My Digital Life

Hurray! After 6 Months AT&T Finally Turns Up 3G on a New Cell Site Down My Street

3G signal strength inside my home has been terrible until yesterday. It has forced me to use 2G while at home (iPhone did not switch bands effectively and caused too many dropped calls), which has been a real pain since on the iPhone it takes 4 taps and I have to remember to do it.

Back in early 2009, I heard that AT&T was about to put a new cell site down my street and I was quite excited. Little did I know it would take so long to activate. The antennas were put up back in May, but apparently there were issues with Verizon (the local phone company) installing the appropriate backhaul circuit and Dominion Power installing a dedicated power feed. Even after all the regulatory and contractual hoops AT&T has to jump through to get a cell site approved, they then have to deal with the local phone and power companies taking their sweet time to deliver critical infrastructure. Especially Verizon who has no real incentive to give AT&T any slack when it comes to building out their 3G network, I know this is cut throat business but…

Anyway, it looks like yesterday was the magical day when all the stars aligned themselves and now I have 5 bar 3G coverage even the depth of my basement. And look at that dslreports speed test result…

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My eReader quest: Amazon releases iPhone optimized Kindle web store

I am finding that the iPhone Kindle application display font and spacing is very easy on the eyes. The two main drawbacks are the size of the screen which requires frequent page turning and not really suitable for manual layouts. Up to now another major drawback has been selecting and purchasing Kindle books on the iPhone, the desktop version of the Kindle site was not suited for the iPhone's screen. The fix: Amazon has just released their iPhone Safari optimized web site accessible via the Kindle application "Get Books" button.

The Amazon iPhone optimized Kindle store web site.

One big advantage for Amazon is that they bypass the iTunes purchase infrastructure to sell you content. This makes logical sense since they have all of the backend applications to deliver, track, and bill purchases; and the most important feature is that it saves them from having to pay Apple a transaction fee which Mac Rumors reports to be 30%. This seems high for a content purchase but Apple Insider reported earlier that for a $.99 song, Apple collects an average of $.30 making the 30% about right.

See my other ereader posts.

The Wall Street Journal releases an iPhone application

The Wall Street Journal has finally released a free application for the iPhone. Up to now the only way to view the Wall Street Journal on the iPhone was to use their desktop site (very slow to render) or to use the link to their mDog.com rendered mobile site http//mobile2.wsj.com/device/index.php. The mDog.com mobile site and the iPhone application do not require a paid subscription to the Wall Street Journal as required by the desktop site.

The mDog.com Wall Street Journal web site in Safari.

 

The new Wall Street Journal iPhone application.

The lack of a required subscription is an interesting twist for the Wall Street Journal, given the financial trouble in the print media and the Wall Street Journal's success in attracting online paying subscribers, but I am not going to complain. I may even decide to cancel my $109 per year subscription to the desktop site, since it looks like the majority of the news content is available using the iPhone application. You do however loose the personal journal and article search features. They have also built a log in feature into the iPhone which at this time is described as: "…to help us improve our iPhone product and take advantage of future exclusives". Could they be waiting for the release of iPhone 3.0 and implement the new paying subscription model...We will have to wait and see, but for now you can enjoy the Wall Street Journal's coverage for free.

iPhone - Tip of the week - Copy Paste for Safari and Mail

The lack of Copy/Paste functionality on the iPhone is one those items I like to rant about, especially given Apple's stance that they are working on it but don't see it as that important. What frustrates me is the lack of any thoughtful reasoning or comment why copy/paste is not included, the fact that they have been working on the right gesture combination after more than 2 years of design and development does not wash. If the architects at Apple don't feel that Copy/Paste is necessary, at least educate me why I don't need it....

Anyway, the lack of the feature has created a cottage industry of designers and even an open source Software Development Kit called OpenClip which developers could include in their application. The problem is that OpenClip exploited a security loophole which Apple closed in version 2.1. 

Now another group has developed a very innovative mechanism called Pastebud to copy and paste between Safari web sites as well as the email application. Pastebud cleverly uses two Java scripts (COPY and PASTE) saved as bookmarks in Safari to perform the copy and the paste functions. To bookmark the two Java script applets in Safari, you follow the instruction on the Pastebud web site. Once you complete the saving of the bookmarks, you are issued a personal email address which you save in your contacts. This email address allows you to copy from the email application using the pastebud email server as the clipboard which allows the Safari PASTE Java script to paste from.

The process of copying selected text from Safari to an email is simple:

Open a web site like My Digital Life in Safari.

