Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Just a quick update for anyone who bought (or is thinking about buying) the new iPod Classic or iPod Nano. I picked one up last week, and it works great with Runner’s Log; no updates needed. Keep in mind that this only applies to the Stopwatch application. The Nike+ won’t work until the next version of Runner’s Log, which should be ready to go sometime early this fall.

Good roundup at Ars Technica:

If you’re an iPhone owner (and perhaps even if you’re not), chances are you’ve at least kept an eye on iPhone hacks like the Turbo SIM unlock, as well as on application development progress. Perhaps you’ve gotten a few hacks working, or maybe you’d like to do more with your iPhone but get scared off by lots of command line mumbo-jumbo. No matter what group you fall into, improved tools like Installer.app and a slew of iPhone hacking guides will get your feet wet and allow you to do some more advanced tricks, all in no time flat.

It’s impressive what people have come up with in only a short amount of time. A lot of people were talking about hacking the iPhone back when the “no third party apps” thing was announced, but I wasn’t expecting this level of quality so soon.

A few months ago I picked up Marware’s Sportsuit Relay iPod Nano case. I’ve actually been looking for something like this since the first time I took my iPod running; at the time I was using the Stopwatch to time my laps, and I soon realized that with the Apple armband it’s almost nearly impossible to read the screen or split laps without stopping. The Sportsuit Relay solves this by strapping to your wrist, where it’s much easier to use during a run.

As far as an iPod case goes, it does its job well enough. It protects the iPod, and comes with a nice Nike+ sensor shoe pouch. There’s a little bit of tearing on mine near the bottom where you put the iPod in, but that’s not a big deal. There’s only one real flaw, and unfortunately it’s a big one. It’s sweat; the back of my wrist ends up with a lot more sweat than my upper arm after a long run, and for whatever reason, the Sportsuit case soaks it up.

For short runs, it’s not a big deal. The case gets a little damp, but not enough to cause concern. But after a longer run, or a run in light rain, the case ends up soaked. The screen cover fogs up to the point where you can’t really see the display, and you pretty much have to wipe down your iPod when you take it out. It hasn’t actually caused any problems with my iPod yet, but it’s still pretty alarming. It’s disappointing too, since otherwise this would have made a pretty nice case.

From Ars Technica:

There are two kinds of people in the world—those who believe in the power of the PDA and those who don’t—and the first group is shrinking faster than a cotton shirt in an industrial dryer. If you’re the sort of person who won’t part from a beloved Tungsten E until it is pried from your cold, dead fingers, now may be a good time to start stocking up on replacements. According a variety of new reports, the PDA market is drying up. In the year between the second quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007, for instance, PDAs saw an astonishing 43.5 percent decrease in worldwide shipments, and no more than a million devices were sold in the quarter.

It’s definitely a sad time for PDAs. I remember five or six years ago, when I first started to look at the PDA market it seemed like there was plenty in store for the future. PDAs were getting smaller, packing in more features like high-resolution screens and wifi, and manufacturers like Palm and Sony were coming out with some very high quality, innovative and stylish designs. It all seemed to stagnate though. There’s been very little true innovation in PDA software (both operating systems and third party applications), and hardware manufacturers have been either re-using their existing designs or getting out of the business altogether. When I look at the iPhone today, that’s more or less the future I had thought was in store for big PDA manufactures like HP and Sony.

I guess I share the blame in a small way, though. I had a few small unreleased games and a web application for Windows Mobile I used to be involved with, and I pretty much forgot about them once I started programming for Mac OS X.

It’s been a rumor since last Christmas, but it looks like the Nike Amp+ iPod controller is finally nearing release. It looks like a neat device. These days I wear my iPod on my wrist where it’s not too hard to use while I’m running, but I remember back when I was still using the Apple arm band it seemed almost impossible to not press the wrong button.

I should also mention that Nike+ support is coming to the next version of Runner’s Log; I’ve been testing it the past two weeks and it works even better than I initially thought it would.

From Ars Technica: Connect your computer to your iPhone’s EDGE. It’s a little complicated, but with some work it looks like you can use your iPhone to create an ad-hoc WiFi network, which you can then use to share your EDGE internet connection.

