For a long time now I’ve wanted to construct a cheap-ish media centre device for the house and I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago when I bought an original xbox for the purpose. There are a lot of ways to modify an xbox but I eventually decided on the softmod approach which meant minimal soldering on my behalf. It was also the cheaper option as I already had many of the materials lying around the house.
Well it’s only been 10 days, but the iphone dev team have already pwned the new iphone software so I thought I’d post a few opinions on it.
The Good
The App store is really nicely done and there are a lot of cool apps to chose from such as Twitterific and the Google Mobile App.
The little tweaks such as mass move/delete in Mail.app and the domain postfix choice when the .com button is held down in Safari are welcomed changes which make things just a little easier.
Contacts search is finally here and it’s a very welcomed change for me. The fact that I can now search through my very badly organized contacts is very useful and it makes a huge difference for me.
The Bad
Even though Apple introduced little tweaks in the 2.0 software there’s still no sign of copy and paste. How this fell tao the bottom of the pile of changes to be made is just beyond me. Hopefully it will be introduced soon as it will be a huge advance for users.
The new apps are nice but the lack of background processes hinders their usefullness. This is especially evident in things such as IM apps which cant function when they’re closed. I can see why Apple did this but it is still a technical letdown for developers.
The changes in the new firmware have invariably broken all the unofficial 3rd party apps which the jailbreaking community have created over the last months. It’s a pity because some of those apps were very useful (for example MobileTerminal.app) and now it’s up to developers to port them to the new firmware which I doubt all will do.
Instead of a list of all the apps I have installed here’s a screenshot of all of them.
Those of you who own an XBox might be familiar with this piece of music which is taken from the soundtrack of Halo 3. I came across it while browsing the net on rampancy.net, a site of music enthusiasts dedicated to the music made by Bungie, the company that made the Halo series as well as the classic Marathon.
Phew! what an afternoon. Jason Calacanis managed to create a huge flurry of activity using only youtstream and twitter and the results are more than impressive. Faster than anyone could think the community of people gathered around jason (the jason nation) scoured the web to create 3 fully featured pages on mahalo.com Mythtv being one of them. The man is pure genius. Never before have I seen such productivity appear so fast. I can only hope that he continues cause it was good fun.
If your interested, take a look at mahalo.com and see if you too can help us create a spam free internet