pretty much out of luck. To chance the period it is no problem on your favorite desktop browser, but there is some issues with the Iphone's Safari browser.

Google Analytics Change of period of time On Iphone

Unfortunately the Iphone only shows a question mark, instead of the output of the embedded JavaScript code. So you don't see the calendar view of Google Analytics and therefore there is no way to change the period of time. Google does not provide any alternative method to change the period of time.

But also the presentation of results is not very convincing right now. See below the Map Overlay as shown on the Dashboard. There you can also see the little blue question mark, showing that Iphone Safari may not present any useful information.

Google Analytics Map Overlay On Iphone

Google Analytics is a really cool tool, and so it is quite sad, that you can hardly get any information on the Iphone.

I like to bash the Apple Inc. guys and Ubersteve (aka Steve Jobs) for their on going "the Iphone is sooo revelutionary" bla bla bla shouting. But of course, the Iphone has tons of issues, and especially the great Safari web browser is not a fully fledged web browser. I think Safari should be able to display the JavaScript content as presented on the Google Analytics.

But it is also sad, that Google is not aware, that some of its Google Analytics fans like to use that tool also from their "revolutionary" Iphone, which does not work right now. I can accept that a full version of Google Analytics optimzed for Iphone may not come really soon, but some basic information should be made available. And it should also be obvious, that the period of time for the data should also be changeable, while using it with the Iphone.

You know, we all have to endure the annoying auto landscape/potrait mode changes of the Iphone display. So while taking these screen shots, I also had the trouble that the Iphone suddenly had the idea to change its screen orientation. And during that change, in whiche the content of Safari was rotated, the screen shot was taken.

Google Analytics Dashboard On Iphone in Motion

It looks quite funny, and is really tells so much about the Iphone. It is not important to have a full implementation of JavaScript, which could also display Google Analytics pages free of any errors, but it is more important to have all those useless gimmicks like rotating web pages ...

Safari's incomplete phone number detection and processing

2010-02-17T09:02:00.001-08:00

I was in Canada last year, and so I had the opportunity to use one of their local GSM/3G operator with my Iphone.

Actually, I think there is only one nationwide provider called Rogers, which also offers its GSM/3G service under the brand name Fido.

The rates of Rogers and Fido are different, and for the unaware customer, this seems like two completely different operators, but actually it is just one.

What happened?

I was surfing the web with most wonderful and revolutionary Apple Inc. web browser Safari on a Canadian bank website. Then I actually touched the screen near (or on) a phone number shown on that web page.

All at once, the Iphone suggested to call the following number:
1 (877) 847

Desjardins Bank Canada Quebec Web Site
1 (877) 847
Cancel Call

Does it make sense?

Of course not! 1 (877) 847 is certainly not a valid phone number in Canada, and would also not work in the U.S.A. either.

Isn't the Iphone the most revolutionary Internet Device, able to do just about everything? Well, not really everything. As also being a phone, the Iphone does not have much knowledge of phone numbers. So the first thought of the Iphone to create 1 (877) 847 was right, but considering the Iphone is in country code 1, which is the U.S.A. and Canada and some Carribean countries, it should know that numbers that begin with a "1", should always have additional 10 digits. But the Iphone does not know that. Or does it?

Another fact is certainly that alphanumeric phone numbers are highly popular as vanity numbers for all kinds of businesses. So why did it not consider the extra 4 characters VISA as the phone digits 8472 to make it useful and complete? Even the dash after the "7" of "847", could not convince Safari to think the phone number is not complete.

Ok, parsing text and extracting phone numbers may be quite complicated, but can be done. But considering the complexity of such a task, the Iphone does not provide any feature to change the Phone Number to a useful phone number, which could be the work around.

The modal dialog box only provides "Cancel" and "Dial", and there is no "Edit Phone Number", that could help here.

It is not a big issue, but I think this really shows that Apple Inc. and its team of god like software developers are not really the ones, that are the #1 in regard to phone software development.

Apple Inc. and Ubersteve, you wanna be perfect, then get the h*ll your act together and think a little bit more!

PS
I was just thinking, that the Iphone should not just offer to "call" this number, it should also offer to "text" it!

WORKAROUND FIXED: Iphone camera roll not capable to deal with more than 10000 photos

2010-02-15T03:26:00.001-08:00

What is the problem?

Before telling how to fix or to work around this problem, I should explain what the actual problem is.

All digital cameras store their photos in directories (aka folders). Each folder may contain a certain number of photos. Some cameras accept up to 100, the Iphone accepts 1.000 photos per directory.

The directories have names, that contain a number and the product name. The first such directory on the Iphone is called 100APPLE. After you have taken 1.000 photos, the Iphone will create 101APPLE, 102APPLE, 103APPLE, 104APPLE, 105APPLE, 106APPLE, 107APPLE, 108APPLE, 109APPLE. etc for each addition 1.000 photos.

After the Iphone has created all these directories, you have taken 10.000 photos. So far everything works perfectly. Not to worry a bit.

But once you have taken photo # 10.001 you have a problem, because this photo and all later photos are never shown on the Iphone's photo roll!!!

Even though that the Iphone camera application, does everything right, the Iphone's photo viewer s*cks. Actually the camera application creates directory 110APPLE and puts the next 1.000 photos in that directory.

But the Iphone photo viewer is too shy to show any of those photos.

So even though, the photos are clearly available on the Iphone, by copying them with a USB cable, the Iphone's applications itself have no use for those photos.

Wow, this is really pathetic, Apple Inc. photo viewer developers can't do what software developers at a digital camera maker like Canon can do easily. I have a very cheap Canon Powershot A590, which can deal with 16GB SDHC cards just perfectly, and can store zillions of photos and videos, without any real limit on the number of photos taken.

But for the guys at Apple Inc., creating an error free Iphone photo viewer application is not possible. And never assume Apple Inc. will fix problems, they are more into creating more useless gimmicks, before ever fixing anything.

So if you like to have access to all photos from # 10.001, you need a solution!

BTW,
I have only mentioned the word "photo", but the Iphone can also store videos and screen shots. Those are also invisible and not usable for all of them, that were made from photo # 10.001 on ...

Why you can't fix it
out of the box?

First of all, completely forget about the Iphone's photo settings! The Iphone is all about tons of gimmicks, like slideshows and stuff, but not the real function you need!

Photos
Settings
Slideshow
Play Each Slide for 3 Seconds
Transistion Disolve
Repeat Off
Shuffle Off

Well, then Iphone also provides the following functions to reset it. Actually this should do the trick. But it does not ...

Reset All Settings
Erase All Content and Settings
Reset Network Settings
Reset Keyboard Dictionary
Reset Home Screen Layout
Reset Location Warnings

Well, you can reset a lot of different parts of the content, but apparently Apple Inc. never thought of Erasing all photos and resetting the photo storage. So the only option to solve the problem could be "Erase All Content and Settings" but this would require a lot of work the reconfigure the Iphone again. And I guess you do not like to reconfigure everything from scratch.

So Ubersteve give us finally this function:

Erase All Camera Photos (and Reset Photo Storage)

BTW, I do not know what

Reset Location Warnings

is all about?!

Really sad, how poorly the Iphone can deal with this.

How to fix it?
Well, how to work around it ...

Well, actually this is not a fix! As I may not repair the Iphone's really bad software. The method explained here is a mere workaround. Sorry, you may have to do it over and over again, once you haven taken more than 10.000 photos again ...

The workaround works very simple, just clear the Iphone Camera memory.

You expect, that the Iphone's masterminds of Ubersteve have integrated such a simple function. But as said, this is not the case! Maybe some day you may buy the "fix the photo viewer bug" app, for only $9.99.

I bet Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs is crazy on cashing in on any kind of flaw of the Iphone.

It should be no problem to delete all those photos. Actually you need to delete (remove) all of the existing 1XXAPPLE directories!

And this can not be done without the help of yet another little tool.

For Mac users download PhoneView (download link). Sorry, this is a commercial offer, I have no way to test the application, as I do not have a Mac.

For Microsoft users download iPhone Browser (download link). This is a free offer, and I could test it! Great.

Now let's fix it! These are the steps to go along ...

1. Backup the Iphone with iTunes. Just to make sure if things go wrong ...

2. Copy your photos to your computer ... (not included in crappy iTunes functions)

3. Delete all files and directories in the DCIM directory. Be careful when doing this!

iPhoneBrowser (v1.9.1.0)

4. Reboot the Iphone and hope things will work as expected.

What is so great about the Iphone?

You can not even handle your photos without external help of some special applications. And absolutely forget about iTunes ... iTunes can not even download the photos shot with your Iphone camera ...

YAMF yet another missing feature ...

Vancouver 2010 Olympics: How can you build such a dangerous track?

2010-02-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Luger dies in Olympic practice crash.

You can see very clearly that the poor guy left the track and was then able to fly straight to the massive metal post.

This is awful bad design!

He should have never been able to get in touch with that very dangerous metal post.

If he never had the chance to get in between the posts, then this would have not happened.

One life killed by incompetent engineers!

Facebook can do better than Apple Inc.! No stupid and useless modal dialog boxes!

2010-02-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

I am really amazed, there is still some smart people around Silicon Valley.

Wow!

It is the wonderful people of Facebook! I really like that. Thanks so much!

But why?

If you read this blog, then you may have noticed that I absolutely do hate modal dialog boxes. A modal dialog box, is probably the capital sin of good usability design! It is really an indicative of pure incompetence of people who are really crazy about using this is as an everyday standard approach to "communicate" with their users.

I am not really a big fan of Facebook. It is just the perfect means to waste tons of time of people around the world, exchanging (mostly) useless and unportant information. But I accept that people do that, as they do not infringe any of my own rights.

To be part of the club, but not with my real identiy, I have setup a fun Facebook account for this matter, for which I use the Facebook App. And on one of those very limited moments in time, when I have played around with the Facebook App, those people have deserved a lot of credit for using state of the art usability. Yes, they really do so. Considering all the bullsh*t usabilty on the Iphone, they are just the gods of usability for me now. Well, almost. :-)

Just see the following (redacted) Facebook app screen:

Facebook App
No Internet Connection

Apparently at the time of lauching the Facebook App, there was no Internet connection. Having no such connection is actually not a big deal! It happens basically all the time on a cell phone, that you may lose your coverage. So it is not really worth to make some big fuss about it. And this is exactly what the great Facebook App is able to accomplish.

Instead of firing up a useless and disturbing and highly annoying modal dialog box, the great Facebook App, just says with red background color "No Internet Connection".

And as the Facebook App has never used the modal dialog box, so there is no useless and annoying click to do. The red error message will just go away by itself!

Wow!

As most usability and software people on the Iphone just use stupid modal dialog boxes all the time to annoy all of us, this time it just does not happen.

Facebook you are so great!
At least for the way your App
can deal with such all normal situations!

Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, wake up and tell your incompetent guys at your great usability department, just copy was Facebook was able to accomplish. But maybe Facebook is evil in Apple's vision of the world, as they are too friendly to the stupid users ...

STFU: Most useless modal dialog box "Nothing to Undo" - What a great information I never ever needed to know!

2010-02-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

I was messing around with the Iphones implementation of a Chinese Pin Yin keyboard. Actually I can read and write some of that language, which I think is really great, though hard to deal with for most of us.

So anyway, I was playing with that keyboard in Iphones Notes application.

Wow, that is one of those workarounds you can use on the Iphone to store some information on it, and even permanently! Wow! I annoyed you so many times, that I am highly not impressed about the fact that the Iphone has no Filestore, even though it has tons of memory.

My Iphone 3G S has 16GB of that, but what the heck anyway.

So all at once, I got one of those crappy and all compeletely useless and b*llsh*t modal dialog boxes once more, which asked me to click on them to just go back to modal dialog box hell.

Nothing to Undo
Cancel

What happened? I finally found out how UNDO works on the Iphone. Just shake the weird thing and UNDO will happen, if it can happen.

This time, there was nothing written in Iphone Notes Application yet and my weird and completely random shaking triggered the UNDO function. And so I got this completely useless error message in the form of those f*cked up modal dialog boxes!

OMG, the Iphone really s*cks!

Will it ever let me alone and not tell me stupid things I really do not need to know?

Of course not, it will always annoy me. It is just the concept of weird Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, the mad mastermind and CEO of Apple Inc., to ask for my full obedience to his most crazy ideas.

It is all pathetic, the whole concept of those very invasive and intrusive modal dialog boxes, that annoy you by not just asking but REQUIRING YOU to click somewhere to go away. What is the purpose? There is really no purpose at all, except showing the whole world of Iphone users, that those weird people in Usability and Software Development at Apple Inc. got not slightest of ideas how to create a device with a really good and useful approach to Usability.

Hey Ubersteve, I know you are not dealing with all of this b*llsh*t by yourself, but kick all of those idiots out of your mad house.

Ipad the fattest Iphone ever: Introducing the Micro SIM Ubersteve's latest annoyance

2010-01-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

I do not want to say that much of the new highly anticipated toy made by Apple Inc., the Ipad! Actually I think it is the ugliest Iphone ever built by the design and usability prodigies.

You know I was so thrilled when I heard how Ubersteve mentioned that great features on that wonderful but still kinda obese Iphone! Just imagine, he started by telling the anxious crowd in San Francisco, that the Ipad will allow you to change the desktops background image! What a great feature, we have for so much time around, even the guys from Microsoft have stolen that presumably Apple Inc. idea so long time ago, and now the Ipad still embraces that wonderful idea. And there was much more to come on Ubersteve's Ipad product presentation. Thanks a lot for that!

But Ubersteve is pretty much a double sided personality. Being just the average non appreciative Apple Inc., Iphone, Ipod, Mac etc. critic, so it also happens to the next revolutionary product to depart from sunny Cupertino, California!

Having all the typical Apple Iphone, Ipod inefficiencies such as not accepting common standards, like an really open USB interface, the Ipad goes all along with that. Having access to the Ipad either requires some sort of Internet connection or the most hated Itunes weirdo application.

But this time Ubersteve went even one step further ahead. Embrace new standards, to exclude some carriers to be used with the Ipad.

The Ipad is sold without being "SIM locked", which means it can basically be used with any SIM from any provider.

Wow!

That was such a thrilling news to me, that I had to punch myself into the face, to make sure this is reality and not a nightmare ... What seems to be really great is not so great after a while, at least for the beginning of the service.

The magic new word on the block is

Micro SIM.

In the beginning of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) age, subscriber SIM cards had the size of a regular credit or debit card. In those days, about 20 years ago phones were so big, that having a credit card sized card were not a big problem.

But then phone got smaller and smaller, and so the current SIM card size has been introduced, which is called ID-000 (15 x 25 mm footprint). This size fits perfectly in any existing, even smaller cell phones (e.g. the wonderful Iphone) around the globe.

But then there was yet another smaller SIM card specified, which is now called the Micro SIM aka Mini-UICC (12 x 15 mm footprint).

And this new card size, is what is the new standard f0r the Ipad!

And this is so pathetic! But why?

The current ID-000 card size, used around the globe in billions of phone, used by thousands of providers is common standard, and that SIM card could easily fit in the new Ipad.

The Ipad is compared to a regular not really a small device, and we should not expect that the Ipad has not sufficient space to house such a card.

So there must be another reason to do this really f*cked up design. Obviously, there is a financial or economic aspect to this. As this card is not widely accepted by probable more than 99% of most GSM operators, those operators will not be able to offer special data plans for the Ipad, as their cards do not fit in the Ipad.

And I bet AT&T will (just by accident) be able to offer such a SIM. Isn't that a great coincidence?

Upper SIM: current standard size ID-000 SIM
Lower SIM: new Micro SIM aka Mini-UICC SIM
Tiny differences but a huge annoyance!

Previous graphics copyright by Andreas Steffen, 14.02.2009
Acceptable use by this blog is considered. Thanks Andy!

Physical Form Factors (ISO 7816)

ID-1: 54 x 85,6 mm (ISO 7810 credit card format)
Visa Mini: 40 x 66 mm (Visa/MC credit cards)
ID-00: 33 x 66 mm (mini card, rarely used)
ID-000: 15 x 25 mm (GSM SIM card)
Mini-UICC: 12 x 15 mm (new SIM card)

In the long run the Micro SIM will not be a major constraint to use other providers, especially some discount providers, that may not have 50 million of subscribers, but maybe just 1 million, but it will certainly take some time before those operators will be able to offer such new Micro SIMs.

There was also some discussion in the blogosphere that there will be specialized cutting tools on the market to cut the regular size SIM to the new design. Some even mention, that they could think this could also be offered as a service available on the web.

Anyway we will see some solutions for this really typical Ubersteve Apple Inc. created f*cked up problem for the rest of us!

But no doubt Ubersteve is a bitch and will be forever!

Micro SIM is a special size SIM, which is not the standard right now and will not be very soon!

So this was just another way to p*ss all of us off, who do not want to go with Ma Bell aka AT&T.

PS
I know in the Ubersteveian world, the Ipad is yet another revolutionary device, which will make your life so much better. Incredibly better, awesome, extraordinarily better!

For me it is just the fat Iphone, which you may probably not even use to have Skype video conference call, as they forgot to put in the required camera! And wouldn't that be one of the most obvious uses of the Ipad?

EXTRA EXTRA: Tervetuloa kaikille Nokialandian kansalaisille, joka Suomenakin tunnetaan and Top 5 Annoyances of the Iphone

2010-01-29T07:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all people visiting this website from Nokialand, which some old guys still may call Finnland ... :-)

It is so great to notice that hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of people come here to find out, that the most beloved Iphone may just not be the perfect phone for you. To give you some extra information, I have an All Time Top 5 Iphone Annoyance list.

If your are not into reading a lot, then take a look at the breath taking commercial created by Ridley Scott some 26 years ago!

This is still work in progress. Changes will happen, but I wanted to publish the information already. Please excuse some possibly logically or syntactically errors ...

1. iTuneism or blatantly ignoring widely accepted standards

Since the introduction of the overpriced Ipod MP3 players at Apple, this piece of software has become the arch enemy of so many users around the world. In Apple's world it was obvious, that iTunes should also become a major part. So it happened.

First of all, once you buy an Iphone, you need to hook it up to iTunes to register it. Why can't you just put in your SIM and then let's go?