I’m glad to see this is possible, even though it’s a long way from being as easy to use as if it were a built in feature. My current cell phone is a Sony Ericsson w810i, which works amazingly well as a bluetooth internet connection for my MacBook Pro. I use it very infrequently, mostly when I’m working at a cafe without an internet connection or when I’m traveling. Even so, it’s so valuable when I do need it that I would have a hard time moving to any other phone (iPhone or otherwise) that doesn’t work the same way.

The big blog news this week is Exchange email support on the iPhone. Financial analysts say the iPhone is doomed without it, Apple bloggers say you can enable IMAP on your Exchange server, and so on and so on.

There’s a few points I think people are missing though. First, email is only half the issue when you’re talking about Exchange. What makes Exchange impressive in the business world isn’t the fact that it gives you email, it’s how it integrates with calendars, your address book, public folders, and everything else in Outlook. It all tends to revolve around email, but when you’re talking about Exchange there’s simply a lot more to it then that.

Second, yes, you can enable IMAP on Exchange to give your iPhone users access to their email from outside the office. In my opinion though, that’s a terrible way to do it. Not just because it means extra configuration, documentation, changing firewall settings (and all the few select users at your company who might buy an iPhone), but because there’s a much easier and better way to handle this. Simply have the user create a free, web based email account and forward their Exchange email to it in addition to delivering it to their local mailbox. It take literally under a minute to do, and you can take advantage of push email on the iPhone if you use a free Yahoo! account. You could also just forward email to your user’s regular home email, but then you have to worry about them sorting the messages on their home email client, and you lose the push email features. I’ve been doing something similar with my email accounts for the past few months, and it works great; either from your cell phone, at home, or any other PC you may need to use.

In the end though, I don’t think it matters one way or another. Out of all of the users I work with that own an email capable phone, not one has ever expressed interest in using it with their office email account.

Leopard: I have a feeling this will be a very significant OSX release. I’m looking forward to it in October.

Games: I admin, I’ve secretly been wanting to play C&C 3. Not that it’s much of an issue with Bootcamp and the new 3D acceleration in Parallels and VMware, but it’s still nice to see a native Mac app.

Safari 3 on Windows: I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it so far, mainly due to the non-Windows style UI. I tend to agree, and I can’t see Safari replacing Firefox on my Windows PCs anytime soon. I don’t think it really matters if it gains any marketshare on Windows though; what’s really important is that web developers can finally test sites in Safari, even if they don’t own a Mac.

The Safari 3 OSX beta, on the other hand, is great. Lots of neat new UI features, and the new WebKit is much faster, even on my aging PowerBook.

iPhone Web Apps: A little disappointing to Cocoa developers, but I guess at least it’s something. Web apps will be able to tie into the phone’s dialing and email features, so it should give potential developers basic capabilities.

I’ve heard some speculation that this is really a stopgap measure until Apple has the time to develop a set of stable iPhone APIs, create a working development environment and emulator, and take care of any hardware and software bugs in the rev A model. I tend to agree; you can’t assume anything about Apple’s long term plans for a device that’s not even in stores yet.

Daring Fireball:

Long-term, within the next two years, if not far sooner, I feel certain there will be various ways for developers to write iPhone software. (In fact, in Gizmodo’s transcript of the same Q&A session with Jobs from the D conference, they quote Jobs’s response to the question of third-party iPhone development as follows (emphasis added): “This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”)

I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of options start to spring up once the iPhone is officially released. I had a few neat ideas for possible applications back when it was first announced, and I’d still like to pursue those.

You’ve all seen CAPTCHAs before, where a form requires additional input from the user to protect itself from automated spam. Here’s a new project from Carnegie Mellon, made by Ben Maurer:

You might notice that reCAPTCHA has two words. Why? reCAPTCHA is more than a CAPTCHA, it also helps to digitize old books. One of the words in reCAPTCHA is a word that the computer knows what it is, much like a normal CAPTCHA. However, the other word is a word that the computer can’t read. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, we not only check that you are a human, but use the result on the other word to help read the book!

This is a great idea in my opinion; it finds a use for what would otherwise be wasted effort, and turns it into something useful. Accessibility (which has always been a big problem for CAPTCHAs) seems to be taken into account here as well.

Another good one is on the ridiculous fish blog, which uses a homemade CAPTCHA to calculate pi.