Gary's Bloggage » iphone

There Isn’t An App For That

Gary — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:47:28 +0000

Want to upload photos to multiple social networking and photo sharing sites, such as Flickr and Twitpic? There’s an app for that. Pixelpipe seems to work for me.

Want to update your status on multiple social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook? There’s an app for that. Tweetdeck seems to work for me.

Want to check in to multiple place based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla? There’s an app for that. check.in seems to work for me.

Want to change your profile photo or biographical information for all of your online accounts. There’s an app … oh … wait. There isn’t an app for that. But there’s a app crying out to be written.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Creative Commons in Action

Gary — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:24:24 +0000

I take a lot of photos, most of which end up on my Flickr photo stream. While some of them are taken with a proper camera (though some would say that my Lumix FX12 isn’t a proper camera), most of them are taken with my iPhone, which doesn’t take great pictures but takes pictures which are good enough and with the added bonus that I have it on me almost all of the time.

My photos all used to be publicly accessible and with an all rights reserved copyright on them but then I lost my Flickr innocence, which was a bad thing at the time and switched all of my photos to friends and family visibility. About a week later, when I’d calmed down a bit, I went through all of my photo sets; photos of my family and of home stayed out of the public eye and stayed all rights reserved. But everything else, I opened up and changed the license to some rights reserved using the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

The reasoning behind this was that pretty much every slide on every deck I put together has a background from Flickr which is licensed under the Creative Commons model. Without this license and without people releasing their photos using it, my slide decks would be altogether poorer and a whole lot blander.

Opening up some of my photos under Creative Commons works both ways. In February I received a mail from someone at Schmap telling me that two of my, Creative Commons licensed, photos had been shortlisted for including in the next edition of their London guide. Instantly suspicious of this I asked the Twitter-verse for commentary; Vikki Chowney, Lorna Brown and Tim Moore were good enough to respond and tell me that this wasn’t a scam, as my cynical mind had first surmised.

It’s not much in the grand scheme of things but the people at Schmap either liked the photos I’d taken of the Royal Festival Hall and in Chinatown’s Tokyo Diner (less likely) or didn’t have any other suitable candidates and so plumped for mine (much more likely). Either way, this was a great example of Creative Commons in action and it allows me to continue to mine Flickr’s ever growing pool of photos for my slide decks with a clear conscience.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

It’s Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

Gary — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:03:29 +0000

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone.

If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you’ve probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there’s also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.

We’re poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let’s call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.

As Ed Parsons pointed out on his blog yesterday, Apple are banning location based advertising in apps.

“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.“

This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.

The first time you use a location aware app on an iPhone, it asks your permission in nice, unthreatening language; it “would like to use your current location“. What this actually means is that it wants to use, and continue to use, your precise location to the finest level of granularity that the A-GPS system on the phone is able to deliver at the time it’s being requested.

There’s no way of halting this process temporarily, of being your own source of truth for your location (AKA lying about your location) or of controlling this on a per application basis. You can only reset asking this permission for all apps and for the entire phone via the Settings app. Although some well behaved apps such as TweetDeck do allow you to disable use of location information altogether as as well as on a per Tweet basis.

What we really need is to see is a way to set location granularity, including no location information at all, on a per app basis in much the same way as Fire Eagle currently does. And for all apps on all location aware platforms, not just Apple’s and the iPhone’s.

Some may argue that requiring such a degree of choice and intervention by the user may raise the barrier to entry to such a degree that an app doesn’t reach such a large audience. It’s a valid argument but as part of the location industry, I believe that we need to find the middle ground between irking the user once per app and letting LAMB loose on the world which has the possibility of irking the user multiple times per hour.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

2009 In Review Part 1: Gadgets

Gary — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:57:48 +0000

As the end of 2009 and of the decade of the noughties approaches rapidly, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the previous 12 months and give credit where credit is due or overdue. So let’s start with gadgets.

Not one but three.

Firstly there’s Posterous. Can a web service be a gadget? I think so. According to Wikipedia, gadgets ”are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technological objects at the time of their invention”.