What is valid around the world, does not work for Apple. iTunes is the way Apple can control the access of the outside world to the Iphone.

It is the only way to add music, videos and photos to the Iphone. Even to delete music from the Iphone you need that awful program. But even more, if you are not the typical Mac user, or even hardly accepted Windows user, you are absolutely out of luck! iTunes can not be used from Operating Systems other than OS X or Windows.

2. Modal Dialogue Boxes or useless error messages

The Iphone is obsessed by presenting error messages all the time! Even if some of the error situations are not even worth mentioning, the Iphone will tell you about it.

What is annoying gets extra annoying if such error situations are presented by so called

Modal Dialogue Boxes.

A Modal Dialogue Box will not just tell you some stupid error situation, it will also require from you to acknowledge it! Usually you have to press on a OK, Dismiss or anyother pretty useless button. If you do not ack the Modal Dialogue Box, then you all stuck! The Iphone will not go any further.

I admit there may be reasons for Modal Dialog Boxes, but these cases are limited to fatal system conditions, when the system may ask extra authorization for some operations. This kind of situation do never happen with the Iphone, it is mostly utterly useless and unnecessary to show a Modal Dialogue Box!

Some stupid Modal Dialogue Boxes:

The claim of an incorrect password is a lie!
The password is alright,
but the Iphone apparently gets confused somehow.

Cannot Get Mail
The user name of password for
...
incorrect.

Most stupidest error message ever presented on the Iphone.
Network lost after switching to Airplane mode ...

Network Lost Your selected cellular network is no
longer available. You can choose a different network in Settings.
Dismiss Settings

WTF, do I need to know that Call Forwarding is active,
and press Dismiss for every call?

Call Forwarding Active Dismiss

You may ask, what is the problem about a lot of these Modal Dialogue Boxes? If it would be like once a day, it would be alright. But some of these Boxes are shown like 20 times. And what is even more annoying, is the fact that some applications are that dumb, that they show almost identical Modal Dialogue Boxes for 10 or even more times! This happens usually with the Iphone Mailclient. Whenever there is a problem with the network connection, which may happen very often a day, then the application will tell you that fact for each and every individual mail account! For myself, I have more than 10 mail account, this results in getting the (almost) same error message 10 times ... I think this is really weird!!!

3. Tons of memory but no good use (max. 200 mails locally stored per mail account)

My Iphone has 16 GB of wonderful FLASH memory. This is really a lot of memory, which you could to store more than all of your life's most important documents and accomplishments. Or you could think of using it to store much more profane stuff like some files from your job, you like to carry around, and make them available at some meetings or other business situations.

Forget completely about this!

The Iphone's memory is completely dedicated to the Iphone number one use, which is being a great MP3 and video player.

It is, using the awful iTunes software, possible to use all of those Gigabytes for just that single purpos. You may also use the memory to store the photos taken with the Iphone, but completely forget about other situation when you would like to store files or other data.

The Iphone, of course not jailbroken still virgin, has NO (this is the opposite of YES!!!) concept of a file store! I was furious to find out about this stupid limitation and lack of feature.

So there is no way to

create directories,
put files in them,
copy them,
rename them,

and all the other stuff you would like to to.

This is just not an application Ubersteve, his holy Steve Jobs, does allow you to do with the Iphone.

So all that memory is basically a lot of waste, if you really do not like to use it as a fat MP3 or video jukebox.

But even in regard to its built-in applications, the contraints imposed on your memory, are absolutely b*llshit!

The Ipohone will only let you store a maximum of 200 mails (per mail account) locally.

200 mails stored locally, can mean that you only may have the mails of a week or a couple of days. Everything else will be overwritten by newer mails. Access to older mails is possible, but only through Wi-Fi or GSM/3G access.

If you are out of coverage, e.g. as you are in a foreign country and hate to pay absurd roaming charges, or even in your own basement without Wi-Fi coverage, then you are completely out of luck! No way to access your mails, even if the Gigabytes you have in your Iphone could easily accommodate all of your mails, including their attachment.

This just pathetic! This is the all too common Apple Inc. approach of paternalism, which will not let you decide how to use your device. Just sick!

So if you are tempted to buy an Iphone, then get the one with the least memory, as you may not use it anyway.

Show
25 Recent Messages
50 Recent Messages
75 Recent Messages
100 Recent Messages
200 Recent Messages

4. Bad (or no) search function or forget about huge documents

The Iphone has a small display, actually too small for a world of of big webpages or other documents like PDF.

So in most cases reading a lot on the Iphone is not always a very good option when it comes to lengthy documents.

For most most cases, even on your notebook or desktop computer, you may not always read everything you see on the screen, but you use features like

"Ctrl-F"

in your Firefox browser to make a fulltext search.

For so many websites I surf I or big PDFs, I usually have a certain interest, so I use the "Ctrl-F' feature very often to find the information I need to know.

What is really an everyday feature in the big computers world, should also be available on a tiny computer, and the Iphone is actually a tiny computer, as its limitations (e.g. small screen size) create extra burden for using it.

But not on the Iphone!

A useful feature to be able to search a new mail you are reading, a big PDF or a new Powerpoint Presentation opened, does not exist. Even searching a shown web page in Safari does not give you the powerful feature of "Ctrl-F" aka fulltext search.

No way.

If you really like to know what is on the web page or any document, then you have to read it, easy access to certain information is no there.

This makes the Iphone basically pretty useless for dealing with any kind of information that is little bit more than the typical twitter message or SMS.

If your business associate sends you a 100 page PDF, and you like to know if a certain detail has be included, it is very difficult to do that without this search feature!

As said before, the Iphone has no concept of a file store, even its underlying Unix system supports all of that. Storing documents is basically only doable, as long as they are attachments in mails, which may require access to Wi-Fi or GSM/3G.

5. Landscape Mode and paternalistic usability

Good usability, which means that you can use your Apple product very nicely, is said to be key to all Apple Inc. products.

Ubersteve, aka Steve Jobs, said in his recent Ipad product presentation that it was always Apple's main focus to do that.

No doubt, Apple products, and especially the Iphone have some great features of usability, but unfortunately sometimes the idea of the Apple usability designer does not always match to the idea of the stupid user and customer.

My number one annoyance in regard to this is the automatic switch of Portrait mode to Landscape mode.

Once you turn the Iphone from its original upright position 90 degrees (or even less) to the right or the left, it will (well, not for all applications) switch to Landscape mode.

What is said to be a great feature is not a great feature all the time.

You have the Iphone in your hand and you move around with it quite a lot, so every once in a while the Iphone thinks it is a great idea to switch to Landscape Mode. Ok.

But sometimes it is really a stupid idea, even if this is hard to accept by the Apple usability guy, so the screen may then present information in a way you may not like it.

I (an a whole bunch of other people as well) actually like to read mails and surf the web in my bed, while having my head rested on a pillow. So my head is moved by 90 degrees to the normal position. If I like to read in Landscape mode, which would actually mean that Landscape mode is shown even if the Iphone is in upright position, then I am completely out of luck.

The Iphone will switch to Portrait mode, and I can not use the Iphone the way I like it.

What is so annoying about this, is again the concept of underlying and latent paternalism of the Iphone.

The Iphone is basically a pretty stupid piece of plastic, which may not always make the right assumption how to do this or that. This would be all fine. But it would require that the Iphone would allow the user to decide how things should be done. In this case it should allow the user to choose, if it should be in Portrait or Landscape mode, but this is absolutely against the

whole concept of the Iphone, which says
"The Iphone is smart, the user is all stupid.".

So there is no way to set automatic display orientation mode ON or OFF, it is always ON. There is also no way to change the display orientation on purpose, it is always set automatically.

And this can be sometimes very annoying. This annoyance is basically not just about the Landscape mode, it is just about the overall paternalistic approach of Apple Inc. to usability!

Extra Annoyance: The most stupidest switch ever designed by Apple

Maybe this extra annoyance is the most obnoxious thing Apple Inc. has ever created. It is the mute ringing button of the Iphone.

The idea is very simple. Have a single switch to turn on the off the ringing on the Iphone.

Most phones, even the very basic ones, have some kind of "profiles". A profile defines certain features of that phone (e.g. the ringing tone, ringing volume and the vibrator settings). Depending on your possible situations, you define one or more profiles.

Once you are in that situation, you choose that setting and everything as required, will be set in a second.

The Iphone does not have this concept, it has just this great switch on the upper left side.

With this switch, you can easily switch of the ringing of the Iphone.

Wow. But WTF is the problem with that extra smart switch?

Very simple, the position of the switch, and the location of your Iphone (e.g. pocket of your pants) may do things you may not appreciate very much.

So it happens to me all the time, that the switch is moved by itself, once I put my Iphone in the pocket of my pants.

And so I may not get important calls, because the Iphone turned its ringer off, just by itself!

But what really s*cks here, is the mere fact that the Iphone does not bother to let me know, that ringing is turned off. The Iphone has no indicator on its beautiful display to show me somehow "ringer off". Nothing.

So even if you have taken the Iphone out of your pocket, and have it on your desk, you may not know about the changed ringing settings. That is all weird!

Why can't the Iphone not just let me know about that fact?

BTW, the bell (representing the ringer) shown on the the photos below, which shows a plain bell and a stroked bell, is not shown as a status indicator, but will only be shown during the transition of the state.

So you will only see it for seconds, once you intentionally switched from one state to the other state. After that, there is no information about the current ringer state!

Finally you can have fun with two videos.

Enjoy this short movie ad as a remake of an original 1984 ad from Apple.

Now see the original ad from Apple Inc. on YouTube!

"1984 is a television commercial launched by Apple Inc. in 1984 to promote the Macintosh personal computer in the United States. Directed by Ridley Scott, the commercial first aired on January 22, 1984." as written on YouTube.

I THINK APPLE HAS TURNED THE EVIL SIDE,
WHICH IS SHOWN IN THE VIDEOS ABOVE.

If you like all of these stupid limitations,
or you just like to have
the ultimate Ipod ever built by Apple,
then the Iphone may be your toy!

But be aware,
maybe your government may
kick you out of your country,
as you have not chosen
NOKIA.

Varokaa Ubersteve:iä

HOWTO: How to reset your locked or frozen Iphone

2010-01-24T04:19:00.000-08:00

I have an ongoing issue with the Iphone in regard to turning it on again after a night the Iphone was turned on, and it has a very low battery on the morning afterrwards. When I plug in the USB (the Iphone charger cable) it comes back to life, shows me the red battery status indicator, and shows me it is charging.

After a while that indiciator goes away, and it seems to start as anticapated. But all at once, the screen turns all white. No information is visible to me. Just a all white screen. It seems like that the white screen is the new blue screen, we have seen so many times on software made by Microsoft. :-)

Actually I can notice that the Iphone is somehow working in this peculiar state, as functions like "take a screen shot" do apparently work, because the Iphone produces that typical "take screen shot" sound. But the screen is still actually all white!

Ok, so the only remedy seems to reset the somewhat frozen Iphone.

HOWTO Reset A Frozen Iphone

Reset the Iphone by holding the sleep/wake button at the top right of the device
and
the home button at the bottom center of the face at the same time.

Hold them both until you see the screen go black and the white Apple logo appear.

After this has happened, you can let go - the Iphone will then reboot!

What is today's date?

2010-01-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

I don't know how you use your IPhone, but for me it has to serve many different demands. First of all, you need something to hate, this is very well served by the IPhone. But then there is also real stuff, you may like to experience as well.

Just take a look at this screen:

What you see is that lovely blog you are reading right now, shown in that quite ok, but not perfect Apple Inc. Safari web browser. What else you can find out? Basically you are on Airport mode, a quite filled battery of 92% and of course the current time.

Seems pretty much info. Wow.

But for me, something very simple is missing. It is the current date and possibly also the DoW aka day of week!

Actually I do not have wrist watch for quite a long time, so all of my cells have been abused by me asking to tell me the current time for this long time. This is all fine, but regularly, I also need to know the current date.

And this very useful information is not shown on the IPhone's top status line. Apparently the IPhone knows obviously the current date, and it can do so without asking you to get one of those billions of crappy Apps available on the Apple Inc. AppStore. Great!

All you need to do is "press the home button". This will then terminate your current App or IPhone Application running, and show the IPhone Apple Inc. Calendar Application icon. Which shows here "Wednesday 6". It does not tell you the current month or year. but the smart guys at Apple Inc. ask a little cooperation of you in this challenging task.

Actually pressing the home button, may not be sufficient to reveal that limited and in-comprehensive information, as you may terminated an App or IPhone Application, which has its icon on a different screen than the Calendar icon. This would require to press twice the home button, but only if you did not dare to move the IPhone Calendar Application to yet another screen. By default it is on the first screen. This would then even require to look for the Calendar App among your screens. Which may require even more user interface actions.

Ok, to make things very simple. The IPhone may not provide you an essential information, such as the date and day of week, which you may be seen on other cells just by looking on the screen, without an additional one, two or whatever number of user actions!

Wow.

That is really great usability. I just have to limit my obviously silly request for features on the IPhone. I should not expect, that the IPhone would let me allow to show the date and week of day permanently on the IPhone's top status line. If I like to have that I should rather go to Walgreens or your other favorite drugstore and get a $30 cell there, which may do this trick. Ouch!

I just like to click every other moment to get rid of those useless modal dialogue boxes and I should be too shy to do the same to find out what the current date and day of week is.

Happy new Year 2010!

At least I know this without asking the IPhone.

YAMF Yet another missing feature: No date and time information shown in IPhone Photo Viewer!

2009-12-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

After so much sadness I had to go through with my most hated IPhone, I am always more than excited to find new and astonishing annoyances!

I am so surprised that I have not found out about this so much earlier. Probably I was too much consumed dealing with all the crappy features and inconsistencies, and certainly about those horrendous modal dialog boxes, which I really love to hate!

Since the advent of digital photography, a very useful feature came along. In the good old days, it was always a big issue to find out, what was the time that perfect shot was made? Now this is no longer a big deal with digital photography, and so we take if for granted that our photo viewing devices will show the exact date and time. And some may even tell you the geographic position, if that information was added to file during the shooting of the photo.

I was browsing photos in my IPhone Photo Viewer, to take a closer look at the pictures I have taken since I have bought the IPhone.

So this photo came along, which shows the "House of Evil", also knows as an Apple Inc. retail store in San Francisco:

Store Information

Address:
One Stockton Street
San Francisco, CA 94108 (415) 392-0202

On the IPhone's Photo Viewer, this photo looks like:

And what is most interesting, there is no way to find out the date and time the photo was taken.

Wow!

Isn't this one of the most essential features ever to have using such an application? I absolutely do think so. But not according the smart guys at Apple Inc. in charge of product management or product development. It is just insane, that we even may not get such a basic feature on the Wunderphone! Just horrible.

Then I was checking, if the IPhone would actually write the so called Exif (Exchangeable image file format) data in photo file. And my lovely Ubuntu machine would release that information in a matter of seconds:

So the IPhone Camera Application, is basically capable of writing correct and comprehensive Exif data in a photo file taken with just that Camera Application.

As I have told before, the IPhone Camera Application usually does the right thing, but the IPhone Photo Viewer has the problems to deal with.

So even though, the data is available, no one of the numerous smart guys in charge of whatever at Apple Inc., thought it could be a cool feature to show time and date of a photo!

I just don't get it! What is wrong asking for such a basic feature? This is really weird!

C'mon Apple Inc. and most beloved Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve, just offer the extra "show date and time information" app for just $1.99. I guess that could be another approach to cash in on the most obvious features, that are missing on your so much beloved Wunderphone!

Microsoft Inc. Bing App & Google Inc. Maps & Apple Inc. IPhone = Total Annoyance Guaranteed - revisited

2009-12-27T11:32:00.000-08:00

This is a short article about new findings in regard to the annoying Google Maps and Microsoft Bin App in regard to Location Services.

Previous article.

Initially I have complained about the fact, that

Google Maps annoyed me by stupid "Your location can not be determined." messages
Microsoft Bin Apps annoyed me by asking me to turn on Location services.

If you take a closer look at the screen shots of the previous article, you will notice that I was in Airplane Mode.

Switching to Airplane Mode, will initially turn off all network connections (3G/GSM and Wi-Fi) but will also shutdown the IPhone's GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver!

So whenever you are in Airplane Mode, you will never be able to use GPS! Even considering the fact, that GPS only receives signals from the GPS satellites, but does not transmit anything!

But still the IPhone Applications (e.g. IPhone Google Maps) and IPhone Apps (e.g. Microsoft Bin App) are completely glueless about this fact! Apparently they do not know, that Airplane Mode equals to Non GPS mode!

So that Application and App, will nevertheless terrorize you by sending all of those horrible and useless modal dialog boxes about the Location Services.

Isn't that amazing? Location Service may not work, as they are shutdown by Airplane Mode, but still Applications and Apps annoy you? No, I don't think so. this just the typical approach of the IPhone and its contributing developers to do business. It is all too typical for the IPhone software system, that one end never knows what the other end is doing ...

Microsoft Inc. Bing App & Google Inc. Maps & Apple Inc. IPhone = Total Annoyance Guaranteed

2009-12-24T08:18:00.001-08:00

This should be an easy Christmas Eve morning, playing around with my (not really) loved IPhone.

First I was checking Baltimore, MD on Google Maps on the IPhone. Google Maps found Baltimore in a matter of seconds, but even some seconds later, I was informed that my location could not be determined. Obviously the IPhone could not pick up the GPS satellite signals in the room I was. Which is not a big deal. Ok.

IPhone Google Maps

Your location could not be
determined.

OK

But, Google Maps was so persistent, to send this stupid modal dialog box, every other minute! Just imagine you want to surf Google Maps, and then this stupid modal dialog box, pops up every other 60 seconds! Wow, this really s***s! How can the geniuses of Apple Inc. and Google Inc. ever build such a kind of software? This is really crapware instead!

Let's try a work around

So to get rid of this annoying modal dialog box error message, I have turned off Location Services. This should do the trick! After all, how can we all endure the stupid and arrogant IPhone software without all of those work arounds?

Then I wanted to check something using that horrible Microsoft Bing App. And you would not believe what kind of error message I have gotten after turning Location Services off!?

