App Store For The Clueless (Finally In Egypt)

Today, I was driving my car when I received a message from Vodafone. At first I thought it was reminding me of paying my bill, yes I'm lazy when it comes to paying my bills. But to my pleasant surprise, it was Vodafone informing me that the App store is finally available in Egypt. Hurray!



So, as soon as I got home I fired up iTunes and found that it's true. Egypt is finally on the App Store map.



I created an account, nothing unusual, I finally got to use my credit card so I can buy apps. The first annoying thing is that all the prices are in USD. Nevermind, minor setback.

Next I went on to check my favorite free apps, see if I can ditch the US store forever. My list of essential apps are Twitterfon, Palringo, Facebook, iPray, Lose It!, Sudoku Free, Skype, iZoo, Remote, Last.fm, GPSlite and WordPress. Out of those I couldn't find Lose It!, Last.fm and GPSlite. Also, I couldn't find the Google app and Google Earth. So if you were thinking about ditching your old US store account, I'd say not yet, give it a few months of trial first.

Tomorrow I'll try to purchase an app and I'll let you know how it goes. Until then, happy app downloads.

OCT - Yet Another Twitter Post

I've been on Twitter for less than a year now. I only joined to document my experience buying the iPhone. And since then, I've been on and off the "Tweetscape" (yet another silly word like the now dead "blogosphere").

The great thing about twitter, is that besides the great stream of news, I get to know when somebody made some tea, I get to know when somebody wakes up an hour earlier than the usual and I get to know when somebody goes for a number one. OK, nobody twitters about THAT, but I think I just need to follow more people.

So after a lot of research, I proposed a new expression: Obsessive Compulsive Twittering. OCT is diagnosed mainly among twitter users, a "tweep" is compulsively twittering about every boring detail of his/her life and takes pleasure in doing so. OCT is contagious, exposure to an OCT host for more than 20 tweets will increase a healthy tweep's chances of catching the disease by 93%. Also, male tweeps are less prone to being diagnosed by OCT than female tweeps by 6%. Most likely an OCT diagnosed tweep will not realize that he/she's ill, and will resist all forms of treatment. Treatment of this case would include freezing twitter account for a week, decreasing followers count and in severe conditions a deletion of patient's twitter account. An OCT test is recommended for all tweeps whose tweets exceed 15 per day and a test result is available within 25 minutes.

Happy Twittering!

Follow me on Twitter.

A Podcast For Your Toddler

If you're not a dad or a mom don't read this post. I happened to stumble upon the Sesame Street podcast.

The podcast is really nice for toddlers. The main theme is "What's the word on the street", so the weekly video takes a word and builds an episode around it. My two year old son now knows the words Robot, Squid, Tricycle and Pumpernickel. Actually, I learned the last one with him.

So if you have a toddler, subscribe to that podcast, I'm sure he/she'll love it.

Productivity Tip: Sync Your Outlook Calendar

If you've been following my blog for a while you would know by now that I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan. But unfortunately at work, like many other large corporations, we're 100% dependent on Microsoft tools especially Microsoft Office Outlook.

While Outlook calendar does the job if you have a desk job, but if you're like me 50% of your day away from your desk, it falls short of reminding you of your important meetings and deadlines.

That's when Google comes to the rescue. Yeah I hear you, Google already knows too much about me. Well, if you're THAT paranoid, then you should stop having phone calls, internet connection and basically go back to the early 1900's. What was I saying? Yes, Google to the rescue.

Google has a little utility called Google Calendar Sync which just sits in my task bar and synchronizes my Outlook calendar and my Google Calendar every set amount of time. While it's no push synchronization, it good enough. It can also be configured to sync one way from GCal to Outlook, from Outlook to GCal or both ways.

Now that my calendar is in the cloud, the options are unlimited. I can sync it to my mobile, iCal on my Mac or even Sunbird on all platforms.

Now, my iPhone reminds me of all my meetings, deadlines and conference calls and I never miss any of them anymore. And the cool thing is, it all happens automagically.

Calendar icon by jilagan.

A Week Of iPhone - Day LXXXIII: The Verdict

If you've been following this blog, then you must know that I've been having my time tinkering with my new gadget that is the iPhone. Almost three months have passed now and I'm loving every minute of it.

The ride was not always smooth, as I have mentioned before I've had a few bumps on the way. But all in all it was a wonderful experience. So, let me first start with the drawbacks.

First of all, it's a very, and I mean very, basic phone. I missed a few functions from my old N-Series phone: the ability to reject a phone call with a message, send contact details via text and basic user contact groups to say the least. Also, messaging is really basic to say the least. And don't get me started on battery life, though I could get through the day just fine on a single charge, but when I really get to use it, the battery would be totally drained by 2pm. No cut and paste, really? One more thing, the lack of bluetooth stereo support is awful, back to the 20th century.

Enough of the rants, on to the good stuff. Where do I start? Let's take it in a chronological order.

The first thing that strikes you is the screen, not only it has great resolution, but the touch screen is quite impressive and very responsive. The iChat layout of text messages is very convenient, lets you keep track of your conversation as though they're IM's.

