Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Big buzz today around the revamped Flickr mobile site (see TC, RWW, Mashable), their “universal access point for all device types.”, but a simple test that I did on my iPhone shows that the folks at Sunnyvale have missed one important and frustrating issue that mobile users experience daily when accessing Flickr urls.

This is not the first time I write about the fact that a direct link to an image does not load in its mobile version. The solution is so simple, that I am amazed no one at Flickr caught this while building the new version. All they have to do is detect the UserAgent and in the case it is of a mobile browser, change “www.flickr.com” to “m.flickr.com”. A simple manual test proves it is working.

So from now and until it gets fixed by the Flickr folks, you can use this manual hack and edit the url in safari’s address bar whenever you get a link (via email or twitter) to a Flickr image.

flickr-on-iphone-manual-hack

According to Flickr Camera Finder, the iPhone is the most popular cameraphone users use to post photos to their Flickr accounts. Not that a surprise given the iPhone’s popularity and how easy it is to upload photos direct to a flickr account via email or one of the native iPhone application.

So, if Flickr is so popular among iPhone users, how come Flickr has not optimized their site for the iPhone? It is really annoying to recieve direct links to Flickr images (I get those mainly via Twitter) and see that they resolve to non-optimized pages.

In case Flickr is looking for inspiration, they should take a look at Picasa’s optimized interface for the iPhone. One thing I wish Picasa would take from Flickr is the ability to upload via email. Picasa could only benefit from this feature and see a spike in photo uploads, just like Flickr saw.

This post was done using the new WordPress client for the iPhone, and my first impression is very positive.

The app is super simple to set up. It took me 30 seconds to put my blog’s URL, username and password, and that’s it.

Beyond a simple setup, the app has the popular feautres you would expect – write a post and attach photos (although it crashed when I tried attaching a few, but the recovery mode worked nicely).

The preview mode is also a great feature.

If you are a WordPress user with an iPhone, give it a try.

I was not sure whether I should upgrade or not. I thought of waiting until the jailbreak app will be released by the iPhone Dev Team so I won’t loose the applications I have installed using the “Installer”, and most important, the Hebrew support. Note: I am an AT&T subscriber so I did not use Jailbreak to activate the phone to work with a different carrier.

But the sync issues that I have had for months between Entourage –> iCal / AddressBook –> iTunes –> iPhone (not being able to sync AddressBook, having duplicate contacts, Inbox not in sync, etc.), is what pushed me to upgrade.

So, I upgraded last night to iPhone 2.0 and was very happy to see that setting up Exchange and getting Push to work was super easy. Minutes later, after the first sync process, the Inbox, AddressBook and Calendar were in complete sync with Exchange without any conflict/merge warnings. And my biggest surprise was that the iPhone has a partial Hebrew support!

Apparently, even though Apple did not officially add Hebrew support to iPhone, the fonts that I installed in the past still work. Yes, it is not 100% perfect and there are some issues – the Hebrew keyboard is gone (but I hardly used it), the labels inside Contacts and iPod are displayed left to right,  email previews are displayed left to right as well (so you have to open the email and then it renders right to left), but being able to read Hebrew websites and emails is good enough for me.

Couple of additional tips and comments after a few hours of usage:

1. iPhone 2.0 has a built in screen capture utility.

2. Twittelator is a pretty good free twitter client. A perfect replacement to the popular Twinkle.

3. I am missing the good old “Services” which allows to easily turn on/off Wifi, Bluetooth and Edge. Does anyone know of a replacement? I could not find one in the AppStore.

4. The NYTimes app already has ads integrated (nicely done), but it is missing important features such as sharing (email, bookmark).

My own conclusion: No need to buy a new 3G iPhone since I am around Wifi most of the day, and no need to jailbreak since I found good apps to replace old ones and I have Hebrew fonts.

The man behind it told me it is going to be worthwhile…

Have you registered?

I think there are still some places left in the black level.

Earlier today I upgraded the version of the Nullriver Installer that is installed on my iPhone. The biggest improvement in the new version, numbered 3.1, is search which makes it easier to find applications. In addition to that, the “Featured” page was updated to include a few additional applications, among them Kate, a commercial package of tools and toys.

This made me thinking about the economics of the “Featured” page and the Search results pages. After all, VC are investing and companies are raising money to develop iPhone applications and so distribution is going to be critical to succeed. So far, everyone has expected Apple to be the one selling applications via iTunes but I think that there is a secondary market that is already bubbling called the Nullriver Installer.