So, Posterous. Yes it’s a blog creation tool but it’s a simple, fiendishly simple blog creation tool. Nothing more than an email to post@posterous.com and you’re done. It’s how I wrote and posted this post. You focus more on the act of what you’re writing, or the photo you’ve just taken, than on the mechanism where the post is formatted and uploaded. My posterous blog is http://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at http://www.vicchi.org/. Add in the other services that Posterous can update and some WordPress plugins and by the mere act of sending a mail, I post to Posterous, to my self hosted WordPress blog which in turn notifies Twitter and Facebook. Phew.

The second gadget is still my iPhone. Forget the controversy over the appstore approvals process, forget the appalling coverage that O2 provides here in the UK and focus instead on the fact that just as Posterous has pretty much revolutionised the way I blog, the iPhone has revolutionised the way in which I interact with the internet, where ever I am. Well, at least where ever I have coverage and I’m not being fleeced for international roaming charges that is.

The final gadget is YQL. The Yahoo! Query Language. This simple, easy, free, web service allows me to pull in feeds from my blog at http://www.vicchi.org/, my work blog at http://www.ygeoblog.com/, my decks on Slideshare, my photos on Flickr, my bookmarks on delicious and a whole slew of other sources and produce the dynamically updated vanity site of http://www.garygale.com/. All this through a single SQL-a-like select statement, some PHP and the Yahoo! User Interface library. Phew (again).

Coming up later today is Part 2: Organisations …

Photo credits: PurpleLime, Sam Doidge and Studio Ego on Flickr

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

O2 in Positive Customer Service Shock?

Gary — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:11:15 +0000

O2, the UK Telefonica brand and soon-to-be-loosing-the-iPhone-exclusivity-to-just-about-anyone mobile operator, have a reputation which is, to be honest, just a little bit crap. Their coverage in the rural wilds of Central London, especially around Soho and Covent Garden, seems to be scaled for a single user and a web search for “o2 customer service problems” throws up such gems as “O2 customer service consists of PAY UP OR ELSE” and “O2′s customer service has to be the poorest I have ever come across“.

So we’ll leave aside for one moment the fact that I have to pay an additional £20.00 for a measly 10MB of data when abroad via O2′s Data Abroad 10 bolt on and accept that I ordered this to be added to my account so I could use data on my iPhone when in the US for this week’s Open Hack NYC.

The first mailed response from O2 didn’t inspire confidence.

“Hi, Thanks for getting in touch. We’ll look into your query and get back to you as quickly as we can, normally within 24 hours.”

So I waited and less than 24 hours later I got this

“Good Morning Gary. Thanks for emailing us about adding the 10Mb Data Roaming Bolt On to your account.
Gary, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve added the 10Mb Data Roaming Bolt On to your account effective from your next bill onwards (10 October 2009). You’ll be charged £17.02 excluding VAT (Value Added Tax) per month for this Bolt On.

If you want to add the above Bolt On on a different date, please reply to this email and we’ll help you further.”

Data roaming on; WIN. Data roaming on from the date of my next bill and after the event in New York; FAIL.

So I asked them, nicely.

“I’m having to travel at very short notice so I really need this up and running from my first day out of the country which is this Wednesday, October 7th. Can the bolt on start date be brought forward to this day?”

That automated reply came back again

“Hi, Thanks for getting in touch. We’ll look into your query and get back to you as quickly as we can, normally within 24 hours.”

I’d expected a cut-and-paste response that they could only start services such as this on the first day of a new monthly bill, which basically means minimal work for them and maximum inconvenience for the customer. Then this morning I got this, which was emphatically not what I was expecting.

“Good Evening Gary. Thanks for emailing us as you want to pre-phone your Bolt On start date. I’ve pre phoned your Bolt On start date to 07 October 2009 as requested by you. Important – When you email us please provide: your date of birth, postcode and mobile number as it helps us answer your query faster”

So fair play to you O2; I’m not entirely sure what pre-phoning is and a bit surprised that you expect me to provide personal data including my date of birth and postal code in every email, but I went into this dialogue with you with zero expectation of success and you pleasantly surprised me. Now if we can just fix that “No Service” in Central London …

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Delicousness: iPhones, boarding passes, Cult of Mac, nerd subclasses, Snow Leopard and weird ads

Gary — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:16:46 +0000

The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Paperless Boarding Passes

Gary — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:37:43 +0000

Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I’d checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM’s online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I’ve yet to see it being used and there’s no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous