All About Iphone

Call me stoked when I was doing my not-often-enough browse through the App Store look for something to download on my iPhone, when I got nothing better to do, and I came across Galaga. Previously I had been impressed with the turnout of games like Pacman, for example, but I was never really a Pacman guy back in the day, but I was definitely a Galaga guy. So when I saw Galaga Remix, I was intrigued. I have to admit though I am a perennial cheapskate though, so the $5.99 price tag took me for a bit of a loop as I am never really sure how much interest such a game will hold for me. In other words, will I play it once and then never play it again?

So I filed it away as a cool blast from the past and something I might consider in the future and went back to my browsing. This is when I got to the free applications and found Galaga Remix Lite. Now the price was right for me. I realized it was probably a very limited reproduction but that is okay I just wanted a taste of the old days. So I downloaded the Lite version and started it up. First I chose the arrow controls over the slider controls, because it seemed to make more sense, although I was a little concerned about my abilities to play Galaga on the iPhone. So as it loaded up, automatically in landscape mode, I got ready. I was hit by the music first, then the very nice graphics and I was engrossed. I was able to clear the first two levels even though one of my dogs attacked me on the second screen. That being said, the game was over, and now I had to decide what to do.

As soon as I finish writing this, I will be forking out the $5.99 as Galaga is one of those games that never gets old. The only game that might capture me more is if someone made Tempest on the iPhone, although I am really not sure how that control would work.

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I tried to submit a story via the iPhone earlier and ran into a few problems. The first problem is that there is no Cut and Paste on the iPhone, so when using the Submit a Story URL you have to type it all in. That is where the problem comes in. When I hit the backspace/delete button on the iPhone it erases the entire line including the “http://” that is pre-entered. Since I am still getting used to the keyboard, it was difficult for me not to make at least one mistake when entering a 60-70 character URL.

By the way the funny thing is the story I was submitting to Digg was something someone else had already submitted so I would have ended up canceling the submission anyways.

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Since this is a blog and a blog about iPhone, it stands to reckon that I would eventually try to write a blog entry on my iPhone. I was not sure how it would go and how well the latest revision of Wordpress would work. So I was in a parking lot away from home dutifully on the EDGE network when I decided to give it a go.

It was easy enough to log in to Word Press and choose “Write Post”. The problem came, however when entering my post. My Wordpress defaults to the visual editor, which is great when using my computer, but I soon found out that with the iPhone, at least on the edge network. Apparently it is redrawning the entire text box with every key stroke. This makes sense as it is a WYSIWYG editor. The problem on the iPhone is after pretty much every keystroke the focus flies all over the page and makes it virtually impossible to type anything in.

Fortunately I did not struggle with it for too long and I was able to switch to the Code setting and was good to go right away. I did not have any fancy formating, images or anything else, so it maybe a bit more of a challenge if you want to do anything beyond basic text. There is always old-fashioned HTML in the Code window. If anyone figures out how to overcome the issue in the Visual editor on the EDGE network please let me know. Otherwise it is completely possible and relatively easy to blog from the iPhone.

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One of my last hurdles to overcome in fully utilizing my iPhone was setting up e-mail. I have been essentially dreading it as my set up has me getting a lot of mail every day, with a significant portion of it being spam. I have essentially been relying on Thunderbird to deal with SPAM which is not the best solution. After mulling it over for a day or so, I came upon a solution.

I decided I would try to utilize Gmail as a Spam filter for my E-mail. Then I would either pick it up from Gmail or forward it back. My original plan was wanting to forward it back to the same address. This is doable, but I would to muck around with my mail on the server, and my main mail account is actually hosted on a shared server that I do not own, not on one of my own servers. I attempted some half-hearted hacks with Cpanel, but suffice it to say it did not work how I wanted it.

So while still trying to crack the nut of having Gmail sending mail back to the same account that was forwarding to it in the first place, I decided to try the Gmail setup on the iPhone directly. You have to use POP3 with Gmail and the iPhone. This is fine, but the problem for me was that it does not honor the changed “From” field when sending mail. So when I sent mail even though I wanted it to show coming from “me @ mydomain.com” it showed coming from “Mynick @ gmail.com”. This simply was not workable as it made my e-mails potentially confusing to recipients. I really needed a solution that would allow me to send out mail and have the from and reply-to line set to what I wanted, so it would appear to be coming from my original address.

I finally settled on using a second email account. I just set up a second account on my server and had Gmail forward the mail to that account.

So to explain how it works:

Mail comes to my server at “me @ mydomain.com”

My server automatically forwards all mail for “me @ mydomain.com” to “mynick @ gmail.com”

Gmail takes all that mail runs it through their very good spam filtering, and then forwards the remaining messages to “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” and then also archives the messages on Gmail.

I receive the messages at “me-secondary @ mydomain.com” with IMAP both through Thunderbird, and through my iPhone.

So far it has been working excellently. There is no filtering or ability to create new folders on the iPhone, so I have to do all that on Thunderbird, but it has not been a big deal so far. Gmail has been doing an amazing job filtering out the spam, leaving me with a reasonable inflow of mail that can be effectively used on the iPhone. I will ocassionally go to Thunderbird and run my mail filters, but I can access the same mail from both locations now.

The only thing I had to change on the iPhone was what some of my default boxes were. For Trash and Sent boxes, I had to choose the ones I was using on Thunderbird, to sync them up. When people get messages from me it shows as coming from my original address and replies get sent back to the same address.

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In case it has not been specifically said, one of my favorite features of the iPhone is its WiFi capabilities. So when I struggled with getting WiFi to work initially, I was bummed. You can read about what I did to fix it here. Regardless, now we move on and really start to see how WiFi is going to work with the iPhone. So Sunday morning I was going out to breakfast, and WiFi hits were popping up all over the neighborhood. I could see all the local routers. I even tried to attach to one unsecured network to see what would happen, but I got out of range too quickly.

Then today I was in the center of nearby McDonalds that offers WiFi, and noticed a pop-up for their network. I connected up, and in a few seconds I was browsing on their WiFi network. The great thing about this, though, is the iPhone remembers these things, so anytime I am in range of this WiFi in the future it will automatically switch over and use it. So anywhere you go where you can tap into a WiFi (that you are authorized to use), I recommend setting it up. Then in the future, even if you are not thinking about it, you can get all the benefits and speed from going through the WiFi network.

I am really pretty excited about this. I know a lot of people like to take about EV-DO and 3G and the rest, but honestly, the future of mobile communications is not going to be tied to cellular networks. It is going to be WiFi Maxi WiFi, Broadband WiFi and the rest.

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