nihaar's notepad » iphone

iPhone OS 3.0 is here

nihaar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:59:04 +0000

Apple released the long anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 this week. Having just downloaded it today, I love the improvements they’ve made; again displaying an uncanny ability to know what their users want. Some of my favorite upgrades are the copy & paste feature, universal search (apps, contacts, and even emails!), and landscape mode for keyboards (this makes a small improvement on the typing experience, but its still far from perfect).

I also love the new CalDAV support which now lets you add multiple calendars (from Google, Yahoo etc) on your iPhone. To enable this,

Go to your settings and under “Mail, Contacts and Calendar”, tap on “Add Account”.
Select Other and under calendars tap on “Add CalDAV Account”.
Enter google.com as your server and your login information and voila!

Your google calendar now shows up on your iPhone. Another great reason to try out MyCal, as it makes adding events to your iPhone a piece of cake.

My favorite iPhone apps

nihaar — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:27:23 +0000

Mint: Love this application even though I am not a fan of apps that are simply conversions of their websites (just create a mobile friendly version of your site that I can access via Safari!!)
VNC lite/OpenSSH: Lets me access my laptop at home no matter where I am
Evernote: This is a good example of a web-service that has created an application for the iphone that actually adds value. Love the ability to take pictures and search for text within them – very handy after a long brainstorming session on the whiteboard. (more Evernote tips from Lifehacker)
Yelp: Nice but could me much better. I would LOVE if they included more sorting criteria for their results especially by number of reviews, cuisine, and proximity.
Files Lite: Great to throw ebooks/pdfs that I can read while I’m away from my computer. Use this to store an image of NYC Subway map on my phone that I can access anytime without a signal.
Skype: Awesome way to keep your phone bill down. I have a US/Canada plan for $3 a month that lets me call anywhere anytime unlimited. Also, if you jail-break your phone, you can use Skpye on a 3G network as well.

iPhone app success

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:04:56 +0000

After reading a lot on the immense success of these seemingly trivial and useless iPhone apps like iFart, virtual lighter, etc I can’t help but a. want to create an app on the iPhone and b. understand why this is happening. This seems to have all the makings of another mini-bubble. Thinking about this a little, a few factors come to mind:

The obvious one of the iPhone being a new platform, hundreds of thousands of users are hungry to try out new apps (akin to when the Facebook platform first opened up)

There is a high initial cost of owning an iPhone and hence users are more inclined to “invest” more in their iPhones by trying to make them more useful and interesting.

A more subtle reason could be the ease at which you can download and pay for these apps. With just a few taps on the app store, I can download several apps and never have to even take out my wallet or credit card.