You simply set the size of the content. If that size is larger than the scroll view itself then it will become scrollable.

this.MyScrollView.ContentSize = new System.Drawing.SizeF(768, 2048);

This would be in a MonoTouch project.

Today my WACS700 went dead. It’s a Streamium music center from Philips. I was trying to connect to it from an older Windows app included as a bundle to upload some new music. Something happened with the Streamium when starting the app at one time and since then the music center hangs when booting up. I’ve just mailed the support so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. My best guess for the reason is that the music center has poorly written logic – a.k.a. buggy.

It got me thinking about how often products including WiFi are too quickly released to the market. I don’t own any product, except the Iphone of course, that has WiFi implemented in a way OK for the user. In addition there are several fields where you’d think there were products with WiFi but there isn’t. Digital cameras is one.

I don’t know, but I’m still waiting for the world of no cables.

In March 2009 (yes, I’m a bit late) they added support for the most common controls in the iPhone. The following UI bar is now available:

iPhone UI bar for Balsamiq Mockups

And here is a quick example for yet-another Task app:

Balsamiq Mockups iPhone example

Very nice work by the Balsamiq people.

I stumbled upon this today while browsing casually. It’s a tripod for the iPhone – or actually it’s a mini tripod with an iPhone adapter. It’s a fairly high want-to-have score on it, but I wonder how much I would use it in the end. Quite cool though, and it even has adjustable legs.

Packaging

It’s very elegant. Instead of coming home with a rather big box made up of a mix of carton and transparent plastic, it’s a quite small, black box made of smooth carton. On the top is the image of an iPhone with its home screen displayed. The edges of the phone are reliefs.

In that box, together with the phone and charger, is a bunch of small papers, five to be exact. There are two quick start guides or something like that, one in Swedish and one in Finnish, one legal information for each language and two Apple logo stickers on the last paper (maybe I’ll convince my wife to put one of the stickers on my Lenovo Thinkpad – or not). The quick start guides may be more of introductions to the cool touch features than information on how to get started. That leaves out real documentation which I cannot see anywhere, but who should need it, right.

All-in-all the packaging is very elegant and eco.

iPhone – My ego: 1-0

Physical installation

Applying the SIM-card. That shouldn’t be too hard. We’re looking for some slot or something to pull out where a SIM-card can be placed and then applied to the phone. We cannot find anything of the like, but the inner packaging where the “quick start guides” were located we see a figure explaining how to do just this. Something that looks like a tuning fork or a clip should be applied to the bottom of the phone. This small tool is finally found and can then be used to pull out a small container where we put the SIM-card. It’s quite cool, cute, elegant but my final feeling is “why”? Now we have to make sure not to lose this stupid little tool if we would ever want to switch SIM-cards. Maybe a standard clip will work, but I’m not convinced.

It’s been equalized: 1-1

Startup

My wife did all of this – kudos to her – but I heard her groaning a bit in the background while doing it. I’m not sure this is required, but she had to install iTunes on hew EEE in order to get the SIM-card validated or something like that. I really hope this is not the case, since even if every person has a computer today, it shouldn’t be required to install a phone. But then again, iPhone is so much more than a phone.

After all, I think now have the lead: 1-2

UI

This is where it starts to get very interesting. Just to unlock the key-lock (or is it screen-lock) is so super cool. Just slide your finger to the right and voila, you’re in. Looking at a web site and doing the zoom-in and zoom-out is also very cool. Graphics are very nice and they’ve nailed the scrolling and switching page thing. Pre-installed applications are quite OK. Not too many eye-brow raisers but having YouTube and Maps directly in the phone is nice.

There are some negative things though. The keyboard is a bit hard to use, but maybe you get used to it. They should have spent more time on being able to type numbers and the most common special characters (like @ and . etc) on the first key-page. Maybe there are some special gestures or something which I’ll learn. The check box is also a bit strange. It’s like a physical flip-button which says | or O. It’s not obvious what means turned on and off.

Overall, they made a three-pointer here: 4-2

Continuing

I’ve also looked very briefly into how to develop own apps to the iPhone. Even though there seems to be ways of developing on a Windows machine, it turns out that you are really forced to have a MAC OS computer. This smells so bad that I could almost refuse to get one for myself, but I will probably surrender in the end.

Small comforting goal in the end: 4-3

Summary

As a quick summary for this very brief review I can say that I like the iPhone, it feels like a mature phone and they have really spent time on the user interface. I feel like it lacks in functionality, but I can’t pin-point what I’d like to see more. It is truly a fun phone, but maybe it’s not the best business phone yet – that’s yet to be evaluated by me.

Another color though:

Renault Mégane Sport Tourer - Extreme Blue

But we are looking to buy one. By living in central Stockholm and working from home, you don’t need a car very often, which is why we don’t have one. But now we have a kid and even if it’s quite easy to take the commuter train to visit our families it’s always somewhat of a hurdle. Plus, with a car of your own you get a completely different freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want without having to loan one from your friends or family.

As the third city in the world, Stockholm introduced congestion charges in 2006, but if you have an environmentally friendly car (relatively speaking) you’re not charged anything. In a similar way it was free to park on the streets without paying any parking fees up until 2005 if you had such a car. That’s history now, and so will probably the exclusion from congestion charges be as well, from 2011.

Nevertheless we’re aiming for this car, Renault Mégane Sport Tourer (Swedish link), Expression Flex Fuel version, and we’re going to pay a visit to look at it today.

Renault Mégane Sport Tourer

Perhaps we’re a lucky car owning family by the end of the weekend. Then it’s just n number of months before we can take it for a spin.

I have some personal bests, and these are the one with the palm tree and the one with the bridge. I’d like to think they have some artistic quality. The rest are just examples of pictures I’ve taken. To be fair, it could even be that some are taken by my wife.

All are taken without any kind of real stand and all are taken with the auto exposure set, if available. Most are taken with a compact that has only the auto exposure.

Anyway, enjoy.

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