Well, I’ve been running the new iPhone 3.0 software update for a whole 3 hours now. What have I learned thus far?

Firstly, it is that Apple can’t handle everyone updating their phones at once. The update is of course delivered via iTunes, and it’s pretty much acting as if it was a self-inflicted DOS attack on the iTunes store. It’s timing out constantly, letting you in occasionally. Which is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to use the store in general. It’s very worrying if your phone appears to be blank because it hasn’t yet been authorised by iTunes (it has already, but for some reason it needs it again for this update). Oh well. I guess Apple will learn their lesson from this one, as it has to shaft their sales on iTunes for the day quite nastily.

Okay, so having passed through that hurdle, I got it up and running, and tried sending my first iPhone MMS. I’ve been waiting for this feature for a while, seeing as I had it on every one previously for the past few years. The interface for doing this is really nice, just click the camera button, and if you’re happy with your shot, it will put it as a thumbnail into the flow of the conversation. However it then turned out you have to wait for O2 here in the UK to turn it on. It failed a couple of times, then a little while later I got a couple of texts from them to say “it won’t work until we turn it on for you”,”okay, we’ve turned it on” (Got a tip from @jturnbull that this would happen when I was moaning about it on Twitter, which was most appreciated). Sent it again after this, and it worked fine.

That’s the moaning part of the post over now. What else? Well, it’s a few little things thus far. I’m a big podcast listener, so I was impressed to find a new little feature they’ve added, which is for podcasts only (not ordinary music tracks). You can now play them at half or double speed. The double speed could be useful for talk podcasts, as it seems to still be a sensible understandable pace, so you could speed-listen if you want. As someone who occasionally gets massive backlogs of listening, this could be rather handy for me.

Spotlight, a search feature from Mac OS that has been added to the iPhone, works beautifully. Just scroll left from your home page, and start typing. It’s searching and finding words in my email very quickly, and it is something I see me using a lot. Cut and Paste works fine. And the new voice recording application is nice, saves files to the phone, lets you email them to people, and they also show up in your phone folders on iTunes. It is a bit quiet though, be prepared to talk fairly loudly. It just isn’t as powerful a mic as say the N95 has (which if you’re so inclined, and I’m not, is a boon for concert bootlegging).

Finally for now, you can sync Notes to iTunes. However what you don’t seem to be able to then do is to find them on your computer. Which is kind of the point of syncing them (okay I lied a little about the moaning ending). I seem to recall that they may add something proper to handle this in Mac OSX Snow Leopard, but they maybe could even have just added something in iTunes for now.

So it’s not a bad start, couple of frustrations, some nice little twizzly bits to keep me occupied. However I’m not really expecting too much to begin with, as the real meat of the 3.0 update is in what it offers developers. Lots of potential in that, and that potential will start to be realised over the following weeks and months as developers start to both update their existing applications and write new ones that take advantage of the expanded feature set on offer.

• dafont.com
  Nicely-laid out site with font downloads, including many free ones.
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• DonkDJ
  Turn any song into an instant Donk anthem. Or alternatively a bleep-laden nightmare. Your call.
  (tags: musicremix music remix donk putadonkonit methodologiesofdonkapplication)

Great little tip, lets you add notes into Evernote from Twitter (from Lifehacker)

• GeekTool: Put News On Your Desktop With GeekTool
  Embed output from a shell script (in this case to grab a news feed) directly into your OSX desktop
  (tags: mac osx software apps applications commandline shell geektool)

• Marathi style Lamb shank by Atul Kochhar
  Marathi-style Lamb Shanks recipe
  (tags: indianfood indian recipies lamb)
• AddressBookSync | Facebook Picture Synchronization with OS X Address Book
  Sync Facebook with your OSX Address book
  (tags: macosxsoftware software facebook)

• 2600Online.com - Adventure - Online Atari Games - 2600 Games - Pac-Man - Ms. Pac-Man - Berzerk - Yars Revenge - Classic Games - VCS
  Online versions of classic Atari games
  (tags: atarigames)
• USB Kubuntu 8.10 Install via USB Creator | USB Pen Drive Linux
  How to set up your usb drive as a bootable device
  (tags: linuxusb)

Have had a little fun tonight following Stephen Fry on Twitter. Following this tweet:

Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle

he posted a picture of his predicament to Twitpic:

There then followed a deluge of tweets with the hashtag of #frylift, and even some cash-in merchandise:

Okay that was me. My favourite was from Father Ted co-creator Graham Lineham who called for help:

Help! I’m stuck halfway up the stairs!

and also provided a photo:

Happily both Stephen and Graham were rescued and are now safe. This should say something about Twitter, given the numbers of posts and views involved, but I think more than anything it says it is a load of wonderful silly nonsense at times.

Spamming Twitter User

There are so many reasons in that single image as to why I did not return this user’s follow…

• Do You Hate Helvetica? | The Design O'Blog
  Interesting interview with a designer who hates the font Helvetica
  (tags: fonts typography hatred)
• Hackszine.com: Train your iPhone's dictionary
  How to train your iPhone to learn new words, a nice simple trick.
  (tags: iphonetips iphone tips hacks)

Having had an iPhone 3G for a few months now, I had noticed that it seemed to learn words after you had typed them out a few times, adding them to the dictionary for that phone. I had even wondered if there was a way to get those words directly into the dictionary, but presumed it would probably be protected and tricky to do. Hackszine points out that there is a nice simple way to do it, simply type the words you want into notes a few times, until the word is learnt:

Hackszine.com: Train your iPhone’s dictionary