After my stint with iPhone 3GS and iOS 5 was over, I felt a bit.. empty. Was this it? Had I missed something?

Now don't get me wrong. I still think the UI is slick, that iOS 5 seems quite a thorough OS. However, I can't understand the hype. Ok, Apple were the first ones to give a great and smooth smart phone to the masses, and they still deliver. The competition has however come leaps and bounds and I didn't feel Apple improved my life with their latest OS on one of their best selling cell phones ever, 3GS.

Also, three things bothered me:

1. Many apps didn't save the state, meaning I would fire up an app, do something, then fire up another app, do something, go back to the former app just to see what I did now was gone. Dislike.
2. In general, you had to pay for good apps. Since I'm an Android user, I'm not really used to pay for good apps. I pay for great apps that improve my life.
3. You had to use iTunes to even change the ring signal. No way I would bloat my laptop with that crap.

This is my second day using an iPhone, ever, and here are my thoughts on the smartphone and its latest OS so far:

Pros

• Very slick UI, iPhone might actually be the easiest phone ever to get started with.
• The keyboard just works and is very accurate more often than not. Normally, I'm having a torrid time using the keyboard on new smartphones, but this keyboard is nothing like it. And this is the standard iOS keyboard..
• Of course, the number of apps in The App Store. It's filled with goodies and there's plenty to choose from.
• Once you get used to it, Notification Center is great for a productivity guy like me.

Cons

• I have to fill in my Apple Id password every time I download something from The App Store. Not OK.
• I miss some Android apps, like my keyboard SwiftKey X, the best Facebook app FriendCaster and remote app Unified Remote. Even after some research, I've not found anything similar that is as good as these apps.
• I'd like The App Store to have a filter for games vs just apps. I'm not interested in games at all, which means browsing The App Store for the most popular apps would be so much better if I could filter out the games. As a new iOS user, I'd like the most used apps presented for me in an instant.
• To set up complete Gmail syncronization, with e-mail, calendar and contacts, you have to setup an Exchange account. The Gmail account alternative won't syncronize your contacts. I haven't tried iCloud, even though I can imagine it's a life saver for many?

I'll be posting more stuff on my experiences with iOS. Feel free to join the discussion!

However, you can do something about it:

• You can stop sending your music to Facebook.
• You can hide all Spotify notifications in your news feed.

Stop sending your music to Facebook

1. In Spotify, choose Edit->Preferences (or just tap Ctrl+P)
2. Find the Facebook box and untick the Get personal recommendations by sending music [..] alternative:
   

Alternatively, you can remove the Spotify app from your Facebook:

1. Hover a Spotify notification in your news feed, click the top right arrow icon.
2. Choose Remove Spotify and confirm.
   

Remove all Spotify notifications from your Facebook news feed

To hide all Spotify notifications, as of now, you first have to remove the Spotify app (see above image).

Now you can choose to hide all notifications in your news feed:

1. Hover a Spotify notification in your news feed, click the top right arrow icon.
2. Choose Block Spotify and confirm:
   

Facebook seem to change the options here too, so there's another alternative available to some users: Hide all by Spotify:

1. Hover a Spotify notification in your news feed, click the top right arrow icon.
2. Choose Hide all by Spotify and confirm:
   

For instance, if you post to your wall and you've set your wall posts visibility to friends only, that still means:

• Friends of friends can view, comment and like your check-ins.
• Frends of friends can view all your likes (both Facebook fan pages and liked links).
• Friends of friends can view your subscriptions.

Regarding the check-in visibility, it's hard to do something about. Even though you've set check-in visibility to friends only, that still means friends + friends of friends. That's just how check-ins work right now.

However, you can do something about your fully visible likes and subscriptions. You can hide them, but at a cost - you'll hide them for everybody instead. Including yourself and your friends. Plus you'll hide all future likes and subscriptions for everybody.

Anyway, here's how you limit likes and subscriptions visibility to friends of friends:

To hide likes, go to your Facebook page, find any like, click the X button that appears in the right corner and choose "Hide all recent likes activity from my profile":

To hide subscriptions, go to your Facebook page, find any subscription, click the X button and choose "Hide all revcent subscription activity from my profile".

If you want to remove those settings in the future, do it by scrolling down the news feed on your Facebook page and click on Edit Options in the bottom right area. Then you get this popup where you can do the changes you want:

Of course, you can use the Manage Past Post Visibility feature in Privacy Settings (arrow in top right corner) to hide previous public posts, but that only takes you so far.