Access your bookmarks and select COPY.

This bring up the web site inside the Pastebug Safari web application. Select all is set by default, however if you only want to copy a subset of the text slide your finger across the desired text. The selected text will be highlighted. Tap copy in upper right hand corner, then to paste the text in an email tap the write icon in the upper left hand corner.

The email application is launched and the text is pasted in the email body.

If you wanted to paste the text in another Safari web application like Typepad's web application (not the app store application), instead of tapping the write icon, you would access the Typepad web application, create a post, tap the body area, bring up bookmarks, and select PASTE.

And voila!

This is a wonderfully well thought out functionality with only three downsides:

1. It requires you to be connected, the clipboard uses pastebud's servers.
2. It currently only works works with Safari and email, but I don't see why it could not be included in other applications.
3. The clipboard only supports text right now.

Pastebud is free but you can donate $5 (I have) which will help continue the innovation and get rid of the tag line inserted in the pasted text...The bottom line is that the simplicity of this solution is what makes it great.

iPhone Web - Air travel information web sites

Unless you feel you need all your travel status information all in one application, I have found that there is no need to purchase an application. All of the status information is derived from government and airline web sites which can be accessed directly.

Out of the Washington, DC we use the predominant airlines United and USAir. They both have mobile sites which I use while traveling, but I have found that today most airlines have them, and some of them like British Airways have iPhone Apps.

• United mobile Web site: http://ua.flightlookup.com/
• USAir mobile Web site: http://mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.usairways.com/awa/?un_jtt_redirect

If you use the main URLs you get directed to the main web sites which are somewhat unwieldy on a small screen like the iPhone and you do have Flash compatibility issues with most of these websites.

On the FAA status front, the easiest web site to use is the Air Traffic Control System Command Center text web page.

• ATCSCC text web page. http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/plaintext.html

The ATCSCC web site displays a national summary, you can select to view the status of a major airport by tapping the drop down list towards the bottom of the screen next to Select an Airport.

The last web site I use is flight stats; http://mobile.flightstats.com which provides with a myriad of information from TSA wait times to flight status by route.

 FlightStats is one of the most informative all around air travel sites I have found.

iPhone enabled websites

Last week was a big news week in the US and while traveling I used my iPhone pretty heavily to stay abreast of what was happening.

Even though Safari on the iPhone renders most web sites designed for desktop browsers well, if you only have GPRS and limited WiFi available using web sites designed for mobile devices is much more efficient. A major problem with using mobile sites on the iPhone, is the vast majority of web sites do not recognize Safari on the iPhone as a mobile device. This means that you are directed to the full web site which Safari will render fine, however on slow data connection it can take forever and without Flash support many sites are missing content. I have started to compile a list of mobile web sites and I have added them as bookmarks.

Here is are the four mobile news web sites I use:

• Wall Street Journal - http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/index.php . This site works well, however WSJ's article links in their alert emails which are suppose to detect mobile devices do not work with the iPhone, you get the full web site.
• New York Times - http://mobile.nytimes.com . Very good mobile web site, some web site feature are specifically designed for the iPhone.
• CNN - http://m.cnn.com . This is the worst of the mobile web site, it uses some type of software which translate their main web site and I do not think it works very well. Last week during the election the responsiveness was so poor I stopped using it.
• The Washington Post - http://mobile.washington.com . This is the best news site for the iPhone, because it is designed for Safari on the iPhone.

Apple's original intent was for developers to use the browser as the way to develop application on the iPhone (nice idea, but we are just not there from a wireless world standpoint). However, for web sites the iPhone Safari development kit offers a way to really enhance the user experience. You can see it when you compare the Washington Post web site to the CNN's. The Washington Post's iPhone web site is so much better.

Not to trash CNN mobile site to much but on election night, in addition to poor response time, they were not even in the same league as the NY Times iPhone enable election night web site.

This site really shows how well you can design an iPhone web site. Also notice the little circle at the top next to DIGI...(DIGICEL), that denotes a GPRS connection which is as bad a dial up modem...

iPhone Web - Weather Underground Site

With hurricane Gustav bearing down on New Orleans, I wanted to point a great weather site designed for the iPhone: Weather Underground.

It provides local weather (you can choose high schools weather station which are part of the Weather Underground network), National Weather Service alerts, moving radar and hurricane target projection maps which are designed to be viewed in landscape mode.

This is an excellent iPhone web site, and I see no need to download and/or purchase a specialized weather application.