My first iPhone app – iCount

Yeehaw! My first iPhone application has finally been approved by Apple.

iCount (and iCount Lite) helps you keep track of things…

It’s not the usual tally application that counts many units of the same thing, but instead you count stuff that happens in your daily life and then can get some meaningful statistics about it.

For example, you can monitor your coffee addiction. Just launch iCount and tap once everytime you drink a coffee, easy! Later on you can see how many coffees per day you drink, and a little graph showing the trend.

More seriously, you can track time spent on personal projects or paid work; similar to a timesheet, but it’s right there in your pocket.

iCount is intended as an entry method for these things, it can do some basic stats, which should be usually sufficient. But if you need to analyze the data further, you can easily email it to yourself and paste it in your favorite spreadsheet… Also the full version can securely upload data to our server, where you can retrieve it in a number of handy formats.

In the future we will probably add more functionality on the server side…

If you have questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment here or “contact us” at Hydrix…

I hate it when…

• I carry 2 coins in my pocket, and they cling loudly when I walked.
• I carry 3 coins, because I cannot even split them between 2 pockets!

…

• I remember something good in the fridge, and it’s just past the expiration date.
• I want to cook something, and I’m missing one important ingredient.

…

• I want to remember a movie title, and I feel it’s just hiding just behind my conscious thoughts.
• I suddenly think of a movie title, but I can’t remember why I wanted to remember it.

…

• I just got into my house, and remember I should have taken something from the car.
• I finally got the thing into my house, and then I forget to put it back in the car on the day I need it.

H2O, incomplete

It rains in the shower,

It rains outside.

I forgot that line-er,

Let’s go for a ride!

Little UI Details: Moving Clock Hands

Ah, those little details that are barely perceptible, but make the metaphors all the more real…

On the iPhone, in the Clock app go to the “World Clock” view. Carefully look at the moving hand for the seconds… Closer… Closer… Do you see it?

When the hand moves to the next second, it vibrates a little bit before settling, just like on a old mechanical clock. How cool is that?

I know, I get excited for nothing…

Placerat Hydrix et Tangentia

Conducting an experiment on the InterWebs…

On the Competing Philosophies of Dishwasher Organisation

This morning after breakfast I was putting some dishes into the dishwasher when I came to a couple of spoons and forthe first time wondered if I was doing things right..

See, I usually try to put the same kinds together: spoons with spoons, forks with forks, etc. My theory is that the minute extra time I spend picking the right spot for individual items will largely be compensated with the time I will gain when emptying the dishwasher afterwards: I will be able to just scoop a whole set of spoons and drop them in the spoon compartment in my cutlery drawer.

I employ a similar method (only reversed) when playing board games too: When discarding a set of cards, I spread them randomly across multiple discard piles. This way, when time comes to reusing discarded cards by shuffling them, I can just take the discard piles together and give them a quick shuffle. Had I only used one discard stack, I would have had to shuffle it repeatedly to get an acceptable randomised card stack. With the multi-stack method I save time and prevent some damage from “hard” shuffling…

Back to the dishwasher. What occurred to me today is that by putting like items together, I was running the risk of lowering the overall cleanliness of their wash. Because spoons could, well, spoon together and therefore hide some areas from the cleaning action!

I guess I will have to conduct some experiments to check this theory and see if I have been doing things wrong for many years…

What an exciting day for science!

iPhone rant

Here are some random complaints with the iPhone:

• No copy/cut/paste.
• No landscape mode in “Mail”.
• Super slow to install and upgrade apps. Why does it take a good 5-10 minutes to install a 100KB app?
• When upgrading apps, icons get messed up and I have to re-arrange them again and again. Fixed?
• A bit confusing that some apps seem to reside mainly on the device and some mainly in iTunes, depending on where I bought them first. I’m never sure where to upgrade them from.
• Safari crashes a lot.
• Safari: Can’t open in a new tab without switching.
• Safari: Sometimes when changing tabs, the page will reload, sometimes not. It’s quite annoying when using sites like Google Reader.
• No categories or folders on the home screen.
• I made the mistake to cancel a backup once. Now every time I plug the iPhone it takes almost two hours to backup! Update: After a few days of painful 2-hour backups, suddenly it takes “only” 5 minutes. Fixed?
• Some alarms are modal, even when they appear on top of the phone app. So once it took me a few seconds before I could hang up on a call, because I had to read and close three successives messages!
• Alarms ring forever. Once I was driving and the iPhone started ringing and vibrating but I could not safely stop it; It continued until I finally stopped 10 minutes later… I could imagine an alarm going off when I leave the iPhone unattended and draining the batteries flat. Why don’t they auto-snooze alarms after say 30 seconds without action?

And in iTunes:

• Does not remember what I was listening to after I close iTunes, or even when I switch screens.
• The application library screen tells me I have 1 update available, then shows me 13 apps with a “get update” button. Then updating only downloads a few, I have to click again to get more, etc. And in the end, it still tells me I have 1 update available, aaarrrghhh.
• In iPhone->Applications, “Selected applications” stays on, though I always change it back to “All applications”.

I have just downloaded the new iPhone release 2.0.12.1, we will see if that fixes anything!

Removing iPhone apps for good

Short one today!

After more than two week playing with the iPhone, I have downloaded countless free apps (and a couple of non-free ones, but more on that later…) So now I have four screens full of apps.

Now comes the fun part: I wanted to get rid of a few that have outgrown their fun five minutes. After all, do I really need four ways to keep separate todo list?

I removed the unneeded apps from the iPhone… Only to see them reappear when I next sync! Of course, I could choose only to sync certain apps, but I really wanted to get rid of them.

So the solution is to remove them from iTunes. But it’s not trivial, at least for me, fresh new user of iTunes! To remove an app, you have to go to the LIBRARY/applications view (NOT the iPhone view!), right-click (or Ctrl-Click on Mac) on an app and select “Delete”. Next time you sync, the application will be removed from the iPhone as well and will be gone for good.

Screenshots from the iPhone

Here is the next useful trick that is not in the manual: How to take screenshots on the iPhone. Also, how to transfer them to a PC…

After googling through countless pages that try to sell you software to make screen captures, I found this CNET article that explains how to do it, without buying nor installing anything! All you do is press and hold the Home button (the one just below the screen) and press the sleep/power button (the one at the top right of the device); The screen will fade for a second, and the screenshot will be put in your Camera Roll!

The next step is to get the picture off the iPhone of course. I do not know how it works on Mac, but on PC, the iTunes software allows you to synchronise photos from the “My Pictures” directory. Unfortunately the camera roll is not visible there! Also I did not find a way to move pictures between albums on the iPhone… Well, the solution is simple: The iPhone is seen as a camera from Windows! So if you open Windows Explorer, under “My Computer” you should find an entry like “Apple iPhone”, in which you will see the pictures that are in the Camera Roll. Voilà! Here is my first screenshot in all its pixellated glory:

iPhone home screen

Trying wordpress on iPhone

Well, this thing is not going to write itself… So here I am, watching House and playing with the iPhone, but I have run out of (free) things to do so I might as well write something for both my readers to read.
Writing this, I notice than my writing is now much faster than before, even faster than I could type with a stylus on my previous PDA phone, a pocket PC.

Talking of typing, here is a little trick I discovered when I was fumbling in a web form, trying to correct a typo in a text field… I was trying to get to a spot in the text but the &@%$ thingy would only move to the beginning or the end of the line, aaaargh!

So the trick is to simply tap and hold your finger down; after a second, a little magnifier appears with the cursor in the middle, you can just wiggle your finger to precisely move the cursor to where you want it.

This should really be in the help… Or did I just miss it?

Update: I did miss it! This is explained in the “Finger Tips” booklet that comes in the iPhone box. Who reads manuals these days?