Microsoft Inc. Bing App

Turn On Location Services to
Allow "Bing" to Determine
Your Location

Settings Cancel

Wow, this is incredible! If Location Services are turned on, then the stupid Bing App, will always ask me, if it can get my location. If Location Services are turned off, then it asks me to turn on Location Services. WTF is going on here. Who the f***k is in charge of the IPhone in my hands? Apparently not me! :-(

Will these horrible and stupid companies

Google Inc.
Apple Inc.
Microsoft Inc.

never let me decide, how I want to use

MY

IPhone?

This is really the total annoyance achieved by all those extra smart guys working for all of those top IT companies. It is just weird, stupid, and whatever ...

Merry Christmas!

IPhone Disenchanted: Top 10 Iphone Web Surfing Safari Annoyances

2009-12-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

This is a preliminary version of the article. Some corrections may be needed.

To be honest, web surfing on the IPhone is definitely one of the better product features of this Wunderphone. I would admit, the IPhone's general features of Safari are a benchmark for the industry. Surfing the web feels so much better now, then what was given to us before the Iphone from guys like NOKIA, MOTOROLA or even RIM aka BLACKBERRY.

Actually, I had the pleasure to mess around with a NOKIA E71, and I really did not like it very much. In so many ways, it was much more complicated than the IPhone is right now. But the IPhone is the Wunderphone.

It just has to do not just better, not just significantly better, instead it just has to be PERFECT. But actually it is very IMPERFECT in regard to surfing the web.

Again, even though it's holiday season, I can just not let go and have to tell about those really stupid and for most part really unnecessary annoyances in regard to web surfing.

So find attached my Top 10 Iphone Web surfing annoyances:

TOP 1: Safari most useless modal dialog box "Cannot Open Page".

Cannot Open Page

Safari cannot open the page
because it is not connected to the
Internet.

OK

My first negative experience with the IPhone using the Safari (TM of Apple Inc.) web browser was one of those numerous and highly useless "Cannot Open Page" error messages. I'd rather prefer to call them "terror" messages.

The IPhone is a cellphone, so usually it has no permanent ethernet or other wired connection. This is obvious, as a cable, permanently connected to the IPhone, would limit the IPhone's and its users freedom to move around with it, which would defeat the IPhones purpose.

Sometimes there is no coverage. This time it is not to blame the IPhone or Apple Inc. or Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve. No, you may have no coverage as you are in your garage, somewhere in the woods, which is not served by AT&T, then you are out of luck and should not expect much connectivity.

No problem with that, I fully admit as "sh*t happens", also "no coverage happens" ... :-)

But the problem with the IPhone is, that it really annoys even more about those non coverage situations. It fires one of those numerous and highly unnecessary modal dialog boxes! And as required by those, you have obediently ack them by pressing OK. If you ever had a shaky coverage situation, and tried to surf the web, then those terror messages really do s**k a lot! They somehow may annoy you even more, than just the fact you are out of coverage.

It's just this obsession about the IPhone telling me constantly about one or the other error, or not even near error situation, and requiring me to click on something to make it go away. This makes totally no sense to me!

What I request:
SAFARI STFU! DO NOT REQUIRE OF ME TO CLICK "OK", WHENEVER YOU HAVE NO COVERAGE AND THEREFORE CANNOT DOWNLOAD A WEB PAGE.
TELL ME ABOUT THIS SITUATION IN A FRIENDLY AND "CLICK FREE" WAY!
THEN EVERYTHING IS ALL FINE FOR ME.
BUT AS SAID BEFORE STFU IN THIS SITUATION!

TOP 2: No way to store (or keep) a web page permanently

If you are reader of this blog, then you may have noticed that I am highly disappointed about the way I can not use the tons of memory my IPhone actually has. As said before, the IPhone is just an IPod, which I can use to make phone calls, surf the web and write emails/text messages. But the IPhone does not offer any useful way to use those tons of memory to store anything else. So it does not allow me to store a web page permanently. For most cases this would be at least some kind of work around to store information on the IPhone permanently.

Whenever you have opened some (more than one) web pages, and go back from one page to the other, the IPhone will try to make a reload aka refresh of that web page. If you have coverage, then this should work, but if you are out of coverage, Safari will throw that page to its trash bin, and show you an empty webpage. The information is all gone ... great!

So for this very simple situation, the IPhone may not even live up to $16 moleskine! Whatever you write in it, it will stay there.

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO KEEP ANY WEB PAGE AND STORE THEM IN A PERMANENT WAY. THE IPHONE SHOULD NEVER DELETE A WEB PAGE AS A RESULT OF NON COVERAGE. IT SHOULD BE VERY CONSIDERED WHEN DEALING WITH INFORMATION.

TOP 3: No search (or should I call it find) feature

The IPhone has this wonderful 320 by 240 pixels screen. Wow, it is great, but to read fat and lengthy documents or web pages in full may be considered some sort of a challenge. Just think about the currently debated senate health care bill H.R. 3590! Could you read this completely?

Sometimes you are just interested in certain information on a web page or document, which can be easily found, if there was only a "find" feature in Safari. Even in its third version of the IPhone, there is no search and therefore no find feature. I tried some simple javascript "bookmarklet" to do the magic, but it was not really enchanting to me. The bookmarklet used, did not just search all through the visible text, but also through the text of the HTML tags. Wow. After finding some stuff, it changed the HTML document by marking the found location with yellow background.

But it changed the HTML in a way, that some hyper links did not work anymore! So to be honest, it was just a crappy and non functional work around. So do not tell me about this here!

For the IPhone, just like any other usable web browser, a good working search/find feature is not just a plus but an essential feature!!! I use it all the time on the great Firefox browser. CTRL-F along with the search string, usually gets me the information in seconds, compared to reading the whole documents all the time!

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SEARCH WEB PAGES IN A VERY EFFICIENT WAY. I WANT TO HAVE A GOOD AND EFFICIENT SEARCH AND THEREFORE FIND FEATURE, WHICH CAN BE FOUND IN ANY OTHER GOOD WEB BROWSER. EVEN THE MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER CAN DO THAT, ALTHOUGH I ONLY USE FIREFOX INSTEAD! C'MOM THIS IS A STATE OF THE ART FEATURE.

TOP 4: Issues with Cut & Paste (Which is one of my overall Top 10 IPhone annoyances!)

Ever since I had the pleasure to use Cut & Paste for the first time, I really did and still do like it so much. CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V and CTRL-X are one of my most efficient keys that I use every day. It saves me so much time. Initially there was no Cut & Paste on the IPhone, and this considering Apple Inc., who has brought us the first widely available desktop computer to have this feature built in!

Maybe Apple Inc. IPhone division has completely forgotten about the Apple Inc. line of Mackintosh aka Mac computers, which ever since brought us great Cut & Paste experience. So it took them a major software update to bring this feature finally also to the IPhone.

I do not want to reiterate of some of the problems users may encounter using Cut & Paste, but just about the fact, that this highly useful feature can be turned off of by some web pages! I have experienced so many times, that Cut & Paste did not work on some web pages.

One of my #1 web pages on the IPhone is amazon.com. If you ever had to deal with long product or order numbers, you would certainly appreciate Cut & Paste. But that feature does not work on that very important web site! And do not blame Amazon, a really great company, but blame Apple Inc. for somehow letting Amazon shut off the Cut & Paste feature.

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO USE CUT & PASTE ANYTIME! NO WEBSITE SHOULD BE ABLE TO INHIBIT THIS ESSENTIAL AND USUALLY SO USEFUL FEATURE.

TOP 5: Scaling of webpages not always possible

Sometimes reading web pages is great, as everything has the right size and is just perfect. But there is other times, when you like to use the very useful and great scaling feature of Safari. It is great to make it bigger, so that you can read it so much better. But just like Cut & Paste, this feature can somehow be turned off. This also applies to amazon.com . And I do mean the special web page built for the IPhone.

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SCALE ANY WEB PAGE ANYTIME. NO WEB SITE SHOULD BE ABLE TO INHIBIT THIS ESSENTIAL FEATURE.

TOP 6: No way to download documents (PDF, Microsoft Office, etc.) and store them on the IPhone permanently

As complained so many times, there is not much use of the IPhone's tons of built in memory! This is especially true, whenever you like to download documents for long term storage on the IPhone. The IPhone's Safari web browser does not offer this very useful feature.

Just imagine you go some place, like another country, where you have no coverage, or coverage is just too expensive to use. Then wouldn't it be nice to download some documents before going there and storing it in one of the many GBs available on the IPhone?

Of course it would be great! Even if you are in a tunnel it may be great to have some access to downloaded documents. But Safari just does not offer this very essential feature! Instead there is this constant mandate imposed by Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve to download and download and redownload documents all over again. And this may cause extremely high phone bills, that you would like to avoid. Never forget, the IPhone is not that smart phone, but just that revolutionary internet device.

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD DOCUMENTS FROM A WEB PAGE (E.G. PDF, MICROSOFT OFFICE, OR ANY OTHER FILE) AND STORE THIS DOCUMENT PERMANENTLY! I OBVIOUSLY ALSO WANT TO DELETE, RENAME, COPY, ETC. SUCH STORED FILES.

TOP 7: TBA
TOP 8: TBA
TOP 9: TBA
TOP 10: TBA

Bing App - You ain' t better than the other crappy IPhone Apps ...

2009-12-21T13:56:00.000-08:00

I have just installed the new Bing App.

No doubt, Microsoft Inc. ever since was the inferior company
compared to the magicians from Apple Inc.. You just gotta have
the better ideas once you work in sunny California as compared to
rainy Washington state.

But Microsoft has changed a lot.
So I thought, why not install the Bing App?!

You will probably not be surprised, but

Stupid Usability

and

Stupid Error Messages

are also what you get from the guys in Redmond, WA.
I could not tell, if I actually should expect this, but it happened anyway.

This is really the stuff that I DO HATE SO MUCH about the IPhone.
It is those everyday annoyances that really p**s me off!

What is it?

Stupid Bing App Welcome Dialog

After starting the Bing App
I AM ALWAYS ASKED

"Bing" Would Like to Use
Your Current Location

Don't Allow OK

And I always click on Don't Allow!
As I just do not like to tell the stupid Bing App what my current location is.

I can understand, that it is a useful feature for Bing to use the current location, but is there any useful point in asking me this f***ed up question all the time?

I DON'T THINK SO!

But the problem seems to be, that the guys at Microsoft Inc. do not think much more than their counterparts at Apple Inc. and so many other amateurs in the IPhone App Software Development.

As the Apple Inc. software developer and usability guys are so much under constant pressure from Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve, they may have never come to this very simple idea.

Let's provide a general setting, which controls the Location Information for all Apps!!!!

It could look like this:

Always Allow Location Information for Apps
YES NO

Having this general setting, could save all of us billions of those useless clicks, we have to endure every other day.

Then I had my next experience, just by clicking around the Bing App. Actually I clicked on movies. I thought Bing would somehow pop up a cool movie list of some sort or anything else in regard to movies. But I just got one of those stupid modal dialog box error messages.

Stupid Error Message

We did not find any results for
Movies

OK

Well, obviously you can not find anything as I have not entered anything in the big white search field right of the "Bing" logo! So what is the point in telling me, there is no result as I have obviously not tried to search anything?

And why do the dirty and cheap modal dialog box, which I sure
HAVE TO CLICK ON
to continue with using the Bing App?

Wouldn't it make much more sense to write the same informational message just above those 6 buttons, in a way, which needs not to be OKed?

Still after all the years of MS DOS, MS Windows 3.x, Windows95, ... and all the stupidity we had to endure, again the same sh*t seems to happen on the IPhone. Stupid Error Messages along with Stupid Usability that continiously makes you do things you do not like to do!

THIS REALLY S***S!

C'mon Microsoft Inc. I know you can do better! This time do not follow the crappy stuff you see made by Apple Inc. and all those other amateurs in the IPhone App Development community.

I know there is great IPhone Apps around, but my guess it that about 99% of all Apps in the wonderful Apple Inc. App Store should be rather in the trash can, as they have not much quality in any way.

Update

Even more useless and annoying
Stupid Error Messages
from the Microsoft Inc. Bing App

The internet is currently unavailable.
Check your network.

OK

WTF, do you think at all?
OK. the Internet is not there. So what?
Does this justify to ask for another useless OK click?
Not for me.
I do not like to click for any b**ls**t that comes along.

Is there no way to tell me this situation in a more
calmed down way?

The Microsoft Inc. Bing App
is just crap!

Because it follows the same error message concept,
the so called modal dialog boxes,
which has been made the standard by the Apple Inc.
usability amateurs!

Top 10 Iphone Mail Annoyances revisited: STUPID ERROR MESSAGES and STUPID MANDATORY CLICKING

2009-12-16T15:37:00.001-08:00

After writing my Top 10 Iphone Mail Annoyances, it was obvious to see those stupid things I really hate about the IPhone. I guess you have gotten through the same kind of experience!

Stupid Error Messages

The IPhones approach to error situations is very simple:

Annoy the user by presenting a useless modal dialog box!

A so called modal dialog box is a user interface methodology, which dates back to the times, when most IPhone users have not even been born. It is a basically completely outdated approach to inform a user about an error situation. What makes such a dialog box so annoying is the fact, that the whole workflow is blocked, and the IPhone REQUIRES you to click on YES, NO, DISMISS, or whatever it likes you to click. If you do not obey, then nothing is going to happen. You will be stuck in the situation. So you must click to go.
Ok, I do not like this, but I hate this!

Here in this case, I got one of those so many and numerous horrible modal dialog boxes.
What really s***s here is the fact, that the stated error situation is complete nonsense!

Cannot Get Mail
The user name or password for
.... is
incorrect.

OK

Ok, the IPhone pretends there is a problem with the user name or the password. As said, this is absolutely not true, as the IPhone is actually downloading mails from that account and I can also send mails using this account. No problem with that. It is true that the IPhone may not get mails at a certain moment in time, but this is caused by too many requests sent by the IPhone to the POP3 mail server, which will then somehow (which I actually don't know exactly) send an error telling this fact or whatever. Based on this feedback, or whatever other situation, the IPhone makes up this b**ls**t error message, which I have to obediently acknowledge by clicking on OK.

NO SORRY,
THIS IS NOT OK!
DO NOT ANNOY ME WITH THIS KIND OF USELESS ERROR MESSAGES
DOZENS AND DOZENS AND DOZENS OF TIMES
A SINGLE DAY.

Stupid Usability

Another very common IPhone user interface approach:

Annoy the user by requesting to click to do the most obvious actions like completely downloading a mail.

Ok, this time the annoyance is also related to another of those thousands of useless and unneccessary clicks we have to go through during our limited life on earth, while using the IPhone. The IPhone does not download a mail completely, which actually may not have 5 fat 2MB JPEG files or one of those useless funny Powerpoint presentations floating in mail cyberspace. No, it is just an all plain HTML text only mail, which has some links embedded in it. Nothing really fancy. But it seems to be at the cutting edge for the IPhone. So it only downloads half or even less of the mail, and asks me to click to download to huge amount of 6.6KB to make it whole.

This message is only partially downloaded.

Download remaining 6.6 KB

What is wrong here? I am at home having a fat DSL broadband connection. And still the IPhone is too shy to completely download another 6.6 KB of a mail? Are those guys, who have developed the IPhone mail client completely brain dead? Or what makes you think a user may like this kind of stupid user experience? It is all nonsense! Makes not any sense what so ever.

OK, I admit, downloading megabytes, while using GSM/3G may be a problem because of potental data traffic fees, but does it make any sense to scrap 6.6 KB of a rather small sized mail? Not for me! As I have explained before, even a very useful concept, what I would call SMART SYNCING, that has a rule based concept of what to download and what not, is just phantasy right now on the IPhone. It just does not exist.

But as complained before, the problem of these hidden non downloads, may cause problems whenever you are out of GSM/3G signal or access to your own access point or hotspot. In such cases you may have downloaded a highly important mail, have already half of it and miss the end of an important story. And then you may be excited about it, and may end up not knowing the whole story of it. The IPhone does not even offer a central function, download all mails completely. Not to mention the lack of downloads of all attachments ...

THIS IS AMATEURISH AND ALL WEIRD!

Completely forget about mail on the IPhone,
if mail is very important for you.

The IPhone's mail client is just so stupidly designed and built,
that you may not be able to have access to your most important mails,
when you really need them most!

IPhone Disenchanted or TOP 10 Iphone Mail Annoyances

2009-12-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

Let's disenchant the wonderful IPhone!

These are my TOP 10 IPhone Mail Annoyances

TOP 1: Where the heck are the new mails?

The IPhone's mail client icon shows you with a little red dot, and a white number in it, how many new mails you have received. Looks great, and should be Ok. But once you click on the icon, you are not easily guided to your new (unread) mails, but the IPhone will just shows you the regular overview of your mail accounts, as you would see them anyway. To read the new mails, you need to check the whole overview of all of your mail accounts and look now for little now greyish squares instead of the very visible read circles with numbers in it, to tell where you may find your new mails. So you always have to search the new mails, which may take some time, if yoy have more than one account. Why can't the IPhone sort the mail accounts in that way, that mail accounts with new mails are shown first in the list? The IPhone could even sort the mail accounts by the number of new mails. So the first mail account would always have the most new mails. Instead the IPhone wants you to waste your time to look for all those new mails. Well, this should be a user selectable feature, which is rare with the IPhone.

What I request:
I WANT TO SEE ALL MAIL ACCOUNTS FIRST THAT HAVE NEW MAILS FOR ME, WHENEVER I START THE MAIL APPLICATION. SO THE MAIL APPLICATION SHOULD IMPLEMENT A VERY SIMPLE RESORTING FOR THIS CASE. I DO NOT LIKE TO BE FORCED TO "SEARCH" FOR THOSE NEW MAILS. THIS IS ANNOYING AND WASTES MY TIME.

TOP 2: No useful use of the tons of memory for mails.

