Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category
How to Hack Boingo WiFi
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, Miscellaneous, iPhone
I’m currently at Oakland International Airport, with about an hour and a half to go until my flight, but I don’t want to pay Boingo Wireless $7.95 for 90 minutes of web access from my laptop. On a whim, I hopped onto the Boingo network from my iPhone to see if anything was different for phones. And it was: mobile browsers can gain internet access for 15 minutes if they watch a 15 second Flash ad.
Now, ironically enough, iPhone doesn’t support Flash, so on that device I’d see 15 seconds of a blank screen. However, I realized that I can spoof Mobile Safari (the iPhone browser) from Safari on my laptop. So I did, and voila, after sitting tight for 15 seconds, my laptop was granted internet access.
And of course, the first thing I did was hop on twitlive.tv to see Leo Laporte’s live streaming iPhone 3G coverage. If there’s someone monitoring this network, I want to see their face when they notice that some random cellphone is getting fullscreen video streamed to it.
Alphabetical App Store Listings
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, iPhone
Given that the listing is in alphabetical order when you click “All Free Applications” in the iPhone App Store, I wonder if we’ll soon get a deluge of applications with ‘A’s, numbers, and special entities as their first character just to get on the front page.
iPhone 2.0 Launches, Kind Of
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, iPhone
Planned obscolescence? Hardly. My original, non-3G, slow-as-a-dead-turtle iPhone is now running software version 2.0.
Caveat: as far as I know, nothing’s actually launched yet. I followed TechCrunch’s instructions to download the software update outside of iTunes and their link to the App Store, which still isn’t featured in the main iTunes store page. However, it all works (more or less, I’ll talk about that in a second).
I downloaded the Facebook, Google, Evernote, and Twitteriffic applications, and then a few random games. All of these were free, might I add. One small tidbit worth noting is that the Applications section in iTunes has a link to “Check for updates”, so I’m guessing developers can push updates through iTunes.
The Facebook app isn’t working yet; when I try to log in, it errors on “Can’t connect to Facebook”, so I wonder if their server’s aren’t ready yet (although the Facebook blog has a post this morning announcing the new app).
Google’s application simply makes it easier to search than using Safari, and can use your location for local search.
Evernote successfully synced down all of my notes. I haven’t played around with this application too much, but I suspect it’ll supplant Notes as my, well, notes app of choice.
Twitteriffic is still problematic. Scrolling isn’t smooth and there are some HTML tags that are being displayed instead of interpreted in the ads. Interestingly enough, it also doesn’t seem to utilize Apple’s push service to notify me when I get new tweets; i.e., I received tweets via SMS and not via Twitteriffic. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future.
This stuff looks really good. I’m going to try buying some games soon (Bejeweled or Prism, probably) and see if I’m getting my $9.99’s worth. More soon.
Update: 2.0’s still not out yet, but here’s The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s coverage on how to get it. I’m also seriously considering switching to NetNewsWire as my feed reader, because the iPhone and Mac apps sync feed and read items. Mmm…sync.
Yes, iPhones Allowed on Microsoft Campus
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, Microsoft, iPhone
I’ve heard rumblings that some employees at AT&T stores are telling customers who work at Microsoft that if you’re caught with an iPhone on a Microsoft campus, it’s grounds for immediate dismissal. And, unfortunately, someone (who hasn’t been in the country long) believed this and got a BlackBerry instead.
First, this is obviously completely false. I’ve been walking around 1075 La Avenida Street for the last three weeks with an iPhone, and I’m still here and fine.