As Seen Through PeriVisioN

Guest post by Kevin Rochowski – @thunderberry

Despite it’s enormous popularity, Twitter has no official iPhone app of its own. Developers, seeking to plug this gap, have taken up the challenge to make their own, ensuring that there is no lack of native clients to choose from. Today, we take two of the more popular paid apps, Twittelator Pro and Tweetie, and pit them against each other for your viewing pleasure.

Both of these apps will satisfy the needs of the basic twitter user, but their defining feature sets are most definitely targeted at the pro user. Both feature the ability to define multiple twitter accounts, post photos, add in geo-location data and browse links within the app itself. But ultimately it’s the execution of these features that sets apart the victor and the loser:

Twittelator Pro

Cost: 4.99 USD (iTunes link)

Pros: Landscape mode for composing tweets, support for both instapaper and readitlater, themes, support for multiple photo and link shortening services

Cons: Frequent (and confusing) error messages, clunky interface, could be faster.

Tweetie

Cost: 2.99 USD (iTunes link)

Pros: Intuitive interface, speedy, smooth operation, simplicity of use

Cons: lack of support for alternative services for photo and link shortening, instapaper support only, no push notification for DM
So which is the winner? As is often the case with these sorts of things, personal preferences will play a large part in determining which you prefer. Twitterlator Pro has the advantage of providing landscape more editing, but it is outperformed in almost every other aspect by Tweetie. When cost is added in as a factor, the lower price and higher aesthitic qualites of Tweetie make it the clear victor in my opinion, and has earned it a permanent placement on my home screen.

I’m not holding my breadth though. Since the 3.0 update, I have had more issues with dropped calls and poor cell performance. I’m not the only one to see it.  Since my first post on this issue, I have received quite a few comments from people experiencing the same thing, and tips to help reduce dropped calls.

Well, the 3.1 SDK is out and not much has been mentioned on fixing this issue short of this line.

..iPhone Software 3.1 also reportedly improves battery life on the iPhone 3G S, updates the “Carrier” profile for U.S. users to “AT&T 4.2,” as opposed to “AT&T 4.0,” ..

Now I this does not mean its going to improve the situation, and I’ll looking for something somewhere, but its better then nothing. Still, after being used to good connections since the 2.1 update, I’m really bummed to have to return to watching where I place my phone calls again to avoid dropped calls. 

Guest post by @thunderberry –  Follow him!

Evernote has long been the swiss army knife of universal capture. Running on Windows, Mac, the Web, multiple smartphone platforms and of course the iPhone, this hybrid of application and service has undergone multiple revisions in its goal to help you ‘Remember Everything”. Add or edit any note on any platform and with a simple sync it becomes available everywhere else.

Prior to OS 3.0 on the iPhone, Evernote was a little restricted as to what you could capture. We’ve already touched upon how the lack of Copy and Paste on made clipping sections of web sites impossible, and the restrictive lack of macro function on the camera made snapping all those important business cards (or wine bottle labels) infeasible unless you were willing to make do with a blurry smudge or used a macro lens. All that has changed now with the release of Evernote for iPhone 3.0 and the advent of the new, snappier iPhone 3GS and update of 3.0. So what exactly has made Evernote go from cool to essential? Let’s take a quick look.

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I do not use Evernote much, despite having it on my desktop and iphone.  However, I REALLY wish I could edit text in the cloud from the iphone, but Evernote just never made it into my workflow, instead I use Google Docs.

Well, now with cut and paste being easier to use, I found myself grabbing text from google docs and pasting into Evernote. I can then edit and keep editing till I get around to putting it back in google docs via my desktop from Evernote.  This is not perfect by ANY means, but better then nothing… well, its this or nothing.

What I REALLY wish for is either Evernote allow rich text editing on the iphone or google docs doing it.  Its a race boys!!  First one will become my default text system for the iphone, and thus the desktop.

If ANYONE knows of a way to edit rich text directly in the cloud from the iphone, please let me know …

W00t I say, w00t!