The IPhone has tons of memory, but Apple Inc. / Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve will not let you decide how to use it. So you have no way to have all of your mails stored in your IPhone. Even if you have 15GB free memory, the IPhone will only store 200 mails per mail account locally. All other mails need to be accessed through an existing internet connection. If your are out of signal of your favorit 3G operator or Wi-Fi access point, you have no way to access those mails beyond the 200 mail (per account) limit. So better not be in the desert or some other distant place to read some "older" mails there. If you get about 30 mails a day, it means you may not be able to read the mails of the last week. The obvious question for this rather stupid and paternalistic approach is quite simple, the IPhone is basically an IPod that can make phone calls and surf the web. "Wasting" useful memory for mails, may block the memory and inhibit that an IPhone customer may new stuff from the ITunes Store!

What I request:
I WANT TO HAVE ALL MAILS AVAILABLE ANYTIME! I WANT TO BE ABLE TO READ ALL OF MY MAILS EVEN IF I HAVE NO PRESENT 3G/GSM OR WI-FI COVERAGE. THEREFORE I WANT TO BE ABLE TO STORE ALL MAILS LOCALLY! THE IPHONE SHOULD LET ME DECIDE HOW MANY (IF NOT NOT ALL) MAILS ARE STORED LOCALLY.

TOP 3: No explicit selection of language for spell checker.

The IPhone has some kind of spell checker, but I do not know how it works. As I am capable of writing more than one language I would like to enjoy the great work of a spell checker to support me. Instead of letting me decide which language the spell checker of the IPhone is about to use, the IPhone makes that decision by itself. By this I regularlyI realize that the IPhone has apparently chosen the wrong language. This results in making the IPhone suggest me weird corrections, as the correction does not belong to the language I write in.

What I request:
I WANT TO TELL EXPLICITLY THE IPHONE, WHICH LANGUAGE SHOULD BE USED FOR SPELL CHECKING.

TOP 4: No useful concept for handling attachments.

The IPhone does not support the use of attachment in a useful way. The only files you may attach are photos and videos! You can do that from the photo viewer app. But for this kind of attachment you may only add ONE photo, but not TWO or even THREE. But it is the whole concept that is bad. First of all, you may not save any files, except for photos from incoming mails. As a lack of saving files from incoming mails, you may not add those not existing files to a new mail. If you receive a mail that has an attachment, that you may want to send to another person, but may not like the other person to know the original mail, then you need to forward the mail, remove all the mails text, and write the mail around it. If you want to do just that with attachments from different mails, then you have to write (forward) mails for each and every attachment, as you may not be able to put all attachments in one mail. Basically, except for some very limited features, the concept of attachments, which are these days in most cases, a very important part of mails, does not exist!

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAVE MAIL ATTACHMENTS, ADD THEM TO OTHER MAILS, RENAME THEM, AND DO ALL THE BASIC STUFF THAT I AM DOING FOR SUCH A LONG TIME EVERY DAY.

TOP 5: Stupid error messages (not neccessarily a mail problem ... only) - lack of consolidated error messages

If you have more than one or two mail accounts, you have noticed it before. Some times you may get as many as the number of your mail accounts error messages. Those error messages pop up, and require from you to click Dismiss. This is especially horrible if you may have 10 mail accounts, which is not too uncommon for most people these days. The IPhone annoys you by telling you maybe 10 times, that your mailbox may not be reached. A consolidated and smart presentation of this error message does not exist. The IPhone loves to send you error messages as primitive modal dialogue boxes, which resemble the usability of a long time ago. What is really bad about this, is that you have to individually acknoledge each and every error message.

What I request:
I WANT A CONSOLIDATED AND USEFUL PRESENTATION OF ERROR MESSAGES. AND I SEE NO POINT IN CLICKING SOMEWHERE, BECAUSE OF AN NON CRITICAL/FATAL EROR SITUATION.

TOP 6: Searching mails

I do not know the contents of all the mails, that I have sent or received. So somtimes I need to find a particular mail. The search functionality of the IPhone does not work the way as I am now used from GMAIL. Therefore very often I do not find the mails that I am looking for.

What I request:
I WANT TO HAVE A GOOD SEARCH FUNCTION FOR MY MAILS.

TOP 7: Lack of "smart" syncing of mails

The IPhone does not have something what could be considered smart syncing. By this I mean a function, which does somehow smart downloads of current mails. The IPhone, e.g. once you use it as an IMAP cient (GMAIL), does not automatically download all mails. So once you have sent a mail, which will be stored in the "Sent Mail" folder, do not expect from the IPhone to download that mail for you. As a matter of fact, you may be out of luck to read those mails, if you have not click the corresponding folder during you had still internet access.

What I request:
I WANT THAT THE IPHONE DOES AUTOMATICALLY DOWNLOAD ALL NEW MAILS OF ALL FOLDERS (IMAP ACCOUNTS), EVEN IF I DO NOT CLICK ON THE CORRESPONDING MAIL FOLDER. I DO NOT LIKE TO CLICK ON INDIVIDUAL FOLDERS TO UPDATE THEIR CONTENTS.

TOP 8: No easy way to deal with tons of new mails ...

The IPhone does not offer a simple function "mark all mails read". So once you setup a new POP3 mail account, as you may not use IMAP instead, all mails wille be marked "new", even though they may be years old. To mark all mails as read, you need to click each and every mail individually! This can be a hard job, if the existing mail has more than a dozen mails.

What I request:
I WANT TO BE ABLE TO APPLY FUNCTIONS (E.G. DELETE MAIL, MARK AS READ, ...) TO MORE THAN ONE MAIL. IT SHOULD HAVE A FUNCTION LIKE "DELETE ALL MAILS", "MARK ALL MAILS AS READ".

TOP 9: No defined default mail account for outgoing mails

As said before, I have more than one mail accounts. I use the different mail accounts for different purposes, focused either for private or business matters. This is my way to get along with all these different matters. The IPhone is Ok for reading the mails, but is a bit tricky when writing a new mail! If you write a new mail, then the currently selected mail account will be used for that mail. Somehow this makes sense, as you are in Mailaccount dummy@somewhere.com, then this should also be used for outgoing mail. But sometimes you may be overwhelmed by so many mails you have read, that you do not think much about the proper account for an outgoing mail account. So I lot of my mails where sent using the wrong account, which I certainly do not like that much!

What I request:
I WANT TO SELECT A DEFAULT MAIL ACCOUNT FOR ALL NEWLY CREATED OUTGOING MAILS!

TOP 10: Attachments are not loaded automatically, but need yet the extra click!

The IPhone does not automatically download attachments sent to it. Instead the IPhone shows yet another thing to click on, to individually download each attachment. If you have a lot of attachments in a mail, you need to click a lot of times. There is nothing like "Download all attachments.". But this is just a matter of convenience. More annoying is the fact, that you may read a mail, which will certainly (at least for the Inbox folder) automatically downloaded, and be at a location without 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity, then you have no chance to read those not already downloaded attachments. The mail may be completely useless to you, as those attachments are missing. I can understand, that IPhone users may not like all attachments being downloaded for data volume costs, but this could be circumvented by setting a limit for the maximum data size of a mail.

What I request:
I WANT THAT I CAN TELL THE IPHONE, THAT ATTACHMENTS SHOULD BE DOWNLOADED AUTOMATICALLY. THE IPHONE SHOULD OFFER ME TO LIMIT THE KIND OF ATTACHMENTS BY DEFINING FILE TYPES, AND THEIR MAXIMUM SIZE, WHICH SHOULD ACTUALLY BE DOWNLOADED. IF USERS DO NOT LIKE THIS FEATURE, THEN IT SHOULD ALSO BE ABLE TO DEACTIVATE IT.

I think for most
really active mail users,
the IPhone's mail functions
are rather disappointing.

Let's face it,
it is just not
that revolutionary!

New finding: Most Apple IPhone users suffer from Stockholm Syndrom - Wow! Not me though!

2009-12-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from a friend about a psychological analysis for IPhone users. Being not a professional of Psychology I could only express a similar finding about most Apple Inc. customers myself. But now also others have come tho the same conclusions.

These are some interesting parts of an analysis performed by
STRAND CONSULT.

You may read their full findings at

http://www.strandreports.com/sw4031.asp.

STRAND CONSULT,
GOOD JOB
I DO FULLY AGREE!

But let's read some of the stuff they have written.

"It is no secret that there has been a great deal of hype surrounding the iPhone and it is also no secret that Apple probably has the most loyal and fanatic customers in the world."

I would fully agree with this first statement. The "normal" Apple customer is fanatic. That is just the way it is. Sorry, I do not consider myself as the normal Apple customer, as I just have one Apple device of my own, which is my stupid IPhone ...

But I think it is more than weird, even pathetic to see people sleep outside an Apple store to get the first piece of a new Apple product. Most people who leave the store seem to be completely doped on their latest Apple product. That is weird for me!

"When we examine the iPhone users’ arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome - a term that was invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing, by defending the people that had held them hostage for 6 days. You can read more about the Stockholm Syndrome here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "

I have heard about the Stockholm Syndrome before, but did not relate it to the behavior of the Apple IPhone user.

This is one of my most important shortcoming of the IPhone universe, it is the whole concept of paternalism of Apple Inc. and Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve imposed on me!

"9. The app store is a closed universe: Apple knows what is best for end users, which is good for the many iPhone users."

This is absolutely right!
I can also fully agree on this finding from the great guys at
STRAND CONSULT.

My feedback to this finding:

Apple Inc. and Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve,

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WANT!

I KNOW WHAT I WANT
AND
I DO NOT LIKE TO BE LIMITED
WHAT ACTUALLY
YOUR
OWN FINANCIAL INTEREST IS!

I liked Apple so much in the past. It was a cool company. Showing how computers could be as compared to all the crappy software made by Microsoft. It was really a great time to see the output of that hippie company in sunny Californa.

Microsoft has now finally made their products better, and of course there is cool stuff in the Linux world, such as the wonderful Ubuntu, which is my favorit OS now. But Apple has turned to the evil side once they got into the IPhone business. It really feels like 1984, or why the heck do I need to tell them my name and credit card data, to download FREE apps. Sorry, even with the most horrendous stuff of Microsoft, this is never needed. This s***s and is really evil.

I can not understand how the average Apple Inc. user, customer thinks and reacts. I still have kept my own mind and say what is so bad about the IPhone, and there is so plenty of just that. But some, or basically the majority, of Apple IPhone users could never admit that. It is all mental.

Sometimes I have the impression that for those guys, Apple is not just a lifestyle but more like a religion, which tells them what is right and what is not. Completely disabling their own ability to think and asses the realities of life in regard to most beloved Apple Inc. products.

Last year I have read the articles about the medical situation of Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve. He had liver cancer, what we know now, and was in bad shape. I feel sorry for him, as I would never like him to die caused by cancer. But the reports in the financial section have actually shown that Apple is Steve Jobs, and maybe Steve Jobs is Apple. So the potential leaving of Steve Jobs, as a result of his medical condition, was considered really bad for Apple. Why? So much about this company's achievements are linked to the charisma of just that guy. And right now, it seems there is no successor to him, that would be able to live up to his strength.

Steve Jobs aka Ubersteve is somehow almost like Messiah to so many people around the world, who identify themselves with his passion and abilities. But c'mon Apple is selling computers and phones, and is not a religion. But for some of them it actually is!

I think this is all pathetic!

Initially I liked the Apple "I AM A MAC" campaign, which has triggered Microsoft's "I AM A PC" campaign.

Now, I think either one s***s, as

I AM NOT A MAC
and
I AM NOT A PC

but
I AM JUST A NORMAL PERSON
WHO HAS TO GET ALONG IN LIFE
WITH THE SHORTCOMINGS
OF ALL THAT COMPUTER STUFF AROUND ME.

Sorry Doubletwist - You are as evil as Apple Inc. is!

2009-12-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

I have just downloaded the wonderful new Doubletwist iTunes clone software.

I was pretty much excited to get an alternative to my most hated iTunes, but to be honest, Doubletwist has just messed it up!

Whatever I hate most about all kinds of software and web services is the mere fact that I am required to get another account of some sort! This really s***s a lot! Why does Doubletwist not let me try their software, without forcing me the signup this Doubletwist account?

Sorry this is really evil, and is not what I have expected from you guys!

You are evil!
But you do not have to be evil!

Wake up, and fix this!

If your software is OK,
then I may signup for the account!

This posting shows, that I can be very unbiased. So it is not just all this Apple bashing you may read here, but I also gladly criticize other companies and products, that just s***! :-)

FileApp version 1.5 confusing (t)error message

2009-12-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

While writing the previous posting I was checking for those weird FileAid directories. So I started the FileApp to check, if it would be in charge of that directory.

Then I got this very confusing error message:

File Location
As of version 1.5 upon Apple's
request file transfer via USB needs
to be removed from FileApp
(previously FileAid). Woud you like
to copy all files that were located in
your DiskAid folder (USB) to your
Documents folder (Wifi)? This
procedure will be offered to you only
once. PLEASE RESTART FileApp
after the alert has disappeared.

NO YES

I did not click either NO or YES. I have just pressed the home button to leave the App immediately. As I have not stored any valuable data with this App, I do not know what was done by the App. If there was any data deleted or moved somewhere. I just don't know.

But this is really one of those typical horrific paternalisms of Apple. Apple requested that a basically useful feature, the obvious file transfer via USB, to be removed! Isn't that like 1984? Where the big evil master tells you what to do and what not to do? This is another so horrible experience with the IPhone.

I was about to write some stuff about this App long time ago, but then I did not find any time doing it. Now just some remarks about FileApp.

FileApp is a tiny App, which kind of emulates the Apple Finder of Windows Explorer application. You know, the IPhone has tons of memory, but the smart guys at Apple Inc. never considered to offer storing files on the IPhone to the normal user. So the IPhone has no means to store basically anything except photos, music or videos. You may not store anything like a PDF or one of your favorite Windows Office files. No way! There is no way to create directories, to copy files or to do anything. which you would expect from a "smart phone". Sorry, I think the IPhone is called the Revolutionary Internet Device! In this regard the IPhone is basically just dumb IPod, which can also make phone calls, and has internet access. But do not expect more smart things to happen.

FileApp is basically one of those millions Apps around to be we a work around for bad or even missing features in the IPhone. It should be a core feature builtin, that there should be no need for this crappy app.

What is crappy?

There is two ways to use this app:

FileApp as FTP Server: FileApp serves as a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server. To transfer files you just need to connect using any kind of FTP client to your IPhone. FTP was OK maybe 20 years ago, but ever since then, there is a lot of progress going on. The major security issue about FTP is its LACK OF ANY KIND OF DATA ENCRYPTION. Basically EVERYTHING IS SENT UNENCRYPTED. EVEN USER ACCOUNT NAMES AND PASSWORDS ARE NOT ENCRYPTED!!!

So hardly any smart user would ever use this crappy old protocol anymore to transfer data through the insecure internet.

How To Connect
Address : ftp://192.168.0.140:2121
Step 1

Now consider one very typical use case. You have your IPhone and your notebook with you at your favorite Cafe. There you log into the available WiFi HotSpot with your Notebook and IPhone. Usually those HotSpots do not use any encryption, as they consider the devices will use encryption themselves. This is a absolutely valid and useful assumption, as the idea of the internet is not to protect your data, but it's your job to do that! This is what people call the end to end conecept. The both peers, that transfer data on the internet have their own responsibility to make sure, that data transfer is safe! So some people have invented SSL (Secure Socket Layer) / TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols long time ago. You will use these protocols, whenever you use HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) on your web browser.

But the smart guys who have developed FileApp, obviously never heard of this! This is shocking to me, but even more shocking is the fact, that even the gods and godesses of software development at Apple Inc., which are in charge of checking and accpeting AppStore apps, have never thought about this either!!!

So whenever you use FileApp in a WiFi network, that is not yours, which may not be encrypted. You endanger yourself to anyone, who has access to that network, which may be other users logged in the WiFi network, or the network operator itself. So your data may be visible to anyone! And what is even more shocking is the fact, that even the password is not protected! So even changes to your data may be made.

I always had the idea, that the AppStore of Ubersteve is to protect me from all the evil around. But it seems there is not much or any competence there, to require that an App, which deals with person and private data has to use some kind of encryted data transfer protocol, such as SSL or any protocol that uses SSL as its transport protocol. In the given case, this could be FTPS (File Transfer Protocol Secure), which is the secure version of FTP. FTPS ensures that all data is encrypted, no one may be able to read or change the data.

As FileApp uses FTP, I think it is a shame of Apple Inc. to admit it access to the AppStore. This is not state of the art data protection. It is rather an amateurish approach of some people to write this kind of application.

FTP s***s, and will only be used by idiots! The only application of FTP is to transfer data in highly secured environments. Then FTP is excellent as it has a very small overhead. To transfer data through insecure environments is dumb!!!

The second way to use this app, which is now blocked by Ubersteve, was USB.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is the standard way to send data from one device to another. It is an excellent means to carry any kind of data convenient and fast. The IPhone obviously uses USB with it's infamous iTunes Application. But it does not allow any other application to use it.

So by blocking this feature from the FileApp application, the whole app is really rendered all useless. The only way to transfer data is by potentially insecure, because unencrypted, WiFi networks! The safe way to transfer the data using USB is gone ...

Just a remark about the implemention of USB in FileApp. File transfer using USB is a highly and very well standardized technique, which runs on billions of USB enabled devices. But the IPhone does not support this, even it would be very easily available. The IPhone has actually implemented this way USB data for the transfer of photos taken with the IPhone to a PC or notebook. But there is no other data that can be accessed using this method. So as a matter of fact, the maker of FileApp had to implement their own USB protocol and offer a special application for PCs and MACs to use that. In order to transfer data using USB, you would have to install that special application in your PC or MAC. A version for other operating systems was of course not offered. This whole thing makes no sense! You have excisting protocols that work excellently on all kinds of platforms, and then it is blocked on the IPhone! This really s***s!

The whole approach of Apple Inc. makes absolutely no sense to me!

Apple Inc. should have gone just the complete opposite way. They should have blocked insecure FTP access to the IPhone and let USB access still work! But not with Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs, the evil master and CEO of Apple Inc.!

HORRIBLE

PS to a really bad USB implementation on the IPhone:

Once you connect the IPhone to your PC/MAC, all files that are available just at that moment will be available using the USB file transfer. So you may basically transfer all files that are then available. If you take during your USB connection another photo/screenshot, then this photo/screenshot will not be available! It will never show in the directory. To make it visible, you have to unplug the USB cable, and then replug it again!

