yjsoon

From the tumblr account:

I LIKE LARGE ICONS AND I CANNOT LIE

Also, I like that Snow Leopard doesn’t call screenshots “Screenshot X.png” any more – now they’re timestamped.

At my friend Andrew’s wedding last year, I was terribly pleased with myself for discovering a great way to do cross-fades on track changes on iTunes using my iPhone and Remote.app. 

The problem was that I had to switch between tracks on cue by cross-fading between them — usually not a problem if I just let the track end (there’s a crossfade option in iTunes), but not so easy if I had to fade out the current track before switching to the next one. The volume control on the Mac with its “clack” sound would have been loud and obvious (and was in discrete steps, so it wouldn’t be a continuous fade), and fumbling around with the volume slider in iTunes, selecting the next track and then re-upping the volume again would have been a bit tough.

Remote.app for iPhone or iPod touch (free, info here) solves this problem nicely, though, with its touch-sensitive volume control sliders.

To begin, make sure the computer with iTunes is on the same Wi-fi network as the iPhone (set up an ad hoc one on a Mac if necessary). Afterward, just set up a playlist with the songs in sequence and start playing; when it’s time to fade out, drag the volume slider down, hit Fast-Forward to get to the next song, then drag the volume slider back up. Easy enough. Hope that helps someone.

The iphone-dev team has come through again with a jailbroken version of the latest iPhone OS 2.2 firmware update. Detailed instructions and files on their blog.

I jailbreak for a few applications, really:

• pdaNet for tethering
• Some scrobbling app to immediately scrobble songs played to my last.fm account
• For a while, Backgrounder to run non-Apple iPhone applications in the background. The phone seemed a bit more stable after I uninstalled it, but I can’t prove it.
• One-button toggles for enabling/disabling Wifi (Wifi Toggle) and Bluetooth (swapBT). Much easier than clicking through preferences to enable or disable these services — just one button click, a 3-second wait, and the toggle is done.

One thing about swapBT was that the icon never quite showed up properly for me on my iPhone home screen. It was off by a few pixels to the left and bottom, and this irked me greatly. I couldn’t find anything online to solve it, but managed to stumble upon the solution, so here we go:

• Install OpenSSH through Cydia to enable remote login to the iPhone. See this iClarified tutorial (summary: search for “openssh” and install it). 
• Get your iPhone on to the same Wifi network as your computer, and SFTP to it (the IP address can be found in Settings, Wifi). Detailed instructions here for Mac using Fugu and for Windows using WinSCP.
• Navigate to Applications, swapBT.
• Download my fixed icon here: icon.png (might need to “Save As”) and upload it to replace the one in the directory. Make a backup of the existing one if you’re paranoid.

Turns out the bundled icon is 85×85 pixels, whereas standard icons are 60×60. Odd. Hope this helps someone.

Hooray!

The boarding apartment I’m staying in has a curious design at the front door — a 5 x 4 grid of rack space, apparently for people with a shitload of shoes. I decided to put up a little shrine to my favourite company there.

From left: Windows Vista (oops), iPod nano, Mac OS X Leopard, iBottle, iPod dock, iPod power connector, iPod touch, iPhone, Nike+ iPod kit, iPod classic. Some boxes stolen.

Missing: PowerBook and MacBook Pro boxes (too large, rather silly to bring them over from home), Mac OS X Tiger (also at home).

Guess I won’t be needing both of these now, will I?

16 gig for USD499 + 8% taxes + $30 shipping, and a horrifically long wait for shipping by the US Postal Service (damn you for your slowness! And your catchy tunes!). Pretty reasonable price, especially with the hilariously weak USD (the dwindling value of my USD investments mean nothing compared to having an iPhone). Also surprisingly easy to unlock — one click, four minutes, bliss! See here.

Reviewers have said plenty about the phone proper, but I figure there’s no harm adding a bit to the great online blogovoid-of-crap about using an iPhone in Singapore from a heavy data user’s* point of view. Data settings for M1 were reasonably easy to find on Google — Settings, General, Network, EDGE; APN sunsurf, username 65, password user123. Pretty standard.

First slight annoyance after syncing with my Mac address book — the phone either didn’t recognise callers or SMS senders, depending on whether they had the +65 country code prefix in front. Callers were recognised if they didn’t have +65 in front; SMS senders were recognised only if they did. My Nokia used to deal with both fine. I toyed with the idea of adding both versions to my contact list, but was alerted to the presence of Installer application AppSupport, which fixed the problem. I also had to make some changes to the country list to reduce lag — there’s some pretty good documentation at iClarified.

The mobile web experience on GPRS is, needless to say, two giant bucketloads slower than on my Nokia 3G phone. However, the Nokia used to take nearly half a minute just to start up (start Opera Mini, wait 10 seconds; enter address, wait for phone to “scan available networks”, wait 5 seconds; choose the same bloody connection I always use why do you even bother asking and wait for it to connect, wait 5-10 seconds for “Connecting…” dialog; wait for data), so I’m glad to have the iPhone’s seamless experience for getting online (start Safari, wait 1 second; enter address, wait an admittedly long amount of time for data).

Having it able to check my mail every 30 minutes, regardless of Wi-Fi availability, is also nice, and the battery lasts decently long with this setup. The Nokia could do that with the Gmail Java app, but would lose half its battery life within 4 hours of being online. The iPhone does eat data like nobody’s business (1 meg a day if I leave it alone, obviously plenty more if I surf the web), but at least it’s making good use of my M1 1 gig data plan ($22).

After five days of use, I’m satisfied. How could I not be? I’m one of those raving Apple apologists, after all. Hopefully SingTel comes up with something better in September.

* Nearly 100 megs a month, or one-tenth of a ton, depending on how you read that.

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now — link.

Anyway, from daringfireball:

Remember back in November when Palm CEO Ed Colligan was quoted saying, with regard to a then-hypothetical Apple phone, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Guess what? They’re just walking in.

Made especially amusing by the following table (TUAW):

Alright, now which of my friends in the US wants to sign up for a two-year Cingular contract this June so I can have my iPhone before 2008?

Came across this pretty randomly today — Disco, the mystery Mac application featured for pre-order on MacZOT a while ago (who’ve recently gotten annoyingly kinda caught up in selling “mystery software”) finally has its own website, linked above. It’s from the same people who made AppZapper, a fine piece of shareware, but not much else is known about it other than this screenshot they recently posted:

It’s probably got something to do with burning discs, and their subtitle “We’re having toast for breakfast” seems to imply some form of direct competition with Roxio’s Toast software as well. Just a disc burning tool seems too obvious, so I’m hoping it’s some form of solution for burning media files as consumer electronics-readable discs (e.g. DVDs from xvids).

Link to Disco application website.

Also, umm, more comics at some point, yes. Sorry.

The new Safari web inspector (available in nightly Webkit downloads) looks very, very nice. Hopefully this makes it into a stable release of the browser itself, or someone hacks it in.

The Web Inspector lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers and WebKit hackers alike. The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.

(from Surfin’ Safari)

Screenshot (click to enlarge):

Dammit. The new MacBook Pros show up right around when the extended warranty on my trusty old PowerBook expires. Chinese new year ang pows + one month’s salary should raise just about enough funds for one. Hmmmmm.

So if the PowerBooks have been renamed to MacBooks, do the PowerMacs become MacMacs?