Recently in Computer Related Category

I kept wondering, "am I going to see a Blue Screen of Death"?

It was there.

Perhaps I should have asked myself, when, not if.

This is a rant about WebObjects Java Client, but really about Java Web Start, XML config files, and Lazy Engineers.

Submitted to Apple as bug 5806232

iPhone developers need a push API. The iPhone is a breakthrough internet device, but its battery powered. Consequently, Apple has decreed that there will be no background tasks on the phone.

Fair enough. I could live with that. I've heard from others that regularly polling from the phone just sucks down the battery life faster then a:

if (person reading this is a man)

printf("sorority girl can suck down a Strawberry Daquiri")

else

printf("frat boy can suck down a beer keg")

Unlike many iPhone developers, I spent a year with EDGE as my main internet connection, so I know that polling really does suck.

So I don't want to poll anyways. What I'd like instead is a way to push a "hey dummy, wake up and pull some new data" notification to the phone. Besides, once you're on the internet anyways, it makes a lot of sense to setup a server to filter notifications since that server can be plugged into the wall.

Now I don't know about the internals of the iPhone phone radio hardware, so there might be a better way to do this, but it seems to me that there is at least 1 easy way to go about this.

The first way, which I know would work for sure, is to leverage the existing SMS mechanism. Since the SMS mechanism already exists, this would require the following additional bits of infrastructure to be added to the iPhone.

1. The phone would have to be able to recognize these special messages, and know to treat them differently. There are a number of ways these messages could be marked as special, either via the origin (special number), or via the content of the message itself (used here for clarity).

2. Inside the message would be data indicating the destination of the message. For example, this could be a simple as a reversed domain name: com.apple.Mail would indicate that the destination was Mail. In practice, given the short size of SMS messages (140 characters) this might be something shorter, but it makes the idea more obvious.

3. Registered on the phone inside the App bundle would be code for handling the message. The iphone would pass the message into the message handler code, which would have access to the enclosing apps filesystem.

Ex:

The iPhone gets a message saying:

<iPhone>com.apple.Mail|40!gmail.com</iPhone>

This sample message shows how mail could be pushed to the iPhone very reliably. In the sample above, gmail.com is indicating that there are 40 messages available. The handler for Mail can launch, parse the message, queues a sound, and quits. This would not be much more battery cost then that used for receiving an SMS message now.

However this is implemented, I think this is a necessary addition to the iPhone SDK. (perhaps there's some other way to push a data packet to the phone? I know that Blackberry's do this for email. )

Comments Welcome.

Now that I have my hands on the iPhone Software Development Kit, I've completed my first iPhone application.

This application is a digital telephony application that digitizes your voice and transmits it on a special section of the AT&T cellular network dedicated exclusively to transmitting your voice in real time. I call this technology VoCN. In tests, users said it was much superior to VoIP programs like Skype. Unlike VoIP technology, this application works whether you are transmitting data on the EDGE network or the cellular network. Steve Jobs said, upon testing my application:

Wow! My voice sounds so clear! There's none of that weird noise, the annoying delay, crashes or weird dropouts like I have on Skype! This works so much better then VoIP. I also no longer get weird text messages from escort services.

But wait, there's more! Through a special arrangement with AT&T and Apple, Inc. I have arranged to give every iPhone customer a copy of this application just by visiting this web page! While you've been reading this blog post, my VoCN application has already been installed on your iPhone!

It's called "Phone".

Enjoy!

Because this "fake" website actually looks like every other giant corporate site in the world.

The mission statements are incredibly hilarious.

Da Link

When I got my first iPod, and I opened the packaging, it was like the beginning of 2001; all that was missing was "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" playing the background.

One of the Windows guys brought up the Zune music store during our meeting today. So if you go to the Zune store and search for an artist, it will show you the artist and their albums, but it won't show you that you can't buy say and AC/DC or Beatles song until after you tunnel down to the album. Which then throws their entire store into Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Then again, that's always my experience with using Winblows. “Will it work? I hope so. Let's see... squint, brace myself, click Whew, it worked.

With the Zune store you can have the same experience. Can I buy the song? I hope so. Let's see...