EVEN MORE HORRIBLE AND
AMATEURISH IPHONE SOFTWARE

IPhone bug in photo viewer and/or IPhone camera application

2009-12-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

In a previous posting I have explained an IPhone bug about the IPhone's photo viewer, for photos taken with the IPhone. I think the explanation was a little too complicated, so this is my second attempt to explain it!

First of all, the IPhone camera stores photos in subdirectories of the directory DCIM. DCIM is a name for the directory of cameras used by all major digital camera manufacturers. So in this regard Apple Inc. is accepting external standards. Wow.

The subdirectories are names 100APPLE, 101APPLE, 102APPLE, etc. .

This is how my IPhone's DCIM directories look like. I use Ubuntu (A GREAT OS!!!), so the file explorer may look not familiar to you. Some information has been redacted for privacy matters.

You can see directories 100APPLE to 110APPLE. There is also a directory called DiskAid. This directory has been created by a crappy App called FileApp. I need to write about this App very soon, as this is one of the really bad Apps, which was actually approved by Ubersteve's AppStore guys.

These are the contents of the directory 109APPLE:

These are the contents of the directory 110APPLE:

Actually my IPhone shows IMG_9022.JPG as the last photo. All other photos after that, which are in the directory 110APPLE, etc. are not shown.

This is one of those all typical Apple Inc. sloppy software bugs.

It seems to me, that IPhone Camera App and the IPhone Photo Viewer App, are not understanding each other as they should! The Camera creates directories according the explained naming scheme. Each directory may contain up to 1000 photos. As the the IPhone stores photos and screenshots in these directories, the 1000 photos limit per directory may be reached very easily. This actually happened in my case. I have taken lots of photos, of which most were deleted, and lots of screenshots.

So you see that I have around 600 photos in total. And most directories are sparsely filled.

Basically all photos in the directory 110APPLE and beyond are not shown! Isn't that really bad software quality? Yes it is! It is CRAP!

If the IPhone is not capable of handling more than 10 photo directories, then why not give the user in the Camera App one of those numerous error messages "Camera full - No more photos can be taken - Copy photos first!".

This error message would not make much sense in this case, as there is still tons of free memory, but it could be called consistent! Consistency is of the major drawbacks of the IPhone. Apps do not apply to the same standard, Apps do not have the same user interface, etc.

Another option would be to FIX the photo viewer! Right now the photo viewer may only display photos from the directory 100APPLE to 109APPLE. This means it is limited to 10 directories. But why? What is the problem of reading any number of photos from more than 10 directories? My first Canon camera PowerShot A80 had not problem dealing with more than 10 directories. I assume the CPU power of the Canon A80 camera is probly 1% of the IPhones CPU power. But still this is enough for that camera.

Shocking!

Really poor Apple Inc. IPhone hardware quality - cable almost dead after 5 months

2009-12-07T01:37:00.001-08:00

I have complained in this blog about a lot of really bad and stupid "features" of the iPhone user interface. About restrictions, that the iPhone imposes on me, the worst example is, that I can not use the iPhone as a plain and simple USB device to upload things like music.

Now it seems the iPhone is already falling apart, well it's poor hardware quality is falling apart.

Just take a look at my Apple Inc. Iphone power supply:

Apple Inc. IPhone Power Supply with almost broken cables (Model # not readble, just to small and too little contrast written in grey on white blackground)

You can see that on either sides of the "cool looking" but horrible quality cable, the are cracks in the outer white plastic shielding of the cable. Right now the cable still works, but some day (I hope not too soon), the whole cable will break and will let my iPhone pretty useless, as there will be no way to charge it anymore! BTW, the cable is just 5 months old!

Just compare that to another cable from a very inexpensive cable made by Samsung. You can see, it does not look that cool, as what we know from the Apple Inc. stuff all the time, but it looks rock solid. This cable is in use for about 2 years, and it shows no wear! And I think it will be one of the last things to break!

Samsung low price cell phone power supply with perfect cables (Model #ATAD011EBE)

Ok, sometimes things may break, so let's get a new one! What is the price tag of that in the Apple Inc. Online Store?

"Apple Dock Connector to USB Cable

Use the Dock Connector to USB Cable to charge and sync your iPhone or iPod with your Mac or Windows PC."

Wow, Apple Inc. has obviously found out that cables may break, may be lost or that people may like to have more than one cable. So they offer just the cable. No thrills attached to it. But still they charge what you would expect for the cable and the power supply.

It cost $19 ! Plus tax, shipping, whatever. But even without tax and shipping, it is still $19 for a cable, that be no better than the cable included with your iPhone!

No Comment, except one word "RIP-OFF".

President Ronald Reagan "iReagan" (tm) App - Download only via iTunes or WiFi!

2009-12-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

Official photography of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States of America. See copyright notice at the end of this article.

Everyday there is another exciting and useful App in the great Apple Inc. AppStore available!

Finally Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States (in office January 20, 1981 – January 20, 1989) made it to become the main topic of an iPhone App. I have read about this while on a tram on the wonderful SFGate website. This website is a service of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.

So I have decided immediately to download that great App. Ronald Reagan said those great words at the Berlin Wall

"Tear down this wall",

which was then targeted at the former soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

But once I tried to get this great App was yet another of those most annoying iPhone error, or should we rather say "terror" messages!

The application is over 10MB
Connect to a Wi-Fi network or use
iTunes on your computer to
download "iReaganTM".
Dismiss

The iPhone would not let me download and install this App, as it is larger than 10MB! Even trying it once, twice, three times and four times, could not convince the iPhone to do the job. No way!

Isn't the iPhone the revlotionary internet device, that let's all of us do on the go? Not this time! Instead of letting me decide what I want to download now, the iPhone builds yet another wall, almost as evil as the Berlin wall was, and just says NO.

I think this is this very typical situation you always end up when you deal with the iPhone paternalism. It is not YOU but THEM (Apple Inc.) who have full control over your expensive iPhone! This is really terrible, as for so many other data volume hungry applications, such as YouTube, the iPhone usually say YES, even though that YouTube does not really work good on so many occassions!

So this time, we would need another Ronald Reagan saying those historic words

"Tear down this wall",

of iTunes tyranny and Apple Inc. paternalism.

Make the iPhone YOUR device,
which YOU can control,
and demolish all limitations
imposed by Apple Inc. and Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs!

Copyright Notice about the Ronald Reagan photography:
This image is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America, taken or made during the course of the person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.

Serious iPhone Malfunction - No more than 10.000 images! Or all images that fit in 10 Image directories. (100APPLE to 109APPLE)

2009-09-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

I rely pretty much on the iPhone function to take a screen shot. This is basically the only reliable means to store some information on the iPhone, which is always (even without network or wifi coverage) available.

Tonight I wanted to take a photo. Then I wanted to check if it is ok. But the photo was not shown in the Camera Roll. So I took yet another one, and another one. Then I even took a short video to see, if the photos or videos would show up. But no chance.

After that I rebooted the iPhone from my experiences with computers. A Reboot should always help. But it did not do anything! The photos were still not available.

So I hooked up the iPhone to my notebook. Luckily Ubersteve let's me access the photos taken with the iPhone camera via standard USB connectivity without the awful iTunes software, which actually does not run on my Ubuntu system anyway.

Then I found out:

The pictures and the video were actually there.
But they were not displayed!

All photos that were not displayed are in the directory named 110APPLE.
This is actually the 11th directory on the iPhone to store photos.
The 10 others are called 100APPLE to 109APPLE.

So there must be a limit! Just imagine, the extra smart guys at Apple Inc. are only capable of counting from 0 to 9! 10 seems to be too much for their photo display program. Ouch! All of my non professional Cameras could count to much higher numbers.

Finally I managed to find a limitation, which was nowhere actually advertised and which does inhibit me from using the iPhone. I can no longer take pictures with my iPhone. Well, I can take pictures, but I have no way to view them on the iPhone. And obviously I can't send those photos by email, as I can not see them in the first place.. Their display program is just toooooooo dumb to make the step to the 11th directory.

This is what a really great operating system called Linux can do, it can show photos that the iPhone can not show:

This is the picture I have taken from the Blogger screen on my notebook:

This is what the Camera Roll shows me:

The Camera Roll shows 390 images.

And this is what the overview page shows, which means the picture I have taken ("Blogger") and the two screen shots are not displayed!

Here it only shows 323+62=385 (images/videos). This is not the right number. All images shown on the Ubuntu directory can not and will not be displayed on the iPhone. Even though they are actually on the iPhones memory. This is a serious malfunction!

The high performance software developer who work for Apple Inc. are not capable to write a digital camera display program that can handle more then lousy 10 directories containing at most 1.000 images per directory. This is so sad.

This shows the major deficit of the whole iPhone software situation. It is mixed of all kinds of different software pieces that have no common systematic approach they can rely on. No common understanding what are the baselines, what should work and what should give the user an error message. If there is obviously a limit, maybe just by the fact that Apple Inc. does the quality assurance by its customers, a model already in use by other major companies like Microsoft Inc. for years and even decades. Just deliver crappy software and let the stupid and willingly paying customer find the bugs. Ubersteve your are really evil.

What is my situation right now:

I have by far less than 10.000 photos on my iPhone. I have tons of available memory to shoot new photos or make new screen shots. But all is rendered useless as I can not view the photos or videos on the iPhone. And of course I can not send them in mails. The new photos are pretty useless, once I do not carry a heavy notebook all the time with me.

The iPhone does not allow anything to help me. Even if I turn on iTunes on my XP partition, it will probably offer me to download the photos. But I want to keep them on the iPhone. So I have to delete all photos first to start taking and using new photos.

All of this s*cks so much. The iPhone is really a brain dead product. Not even the camera function works to some acceptable standards.

Most stupidest error message ever: Network Lost after setting to Airplane mode!

2009-09-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

My all time favorite for the most stupidest error message is the following:

Network Lost
Your selected cellular network is no
longer available. You can choose a
different network in Settings.

What happened?

I turned the iPhone to Airplane mode, which means it sh0uld disconnect itself from all kind of networks. So somehow I did not lose a network but I'd rather thrown it away.

OMG a hundred times.

What is all wrong with this Wunderphone made by most beloved genius Ubersteve aka Steve Jobs???

There is so much annoying about the

lack of features
bad implementations
inconsistent user interfaces
silly and useless error messages
and of course worst of all the most hated iTunes program.

But this error message tops all of it.

The iPhone is not that smart thing that the whole world believes. It is basically a piece of ..... which has tons of bugs, problems and annoyances. Wow!

It seems to me, the whole thing is glued together pieces that do not talk to each other in smart way.

The piece shuts off the network connections.
The other notices that there is no more GSM/3G and fires then such an useless error message.

Even if the one event triggers the other event, tt may be quite difficult to determine certain dependencies of a certain action and an error situation caused by it. OK.

But the whole obsession of continously informing the user by modal dialogue boxes that must be answered, otherwise nothing is going to happen, is awful, stupid and completely against any kind of good user experience.

How in the world, can a user be happy if it is constantly bombarded by such stupid error messages. I do not like to be forced to always OK or DISMISS something, if the iPhone is pleased to do so.

Right now I have around 10 mail accounts on the iPhone. Quite a surprise that the iPhone lets me have that many accounts.

Under certain network disruption situations I end up getting up to 10 almost identical error messages, that a certain server like imap.google.com can not be contacted. Not one error message, but maybe 10! This is the most horrendous approach of informing users.

There is no sorry here. This is really bullsh.. software! This in no way revolutionary, this is crappy user experience from the eighties. If there is not a major catastrophe going on, there is usually no mandatory need to have such a situation acknowledged by a user.

It is just the easy approach of firing a stupid modal dialogue boxes, which will inform and annoy the user. This is all bad Ubersteve! You finally get it? Or is counting all the money you earn from the crowd of almost sect like Apple customers taking all of your daily time?

DoubleTwist: Ubersteve tyranny of choice - new video remake of famous 1984 Apple Inc. ad!

2009-09-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

Enjoy this short movie ad as a remake of an original 1984 ad from Apple.

Now see the original ad from Apple Inc. on YouTube!

"1984 is a television commercial launched by Apple Inc. in 1984 to promote the Macintosh personal computer in the United States. Directed by Ridley Scott, the commercial first aired on January 22, 1984." as written on YouTube.

Do you also love “new York”? Spell checking the iPhone way ....

2009-09-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

Writing emails on the iPhone works quite good, considering it may help you a lot with its automated spell correction feature. Usually there is not much need to use the shift key to tell the iPhone a word is supposed to start with an uppercase letter. The iPhone just tries to correct the word and makes one automated suggestion. But somehow the guys at Apple Inc., or who has ever coded this piece of software, do apparently not know much about languages. And certainly not much about New York.

Let's talk a little bit about linguistics, even though that I am not an expert on this matter.

Usually a language has some kind of Alphabet. I know the Chinese language does not have an Alphabet, but all languages in the western world and even a lot of others do.
A number of characters of an Alphabet create words. Words are basically syntacticly correct combinations of characters of an Alphabet.
A combination of more than one word may be considered a phrase or a sentence. Such a phrase or sentence (should usually) have some kind of meaning.

The iPhone seems to have a spell checker that is based on checking individual words, but not combinations of words that can be phrases, names or whatever. Another higher level would be the ability to analyze whole sentences, which would make the whole system even more complicated. Some PC or MAC based word processors can already do that. But this should not be taken into consideration with the iPhone.

As a result of this, the iPhone will in its current version never know how to spell New York correctly. Once the user enters the characters “new york”, this could certainly mean “new York” in some cases, but there is usually a high precedence of spelling this like “New York”.

The iPhone analyzes the word “new” and considers this as the correct spelling.
Then it analyzes the word "york", which should certainly be corrected to "York".
But in context to the world “York” following "new", it is most obvious that the "new" should transformed to "New".

As the iPhone was designed in sunny Caliufornia, how does that relate to names in the area of Cupertino. A famous two word name is certainly San Francisco. Not really amazingly, but the iPhone can spell this name correctly.

How does that work? The word “san” does not exist in the English language, instead “san” is always part of a Spanish name such San Diego, San Franciso, San Mateo, … . So “san” must always be spelled as “San”.

So the correct spelling of these Spanish names on the iPhone does not show its complex analysis of spelling, but relies on the fact that “San” is always the correct spelling.

I have some experience with the Chinese language. I have learned it to some extent and I really do like the writing of the Chinese characters. Actually my pronunciation is so bad that most Chinese people would have a hard time understanding me. But now back to the spelling of chinese.

To write in Chinese on a computer, you use what is called IME (Input Method Editor), which is a specialized add-on to your operating system allowing you to write in Chinese. The IME will take Chinese as pinying, which is a form of Chinese written with the western Alphabet.

You would write for example “wo shi mei guo ren”, which would be translated to the characters “我是美国人”, having the meaning “I am an American.”

Depending on the sequence of words entered in the IME, Chinese characters are chosen by context. In the process of typing in more and more characters, the IME would eventually change preceding characters, if those sequences would match predefined phrases.

Once you have ever seen some Chinese kids chatting, you would notice the constant changing of characters, the more characters they enter.

What works great for Chinese should also work great for English! Considering the user would enter “new”, which would be an adjective in the correct spelling. But if the word “york” is entered afterwards it is almost 100%, that the user may like to write “New York”. So a good spellchecker would then also correct the preceding word "new." Technically this should not be a real problem, except for the fact that the spellchecker would need the capability to analyze phrases.

Another very annoying fact about the iPhones spell checker, is that you may not turn it OFF.

Let's say you want to use your own language, which the iPhone will never ever know. You would always be plagued about the iPhone giving you some weird suggestions. For people that are capable of writing in different languages, the Phone has nothing to offer. It will always make corrections for your default language. If you have entered some names in different languages, it even knows them, but it basically does not know another language.

Wouldn't it be obvious to tell the iPhone, which language to be used, if it is not the default language?

Apple's obsession about annoying you once more by useless error messages ...

2009-09-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

On the iPhone and in the world of Apple Inc. the whole world seems to be like a very simple and very limited space.

This shows every other day on the iPhone's error messages.

Right now I have a prepaid T-Mobile connection. The iPhone is not yet jail broken, but will certainly be soon. As it is a completely unlocked phone right from the store even Apple Inc. lets me use T-Mobile prepaid. Thanks so much Ubersteve.

But there is a problem with T-Mobile prepaid, it just does not have data included! I talked about this to some sales rep at a San Francisco T-Mobile store. Even that guy thought the current situation, of not providing data in a prepaid connection, is a little bit backward. And he told a lot of tourist ask this question over and over again. But this is a problem of T-Mobile.

So please, do something about data on your T-Mobile prepaid offering! Offer a per MB or a x MB packacge offer!!! This would make things sooo much easier.

But as I do not have data right now on that connection, I can only use the iPhone in the Wi-Fi space for internet access. If I have no Wi-Fi then I am completely logged out of civilisation in San Francisco. But luckily there is a lot of friendly Wi-Fi providers everwhere.

Once the iPhone has the desire to access the internet, which may happen quite often, e.g. once you open mail, the Wunderphone iPhone gives you a great error message. Of course, it is a f***ed up modal dialogue! So you got to OK or dismiss or whatever that error message.

Could not activate cellular
data network: You are not
subscribed to a cellular data
service

OK

As said so many times, if things do not work the way they should work, what is the rationale of annoying me and other users continuously telling about this situation. If there is no data service subscribed to, OK, say it once, show it somewhere visibly. But do not tell it over and over and over again! This just makes no sense whatsoever. Things do not get better just by saying things are bad all the time. But it seems this is an approach at Apple Inc..

Just say it is bad or even worse, then it should go away.

Besides telling or indicating this situation in a more friendly way to me and other users, there is a very simple approach. Why not offer an option in the settings, by which GSM data can be turned off? There is network connections that just do not offer data, so what. Make it available to turn data off. It is just that simple, but this is not according the Apple Inc. way of doing things. Things have to be the way Ubersteve likes them be, regardless of reality. And if reality is then conflicting with Ubersteve's visions, it is the fault of the stupid user or customer.

It is just bullsh** user experience what is going on! And if this is just a rare situation, as most people may have some data subscription, is there any point in plagueing others? No, it is not. It is just one of those so many existing nonsense experiences I have to go through while using the iPhone.