Also, Facebook privacy settings doesn't include public group's comments you've made. Those comments will appear in your news feed anyway.

But until Facebook fixes this privacy issue, this is how to do it if you want to hide your wall posts from the public.

And, the ultimate question - how far are you willing to go in trusting all friends of your friends on Facebook?

Me, amongst other Blogger users, repeatedly swear about the incredibly bad user interface. But Google changed that recently! However, even though Blogger has become more editor friendly and the editor interface much more appealing, what's behind the surface is a mess.

I'm a huge fan of semantic and beautiful HTML and Blogger does nothing like that. New sentences, bold text sections and much more means absolutely awful conversion to a HTML resembling something like what HTML code looked like in the 90's. And this is bad. Really bad. First of all, search engine robots (even the Google robot) won't completely understand the structure of the blog posts, in the long run meaning worse ranking in search engines. Not good.

Also, editing a Blogger post is an absolute mess. How hard can it be? Google - just look at your closest "competitor" - Wordpress - which is a perfect example of how easy it should be to write and format a blog post. When I write a blog post in Blogger today, I need to actually code HTML to format stuff the way I want. Not very user friendly.

So, please Google - stop whatever you're doing with Blogger and start helping your Blogger users. Please!

Note: a more exact blog post on why Blogger is an awful platform: 12 things wrong about Blogger

It turns out if you run the 32 bit version of Apache Tomcat on Windows, you can only assign 1.3 GB of memory to it. In some cases it's enough, in other cases, it's not.

This is where you should really know the server Tomcat is installed on. If it's a 64 bit machine, you're probably safe. Because if you have a 64 bit machine, you'll be able to allocate more memory to Java in Tomcat.

You just need to install Java 64 bit and Tomcat 64 bit. (I couldn't find Java 64 bit on the Java website so I used FileHippo instead.)

When the 64 bit versions of Java and Tomcat are installed, you'll be able to allocate a lot more memory.

In our specific project where we use Solr (Java based) for search, Tomcat 64 bit in fact used less memory for Java than Tomcat in the 32 bit version. Plus indexing was faster.

Conclusion: if your server runs a 64 bit OS, then you should install the 64 bit Java and Tomcat versions to be able to address Java Heap Space issues.

First of all, take a look at the Public Templates implementation of XForms. Then:

1. Copy XForms.ascx + cs files to your project.
2. Copy the XForms specific events from global.asax.cs to your project's global.asax.cs.
3. Make sure your SMTP settings are correct. If they aren't, there will be no redirect after the XForm is posted, and therefore no thank you message will be displayed.

Particularly the XFormAfterSubmitPostedData event (global.asax.cs) is interesting. Obviously it decides what happens after a form is posted.

Here is a helpful post on XFormAfterSubmitPostedData and SMTP settings.

http://localhost:8983/solr/update?stream.body=
<delete><query>id:298253</query></delete>&commit=true

This lets you delete documents where the id field matches 298253.

If you want to delete items that matches more than one field, just add another query:

http://localhost:8983/solr/update?stream.body=
<delete><query>id:298253</query>
<query>entitytype:BlogEntry</query></delete>&commit=true

If you want to delete all items in the index, just use this query:

<delete><query>*:*</query></delete>

For instance, if you set AutoEventWireUp to false globally, in Web.Config, your web services will fail.

There's a fix for this though, although it's a bit of a different one.

You just have to locate the DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx file in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG (or similar) and add this line to the top:

<%@ Page AutoEventWireup="true" %>

In Apache Tomcat, you can customize the memory settings, thus allowing more memory to Java clients like Solr.

Just fire up "Configure Tomcat", click on the "Java" tab and allocate enough memory in the "Initial memory pool" and "Maximum memory pool" fields:

What memory size should you allocate here? Well, it depends. The default initial memory pool is 64 MB. If you've got a pretty large search index with many searches, you'll surelly need more memory allocated.

In a project here, where we've got approximately 20 Million indexed items being searched, 256 MB weren't enough as initial memory pool. 512 MB so far seems to work it out. I guess you just have to try some different values out, and monitor Tomcat's performance while fine-tuning.

* Also take a look at my other blog post on Java heap space issues and 32 / 64 bit versions of Apache Tomcat and Java.