The thing with the Installer that makes it unique compared to popular software download web sites is that currently the Installer is the single entry point to get 3rd party applications for iPhone and iPod Touch. Hundreds of thousand and maybe even millions of jailbreaked iPhone users around the world access the Installer every day in order to search, install, upgrade or uninstall applications, games, utilities, themes and all kinds of tweaks for their iPhone. Every time these users start the Installer, the first thing they see is the list of featured applications, and from today they are also going to start using the search capabilities.

So, what should a company/developer do in order to get his app featured? I did some research but could not find an answer. So, for now, I am assuming that the list is compiled by an editor with some exceptions (my guess – Kate which charges users and therefore can pay for distribution). The search function is also very primitive and seems broken (a search for “Wiki” returned zero results).

But I think that this is just the first step in what is going to become an active marketplace (probably PPI – Pay Per Install) that is going to be developed around the Installer. Both the “Featured” page and the search result pages are too valuable to be kept as they are today. And seeing how fast the Installer has evolved so far, I expect this to happen sooner than you expect.

Jason finally jailbreaked his iPhone and asked me yesterday for a list of recommended applications he should install. Instead of sending the list to him via email, I am posting it for everyone’s benefit.

I have plenty of applications installed, but the ones I use most are:

• Twinkle – an awesome twitter client with seamless camera & geo-location integration 
• TuneWiki – song lyrics displayed while songs are playing
• Capture – taking screenshots has not be so easy
• iLog – a rich call log util (make sure also to install the Call History Patch to increase the number of entries)
• Snapture – a better camera applications with zooming, color adjustments and more
• iPark – I am terrible at remembering parking spots
• Hebrew fonts & keyboard (by Hebrew 4 iPhone) 
• Fring – both as an aggregate IM client but mainly for Voip calls over Wifi
• and lots of games that my kids love to tryout, including Tap Tap Revolution (Guitar Hero using your fingers)

In case you are interested in the complete list, you can find it below. Putting it together was simple. I used Capture to take screenshots of the “Uninstall” tab. This way you can see all the applications installed, including those that don’t create an icon on the dock. You can also see the category each application belongs to, so you can easily find them under the “Install” tab.

Feel free to recommend more using the comments section. Enjoy.

In case you use Twitter on an iPhone using the popular & excellent web based client by Thincloud, you will see ads, strategically placed, as the first post when viewing recent posts. I noticed them this morning. Here are two examples.

Last week, when I was at the TheMarker COM.Vention in Isreal, I noticed the presence of a very impressive Apple booth on the Expo floor. It was very nice and added to the feeling that this is a true international event (beyond the fact the program was in English and dozens of speakers and many attendees arrived from the US and Europe).

While I was at the Apple booth, I was looking for one of the iDigital mangers to provide some tips & feedback, but since I could not find any of the managers, I will use this post to do it.

Since I first blogged my thoughts about Apple’s web site in Israel, I have been receiving questions and comments from people who visited Israel, purchased an Apple product there, and later on had a need for customer support. Since iDigital’s web site is only in Hebrew they could not find their answer there, and so using the help of Google, these people searched and landed on my blog. I was glad to help as much as I could with basic questions & translations, but did not have answers to all of their questions. So, here’s tip #1 for the iDigital team – create an “English” page with at least “contact us” information. You’d be surprised how many people who do not read Hebrew are looking for a way to contact you.

Anyway, the last question I received was from a woman who was looking for the customer support phone number for iPod, so I visited iDigital’s website and saw that they have recently started offering group workshops and one-to-one training, similar to the training programs that are available at Apple stores across the US. These are great news for Mac users in Israel (but still not for iPhone users since it is not officially sold there yet and therefore not supported) but there is one difference that makes it look somewhat wrong in my point of view – the price.

• Workshops – In the US, group workshops are free and cover a wide range of topics (I sat on a few in the past and learned a lot), but in Israel they cost a small fee and they are limited only to “Introduction to Mac OS”
• One to One – In the US, one to one training personal training costs an annual fee of $99, but in Israel you pay 225 Shekels/hour – roughly $65/hour. I can understand why these private sessions who are done at the client’s house (since there are not Apple stores in Israel) would cost more, but still, the price difference between one to one training is ridiculous.

So here is tip #2 – if you really want to build a market share, look at how things are done where Apple is gaining market share, and then mimic. Only good things could happen if you would do that.

I really wanted to try Yahoo Mobile on the iPhone. I swear I did. So as soon I saw this invite to upgrade to the best mobile experience for the iPhone, I hit the Download link.

But then I got this message that my phone is not currently supported…

Confused? Me too.

I guess I will have to keep using the Yahoo Mobile Web version,  a poor client, that has no way to select & delete emails without opening the email and scrolling all the way to the bottom!

Good thing that I’ve migrated most of my email accounts to GMAIL (with IMAP support) which works great on the iPhone.