I do not know, what kinda approach the guys in charge at Apple Inc. have about making a good and solid product. This phone is just not mature at this time, it is still beta and the way it deals with error situations is pre alpha.

It is not just a matter of this message, but as a result of this erroneous situation according the world to Ubersteve, the iPhone may fire up to 8 or even more error messages, that all asked to be OKed or dismissed.

Ubersteve, no more dope at your company cafeteria. The guys will then not smile all the time at you, but may really do a better job!

More stupid and useless Call Forwarding modal dialogues ... (Another Google Voice problem on the iPhone!)

2009-09-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

As I have complained so many times, the iPhone software developers at Apple Inc. seem to be totally obsessed by producing silly and pretty useless error or other messages by some modal dialogues. Some call this also modal dialogue box.

Again, what is a modal dialogue?

A dialog box that requires an immediate response from the user; other windows cannot be used until the modal dialog box has been dealt with. Modal dialog boxes generally warn of problems such as running out of printer paper or losing a network connection.

So this means, I am as the user have to respond to such a dialogue. Otherwise nothing else is going to happen. So I am forced to OK or dismiss it, even if there may not really be a need to OK anything.

As with the Call Forwarding Active scenario mentioned last month, the smart guys at Apple Inc. had the idea to plague me and other users also with this modal dialogue on incoming calls, that were forward.

Am I not getting anything right here? Someone is calling me, the call may have been forwarded, which happens to be a very common thing in phone networks these days, then I have to be informed about this? And even worse, then I have to dismiss this situation by clicking on the button?

I think I just get it, but the guys at Apple Inc. do not get it at all.

It may be OK to inform me about this forwarding, but it is plain harassment if I MUST DISMISS this situation all the time! I want to use the iPhone and I do not like to do stupid user actions all the time!

Apple Inc. I know, you hate VoIP, as this is probably a big trouble for all major incumbent telecom companies, which will then also be a problem for you. The situation presented here happened on an incoming call from Google Voice! Is this another attempt to make Google Voice not work on the iPhone but annoying me with mandatory stupid and useless actions required by me?

As I said before, take less dope, think first about the crap you are programming every day! And then make really a good product! This is all pre alpha what I have to accept ...

Cannot Open Page: Who the f* wants to get such useless f*ed up error messages? NOT ME! AND NOT YOU EITHER!

2009-09-12T00:23:00.000-07:00

What is good about the iPhone? I think it is less and less! There is situations when you just want to throw this f***ed up thing out of the window or against a massive wall.

Ok, sometimes you are out of luck with your Wi-Fi or maybe cell connection. If your iPhone may not receive the data, it is usually not the iPhone's fault.

But why make such a situation even worse by giving the user a useless error message, which the user has to OK all the time?

Why not make an error message that does not disturb you and that does not need to be OKed all the time?????????????

What does this error message make to be required to be OKed by the user?

This is really a bad user experience!!!

Cannot Open Page
Safari cannot open the page.
because it is not connected to the
Internet.

Besides the fact that this is one of the most useless and annoying error messages, it is also not always true! In my case I have noted that the access point I am using has obviously some DNS (Domain Name Service) issues. So actually some pages load just fine, which means there must be some connection to the internet, but others do not load at all! So it is very likely that the access point is not willing to deliver the IP address after a DNS request issued by the iPhone.

Hey Ubersteve, you should give your employees less dope, so that they may really do a much better job than they are doing right now! This is typical crap ware what your geniuses or artists produce. I think you used the term artist in that wonderful movie called The Pirates of the Silicon Valley. This movie looks more and more like absolute reality to me.

Buy the movie at Amazon and understand why Steve Jobs is behaving the way he is behaving now. It is all just compensation, of what he has to go through in his long time fight with Bill Gates.

OMG, this is yet another situation that is really annoying!

iPhone not ringing

2009-09-10T01:56:00.001-07:00

The iPhone experience is always very strange. Suddenly things do not work the same way as they did before, and you may not find why.

So it happened to me also this time. The OMG iPhone would just not ring. I had no glue about this situation. So I was wandering through the iPhone menus. Then I have noted that the everything should be alright. But still no ringing.

So checking the web helped me. There is a switch on the left hand side of the iPhone. It is above the loudness switches.

What is wrong here?

First of all, to have an easily accessible switch to make the iPhone silent is ok to some extent.

But the way Apple Inc. did this is not just sub optimal it is plain most terrible. Instead of using an easy on screen switch procedure, Apple Inc. just uses this simple switch.

The worst and in regard to good user interface procedures is the complete lack of any kind of feedback of the current status of silent or not silent. Most phones, even the most crappy ones for maybe $30 you can buy at a local Walgreens pharmacy, will usually tell you somehow if they are set silent. But not with the iPhone.

The easiest way other vendors do this is usually by striking out a ringer logo. Or maybe changing the color of the ringer. But not with the iPhone. The iPhone does not give you any information about the iPhone ringer status. The iPhone will tell you only once you are changing the status. But later on, no further information.

The switch itself has also a major drawback. Maybe you put the iPhone in your pants. You may then accidentally switch the iPhone to silent and do not know about this.

Sorry the iPhone after all is a phone. And phone ringing is one of the most essential features for a phone. But here Apple Inc. has really screwed up to the highest level that I ever noticed. It is so amazing what those geniuses do all day. It is said that they offer the best user interface or what we call today user experience, but then they really do this most annoying feature implementation.

The iPhone is set silent, and they do not bother to tell you anywhere.

OMG, this is really one of those OMG cases, which is so hard to believe. I can only think that a user interface expert must be seriously stoned not to come up himself to understand the most essential need to provide some kind of visual, and most importantly also highly visible, feedback if the phone is set to silent.

Because a user must always be fully aware if the ringer is set silent, because you should not make a phone, which may not ring in the phone call of your life.

Apple Inc. go back to school, or copy once more from others what are really working user interface procedures.

Sync the Apple way - or have fun with iTunes

2009-09-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

As I have told you before. Ubersteve does not allow us to delete photos from the photo library without iTunes. It just has to be that wonderful piece of software.

So I had some fun today using iTunes just to delete some photos and also some songs. And then, as usual, I got some strange and nonsense error messages, of course they were modal dialogues that I really do hate so much.

This is what I got:

It says:

No photos were copied to the "iPhone" because there is not enough free space on the iPhone to hold your photos and albums.

First of all, this time iTunes uses the word space, and not the word room as it used before. Even within an application Apple Inc. is really inconsistent.

But what happened before I got this error message?

First of all, I have deleted a lot of useless and bad photos and my desktop running iTunes from the photo sync directory. I guess it must have been like 20 photos making about 30 MB total. I was really relieved to get finally rid of all those bad photos.

Then I thought, it is time to sync now. So I did.

But then iTunes told me, there were no photos copied! Wow, but I did not mean to have any photos copied to the iPhone! I'd rather have meant that some photos should be deleted from the iPhone instead.

I guess Apple Inc. has the idea to make sure that both memories, the desktop and the iPhone are always in sync. So they may go through all files on the desktop and then copy them to the iPhone. So iTunes may n0t check if file A on desktop is also available on the iPhone, and make no copy then. As there maybe no checking done before copying, this may for some strange reasons, if the available memory is very tight, lead to out of memory situations. As it apparently did. But this is just wild guess I am doing here. I can see no other point that a superb sync software like iTunes would come up with this error message.

So even though I have deleted photos from my photo sync directory on the desktop, this has initially not helped me a bit to solve some of my memory issues on my iPhone.

Then I had to use a work around. This is very common with the iPhone to get things done.

I have disabled the syncing of photos at all. Then iTunes told me just that:

Then I agreed to remove the photos and did the sync again. After the removal of the photos completely from the iPhone, the syncing did finally work. Gotcha!

Apparently even deleting requires memory on the iPhone. This is just as stupid as some messages you may have seen before on your Microsoft Windows machine telling you Not enough memory to delete ... .

OMG, OMG, OMG, this is all sooooo sick, what is going on here. Really strange. But we have accept what are master, the most genius Ubersteve, is asking us to do. It is not his problem, it is all our problem as we do not understand the greater picture behind his magic.

Memory Irony #2: No way to delete photos (in photo library) on the iPhone WITHOUT ITUNES

2009-09-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

OMG, what is all wrong with those guys in Cupertino, who are in charge of product management or product development?

Right now my iPhones memory is nearly exploding as I have uploaded too much music. So there is no way to update to the current version of Skype.

The iPhone says There is not enough space to download some of these applications. Please delete some photos or videos. Dismiss . Most interesting Apple Inc. does not seem to have a unique phrase for this kind of situation.

In iTunes Apple Inc. uses not enough room ...
On the iPhones it uses the phrase not enough space ...

Great no one at Apple Inc. is trying to make one approach to usability, user interface and wording. Just another example of this inconsistency on the iPhone.

I have also uploaded about 500 images to my photo library. Those photos have about 2 MB each, which I would certainly like to get rid off. Giving me some free 1GB of valuable memory.

No chance on the iPhone! Well, no chance if I do not like or can not use iTunes, because I am on the move somewhere!

The iPhone geniuses of product development, or whoever is in charge there, have not accepted one of the most essential feature to delete any individual item without the presence of iTunes.

What are those guys smoking? Or what are they pushing in their veins?

It just must be something that has some effect on their perception of reality. My idea of the iPhone is to manage that Wunderphone without the need to carry another computer with me. The whole iPhone is said to be so revolutionary, and they seem to even forget these kind of use cases, if they ever have any glue what a use case is.

The iPhone is a device that has a lot of memory. But every memory may temporarily run over. This is just a real live experience. But instead of making delete a function available everywhere, only certain items can be deleted from the iPhones memory.

And then it may be, that especially those items, that you actually can delete without iTunes, are the ones that you really do want to keep. So you can delete photos taken with the iPhone! Photos that have been put onto the iPhone taken by some other camera, can not be deleted.

This is all irony, what we have to go through every other day with the iPhone.

No way to get rid of this useless and bad photo in my photo library, even though it could give me the extra free memory that I desperately need right now. I just do not see the magical trash bin icon ... do you?

I can do a lot of other things with this photo except for tossing it into the virtual trash can!

This is all terrible!

I see that Apple Inc. has obviously no glue about making products really a great product. It seems they do not do any kind of Requirement Analysis to find out what users would need. It seems they have just a bunch of software developers, probably tortured by Ubersteve's whip all day long, that have to create all those wonderful and revolutionary products without ever thinking what they are actually doing.

This also yet another stupid paternalism that Ubersteve is imposing on me. It is not a matter that it makes no sense to delete photo library photos with iTunes, I JUST DO NOT LIKE TO BE FORCED TO DELETE PHOTOS WITH ITUNES. Ubersteve, got it?

Memory Irony #1 : Problems with iTunes - iTunes can not calculate required memory on iPhone

2009-09-03T09:08:00.001-07:00

Sometimes you may like to put more music on your iPhone than it is actually capable to store. What you get is the typical modal dialogue, which does not really help you a bit, but which you certainly have to ok. I see no point in using this kind of 80's user interface approach.

What's wrong here?

OK, memory may is limited. No doubt about that. Sometimes you may encounter the given situations. But what else than There is not enough room on "iPhone" ... is iTunes telling you?

Not much. Just that.

First of all, wouldn't it be nice to know how much memory is missing? That could give the user some glue about how to manage the memory requirements of music or movies.
Or what about making some suggestions what could be deleted. We know, Ubersteve is always in charge of what is going on your iPhone. So he knows how old music is, how often you heard it. Based on this information the iPhone could make some useful suggestions what could be done to get rid of this problem.

But just forget that, no such suggestions or other help is presented.

Actually, as a result of my first iTunes experience, OMG what a terrible application, I managed to add duplicate music to my iTunes library. Great, iTunes may even show you the duplicates. But I could not find the most important feature here, which is remove duplicates.

Honestly, iTunes has so many menus and button, that it is hard to understand it, essepecially as it tries to give itself the typical Mac appeal on my non Mac computer.

As said, wouldn't it also be nice to have in case of memory problems, an automatic check of duplicates?

In my understanding of how to make useful products, I would certainly think so. But all iTunes can tell you is about the problem, but not help you a bit. Great job done Mr. Jobs.

This is one of the reasons why I require an unrestricted access to the iPhones memory by state of the art standard USB data access!

We have billions of USB accessible memory devices all around the world, but what makes sense for everything else seems to be evil for Apple.

Just as we have this posting about iTunes fun, I have also noticed another error message.

This is yet another of those strange and mostly annoying error messages you get from Ubersteve's Digital Right Management System in place running on iTunes.

Aha, I was authorized to download all of those absolutely free Apps.

But the computer is obviously not authorized to store those tiny, sometimes rather crappy, Apps.

What is going on here? I just hate this. As I was forced by Apple to get into this terrible iTunes account to download free Apps onto my iPhone, I do not accept that Apple may have access to my other computer. And never forget, Apple Inc. required me to enter my credit card data, even the billing address. So they wanted to know for sure, who I am. And all this effort for free Apps? And best of all, they have put a $1 charge on that card, even though they promised to charge only in case I buy some stuff from the App Store.

Therefore I never enter an iTunes account name. Ignoring the iTunes account data, will not be accepted by the iTunes application, unless my computer has no internet access. So whenever I want to upload stuff to my iPhone, I have disconnect my computer from the net. Great to live on those annoying work arounds to get rid of Ubersteve's systems.

This is highly annoying as first of all, it is none of Apple Inc. business to know what is going on my computer. I absolutely do not trust Apple Inc. to search my computer for whatever is useful to them, and send that information then to Ubersteve's "secret service". Apple Inc. is certainly a company you should never trust!

Of course the iPhone may also send such information illegally to Apple Inc. servers, but at least I try do avoid this from my desktop computer.

Ubersteve, the whole way you make me feel that I am fully controlled by you, makes me sick.

I need no account of any kind to upload music to a MP3 player or some files to a plain USB memory stick. But to have access to my own iPhone device, to send my own contents, you force or try to force me to enter a iTunes account, which I will never accept.

This whole approach of taking away your customer's righs of privacy and of course the usability of your property is illegal!

I am absolutely sure, that sooner or later the courts will limit your desire to have this full control over the iPhones of your customers. Hire some additional lawyers for your legal department to be ready for all of those trials. This reminds me a lot of what we have seen at Microsoft. Their legal department was probably the best department of the whole company, as it has started to write all those end user licence agreements and stuff, and as it also has defended the company well over a long period of time. Actually it seems they have also defended some of your attacks.

After all those years now, actually you are copying Mr. Bill Gates this time ...

How to delete a song WITHOUT ITUNES from the iPhone?

2009-09-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

By accident I have noticed that I can delete movies from the iPhone rather simple. Just touch the movie title from right to left and you will get a red delete button.

Wonderful, after all my terrible iPhone experiences it seems I can do things without my most hated iTunes.

But what applies to movies does not apply to songs! I see no point why I should not be able to delete one or even all songs WITHOUT USING iTunes!

This really most annoying situation may even cause other trouble. Let's consider I have uploaded tons of music to iPhone, once I had enough remaining memory to do other stuff. But now as I have used other apps and stuff, my available memory may be depleted. Then I have no chance, unless I have another computer running iTunes on it, to free some memory. To idea is to have the iPhone as an ultra mobile and really useful thing with me, without the need to have a 10 pound notebook to delete music. I just don't get it, that Ubersteve's guys in charge of product development could not think of this usefule use case.

So, what is wrong here?

Ubersteve why are you not accepting ME to take control over MY IPHONE?

What is the idea behind this really most annoying situation?

I guess there must be some financial driven incentive of Apple to do this. If deleting requires iTunes, then this is another opportunity to sell new music. But as in so many cases this is the typical paternalism what we all have to go through every other day.

I love the iPhones hardware. It is probably the best hardware for this kind of application!!!

But the software terribly sucks. It is not built to make my life easy and that I have a lot of fun using the iPhone. But it is purely desinged to avoid use cases, such as simple USB data up and downloads, that may limit Apple's interest in selling music or other apps. This really sucks!

I wished Harry Callahan aka Dirty Harry could tell Ubersteve to no longer cause so much trouble for all of us, and make the iPhone the really revolutionary thing, which it is not now.

Inconsitent UI once more - about right and left arrows

2009-09-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

UI is en essential feature of the iPhone, but it is not that consistent as what we expect from Apple.

Let's say you have opened the Camera Roll, then you may send (ONLY ONE!!!) image by mail. You click on the button enclosed in the red line.

Now let's say you have a mail received. Then the whole thing looks kinda similar but then again comletely different. This time you also have to click on the button enclosed in red line.

Why is the button positioned differently.

Why is the first one going to the right side, and the second one going to the left side?

OMG, really sloppy how Apple has built the iPhone.

iPhone Math 1+0 = 2 No way! Phantom mails in mail draft folder.

2009-09-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

My iPhone tells me I have two mails in the draft folder. GMail tells me I just have one, which is alright.

GMail web interface:

iPhone:

Ok, there is 2 mails in draft.

Even here the iPhone tells me I have 2 mails. Where is that phantom mail? Is it one of the hidden iPhone features?

Amazing! Updating did not help anything!

Safari Annoyance Once More - Why I need to do the extra click to see an image FULL SIZE on the screen?

2009-09-02T01:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you want to see an image on a website at FULL SIZE, which means the FULL SIZE of the iPhone's screen. Which is a rather simple and easy requirement, which does not work for Safari.

This is where it all starts. A blog or any other web page.

Step 1: You cliked on the image. This is what you get! Wow, it hardly fills around one sixth of the screen. Not much more information for you.

Step 2: Now you have to click ONCE MORE on the image, to finally get this. Now you can see how the image looks like. Ok.

You know, the question is once more. What is wrong with the iPhone? Why no t use the already rather limited space on the iPhone screen more appropriately in the first place? Is this too complex to do?

Sorry, not for me, maybe for the guys at Apple. Clicking on an image is like a military order "Make it bigger to look at it." Just imagine how much extra time you waste by making all those thousands or even millions of extra clicks all the time. And not to mention, that the iPhone's display will also wear out much faster as a result of this.

When using the iPhone I do not notice this revolutionary thing about it. Still there is so many rather stupid procedures needed to get things done. Why?

