I *demand* a tour!

http://www.apple.com/antenna/testing-lab.html

The End of :hover.

Basically, if you have a touch enabled device (like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc), you can’t use the :hover CSS attribute.

Andy also points out that the onmouseover etc items just don’t work either, and the same also applies to Flash.

Syncing Facebook to Google Calendar to the iPhone.

It describes how to take your Facebook Events, and get them into Google Calendar, then you can get them synchronised to you mobile device using Google Sync (I’ve done that last bit already.) This will save a bit of a headache.

I was prompted to look for this by the recent upgrade to the iPhone Facebook App, which now provides contact synchronisation with your Contacts on the phone. The problem I found wihth this though is that it’s very non-descriptive as to what it actually synchronises.

According to several newsgroup posts, it only synchronises the profile photo to the contact, and even then it overwrites the ones that you choose. So I went looking for a better solution, and found this diversion.

Well, the Calendar sync’ing is bloody fantastic. I’ve started to get my arse in gear and get my life slightly more organised, and it’s really helping. There is a slight delay in the synchronising, a 10-15 seconds at most, I’d guess, but other than that, it’s perfect. The only downside that I’ve found is that I have recently been playing with some of the lab features of Google Calendar, specifically, the calendar which shows you the birthdays of my Google Contacts and the ToDo List calendars. The Contacts list calendar is transferred to my phone, but the ToDo list isn’t. I’m guessing that that is more to do with Google not sharing it, rather than the iPhone not capable of receiving it.

At the time I set up the synchronisation, I did not enable the contact synchronising, as the contacts on my phone are far more up-to-date. In the inbetween time, I’ve been busy updating my Google contacts, but they still aren’t completely updated, so I still need some time before I can switch that on. However, I did discover that I can already search the contacts and view them on my phone, by using the Contacts App, and pressing the back arrow at the top left of the screen. I can then see the contacts on my phone and my Google contacts.

Finally, and most excitingly, Google have now activated the mail synchronisation, and you can get Push email from Google to your phone. Now, I’m wondering whether this is particularly useful. I retrieve emails from my GMail account using IMAP, I receive updates from that every 15 minutes or so (a preference that I chose, but it could be sooner.) In most cases, that is sufficient for my needs, if I needed it to be faster, I can change the checking interval. The major advantage of Push Email is that you receive it almost immediately. The major disadvantage is that it keeps a constant connection and therefore it drains the battery life of the phone much quicker. So, is it worth it? For me, no, but then I don’t need near instant access to my GMail account – and maybe you should consider that too before you turn it on.

Basically, I wanted to get my calendars on Google Calendar synchronised with my iPhone (because really, my google calendar is my main calendar) and seeing as iPhone OS 3.0 supports the CalDAV standard, it should be a piece of piss.

Anyway. Turns out, you can add the calendar quite easily by following these instructions

http://www.bagofspanners.com/2009/06/17/subscribing-to-google-calendars-via-caldav-in-iphone-os-3-0/

The problem with this approach though is that you only get one calendar. Fine if you only have one, but if you have several (like I do,) then it’s no bloody good.

So, lots of references to this page later…..

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138759&topic=14252

… and I finally twig what’s going on.

Turns out, Google have implemented an Exchange Server which lets you synchronise Calendar items and Contacts with your account.

Reading between the lines, you have to be careful regarding the contacts in your GMail account, as possibly they end up on your iPhone and any contacts on your iPhone end up on GMail. It sounds like you can turn that off, but actually it sounds quite useful too. The added plus of that is, if you change the contacts in GMail, they should synchronise back to Address Book on your Mac once you plug you iPhone back in. So, one address book to rule them all.

The added plus is, you get all of your calendars on you iPhone and you can add and remove items to your hearts content!

Now, I’m aware that this might sound a little redundant, but I really think the iPhone should work with WAP pages. Sure, you have a perfectly good web browser on the iPhone that renders ordinary web pages perfectly well. But….

You simply cannot escape from the fact that the screen is small, and it can be a real pain in the arse scrolling around the screen, zooming in and out, etc.

Which are similar problems that WAP pages were designed to solve!

And seeing as there are some sites out there that are much, much, quicker to use through a WAP site rather than their HTML-based equivalents, it kind of makes sense some times….

No? Just me then….

Whilst the old theme was OK, there are a couple of annoying little glitches that bothered me, not to mention that it made no attempt at (visually) indicating that there was an RSS feed available.

Hopefully, the new theme should solve a lot of those problems (although, I’m yet to try it on a slightly smaller screen).

The other benefit of upgrading of course is that the app for my iPhone now works. Well done to the developers that changed the app so that it would only work with the latest version, and didn’t tell anyone. Genius!

Yup, it’s true, I’ve finally updated this site. As promised previously, it now runs off of a WordPress engine, and has a new theme. I’ve also cleared out the cobwebs and got rid of a load of tat that was unfinished and was lingering around.

The other bonus of this, means that I’m now writing my first blog post on my iPhone.

Brilliant!

First, I’ve used up a lot of disk space on my host’s server with my blog database. The prime culprit for that, is comment spam. I manually approved comments and trackbacks, and have a list of spam words that I use to block unwanted comments. However, this has always been a manual process. I’d always intended on using the spam comments and trackbacks to build a bayesian filter, but never got around to it. This morning, I deleted over 160,000 spam comments, and have over 60,000 left to check. That has freed up the disk space but doesn’t solve the problem of me getting lots and lots of spam

Secondly, I’ve wanted to improve this site’s design for a while, so I’d previously started a rewrite to change the look, and to improve the spam filtering.

Thirdly, posting has always been a little difficult for me. I’ve always been able to post via email, which has worked great, but doesn’t let me do advanced features, plus I’ve always hankered for using ATOM or XML-RPC to post with so I can use some standard tools. Except, I never got around to doing that. Now that I have an iPhone, I want to use some of the blogging tools available for that to post to the blog.

These things have lead me to a fine conclusion – Migrate to WordPress. Why WordPress? I don’t know, just another blog system so don’t argue with me, damn it. I can use it’s inbuilt spam protection (and more with the use of plugins); I can update just the theme of the site quite easily without messing too much with the code; and I can also use the WordPress app on my iPhone too.

So, this leaves me with several problems…

1. I need to import my existing blog into WordPress. There doesn’t appear to be any reference for this, but I think I can start from here: SimplePHPBlog Import Utility. I’m considering creating some PHP library that can be used to insert data into the WordPress table structures. I’ll then make this freely downloadable.
2. I need to implement my own theme. Fiddling with CSS and PHP in the template has already started. Shouldn’t take too long
3. Check out existing blog functionality and get it to work within WordPress
4. Sort out mod_rewrite so that the existing permalinks work without a problem
5. Integrate my “static” non-blog pages into WordPress

I also have a problem in that I can currently installed WordPress under a separate subdomain, and will need to copy this from one directory to another once it is completed. Hopefully this won’t be a problem!

Simple really. Stay tuned for some downtime!

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/2008/07/23/mymote-iphone-app-for-mythtv-control-released/

Actually, I’m impressed with “MythTV for iPhone” and it’s ability to stream to the device. Cool.