[Update: 3G Service was restored in Glasgow at mid-day on Monday... two and a half days after it failed]

It would appear that O2 is struggling to cope with the iPhone 3G.

Their, less than excellent at the best of times, 3G data service has been unavailable in Glasgow and a few other places for 2 days now. 

To make matters worse it would appear that O2 are completely oblivious to the problem and everyone who calls up is simply told “no fault has been reported” - surely the action of calling about it would constitute a fault report??

One customer has even been told their phone “must be faulty, return it to Carphone Warehouse” 

It would appear that the Apple Store in Glasgow however is advising customers that O2’s network has been down for two days!

My eMail to O2 regarding this was met with the usual ineptitude as Anju Bhatnagar from O2 Customer Serice helpfully sent me nothing more than a link to the 3G coverage map and “there is no reported fault in your area.”

After 45 minutes on hold to O2 they have confirmed there is a major network outage… finally… maybe now they’ll fix it?

Remind me why I’m paying these people?!

Seriously Apple, you can do better than this.

Having tried to upgrade my .mac account to a MobileMe Family Pack account I noticed this rather unusual error at the top of the page… “Server Error: CreditCard Auth Successful” - how can a Successful auth be an error?

Contacted my bank and sure enough, Apple have taken the payment, but not provided anything in exchange for it - seems that many more people have had the same problem (and have tried repeatedly or with multiple cards without noticing this Auth Successful message at the top)

First the £121 free trial and now this, it’s ridiculous!!

I suppose we should be at least mildly grateful that Apple’s app designers were kind enough to put a sensible error message up (with a status explaination rather than just “Try again later”) as at least it gave me enough information not to try and pay twice!!!!

Apple - It’s bad enough that you broke .mac for everyone in the changeover to MobileMe but the amount of billing errors (and the sheer scale of them!) is unacceptable.

It seems that O2’s legacy MMS platform doesn’t implement even the basic security my own service did… use of security through obscurity techniques surely is not an appropriate way to protect private images sent to O2 customers by MMS.

Ironically, my own o2mms webapp thrown together in a week or so was more secure in most respects than the solution built by the multi-national O2.

As soon as O2 relaunch the service with improved security I will restore my service, although no doubt this will take some time.

More information on the outage;

• http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/19/o2-allows-mms-pictures-seen
• http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/20/o2-responds-mms-leak
• http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209101313

MobileMe is an excellent service, but has been criticised by a few for not implementing true ‘push’ functionality when you make changes on your mac … e.g. if you add a new appointment in iCal, it could take up to 15 mins to update your MobileMe account (and therefore your iPhone)

The following is a (not particularly ideal, just a quick hack) bash script that provides a quick workaround and allows my phone to stay up to date almost instantly

#!/bin/bash

OLD=`ls -laR ~/Library/Calendars/ | md5`;

while [ 1 == 1 ]; do
	COMPARE=`ls -laR ~/Library/Calendars/ | md5`;
	if [ $OLD != $COMPARE ]; then
		/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DotMacSyncManager.framework/Resources/dotmacsyncclient --sync com.apple.DotMacSync --entitynames com.apple.calendars.Attendee,com.apple.calendars.AudioAlarm,com.apple.calendars.CalDAVAccount,com.apple.calendars.Calendar,com.apple.calendars.CalendarOrder,com.apple.calendars.DisplayAlarm,com.apple.calendars.Event,com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm,com.apple.calendars.Organizer,com.apple.calendars.Recurrence,com.apple.calendars.Task,com.apple.contacts.CalendarURI,com.apple.ical.calendars.DotMacPublisher,com.apple.ical.calendars.Invitation,com.apple.ical.calendars.Node,com.apple.ical.calendars.ProcAlarm,com.apple.ical.calendars.RootNode,com.apple.ical.calendars.TaskOrder,com.apple.ical.calendars.URLPublisher;
	OLD=$COMPARE;
	fi;
	sleep 10;
done

Edit: let me stress this is FAR from ideal, calling the md5 function every 10 seconds has to be one of the daftest ways to implement this but it *does* work and for the use i needed it for the additional load is irrelevant

Well the iPhone 3G is here, as is version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware in the hands of the masses.

At the moment my popular O2MMS application is still a web-app with no immediate plans to bring it to the app store until it can offer something that the web app currently cant (sending MMS for instance!)

However, I was looking forward to improving the web application with a number of features that Apple have touted as being great for web developers in the new iPhone - namely fullscreen mode (which allows the app to run without the safari navigation and address bar - making it feel far more like a native app) and client-side storage (which theoretically would allow the app to store your MMS messages so they could be viewed without a network connection)

Unfortunately, Apple have not included this functionality in the currently shipping version of iPhone OS 2.0

Really annoying that Apple have promoted the way of making fullscreen apps, then not actually put it in the firmware!!
<meta name="apple-touch-fullscreen"
content="YES (but it might as well say no for now)" />

Firstly, sorry for the lack of updates … been busy

Secondly if you normally use my mac.com address to contact me it currently does not work as (a) it has expired, (b) due to Apple’s ‘migration’ to MobileMe I appear to be completely unable to renew it!!!

It’s been almost three months since the O2 MMS iPhone application moved to donation-ware.

I must say the outcome has slightly restored my faith in the shareware model

As of now there are 2,015 registered users of which 470 have donated, a 23% conversion rate.

The O2 MMS application has handled an incredible 12,700 MMS messages since launch

I gather anonymous statistics only (and obviously don’t go reading peoples MMS messages!) but one thing that I did implement out of curiosity was a checksum to see how many images were identical (e.g. forwarded MMS messages) - interestingly one image has recurred over 73 times around Christmas. Sadly, unless someone sends it to *me* i’ll never know what it was

Before anyone’s concerned that this actually compares their photos - it doesnt! - The checksum is based on MD5 so it is impossible to reconstruct original images from the 32 character string it generates, it’s just very unlikely that two images could generate the same checksum so it’s good for random facts like that

How did I miss this one - justmac.net was registered on 31st December 2007 - by someone other than me!

I tried to get that name soo many times when we had JustMac :/

On a more sensible note, I’d like to wish Glyn and his team all the best with their new venture, and commend them for moving their office to Macs - good to see a company called JustMac again (well justMAC in their case)

Well, the visitor counts of my iapps.co.uk website soar again, thanks to Apple listing the iPhone O2 MMS application on their Web Apps section … I must admit I was slightly surprised.

I read this today on the Guardian website;

BBC Worldwide chief executive, John Smith, who is leading an ambitious drive to boost profits from the corporation’s commercial arm, said it was a “historic moment” and that a key aim was to avoid the fate of the music industry in losing control of its assets. “In the UK we felt worried about what happened to the music industry,” he said. “[Apple's] iTunes is a disaster for rights holders.”

I would disagree, iTunes has provided a realistically priced alternative to overpriced CDs and a whole new way of buying music (by the track) …

Not to mention the thought of the BBC charging for access to content seems absolutely outrageous - we all pay a TV license, which is what pays for these programs to be made - we shouldn’t have to pay again to watch them (or if we do, the BBC Tax license fee should be abolished)

Last but not least, if it’s anything like BBC iPlayer and C4’s existing offerings it will be Windows only and not be compatible with the iPod - big mistake. What are 90% of the portable media players these days? iPods/iPhone etc… That’s exactly why iTunes Music Store is the huge success it is… it’s all seamlessly integrated.

Unless I can click to instantly download an episode - on my mac, and then copy that to my iPhone, iPod, Apple TV etc without worrying about DRM getting in the way - then I wont use it (in fact unless it works on my Mac, I can’t use it!)