Blog About Technology

The news this morning as I’m sitting down to write about Google Voice on the iPhone is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple’s board of directors. This, of course, is an outcome of the conflict of interest that arose when Google announced its plans to enter the operating system business. The resignation doesn’t have much to do with Google’s Voice service pre se, but I thought I would mention it because there isn’t a more clear illustration imaginable for just how quickly these two companies are growing apart.

In the past couple of weeks Apple has shut two major Google applications out of the rheir App Store: Google Latitude and, more significantly, Google Voice. Voice, if you haven’t heard, is Google’s potentially game-changing telephony service. It allows for a life-long phone number that routs calls to any number of other lines, free SMS messaging and online visual voicemail. Not only did Apple deny Google’s own iPhone app for this service, they then pulled two previously approved apps that used the Google Voice API from their shelves as well, GVdailer and VoiceCentral.

It appears that AT&T was responsible for the killing of the Google Voice apps, but like John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, I’m not so sure. As Gruber has pointed out, the Google Voice apps Apple banned are alive and well on other AT&T phones. And, when the FCC took an interest in the fate of Google Voice on Friday, AT&T quickly denied they had anything to do with which apps live and die in Apple’s Store.

My point here is to say that it’s sad to see Apple and Google, two companies who have revolutionized how we consume information and consume technology in this century, become increasingly adversarial. I also hope the FCC forces Apple to restore Google Voice to their App Store, and maybe even takes a more overarching look at Apple’s iPhone practices.

In the meantime, I want to make VoiceCentral and GVdailer available for download here. Click to save them to your hard drive. You have to have a jailbroken iPhone, Crackulous and Installous to use them.

Last week, everybody was blogging about a new video of the upcoming version of Stack for jailbroken iPhones. Stack v3, as Irish developer Steven Troughton-Smith is calling it, is a gorgeous and useful tool for keeping extra icons within reach from your phone’s home screen in much the same way Mac OS X makes the contents folders available from your Dock. Stack boasts a native feel, making it a far superior choice for app management over something like Categories, which takes several seconds to launch and removes apps from the springboard while Stack does neither.

I immediately set forth to get Stack going on my iPhone, only to find that the version available through Cydia isn’t compatible with OS 3.0. A little more reading on the subject revealed that v3 of Stack is still in private alpha and wholly unavailable to the public at large. A version of Stack 2.2 that iSpazio promised was 3.0 compatible did work a bit better on my phone than Cydia’s 2.1 did, but was still too buggy to be practical.

Still determined to get Stack, I decided to turn to the source – probably what I should have done in the first place. Stack is donorware, so I sent Steven a modest donation and he promptly invited me to alpha test the product. Though the invitation warns of a potentially buggy experience due to the program’s early phase of development, it works beautifully and I haven’t had a single problem with it. I love it, in fact, and now have a hard time imagining my phone without it. The only issue is that there is yet no way that I’ve found to rearrange the list of apps inside the tack short of removing them all and re-adding them in the order you want them to appear. Despite this, I encourage everybody out there to send Steven some cash and get in on the action.

The only other issue that installing Stack is a bit tricky since it’s not a breezy Cydia touch away. Every set of instructions out there, whether from TUAW or iSpazio or Steven, all seemed to be missing a step here and there. So I thougt I would provide a definitive set of instructions just in case you get hung up on the installation.

1. The first thing you absolutely have to do to install Stack is clear out a space for it in your Dock. Stack will not appear to be installed if you don’t do this. You can move it out of the Dock later if you don’t want it there, but it has to go there first. You will also need to install Open SSH and MobileTerminal on your iPhone from Cydia/Icy if you don’t have them on there already.
2. Okay, so, After downloading the package, SSH it over to the /var/mobile directory on your phone. (I don’t know anything about shell commands, so for this I use a bonjour connection using Cyberduck.) The version of the alpha Steven sent me was called stack_3_alpha_6c.deb, so that’s what I’ll use in these instructions.
3. Next, open up MobileTerminal.
4. Enter the command ’su root’ excluding quotation marks.
5. enter your password, which is ‘alpine’ unless you’ve specifically changed it, again excluding quotation marks.
6. Then you want to enter the following command: ‘dpkg -i /path/to/stack_3_alpha_6c.deb’, without the quotes, obvs.

