Blue Chi’s

I always had a problem with my phone and web-based address books. I have multiple entries of the same people, each with a million different numbers. Very recently I decided to sort this once and for all and have all my address books synced using Gmail’s support for Microsoft Exchange. Using Exchange making any change in either of my address books causes the other one to reflect that change INSTANTLY without doing anything but update the actual entry. As my iPhone is always connected to the internet this really works as advertised and it is just unbelievably efficient!

It took me a while to clean up my Gmail address book and have ALL my contacts on it first, I deleted many contacts of people I have not been in touch with for years and those who I am now exclusively in touch with via Facebook. Once I got my Gmail address book completed, I completed wiped out my phone’s address book and used the Exchange settings to have Gmail sync with it, in a matter of seconds the names started popping up in my address book and the process was done! Whenever I add a new contact to my Gmail address book that person appears instantly on my iPhone, making any change to any entry also appears instantly as well!

OK, what’s even cooler is that after I got both of my address books unified an sorted, I used the iPhone Facebook app to sync the photos of all of my friends with my iPhone address book, so now when any of my friends call me their Facebook profile picture shows up on the screen! AND this picture is later synced with Gmail so I can also see it inside my Gmail address book!

Besides the address book feature, I also use Exchange to push emails instantly to my iPhone so that it email and SMS become virtually the same, and best of all is that my calendar is now synced with Google Calendar live so that any event I add to my iPhone calendar appears in Google Calendar instantly without me doing anything but add the event to the calendar! It is seriously insane I love it!

The recent announcement of the iPad and the experimentation with HTML5 by YouTube and others led people argue about whether or not Flash is necessary, or even good at all, for the Internet. Apple has announced that, just like the iPhone, the iPad will not support Flash. YouTube and a number of websites have started testing the use of HTML5 video instead of Flash to playback web video.

Many people are vocally against Flash because it is a proprietary technology that is controlled by Adobe. People think the web should be built using open standards such as CSS and HTML. Images on the internet do not need a special plug to be played and are placed directly on a web page, the new HTML5 will make it possible to embed a video inside an HTML page the same way an image is placed. As Flash is the most popular method for delivering video on the internet, a lot of people seem to believe that the arrival of HTML5 will be the end of the Flash video era. A number of modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari already support the HTML5 video tag and websites such as YouTube and Vimeo started testing it for delivering video.

There are a lot of compatibility issues with HTML5 video tag and it will take a very long time (years) before it can become a serious alternative for Flash video. The HTML5 video tag enables embedding a video directly onto a web page, but there is no actual standard video format for the web and there is no consistency in the support of video codecs by browsers. The majority of video codecs are restricted by use licenses and no format is currently universally supported.

Apple refuses to have Flash on the iPhone because it fears that it will negatively affect the user experience due to its tendency to consume the system resources, however, all other smart phone platforms (Android, Palm, Windows, and Blackberry) have announced that they will support the new Flash Player 10.1 which has been developed for mobile and touch based navigation in mind. Apple also will not support Flash on its upcoming iPad tablet even though it will come with a new powerful processor that is capable of delivering a desktop like browsing experience.

Instead of waiting for Apple to reconsider its position, Adobe announced that the upcoming version of Adobe Flash Professional, CS5, will enable developers to use Flash CS5 and ActionScript 3.0, the same tools used to create Flash on the web, to create native iPhone applications. This means that Flash developers can use their existing skills and easily create smart mobile phone applications that will run on the iPhone, Android, or the desktop web, using a single SDK with very little changed between each different platform version of the same application.

It must be remembered that Adobe does not make money off the Flash Player, but by selling development tools such as Flash Professional and Photoshop. Adobe creates a number of tools, such as Dreamweaver, that work with web standards such as HTML5. The video tag is very unlikely to have any significant impact of the use of Flash for delivering video on the web anytime soon, and even if it did, it should be remembered that Flash is not just a medium for delivering video, Flash is the most popular method for creating web games and other rich interactive content. Many popular web services such as TweetDeck, Google Streetview, Picnik, are built on Flash and they don’t have anything to do with video.

The fact that the iPhone and the iPad do not support Flash is not the end of Flash, for the real customers of Adobe, the developers, Flash can still be the a good option for developing applications, especially due to the ease at which applications created using Flash can be ported to multiple platforms (including the iPhone) easily!

I have to admit that I am very excited about the recently announced Apple iPad, and just like the majority of people I am not sure if I really need one, but I just want it! I think that it is the best couch/bedside computer, it is just a device you keep at home to check your email while laying in bed or on a coach, maybe carry along when chilling at Caribou while having a cold drink…. damn that sounds cool!

I can’t say that I’m super upset about multitasking, I’ve been using the iPod Touch and iPhone for a while now and I am really not bothered about it all that much. I think that not running Flash in the browser is a drawback, but not a deal breaker for me because I don’t play web Flash games, and because YouTube has its own application.

