jessedyck.com

Though, I don’t know what about.

My friend felt that he needed to update his blog a few days ago. I told him to go home, drink some absinthe and then ramble. While I don’t have absinthe, I can still ramble. If only it would turn out as hilarious.

Apple released Safari 3.1 today. What I’m most excited about is the addition of the client side DB from the HTML 5 spec. Of course in typical Apple fashion it’s SQLite based. Microsoft has recently added the same storage to the IE8 beta, and Mozilla has had a (somewhat limited) implementation since Firefox 2.

What does this mean? More fast loading web apps like Gmail. Offline access to content that will (hopefully) seamlessly update any changes as soon as you get connected again. Also it will provide much more storage then the aging cookies have offered.

The main reason I’m looking forward to more apps supporting this is for my iPhone. The 2.0 software will have the same WebKit updates that Safari 3.1 has, including this client side DB. Being in Canada, I’m tethered to high data rates and sketchy networks. I do not pay for a data plan. While wireless is semi-ubiquitous, open networks aren’t always available. This is prime time for a client side DB. If I suddenly need access to the directions to a meeting that are in my inbox, what better way then pull up gmail (because lets face it, Mobile Mail is far from perfect) and have all my old messages ready for me, no reloading, no network.

And that kids, is what gets me excited.

Quick tip I found on the hackint0sh forums about an issue with MobileMail crashing on a Jailbroken 1.1.4 iPhone.

Forum member Bobhope:
chown -R mobile:mobile /private/var/mobile/

Run that, will solve the problem with mail and iTunes Sync crashing.

Edit: I’ve recently found 2 new things regarding this issue. One, recently I have been unable to receive mail through MobileMail. iPhone appeared to download the mail, but wouldn’t display. This seemed to be the exact same permission issue, as with a lot of other apps that seemingly would not save anything. I’m not sure if this is due to iLiberty, but it appears there is a fix in the payload repo. Instead, I ran the above command, which brings me to number 2. Previously I did not need to run the command under root, I just ran ran it as displayed above, and it worked. For some reason it’s not working now, so I had to run su first, and input the root password.

su <enter>
<enter root password, should be alpine unless you’ve changed it>
chown -R mobile:mobile /private/var/mobile/

This is an old one, but through all the updates I’m sure some people have ended up with this ugly font back on their iPhone. Go ahead, do yourself a favor, remove it!

Gruber: Removing Marker Felt font

That will at least get you to Arial. If you’re ok with that, then you’re good to go. If you despise everything that is Arial and want to show your support to Gary, follow Gruber’s other tutorial:

Gruber: Editing MobileNotes binary

From the Documentary’s blog.

I found Helvetica looks much nicer on the iPhone’s high DPI screen (when compared to Arial).

Read Mike’s story a few comments down.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebeauchamp/2215285685/in/photostream/

To sum it up, iPhone wins.

Going to jump in with a quick post on Garmin’s latest announcement on their new phone.

I’m a happy owner of an iPhone, but when talking to a friend yesterday and the topic of smart phones came up, I struggled to recommend anything else other then the Treo he already owns.

Well, now I may have a new recommendation for him.

The Garmin Nuvifone has a clean exterior look to it, same form factor as the iPhone (at least it looks that way, of course I haven’t seen one of these yet), the phone app looks similar to the iphone, and seems that it has a full web browser on board. Direct compitition with the iPhone? Yes.

A few things pop into mind right off the hop. I’ve never owned a Garmin GPS device, so bare with me if they already tackled these;

1) Does it play music? I hate to say it, but after the iPhone, I wouldn’t consider owning a phone that doesn’t play music.

2) What engine is the browser going to be based on? I’m dreading that 2008 is going to be the start of a mobile browser war. IE, Safari, what’s next?

3) Will it support flash?
…
No, I’m kidding.