That should do it. You can uninstall it thru Cydia or use a terminal command to so (’dpkg -r com.steventroughtonsmith.stack’). Happy Stacking!

Yesterday we found out that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes by pretending to be an iPod. There’s been lots of speculation today about whether or not Apple will block the Pre in the future. They may, but it wouldn’t be a good move. Palm is basically acknowledging that it can’t compete with the iPhone without borrowing Apple’s content-delivery infrastructure. It seems to me that Apple only stands to gain by letting iTunes become the industry-standard for syncing and managing all the devices in this sector of the smartphone market, no matter who makes them. Apple could see licensing iTunes in this way as diluting its brand. However, they could easily force some concessions on the companies seeking to use their software in the interest of quality control. Apple holds all the chips here.

President Obama has, in the couple months he’s been in office, proven himself to be a pretty class guy. He had John McCain over for a dinner in his old rival’s honor. He had Congressional Republicans up to the White House to do trust falls and other team-building exercises like twice. In fact, Obama’s over-arching goal for his presidency (other than saving the United States from total ruin, of course) is to change the tone in Washington for the better. He’s a one man bar-raising machine. And today, on his first visit to the United Kindom as president of the United States, our dapper, distinguished president met with the Queen. An exchange of gifts is customary when statesmen meet. Obama left the queen with…. an iPod.

Yes, nothing says I Respect Your Symbolic Leadership of the Nation that is Our Closest Ally like something anybody can get for three hundred bucks from the Apple store. I guess I’ll note that it was laser engraved and loaded with pictures and stuff from when the Queen came to US a couple years ago. But it’s the thought that counts really, and as rad as iPods are, she’s the Queen. Like, of England. A few weeks ago when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown dropped by the White House for a visit  he brought Obama a real statemanly giftL: an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet, the same ship that the Oval Office desk is thought to be carved from. Obama gave him a DVD box set.

Maybe Obama’s not a fan of the British. Or maybe he’s just too busy trying to save the world from financial destruction to think about what to give people in their goodiebags. But either way, it’s a smacks a little too much of a Christmas day Wal-Mart run.

Yesterday, this article caught my attention from the thousands of stories that aggregate in my Reader every day. It suggests that Google’s Android platform may overtake iPhone by 2012 due to the former being open source and the latter being closed tighter than an armadillo’s you-know-what, as we say back in Texas. Without a substantial change to the iPhone product line, and give or take a year or so, I think this could be a pretty accurate forecast.

Apple is finally rolling out version 3.0 of their iPhone OS and, as an iPhone user, I’m thrilled that the overlords in Cupertino have at long last decided to to give us features like copy/paste, media messaging, video recording, and their long-awaited push notification service for third party apps. But the honest truth of the matter is tens of thousands of iPhone users have already implemented third party (and often times open source) solutions to the iPhone’s longstanding (and heretofore unaddressed) problems.

For Apple, the ominous writing on the wall should be clear: unlock the iPhone or even the most enthusiastic and loyal Apple users will begin to defect as other more practical devices catch up.

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By now, we all know that Facebook changed its layout from the one we all grew to know and love to the current incoherent and indecipherable beast that it is today. This is old news. But Kendall sent me this article from Monday’s Slate Magazine that critiques both Facebook’s changes and all kids like me whining about them. First, writer Farhad Manjoo (whoever that is) starts out with astute indictment of all that is hatable about the new facebook layout:

Do you hate Facebook’s new design? Do you find the home page too noisy, with important updates from your friends getting buried under a stream of banal comments from high-school classmates and other people you pity-friended? I bet you think the site’s confusing, too. It used to be easy to get to people’s photos and notes, but now you’ve got to click around to find anything. Are you at your wit’s end?