One of the perks also is the spell check. First it indexes your phone book and adds the names to your dictionary, pretty handy. Then it suggests words based on the closest letters to your finger not like spell check. Let me explain: if you type in the word "rjat", a normal spell check would convert it to "rat" while the iPhone will convert it to "that". And also, it learns new words, although evidently not all apps are able to add words to your dictionary.

Moving on to Mail.app, the app is delicious. Push Gmail delivered on the fly is enough on it's own to sweep me off my feet. And if that's not enough for you, Google has enabled IMAP for Gmail, frankly POP3 is so 1990. I've tried email on a few mobile devices before, mainly Symbian and Windows Mobile, but this app really lightyears ahead in terms of usability and convenience. Also, as far as your data bill, Mail.app doesn't download attachments unless you explicitly ask it too.

The least impressive part is Safari Mobile. Don't get me wrong, I love the app, but its stability is way less than what I'd expect from Safari. I can't wait to see a version of Opera Mini running on the iPhone, although not likely.

The great thing about the iPhone since firmware 2.0 was released is the wealth off apps that the App Store brings. Almost everything you want is in the App Store, there are still some limitations to Apple endorsed apps, background operation for starters is not allowed by Apple. And though I understand their motives to keep the iPhone processor and memory free all the times, but some apps just need to be backgrounded. And for that you have the jailbroken apps.

All in all, it was totally worth switching to from my old Symbian based phone. Plus, Vodafone gave me back 50% of the price in the form of reward points, so I'm happy.

Let me hear your rants and personal experience in the comments below.

iPhone 3G Unlock Your Baseband

To baffle us all, the imminent software unlock by the iPhone Dev Team will only work on the new baseband (02.88.00). Going against all their previous warnings the unlock will not apply to the previous baseband. Which means you can use QuickPWN on mac or windows to upgrade to 2.2 firmware.

Update: The unlock is out now. Go to iclarified.com for a detailed howto. Happy new year everyone.

Vodafone Pays Back

Apparently Vodafone has been listening to its customers. After the first few weeks of the iPhone launch, Vodafone started secretly offering the iPhone with 50% rebate in the form of reward points. And that outraged all of us, the early adopters.

But today a customer service rep called me to inform me that I will be receiving the same offer and 50% will be paid back in reward points, 26,000 of them to be exact.

Thank you Vodafone for listening. And thanks to everybody who sent their objection to Vodafone, you really made a change.

Newsflash: Massive Internet Outage In Egypt

The Internet service has been down for twelve hours and counting. According to the AP it's another cut cable in the Mediterranean.

Fortunately it's not a total outage, the mobile networks Internet is still up.

Read the full article here.

HowTo: Enable iPhone GPS

And finally (drum roll please) the GPS is enabled on the iPhone thanks to mellervin. Yay.

Ahem. Here's a step by step guide on how to do enable GPS on your iPhone.

Things you'll need:

1. A jailbroken iPhone 3G, with firmware 2.2.
2. The patched 'locationd' file from here or here.

Here's how you'll do it:

1. Open up Cydia on your iPhone, search for and install OpenSSH.

2. From Cydia also install MobileTerminal and BossPrefs.

3. Because the default root (think administrator) password for the iPhone is known, installing SSH introduces a vulnerability in the system, so we need to change the root and mobile (think user) password. So after installing MobileTerminal open it up and type the following Commands in order:

su root
alpine
passwd root
new_root_password
passwd mobile
new_mobile_password

Change the "new_root_password" and "new_mobile_password" to actual passwords that you can remember.

4. On your iPhone go to "Settings>General>Auto-lock" and set it to "Never". And connect it to the same wireless network as your Mac or PC.

5. Fire up the SSH client of your choice. I used Fugu on my Mac, but WinSCP on Windows can do the same job. Type in the username "root" and the IP address of your iPhone and hit return. The IP address can be found under the Wi-Fi menu in Settings.


6. You'll be prompted with the message displayed below. Don't panic, that's normal, just hit "Continue" and type in the new_root_password.


7. Next, browse on your iPhone to /usr/libexec and on your computer to wherever you've saved the patched locationd file.


8. It might be a good idea to backup your iPhone's locationd file before replacing it. Then just copy the patched locationd to your iPhone. Check the files permissions on the iPhone, it should be 755. Now restart the iPhone and use BossPrefs that we installed in step 1 and disable SSH.


9. Fire up Maps and click on the blue button to the left bottom. Your location will be marked by a blue dot instead of the blue circle. Here are a few screenshot with the blue dot following me in realtime.




Happy hacking.

Newflash: iPhone GPS Unlocked

I was so busy yesterday with my personal life that I missed the announcement by one full day. But anyways, for all you legit iPhone 3G users in Egypt, the GPS has been unlocked by mellervin. Read the details at the Hacint0sh forums. And download the patch at the Egyptian Apple website.

I haven't tried it yet, but I'll do in a few hours, stay tuned.

Thanks Mordus for the heads up.

Update: Tested OK. I'll post my experience in another post. Stay tuned.