No swearwords on the iPhone! Ubersteve is always in charge. Is he violating the First Amendment?

2009-09-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Another funny experience with my most beloved Breakthrough Internet Device, sometimes also called iPhone.

I like swearwords, I am not a lawyer, which has to use always proper and political correct language. Sometimes things really do s**ck. Such as so many features of the iPhone. Here in this blog I try not to use many or any swearwords. Even so this is extremely hard to cope with.

But in a mail I absolutely DO LIKE to use such bad words. But the iPhone DOES NOT LIKE that I DO LIKE this kinda language.

Let's start a sentence, which so many people around the world, who have chosen obviously the wrong phone, may write to some of there friends, family or coworkers.

OMG, the bad word was typed in.

But the iPhone has that wonderful spell checker, which may help you with much more appropriate language.

So I even dared to go further to the limit and add the extra evil "s" to make it even more worse. Ouch. After chosing Duck, now the iPhones proposes Ducks (plural of Duck). One Duck may not be of any help, so it must be Ducks.

After pressing "." the bad word has gone completely.

OK, so The iPhone Ducks, but shouldn't this rather be The iPhone ducks instead? Well, I have not a degree in English language or even literature, but according my knowledge The iPhone Ducks. makes no sense at all. Ducks is just no verb or adjective, which would make sense in this context. Or maybe I am just wrong here.

OK, the iPhone has its initial vocabulary of acceptable and Ubersteve approved words. But this vocabulary should also be extensible by adding new words, which I do like! But so far in my voyage to understand the iPhone, I have not found this function yet. I guess, I have just missed to buy that wonderful Dirty Language App, which could make this possible, considering a minor charge of $9.99!

The US constitution has what is called the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A major part of this Amendment is certainly Freedom of Speech. I actually see this Amendment being violated, as my Freedom of Speech is limited by the iPhone. Actually the iPhone does not limit my Freedom of Speech, as I am still be able to write everything I like to write, but it is making it harder for me. This means I have to do extra activities by denying the proposed corrections, or should we rather call it censoring, of the words I like to write on my iPhone. As the iPhone is all built around making everything so easy for all of us, as it has this genial user experience, the extra burden imposed on me, must be considered intentionally and therefore a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Ubersteve, what is WRONG with YOU. I am all fine.

Fixing it the Apple way ... let's create an App!

2009-08-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

please be patient! this story is just too long, so I need some extra time.

Bad spelling on the iPhone! iPhone is silly!

2009-08-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

Is there anything working really good on the iPhone?

Just see this mail I have tried to write on my iPhone.
I have never changed the spelling and let iPhone decide.
As we all know, it is always the iPhone, who does decide ...

Hello Steve
You know i love San francisco so
much so i am about to go there One
more Time. Maybe there is some
Opportunity to Meer somewhere. If you
have some suggestions please let me
Know.
Best regards, ...

Why not write silly? Is this not an English word?

Why Dolly?

Free my USB! or Why 16GB can be really useless!

2009-08-24T07:38:00.001-07:00

The new iPhone 3G s has 16 or even 32 GB of flash memory. That is a great for a phone like this. But the memory can hardly be used for other purposes than storing wonderful iTunes music or videos.

The number one question in regard to the iPhone is:

Where is the iPhone finder?

Finder hereby refers to an application, which the other Apple computers have ever since the launch of the good old Apple Mackintosh, which we all now just call Mac. In the Windows world this is usually called the Windows Explorer. It is for both systems one of the most important applications available.

Finder or Explorer offer fundamental features such as

accessing files (double clock on it and launch an application)
creating directories
moving files
deleting files
renaming files
etc.

Why do you not support a full working USB port?

This is the typical rather fluffy language we hear from Apple just too often:
From its revolutionary Multi-Touch display to its intelligent keyboard to its smart sensors, iPhone is years ahead of any other mobile phone.

So now we have USB for about a decade. Probably billions of memory devices such as USB sticks, cameras and others are doing a great job around the world. But the iPhone, being this most revolutionary Wonderthing, does not offer the most simple feature of accessing data using not iTunes, but built-in USB features of your computer? Does it make sense, that can may easily download (copy from iPhone to computer) images using standard USB, but you may not do the very same thing just the other way? And why not apply this USB approach, which is not that revolutionary for me but rather everyday experience for years, also for other files?

Sorry I do not get it! I just booked a flight, for which I needed to download a boarding pass. But the iPhone does not offer me to create a directory for that trip, download the boarding pass and then store it in the directory. Is this absurd what I am asking for? Or is this not just what we all expect from revelotionary things from the Apple guys?

These most essential features are completely lacking on the iPhone. Never call the iPhone a Smartphone, in a lot of ways it is probably the #1 Dumbphone in the world, considering its price tag.

In the vision of this very own world, the iPhone is a very special device. Among calling the iPhone a revolutionary phone and an iPod, it is also called a Breakthrough Internet Device:

Wow, so I have an Internet Device, even revolutionary whatever that means. Great.

What is said above is not really true. Just imagine Safari, really a great programme to surf the web, but which almost lacks 50% of what we even see in old fashioned applications such as the Internet Explorer.

What you can not do with Safari:

You can not search a web page. There is just no CTRL-F equivalent (search function using this shortcut). Have you ever tried to find quickly and easy some information on web page, without having this? This is not possible for me. I use this feature every day, as I just do not have the time Ubersteve seems to have to surf the web. Or maybe is not really into web surfing, but rather listening to iTunes music.
There is no way to store any file, which may be available for download. Just imagine you have a bank offering some PDFs or other documents about information. Or maybe you use other kind of documents, which you would like to download to your 16GB iPhone memory. This most obvious is completely unknown to the iPhone. Well, this is also driven by the fact that the iPhone has no concept of files other than music, movies or maybe podcasts.

These two functions are extremely information for my everyday life with the iPhone has I can quickly find my information or store information locally.

But this seems not the idea of Apple. The iPhone is not really intended to be a computer, what actually never say. But it is just this Internet Device. Whatever you need, just surf the web, see it in real time, and listen to the music, for which you may need the huge 16GB.

This is not really my idea, how I like to use the iPhone. But what is even more interesting as Apple also mentions all those great Apps that are intended for business applications. But how does that fit into that idea. Windows has a lot of deficiencies, but still it has "copied" all of those great idea, which were first brought to the public by Apple's Mackintosh computers long time ago. But what Apple has brought us, is no longer available on the iPhone. Why not? Just because it is not intended to be. The iPhone is a wonderful machine, havin CPU and GPU power that we did not have on regular desktop computers a couple of years ago. But all of this great power and performance seems now completely wasted. For one simple reason, which is so difficult or even not possible to understand, it is just not liked by Apple. The iPhone 3G s is not a computer, it is just a f**king internet device, even if it could do so great stuff to all of us.

It is this all too typical paternalism of Apple, which I really do hate! It is terrible and it shows that Apple has left long time ago the path of not being the typical big evil company trying to steal from you everyday. Apple used to be a great company, which had wonderful things, which were not just nice to look at, but which also had great and smart features, which let all of use be amazed. Now we are in the Age of iTunes, so why not call the iPhone actually the iTune 3G s device? Wouldn't that make even more sense? The iPhone as the incarnation to deliver all the contents available on the iTunes marketplace to the masses? Yes this is basically what the bottom line of all of this. Everything is just build around this concept to earn a lot of money.

Installing App, even if they are all free requires an iTunes account. Neven forget, Ubersteve wants to know what is going on. And he also wants to cash in on that information. Right now I have a lot of free Apps, he knows what Apps I have on my iPhone. Actually I think more and more that this is not my but his iPhone. I am just the stupid customer to buy it.

Sorry Steve Jobs or Ubersteve as rather like to call you. You have fulfilled your inner deamon's desires, which you actually expressed by that great 1984 commercial made by film director Ridley Scott. You said you wanted to desroy what the big and bad leader did to all those grey creatures, but you have just implemented that philosophy. But there is a big "but" here. What you are doing is not liked by us, the users of the iPhone. So we will stand up and fight this, and eventually through the iPhone away and use other great dveices that are more and in favour of all of our requirements. And so the whole iPhone hype, which even seems to be going down and down every other day, will be finally finished. And then you have to think about something new, which could give you the opportunity to rip us off.

But tyranny, and it is nothing more than just that, will never prevail. Even the worst dictators have come to an end. And you will see this business model also go down the drain.

Change is what we all have heard about a new president in the USA. Shaking the whole country up. Just also change! Restart making the stuff all of us used to love, but now hate more and more, and become just like you were long time ago!

Inconsitent UI (User Interface) between Safari and Mail: Where is the update/reload button?

2009-08-24T03:07:00.001-07:00

Updating data such as mails or reloading web pages are common use cases for all of us.

Instead of providing a simple an consistent approach on the iPhone, Apple has invented two different approaches for Safari and Mail for doing this.

Here you can see that you have to press the reload button, which is right of the URL. BTW the existing reload button can still be at the same position!

On Mail updating has a completely different position.

Well, good User Interfaces give the users an easily understandable approach how to do things. Things which are identical or almost the same should also work the same way! As for two very similar use cases Reload Web Page and Update Mails there is two different buttons to press.

Would it not be nice just to have one way to do it? I absolutely think so!

I'd like if actions I need to do quite often are put to a position on screen, which can be easily reached and can be easily and reliably applied. This is especially true for the updating of mails. The update button is always at the same position, and is rather big considering some of our fingers are sometimes little bigger, hitting that button is very easy.

So I would really like to have the Reload Web Page just at the identical position of the Update Mail button!

Safari's navigational buttons are already in the lower bar on the screen, so the additional button would easily fit just there. But there is also another positive side effect. The Reload Web Page button may be not visible anytime, as the web page is very long, which is true for most web pages. So pulling the whole web page down all the time to get to the reload button is very common. This making the reload even more complicated.

It could look like this. I have also added URL, which is a new button to enter a new URL, without the need to pull the whole web page up to get to the URL input field.

Hey Ubersteve change it!

XSPhone App - more details about registering and unregistering

2009-08-23T14:42:00.001-07:00

After checking the XSPhone App even more, I found more clues about issues regarding incoming calls.

Issue 1: Strange Unregisterings

This is what Asterisk tells me what happens during a call. Some information has been removed.

-- Registered SIP 'XXXX' at II.III.III.III port 49157 expires 240
-- Unregistered SIP 'XXXX'
-- Registered SIP 'XXXX' at II.III.III.III port 49157 expires 240
-- Executing [XXXX@YYYYY:1] NoOp("SIP/ZZZZZZZZZZZZ", "extension=XXXX") in new stack
-- Executing [XXXX@YYYYY:2] Dial("SIP/ZZZZZZZZZZZZ", "SIP/XXXX|55|Ttr") in new stack
-- Called XXXX
-- SIP/ZZZZZZZZZZZ is ringing
== Spawn extension (YYYYY, XXXXX, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ'
-- Unregistered SIP 'XXXX'

It is very simple, after a call, this time an unanswered call, XSPhone App executes an Unregistering! I do not know why this happens, as registering and unregistering should happen rather seldom, but this is what happens. So it is absolutely no surprise that incoming calls can not happen after an outgoing call. It does not matter if the outgoing call succeeded or not. After placing an outgoing call, there is no chance of receiving a call.

Current remedy:
After placing a call, it is neccessary to stop and then restart the app.

Issue 2: iPhone does not ring, while it should ring

If there is no Unregistering problem with the iPhone, there is this other issue with receiving a call.

The call will be properly indicated only if XSPhone App is in the "Phone" tab. This is when you can see the dial pad on the screen.

As soon as you are on one of the tabs:

Favorites
Recent Calls
Contacts

In any of these cases, it seems that Asterisk is all fine about the call setup, so there seems to be no issue there, but the iPhone just does not ring or indicate the incoming call.

I think this can be fixed. Thanks XS4ALL!!!

XSPhone App - detailled analysis of current update

2009-08-23T03:57:00.000-07:00

After some testing the new update of XSPhone App I have the following more detailled findings:

Features that are still missing:

XSPhone App has no direct button to access the App's settings. Changing settings always requires the long way to the iPhones setting section, for which you have to leave the App before.
XSPhone App does not know how to handle incorrec SIP Server addresses (e.g. bla.blublub.nix:50 90x ). It just makes no sense trying to connect, even though already the syntax is wrong. Please check validity of syntax before making a connection. Sometimes error messages are very helpful. It also seems that XSPhone App has no timeout, if a connection fails.
XSPhone App does not provide its own dial tone (which is very common for almost all VoIP/SIP devices) once the dial tone is not provided by the provider (e.g. Asterisk server). Making calls on an Asterisk system, which may not provide the dial tones, is kind of difficult, as you may never find out, if the called party is busy or ringing.
XSPhone App does no offer proper signaling of DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) signals for SIP servers. Besides sending the actual DTMF audible tone, XSPhone App does not send addition DTMF signaling using a standard like RFC2833, which seems to be a common or well accepted method. It is therefore not possible to press the # key to make a transfer to another extension in an Asterisk system.
XSPhone App does not offer to mute a call or change the loudness of the microphone. Especially muting should be rather simple to do. Some friends have noted that the iPhone may actually send the audio very loud, which may cause some crackling audio. Unfortunately I have not found any other settings option to change this.

Features that are now working:

XSPhone App can now safely and reliably make outgoing calls. The only pitfall right now may be the fact, that it does not properly check the SIP server address syntax before making a call. But making VoIP calls on GSM/3G is not possible, as we know Ubersteve does not like the makers of XSPhone App to just offer that great feature! You know VoIP calls are not allowed on GSM or 3G connections apparently even worldwide, as is said by the App.
XSPhone App may and sometime may not accept incoming calls. Sometimes there is an issue with the registration of the XSPhone App, so Asterisk has no proper registration information then. Incoming calls will then work.

Features that are not working properly:

XSPhone App displays Unknown Caller if a call is placed from within an Asterisk system extension. It does actually not show the Caller ID of such an extension. Even if the number is not in the contacts list, an existing Caller ID should be should be shown.
XSPhone App has some issues, if the calling party's number is actually found in the contacts. The substring Mobile is from the contacts as the calling number is a mobile number. Just see this:

Good job XS4ALL. Still some work to be done.

What I love about this App is the mere fact, that it does not make be signup for yet another stupid account to use it. I just enter my SIP data locally and there you go. Brilliant! Thank You so much for providing a FREE iPhone App that actually works!!!

XSPhone App - some issues with server address fixed - some not

2009-08-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

Good news from the guys who made XSPhone App!

It seems there App can now properly understand an address such as:
sip.somegreatsipserversomewhere.com:5090

The 5090 is the so called port number of that server. Before the fix, the App did not understand the port number. Instead the App always considered the standard SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) port number 5060 as default.

This address is all made up and may or may not exist. Do not test it! Thanks!

Thanks to the makers of XSPhone App for obviously fixing their App!

My results are:

After testing the App, I could make outgoing calls.
Soundquality was also rather good, which was very terrible before in the same WiFi setup.
Even incoming calls seem to work, at least sometimes. Actually my Asterisk tells me sometimes "(Unspecified)" for the host address. Host address here means the IP address of the iPhone or another SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) device. So somehow there is sometimes an issue with the proper registration. Therefore calls to the iPhone's extension dot work.

But the guys are on the right track!

Still I can not make a VoIP call with this small App on GSM or 3G! Ouch.

It tells me
"VOIP calls are only allowed on the WiFi network."

Who says that?
How can the App know that a certain VoIP call may not be made on GSM or 3G?
This statement may even be false, as the owner of the WiFI network may prohibit VoIP calls!

I am pretty sure this is going to be a issue for the courts to decide soon.

Is the job of XSPhone App or the iPhone to determine, if certain actions are prohibited or not? I do not think so. Considering this approach we see here, why not block certain web pages? As accessing those web pages may not be allowed?

One of the many Ubersteve's Laws prohibiting us to use our iPhones the way we like it!

My Top 10 Iphone Annoyances

2009-08-21T15:34:00.000-07:00

This is my, currently incomplete, list of Top 10 iPhone Annoyances:

1. iTune
2. iTune
3. iTune
4. iTune
5. iTune
6. TBA
7. TBA
8. TBA
9. TBA
10. TBA

The first 5 places should be given to the most annoying piece of software made by Apple. It is as bad as the Chinese Firewall! "Protecting" and controlling what is sent to and from the iPhone.

The next 5 annoyances will be released later after more analysis of this wonderful piece of modern hardware.

Calendar location information pretty useless

2009-08-20T01:51:00.001-07:00

Setting up a new Event is as simple as 1,2,3.

The iPhone is all about Internet on the Go, Smart Apps, Location Information using GPS and of course a Phone! Everything is about to work together in very close relation giving the user an excellent user experience. But then it does not!

Adding a Event also offers you to enter the Location of the Event. Great, so it should be no sweat getting the Location on Google Maps. But forget about that. Clicking on the location information does not lead anywhere. It is just not a clickable region on the screen, so Google Maps will not kick in. Really sad.

Another issue is certainly data integrity and correctness when it come to Location information.

Just imagine you are about to add a new Event with an address, which is fully unknown to you. In your area there may be a lot of similar addresses. Once you are due going there, then the address information may not be helpful for you.

So automatic address checking should be option available when adding a new Event. Thanks to Google Maps knowledge of city names, street names, addresses and a lot of more info, this should be rather easy. Just send the information to Google Map and see what they may make of it, presenting you a corrected or improved addressed.

As a part of this procedure also an address normalization should happen. Making out of an unstructured address, an address which is split into the different parts, which are stored in their respective data fields. It should also be possible to add this Location information to an existing or even newly created Contact entry. All these links to easily make this data transfer do just not exist. So the Apple guys of the Calendar and Contact did not really work together very tightly.

The Location information entered is just some meaningless information for the iPhone.

Even Alert: Ubersteve will tell you the time of alerting you

2009-08-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

You know the iPhone is pretty dumb when it comes to time. As I have written before, YOU have to tell the iPhone the current time. The iPhone apparently does not have support for NTP (Network Time Protocol).

But the iPhone could also get the current time from time information sent during call establishment or even the great GPS (Global Positioning System). GPS is basically an ultra precise (atomic clock) time system, by which receivers as the iPhone can determine the current position.