In case you do not know about running an iphone app in the background, read this..

http://www.perivision.net/wordpress/?p=1451

Remember though, if you are playing digital radio, it will take up power and thus your phone will get warm and that’s BAD for batteries. So make sure you do what you can to keep your phone cool.

Enjoy!!

With exception to cut and paste, there was not much that I though was really useful in 3.0, but there are a few.. here is #16

Open Link In New Tab In Safari

Safari now uses tabbed browsing, like big boys do on the desktops, and this new hidden feature is great. If you tap and hold on a hyperlink (hyperlinked text) on a Web site within Safari, a dialog will prompt you to open this link, copy it (link locations) or open it in a new page (which opens a new tab in Safari).

I wrote this article for iphoneLife over 1/2 a year ago.  For those who remember before the 2.1 update on the 3G, dropped calls was a continual pain.  Well, I’m not sure what the story is; or if its just odd coincidence, I and others have been having issues with dropped calls once we did the 3.0 update (which included a baseband update).  So I’m posting the article again.  Hopefully this will be helpful if you are experiencing dropped call issues as well.

- original article written in ~Oct 08 -

It’s no secret that the iPhone has been having problems with dropped calls and sound quality. Interestingly, the problem has increased since the 3G came on the scene. Although Apple and AT&T have been improving the situation bit-by-bit, dropped calls are still a reality. Because of this, I thought I would share a few tips that may help reduce the number of dropped calls and improve overall sound quality.

Cell phone reception

A cell phone is basically a small two-way radio. When you make a call, the iPhone connects to the nearest cell tower(s) using radio waves, much like the reception on your AM/FM radio. Your voice is converted into a digital signal (a series of 0’s and 1’s), transmitted to its destination, and converted back to an audio signal on the other phone.

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This just came through the wires via Cnet..

Marking a departure from the world of iPhone, HTC’s new Android-based Hero phone will also come with the ability to handle Flash elements that adorn many Web sites and powers YouTube video.

Adobe Systems announced on Wednesday that its Flash Player will be built into the HTC phone, an important step in the company’s efforts to spread Flash to mobile phones. The phone, one of several from HTC to use Google’s open-source operating system, is scheduled to ship in Europe starting in July and in Asia and North America later in the year.

Now, this is going to be mostly AS2 V9 instead of A3 V10, but still, I used to write some great stuff in As1 V6, so that is plenty of capability as far as I’m concerned.  I have the GoogleIO HTC, so as soon as I can, I’m going to upgrade the OS and started testing out various sites as well as some of my own apps!

… oh, and flash coming to the iPhone…. (sound of crickets)

I really do not understand this.  But for some reason, I’ve been dropping more calls, and the quality of my calls seems to have degraded.  I when I first upgraded, I tried to make a call and it sounded noisy like I had an analog connection.  At first I thought perhaps since the baseband was upgraded, it just needed to re optimize the locations of towers. Well, 24 hours later, I have already dropped 4 calls!  What the heck?

I did a search on google and found nothing, so this could be some local issue, but 4 dropped calls in 24 hours???   I’m going to give this a few more days.  If things do not return to normal then perhaps some extended testing is required.

Has anyone else experienced this?

{Update … I posted an old article here on reducing dropped calls.  Hope this helps.  }

First off, I’m not your typical user, and if you read my blog you would know this; I use jailbreak and LOVE it. However, I also cannot resist experimenting with the iPhone, so once I felt satisfied I heard the jailbreak for 3.0 was relatively stable, I decided to go for it.  However, just as an experiment, I’m NOT going to jailbreak for a few days and see if I miss it. (I already know I will , but like any research type, the experiment must be preformed).

{update … I did not last more to 15 seconds. As soon as I turned on the phone, I wanted to enable WIFI and forgot I could not simply swipe to get the WIFI button. 15 seconds.  Yes, without jailbreak, the iphone is just… just.. andriod. XD  }

Now, on to the upgrade. Here is how I did it

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