Strangely my most favourite feature of the iPad is the new calendar, it looks really awesome and makes me think the iPad could be used as a serious office organizer, especially if you sync Google Calendar using Exchange the same way I do using the iPhone.

All of that said, I am going buy one the second it comes out, I am looking forward to read the reviews and see what the developers do with it.. and then I will seriously have to think about whether or not spending money on a coach computer is really a good idea!

The recent release of the Google Nexus One, the new Android phone, got me a little bit worried about my attachment to the iPhone. I am very interested in the Nexus One, it is a really great phone, but no matter how good any other phone seems now, it is very difficult for me to consider leaving the iPhone platform because I have integrated a number of iPhone specific applications into my lifestyle and I do know if anybody ever will make equivalent applications for any other device (iFitness, iXpense, Nike+, etc).

No matter how pretentious it might sound, but the iPhone has really changed my life, the way I use a mobile phone, and the way I interact with the web on the go, and this layer that the applications bring to the mix make it extremely hard to move to another platform, no matter how appealing that device seems. The only option I can consider now for getting another mobile phone would be to have it as a secondary phone – which I really never had even though I badly think I should get another number for work… but seriously, would someone who has an iPhone buy an Android phone as a secondary mobile phone? I can’t possibly pay for two mobile data plans, that’s just not right.

iPhones and other smart phones users, do you feel attached to your platform or can you easily switch regardless of the applications?

The new iPhone OS came out a couple of days ago, and for some reason, most people are talking about the really boring copy-and-paste feature which barely anybody ever uses on the go. For me personally the most significant feature of this new OS is the official support for Arabic. Not only can the iPhone now read and write Arabic text, but you can set the whole OS to use Arabic as the system language.

I use the iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPod Touch. The only major difference between the iPhone and the iPod Touch is the iPhone has a sim card and a built-in camera while the iPod Touch does not.

In order to set the system language to Arabic you have to go through Settings>General>International and from there pick Arabic as the language of the system. You can use an Arabic Keyboard without changing the system language by going through Setting>General>Keyboard Layout and check Arabic. That would let you switch the keyboard to Arabic at any time.

Once you set the Language ot Arabic the system will restart into Arabic. All the default applications, except Safari and Mail, use Arabic names:

I don’t have access to a wifi network when I was writing this, so I can’t show you how the browser works in Arabic, but I have a random Arabic email in my inbox from a random stupid girl who spams me with forwards sent to an account I use for sending website newsletters. Anyway, you can see Arabic in mail here:

(Of course I did not forward the stupid message, I’d rather go to hell).

The Arabic keyboard is very similar to the PC layout with some changes in the lower row to fit all the letters:

The coolest thing though, in my opinion, is how the music library uses the Arabic alphabet to sort the music and then follows it with English. I rewrote the name of a single song in Arabic to see how it looks like:

All the song meta data appears in Arabic during playback.

And what’s even cooler is that you can have the lyrics in Arabic as well!! Of course you would have to add these manually one by one. There are programs to do this automatically for English songs, but the program will obviously not work for Arabic songs.

Finally, you can also see Arabic meta data on Cover Flow as well:

The other significant additions in OS 3.0 for me were the landscape mode typing for all applications and spot light search everything. I found the shake to shuffle feature annoying as the songs started shuffling randomly as I walked around with my iPod in my back pocket.

I don’t write much in Arabic, but I would certainly like to read Arabic on the thing even if I don’t necessarily write much. I don’t have many Arabic songs on my iPod, but I would also like to have the meta data for these in Arabic just for the fun of it!

The majority of you must have already heard of Apple’s upcoming iPhone: the iPod, cell phone, and internet tablet all-in-one gadget. It is a sleek touch-screen wide-screen device that can make phone calls, play music and video purchased from the iTunes music store, and is equipped with some built-in GBs, WiFi, and a Safari Internet browser. Geeks and Apple fans are over the moon about it, the hype is getting crazier as the release date gets closer (the end of this month).

But it’s really pissing me off.

I am really irritated by how many stupid people are ready to believe everything they read or see in an advertisement. First of all, the iPhone is not going to run OS X in the way that we know it. You will not be able to run any application that you have on your OS X on the iPhone, the fact that Apple names the thing that runs on the iPhone OSX does not have any practical meaning at all.

The phone is going to be expensive as hell. With a 2-year contract it will be sold at a subsidised price of $500. This means that the price of the phone outside the US sold on its own without any phone operator could easily be 3 times that price = $1500. I would not be surprised if it costs way more than this.

The revolutionary iPhone is not a 3G phone – it won’t do video calls or video messages, I do not know if it would even do MMS.

What really got me pissed is the recent comparison chart Apple posted on their website here. It is very normal for companies to pimp their own devices in these sort of charts, but come on, not only that the comparison is irrelevant, who the hell would compare the N95 a multimedia phone to a Blackberry – a business communicator? And so, who does Apple target with this new phone? Enterprises or casual users? I think that it is really stupid for them to omit all the obvious features found on all those other devices such as 3G, Voip, 3rd party apps, changeable batteries, AND WEIGHT.