OK, now back to the issue.

To have an electronic calendar on the go is just great!

But, as usually Ubersteve has it's own idea about this.

A major feature of an electronic calendar is to alert you ahead of time before an event.

It is certainly OK to give the user some default times to alert you. But then you should also able to define your very own time to be alerted.

Not with the iPhone! The iPhone is asking you tell it the current time by the minute, but you may not tell he iPhone by the minute when you want to be alerted. Hey, why not?

And it is certainly not just about a single time you may want to be alerted. Let's assume it is an awfully important date you have, lot's of preparations needed. So it may be very useful to get multiple alerts. Not with the iPhone ... it just s**cks!

Google or Yahoo: That's it. Extremely limited Search Engine Settings in Safari.

2009-08-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

Safari is great, makes all our lives so much easier. Not many choices to choose from. This is even true for the Search Engine settings.

Safari just offers Google and Yahoo.

There is nothing like "Add New Search Engine" or "Change Search Engine Settings", just those two rather big search engines. Great!

What is wrong here?
Is this another source of revenue for Apple?
Will Google and Yahoo pay them some money for this setting?

There is so many other good Search Engines that are great, but the iPhone does not care about those. Just stick with the big guys and you are fine.

Wikipedia, not a Search Engine but an open encyclopedia, can just not be set as the default Search Engine of Safari.

This is the most horrendous paternalism I can ever think of. The iPhone is not about providing a great device for the customer, who had to pay for it, it is just for the benefit of Ubersteve to earn his next millions. It is just a shame what is going on here.

Wrong formatting of phone numbers (Or other big issues with Region Format settings)

2009-08-16T13:44:00.001-07:00

After I had some fun with iTune completely f**cking up my iPhone setting as part of a kinda mandatory Restore and issues with non working Apps afterwards, I need to write down what I have noted before, which is yet another funny misconception of the Apple software developers.

Really amazing what you can find out about that Wunderphone after just about two weeks.

What is matter?

It is a about plain and simple phone numbers and how they are shown on this great device. The iPhone seems to know quite a lot about phone numbers and their structure. What means structure here?

Let's consider you are dialling 4089961010, quite an awkward looking number. But after structuring that number into (408) 996-1010 it looks so much nicer and you would think that this could be a number somewhere in the Valley aka Silicon Valley. It is actually the main phone number of Apple in Cupertino, California.

OK, what does that mean here? Actually it is always nicer to display phone numbers in a structured way according their meaning in their specific country.

What is the area code?
What is the local number?
And in the USA, what is the prefix/exchange number and what are the last 4 digits?

Initially I found out that the iPhone does correctly display phone numbers in the country I am residing right now. But after a while and some changes, that this would not work anymore. After some analysis I found out that I can define how a phone number may look, by changing the notorious Region Format.

Let's see the following real life example.

For all the screenshots shown I have dialed the number 02031234567, always logged into the same GSM network in the same country of that network. No changes here.

(Actually you can see that I am in Airplane Mode. I have done this to hide my network name. Turning Airplane mode off will give the identical phone numbers here! I promise!!)

This is how the number looked, if I used the Region Format United States:

Actually using this Region Format the iPhone does apparently not know much of the phone number as it shows the iPhone just as dialed 02031234567, not any structuring here.

This is how the number looked, if I used the Region Format Germany:

Here the iPhone has structured the phone number as 0203 1234567, which means it belongs to area code 0203 (The city of Duisburg) and the local number 1234567.

This is how the number looked, if I used the Region Format United Kingdom:

Here the iPhone has structured the phone number as 020 3123 4567, which means it belongs to area code 020 (The city of London) and the local number 3123 4567.

Ok, let's think about this really strange experience. Depending on the the Region Format, as it is shown here, numbers are differently shown on the phones display. Is this right?

No, never ever!

The formatting of a phone is defined by the phone number's "residence", which is the country the phone number belongs to. Whatever you set in your Region Format, being it Chinese or maybe Chilean, a number dialed as 02031234567 in the UK should always be shown as 020 31234567 (or maybe 3123 4567). Why, because it is a phone number in London, as 020 means in the UK the area code for London. Just that simple! If the same number is dialed within Germany it is obviously not London, as dialing London would require to dial 004420... and dialing 0203... will always ring a phone in Duisburg. If the same number is dialed in front of Apple's HQ in Cupertino, it should be shown as an error as 0203.. is never a valid US phone number!

So what has Apple done?

Apple has linked the property of number formatting to the Region Format. Well, both words have Format in it, but actually have no relationship at all.

As a result of this, the whole idea of formatting phone numbers works perfectly if you set the Region Format to the country where you are logged into during that call. As soon as you ever move to another country, the wrong Region Format messes up the way a phone number is shown. This renders this great feature quite useless for people on the move. Does this fit to Apple's idea of the iPhone a device for the jet setting young urban guy? Not according my idea!

What should (MUST) Apple do?

Actually fix this dumb flaw. And it is quite simple to do. First of all the phone needs to know which country it is located in. And this is really f**king easy to do! Every network has a MCC (Mobile Country Code) and a MNC (Mobile Network Code). Reading proper GSM standards documents should reveal the idea and the numbers.

Knowing the MCC the iPhone, may then need to format all domestic dialed numbers dialed according the national structure (which the iPhone already seems to know) according the MCC.

If the number dialed is a foreign number, for example by dialing 0044 203..., +44 203.., 01144203..., not the MCC needs to be taken as the country identifier but the country code within the international number just as dialed. Actually the dialed numbers have different country codes then the MCC's. But the guys at Apple should be able to handle this minor challenge.

Here are some MCC's/ dialed CC's

310, 311, 316, 890 / 1 for United States
234 / 44 for United Kingdom
236 / 49 for Germany

After processing this information and phone numbers, the correct format is guaranteed! I can promise that! Nothing magical to this.

To our most beloved Ubersteve: Talk to your smart guys in software development and ask them how they could obviously mess up such a simple fact in their design? Was there any real design phase of the iPhone where modern methods like UML (Unified Modeling Language) or similar have been used, or have your guys just started to write code and thinking if it really makes sense later on? You know, this is what it seems from the stuff we got (do still get?) from your most beloved enemy Bill Gates.

NO MORE MODAL DIALOGUES IN THE IPHONE! THEY ARE BAD DESIGN!

Never heard of NTP (Network Time Protocol)?

2009-08-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

After having some fun with iTunes :-( that wonderful application we all love to hate, has made a Restore to my iPhone. As a result of this Restore, the iPhone's Time was completely wrong. How this has happened was not obvious to me.

Amazing, working with computers for years and years I never had the situation that my systems were running on the wrong time, at least if they had some kind of internet connectivity.

The Time was actually some 2:30 hours behind the real time. So apparently this was not a glitch of the wrong Time Zone.

Anyway, I took a closer look into the iPhones Time & Date setting. Initially I changed the Time Zone to Bern (Capitol of Switzerland), another time Time Zone than it was before. But, what was the reaction? None!

Ok, then I changed the Time Zone to San Francisco. Now everything should be all fine. The iPhone actually changed the time almost correctly, but it was still incorrect. It subtracted 9 hours.

Wow! So the iPhone seems to know the number of hours between different Time Zones. But, as the time before the change was incorrect, the time after the change was still wrong. Sorry to ask the wonderful iPhone to give me a time accuracy of at least one minute, we are not talking about milliseconds here.

Below the Time Zone settings, you can find Set Date & Time. I can understand that in case of non connectivity (no GSM/3G or Wi-Fi) you may want to set the time manually, but shouldn't it be the most obvious for the iPhone to connect to a NTP server and then automagically or at least automatically set the finally correct time?

Is there anything wrong with this obvious requirement? Even the guys from Microsoft seem to be able to build operating systems that are aware of NTP.

So what my dear Ubersteve is the logic behind not using NTP? Is it cheaper to build iPhones that have no NTP support? Are there fees to pay? The best smart phone in today's world can not find out by itself the correct time!!!

Sorry, I DON'T GET IT!

BTW, if you will make NTP part of your UI (User Interface) experience, do not forget to put it in your patent of the lovely iPhone UI!

PS
Even after some 15 minutes writing this article, the iPhone did not spend any effort to change to the correct time.

Dismiss Call Forwarding or Why Modal Dialogues S**k

2009-08-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

The longer I have the iPhone, the more I am annoyed by it. Ok, the world is pretty complicated. But some things should really be no problem for the smart guys at Apple. But forget it. You can encounter every other day a pretty weird and useless behavior of the iPhone.

Ok, no more general bashing, now the real facts!

After all, the iPhone is a phone (with a whole lotta feature though). Let's make a simple, really simple call. First of all the iPhone will show you a nice screen with nicely formatted (but not always to the correct country the iPhone resides during the call) phone number. Offering you a lot of features to choose from.

After a couple of milliseconds something really strange happens. The iPhone tells me "Call Forwarding Active" and offers me a button called "Dismiss" to get rid of this dialogue. Great information to know, that there is Call Forwarding Active, but is this information that MUST BE ACKNOWLEDGED by clicking on Dimiss? NO! Modal dialogues show really bad UI designs. Basically modal dialogues s**k. Modal dialogues are OK if there is no other way to get around a f**ked up situation, which has such a significance that the system may need my explicit OK to go on.

This dialogue shown is not a fully modal dialogue, as it will go away after a short period of seconds. So far I have not timed how long this period is, but if it is longer than 0 (zero) it is just much too long. During this period of time, I am blocked from interacting with the phone. Let's assume I call someone, which has a fast responding answering machine, or maybe during the call I notice that the number is wrong. No chance to End the Call quickly, as long as the dialogue is still present.

But the iPhone has an even stranger behavior of this dialogue. If you do not touch the screen, the useless dialogue will disappear after x seconds. Wonderful. But as soon as you touch the screen, while not touching the Dismiss area, the iPhone will not let go and remove that dialogue. So you either MUST press Dismiss or DO NOT DARE TO TOUCH the screen at all. After all, it is the iPhone which is in charge and not you and me as a user.

But the story gets even stranger. After this annoying incident of silly dialogues shown on my iPhone, I thought it might be a very good idea to explicitly turn off Call Forwarding. Apparently my provider does not offer Call Forwarding, as you can see on the Phones Settings. So why the heck is the iPhone then always telling me, by obviously ignoring the Call Forwarding settings about this essential fact?

Ubersteve fix this!

This is yet another strange behavior. Don't get into technicalities explaining me that my provider may not allow me to use Call Forwarding, but then will send information during call setup to the iPhone, which will just show that Call Forwarding is active during that call! I know most providers these day have also rather not well trained staff, who may not know how to setup a phone network properly.

But, I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THIS CALL FORWARDING INFORMATION, SO DO NOT SHOW ME IT ONE MY IPHONE!!!

And worst of all, do not take away my control over the iPhone! Just imagine your land line phone will tell y0u every time you make a call "Your Call Forwarding is Active. Please press * to complete your call" and will otherwise not complete the call? Strange and pretty dumb behavior.

NO MORE MODAL DIALOGUES!

Safari: Inconsistent UI (User Interface)

2009-08-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

As a new owner of an iPhone I am more and more surprised about Apple's ideas how to make a good UI.

What is the #1 use case for a web browser?

Well, it is probably to enter an URL. No URL no web page, it just that simple.

The iHone tries to copy what we all know from our desktops or notebooks. Browsers like Firefox or IE ask you to enter the URL at the top of their window.

To enter the URL at the top is ok, if you can always reach that URL input field on your screen. As screen size is extremely limited on the iPhone, the URL input field may just disappear. If you scroll down, URL input field may disappear as your website is too long the tiny iPhone display.

This is an example how the iPhone screen looks after scrolling down:

But what now? How to enter the URL?

From my knowledge it is just that simple, I have to scroll up again. Ok, if the page is not too long, this is not much of a problem. But let's consider you have a longer web page, then scrolling may need a number of touches.

But the question is, why not offer the user a button in the lower navigation bar to enter a new URL or to make a change?

So far that bar only allows you to navigate back, navigate forward, add bookmark, select bookmark or add new screen.

Sorry, as a matter of a consistent UI (User Interface) this is just the right spot to make this feature available. Instead of doing that, Apple sticks with the concept of copying what we all know from our desktops or notebooks. I think this is not a very smart idea, as I always have to scroll up to get the URL field.

Why not offer a URL button in the lower navigation bar?

Let's see what Ubersteve thinks about this!

iPhone Top Annoyances or why the world is not perfect Usability Shall Prevail

Support ethical iPhone 5 by supporting SumOfUs.org

Thank You! btjunkie 2005-2012 R.I.P.

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011 - RIP - Thank You Steve

iOS 5: "PC-Free" what a an awesome feature, you have never seen before! IRONY

iTunes annoyances: Determining Gapless Playback Information

iTunes "Gorillaz" or "gorillaz" WTF? iTunes just sucks!

In dire need of ITunes - Reactivating Windows partition for Ubuntu / Linux Systems

Iphone Mail's latest feature: Does not pickup mails and likes to crash regularly

Iphone 4 - no fixes - just the same old sh*t again

Iphone always upside down - I HATE THAT AUTOMATIC ORIENTATION CHANGE ESPECIALLY WHEN IT DOES NOT WORK

From Collegehumor: The 7 Stages in the Life Cycle of Apple Earbuds

Nice to have multi language keyboard support - but stupid position of language switch key

OMG, why is Apple so stupid? Why you can't listen music and look your photos the same time?

"Updating Library ... This may take a few minutes. " Another annoying message

Little lazy recently ...Sorry, but I will be back!

Secret Apple iPhone Developer Agreement Reveals Draconian Rules

Huffington Post: You ain't better than all the other weird App developers (not to forget Apple Inc.) - WHY DO YOU ANNOY ME BY MODAL DIALOG BOXES?

Gagaphone even weirder than Apple Inc. Iphone

Apple Inc. Iphone does not support Apple Inc. Quicktime - No way to use the United States Patent Office (USPTO) Web Site from your Apple Inc. Iphone!

Google Gizmo5 guys and poor software quality - or what is a white-space, trim, ltrim, rtrim ?

Google Analytics can not be used with the Iphone

Safari's incomplete phone number detection and processing

WORKAROUND FIXED: Iphone camera roll not capable to deal with more than 10000 photos

Vancouver 2010 Olympics: How can you build such a dangerous track?

Facebook can do better than Apple Inc.! No stupid and useless modal dialog boxes!

STFU: Most useless modal dialog box "Nothing to Undo" - What a great information I never ever needed to know!

Ipad the fattest Iphone ever: Introducing the Micro SIM Ubersteve's latest annoyance

EXTRA EXTRA: Tervetuloa kaikille Nokialandian kansalaisille, joka Suomenakin tunnetaan and Top 5 Annoyances of the Iphone

HOWTO: How to reset your locked or frozen Iphone

What is today's date?

YAMF Yet another missing feature: No date and time information shown in IPhone Photo Viewer!

Microsoft Inc. Bing App & Google Inc. Maps & Apple Inc. IPhone = Total Annoyance Guaranteed - revisited

Microsoft Inc. Bing App & Google Inc. Maps & Apple Inc. IPhone = Total Annoyance Guaranteed

IPhone Disenchanted: Top 10 Iphone Web Surfing Safari Annoyances

Bing App - You ain' t better than the other crappy IPhone Apps ...

Top 10 Iphone Mail Annoyances revisited: STUPID ERROR MESSAGES and STUPID MANDATORY CLICKING

IPhone Disenchanted or TOP 10 Iphone Mail Annoyances

New finding: Most Apple IPhone users suffer from Stockholm Syndrom - Wow! Not me though!

Sorry Doubletwist - You are as evil as Apple Inc. is!

FileApp version 1.5 confusing (t)error message

IPhone bug in photo viewer and/or IPhone camera application

Really poor Apple Inc. IPhone hardware quality - cable almost dead after 5 months

"Apple Dock Connector to USB Cable

President Ronald Reagan "iReagan" (tm) App - Download only via iTunes or WiFi!

"Tear down this wall",

"Tear down this wall",

Serious iPhone Malfunction - No more than 10.000 images! Or all images that fit in 10 Image directories. (100APPLE to 109APPLE)

Most stupidest error message ever: Network Lost after setting to Airplane mode!

DoubleTwist: Ubersteve tyranny of choice - new video remake of famous 1984 Apple Inc. ad!

Do you also love “new York”? Spell checking the iPhone way ....

Apple's obsession about annoying you once more by useless error messages ...

More stupid and useless Call Forwarding modal dialogues ... (Another Google Voice problem on the iPhone!)

Cannot Open Page: Who the f*** wants to get such useless f***ed up error messages? NOT ME! AND NOT YOU EITHER!

iPhone not ringing

Sync the Apple way - or have fun with iTunes

Memory Irony #2: No way to delete photos (in photo library) on the iPhone WITHOUT ITUNES

Memory Irony #1 : Problems with iTunes - iTunes can not calculate required memory on iPhone

How to delete a song WITHOUT ITUNES from the iPhone?

Inconsitent UI once more - about right and left arrows

iPhone Math 1+0 = 2 No way! Phantom mails in mail draft folder.

Safari Annoyance Once More - Why I need to do the extra click to see an image FULL SIZE on the screen?

No swearwords on the iPhone! Ubersteve is always in charge. Is he violating the First Amendment?

Fixing it the Apple way ... let's create an App!

Bad spelling on the iPhone! iPhone is silly!

Free my USB! or Why 16GB can be really useless!

Inconsitent UI (User Interface) between Safari and Mail: Where is the update/reload button?

XSPhone App - more details about registering and unregistering

XSPhone App - detailled analysis of current update

XSPhone App - some issues with server address fixed - some not

My Top 10 Iphone Annoyances

Calendar location information pretty useless

Even Alert: Ubersteve will tell you the time of alerting you

Google or Yahoo: That's it. Extremely limited Search Engine Settings in Safari.

Wrong formatting of phone numbers (Or other big issues with Region Format settings)

Never heard of NTP (Network Time Protocol)?

Dismiss Call Forwarding or Why Modal Dialogues S**k

Safari: Inconsistent UI (User Interface)

Cannot Open Page: Who the f* wants to get such useless f*ed up error messages? NOT ME! AND NOT YOU EITHER!