One of the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0 update is the ability of the iPhone calendar application to subscribe to iCal calendars. The method is not intuitive however. Basically the Mail application is the ‘vehicle’ for the subscription. Just paste a raw calendar URL into a message and send it to yourself. With the new “copy & paste” feature of iPhone OS 3.0, it might be possible to do it all on the phone! Open the message on the iPhone. Touch the subscription URL and the pop-up message “Subscribe to the calendar ‘{Calendar Title}’?” appears with the option to subscribe. Easy when you know how!

Subscribed calendars are grouped separately from the synced MobileMe calendars, so it’s easy to display them separately. That’s essential for me as I mainly subscribe to sporting event calendars which can make the calendar very messy on the weekends.

Links:

Apple Knowledgebase Article
Apple MobileMe News Article

The initial experience with the download from iTunes wasn’t good. The download was fast enough, but it then took another half hour of repeated attempts to connect to Apple’s a activation server before the update actually started. I also have an original iPod touch, and that took just as many attempts to purchase the update.

The other minor glitch was an update to Apples iTunes conditions of use, which caused my AppleTV to re-synch all of the DRM’d movies.

So far the upgrade has been otherwise uneventful. I used the MMS feature first and sent a photo from the phones gallery to my wife’s Nokia. I would usually do this as an email attachment which is cheaper by the way, but since the rest of the Mobile phone world has this then it’s a handy addition I suppose. I’m looking forward to push notification to make this feature even less relevant especially when sending to other iPhones.

Select, copy, and paste works well and I especially like how it shows a magnified view of what’s selected under my finger.

There’s an extra pane for applications. Prior to the upgrade I had a full first pane. The upgrade added the sound recorder application which pushed one of the third-party apps to a second otherwise empty pane. I’ve also just discovered that an 11th pane can be created by dragging an app to the right of the formally last pane. That’s probably enough until a future upgrade. The new spotlight search pane makes it easy to launch apps without having to navigate the panes. That’s very handy but after quitting the app it returns to the first pane. I would have preferred it to quit to the pane the app was on to make it easier to relaunch. However the results of the last search are still open, so returning to the app from the search screen is not a big inconvenience.

Because I have a MobileMe account I was able to check out the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature. It is at least a phone call cheaper for locating the phone in the house. I think some phone companies charge for making calls even if the recipient doesn’t answer. This feature uses push notification to send a message and play the radar sound, so no need for SMS. This also works for iPod Touches, as long as they are connected to a wireless network. If I really did forget my iPhone in public I would most likely want to use my wife’s iPhone to quickly locate it, as I would not necessarily have easy access to computer at the time I discover that it’s missing. But there’s the catch! It’s not currently possible to access the MobileMe account page using an iPhone!

Apple has added some controls to iPod playback. There’s now a jump back 30 seconds button, an email a link to this podcast button and a playback speed button supporting 1x, 2x and 0.5x speed.

There’s a search box in the mail application allowing selective searches of From, To, Subject, and All. Emails can also be searched from the spotlight pane.

Overall impressions are good. The apps seem to be more responsive. It’s not actually faster. There are just fewer delays especially in the Contacts application.

I’m away on holidays at the moment so I thought this would be a good test of iBlogger using the 3G network. IBlogger gets my vote as the best blog editing tool for the iPhone, not least because it works with all the blogs I maintain both on the web (this one mainly) and at work.

At work I use a blog as the lab’s notice board to keep everyone up-to-date with what’s going on generally and especially about any issues affecting operations. It’s very handy to be able to just take a picture on-the-spot that highlights a problem and then immediately post it with a comment, directly from the iPhone using iBlogger.

I received an email from the developers of Syncplicity that the beta testing period for the new service will expire tomorrow (17th November 2008), but as a beta-tester I receive a total of 5GB of storage space for free – 2GB is the normal allocation for free accounts. At the moment I’m not sure if I want to upgrade to a paid service with additional storage space, as I already have a family MobileMe account, and there are now a couple of iPhone Apps specifically for accessing the files on MobileMe.

Since updating the iPhone to version 2.1, I haven’t lost anything, so keeping files on the phone has become a practical proposition again. The Datacase App is my current favourite for this as it automatically mounts on Mac desktops as a shared AFP volume, making it almost identical to using a USB thumb drive.

Perhaps my opinion will change when the Macintosh Syncplicity client becomes available.

I suppose I should actually read the manual sometime. It’s taken me until now to discover that you can still talk on the phone and use applications by switching to speaker ( or using the earpiece ) and then pressing the home button.

So now when someone gives me information I need to write down, I can just open the notepad while I talk.

I think this is the reason why Apple does not allow third-party applications to run in the background. They want to ensure that this useful feature is not compromised.

It’s been a couple of weeks now and I have not had a single problem with the phone. The 2.1 update has fixed all of the major problems. 3G access is a little better but still not good enough to make it an always-on proposition. So I still leave it off by default. Having extended battery life is more beneficial.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

I installed the 2.1 update almost as soon as it became available. The update process went very smoothly and seemed to be the fastest yet, especially the restore part. I initially thought that it hadn’t restored any apps or podcasts but they were there! Amazing considering I had over 60 apps installed.

First impressions

The contacts app is definitely much more responsive with only a slight and consistent delay accessing details. Backup time is drammatically shorter with most backups taking less than a minute. Installing applications is also faster with none of the long stalls that were a feature of the previous version.

And so far there have been no glitches at all.

For a second there, I thought I was going to be restoring the phone again! When I tried to launch the Datacase program it quit to the desktop, and all the other programs I then tried did the same thing. This is usually symptomatic of the DRM problem that usually requires a restore to fix. But the first thing to always try is shutting down the phone by holding down the sleep button for five seconds and then rebooting. It worked! Phew!

Zarboo has just released a Mac utility for extracting the ‘SpeakEasy’ recordings from the iTunes backup files. They have basically added a wizard style front-end to the pearl script that I was using to do the same thing. It doesn’t make a direct connection to the phone, so the phone has to be backed up first before this utility can find the files.

It’s currently not very smart about searching, so every time it’s used, it takes a few minutes to search the thousands of files in each backup. This is not ideal and Dictaphone is still the best for desktop access with their Sink application. The trouble is, Dictaphone has only one low quality setting for recordings, producing muddy sounding, low volume recordings.

I tried this application on a walk around the Boondal Wetlands. The interesting feature of this app is the realtime track graph. The program is designed more for hikers, so the track graph does not require any maps. At the end of the walk I could upload the track info to an email address from where it launches either google maps or google earth.

The biggest problem however is the relatively high drain on the battery. I was down to 30% within just 30 minutes! As good as the application was, it would not be practical on a more serious walk of say over 20 kms. You would need to have a large external battery connected. Also there is a limit of 10000 location points which might not be enough for a days walking provided the battery situation was solved.