And then:

I’ve got news for you: You’ll get over it soon enough.

Farhad then gives some background information about what he called the Twitterization of Facebook, and I will paraphrase: For months, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg has been obsessing over the success over Twitter, the social networking application that lets people send out text-message length updates over the tubes to whoever has opted to follow said updates. Twitter has been the new hot thing (at least as far as the mainstream media’s technology correspndents are concerned) and rumor round the sewing circle was that Twitters rise in popularity had Zuckerburgs panties in a twist. Thus, with this new stream of constantly updated information, the Twitter homepage has become twitterized. Farhood admonished us for resisting.

Redesigns discombobulate us… But eventually we adjust. Over the next few weeks, you’ll probably grow increasingly comfortable with the new Facebook. You’ll discover the path of least resistance to get to the stuff you like best, and you’ll learn ways to tame the noise coming from everyone in your network. (The site allows you to block certain people’s updates from appearing on your home page; over time, you can expect Facebook to add more refined ways to filter what shows up.) Soon you’ll also forget much of what you loved about the old site. In a month or two, the new Facebook will come to seem like home.

So things brings me to my point. Obviously, no one is going to actually quit Facebook over this no matter how blustery they may be this week. And yes, I’m sure we’ll all get used to it and forget what we liked so much about the old layout. But why should we have to? Twitter works because it’s short-form and completely voluntary. Unless you want to stick to the public timeline, a Twitter user has to be proactive and choose which twitterers she wants to follow. It’s impersonal. You can follow me, you can follow your spouse, you can follow your boss, you can follow Michael Ian Black, you can follow Diddy (especially recommended). You can read their tweets, you can respond to them. That’s the whole service. It’s interactive microblogging, the end.

Facebook on the other hand, serves a diametically opposed purpose. It is essentially a database of all available information about everyone you’ve ever interacted with. The amount of information flowing through it is untamable in a twitterized format. It’s okay to let an apple be an apple and orange be an orange, or, in this case, let an apple be an apple and let the Oxford English Dictionary be the Oxford English Dictionary.

They don’t have to change it back, but it most certainly can’t stay the way it is now.

Update: Macworld says “Facebook caves” on the redesign.

Yes, okay, I know that it’s about two hundred years since I’ve made any meaningful updates on any of my other blogs and you might be wondering why I’m going and starting a whole new one. The answer to this question is exactly what you’d expect: I have an opinion on like every single topic and I think you need hear what they all are.

This particular flavor of blog is pretty much dominated by some huge names: Gizmodo, Engadget, what have you, but I tell you, when you really look at it, all these guys do is pretty much report the news, as it were. There’s some analysis to be had in this area, and while I’m sure this stuff is being blogged about somewhere, I haven’t really come across it. Maybe that’s because I don’t really read lame ass tech blogs. But no matter. Now I write one.

When I was a kid, I felt like I was literally the only one around without a computer. Looking back on it, I realize I had one of my own by like ‘96, but I feel like I spent years borrowing time on my dad’s work laptop, or on a neighbor’s Packard Bell to play Doom, Quake Worms 2, Duke Nukem 3D. I think this caused me to develop some kind of pathology surrounding computers and things that drives me to never be left behind again.

Since then, so long as I had an extra penny to spend I was likely spending it on some new gizmo. That’s a pretty stupid way to spend money and I don’t recommend it, but I have learned a thing or two along the way. The blog is essentially about how to get the best experience using the expensive shit you already have, the best products to look at next, and, of course, using the internet to get expensive shit for free or low cost. This is the priceless knowledge that I want to bring to you now, free of charge, so that you might further your quest for personal fulfillment. And who knows. Maybe this one’ll take.

Greg Wasserstrom