Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

DocumentsToStay

Intomobile is reporting that DataViz is bringing Word, Excel and Powerpoint editing to the iPhone. This is great news, but at the same time, somewhat useless. As James from the site notes:

“If you’re out of the office, no problem. Edit up that proposal and send it back to the office or to your client… Heck, even do it from the golf course!?”

Now if you must play golf, there is already a problem 😉

But the iPhone issue is that you can’t just receive, edit and send documents, because of the device’s lack of a shared user-addressable file space.

(more…)

Quick 2.1 notes

Quick 2.1 notes

Firmware 2.1 is out. Some observations so far:

(1) The phone is snapper, definitely, especially in Contacts searching.

(2) 3G reception seems the same, i.e. poor.

(3) The status icons for cellular connectivity have changed again. This previously happened with the 2.0 firmware. I now occasionally get an empty circle that tells me… nothing. See:

At the time of writing, the relevant Apple Support document does not mention this. What could it mean?

(4) All SMS now get repeat alerts. A second or third alert may sound. That’s fine if you like that sort of thing, but I don’t, and there is no way of turning it off. See this Apple Discussion for more. Decreased the phone’s usability? Check.

I’ll take any improvements Apple offer, as long as they explain them and allow users to control them.

More when I’ve had a closer look.

Add disk mode, but be quick about it

Add disk mode, but be quick about it

Depending on your point of view, there are quite a few things missing from the iPhone. One of these is direct disk access – the ability to use your iPhone as a standard mountable hard drive.

Classic and nano iPods has this ability (known as Disk Mode), but iPod Touches and iPhones do not.

There’s no USB access to iPhones yet, apart from Ecamm’s PhoneView.

Far more prevalent are over-the-air solutions. Jailbroken iPhones have had this for a while, using either SSH or Netatalk. There are also numerous paid-for options at the App Store, such as File Magnet and DataCase. But for the next two weeks, there’s a free option – Air Sharing.

This app’s going to sell for US$6.99, but for the moment it’s free, and offers both the ability to use your iPhone as a disk, plus viewing of documents, photos, video and music on the device itself.

Since I’ve installed it, it has pretty much done what it said on the tin. Bonjour support has been a little flaky for me, but I guess that’s because I had Netatalk running when I first installed Air Sharing. So, I’ve had to manually connect the iPhone. Other than that, it works like a treat. Get it while you can.