February « 2009 « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

28Feb/090

3G Connectivity on the iPhone

Before buying an iPhone, I researched extensively on what existing users were saying about it on the internet. I got a mixed response. Many people were complaining about its 3G connectivity, and given that WiFI is not always available were I am so 3G connectivity was a major issue for me. I went for the iPhone anyway, and after using it extensively I've found out that the 3G on the iPhone works very well for me. I get nearly 1Mbps speed from my home.

Other issues included complains about lack of multimedia capabilities like MMS, video recording etc. Those issues are real, however my prev. cell phone was the N95 a leading multimedia cellphone from Nokia however I've rarely used those features. So these are not a big factor to me.

The thing I think that is revolutionary in the iPhone is the applications ecosystem, no other platform has such a rich application ecosystem. The whole device is not a phone, its a generic computing device. The phone capabilities are encapsulated in a single application, just as web browsing is encapsulated in the Safari application. This concept itself I think is game changing.

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16Feb/090

Upgraded to iLife ‘09

I've just upgraded to iLife '09. Over the next few posts, I will evaluate each component of iLife '09, with the exception of iMovie and Garageband, because I've never used these in iLife '08.

Tagged as: iLife, mac No Comments

11Feb/090

Setting up an Ad Hoc Wireless network with Internet Sharing in OSX 10.5

There are numerous benefits of setting up a wireless network with internet sharing. I set one up today, because I wanted to sync various iPhone applications with the Computer. Many applications on the iPhone sync when they are run while their desktop client software is running in the computer, and the iphone is connected via USB. One of such applications is Things. However some other applications like 1Password sync only via a wireless LAN. At my office, I have a wired ethernet connection, so I setup a wireless ad hoc network and all my iphone application sync'ed smoothly. Some other colleagues connected to my wireless aswell and enjoyed a performance of 4Mbps. On the iphone I got over 3Mbps speed, a lot faster than 3G.

Setting up a wireless connection on the mac is easy, and only two steps are requires:

1, Enable Internet Sharing

Go to System Preferences > Sharing.

Enable Internet Sharing and select the interface from which you want to share connection (In my case it was ethernet), and then select the interface through which it will be shared (In my case its the Airport, which is the default for wireless ad hoc networks). A screenshot is shown in the following picture.

Picture 5.png

2. Setup a wireless adhoc network

Go to the Airport Icon in the Desktop and select
"Create Network". Define a name, and specify a password (if you want one). The built in airport can only create WEP ad hoc networks.

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9Feb/090

Zinio for the iPhone is a good idea but…

I tried to access my magazine subscriptions on Zinio from the iPhone. It turns out that Zinio has a special website for iPhone users, and the website does display the content in a manner which is suitable for viewing from an iPhone.

But the actual text is horrendous. The displayed text is a compressed bitmapped image, rather than vector based text as in a PDF. This is a problem because once you zoom into the text you start seeing a lot of "noise" surrounding the text, and when you zoom out you don't see the noise, but you don't see the text clearly as well, as shown in the screenshots.

As a general rule, you should only use bitmapped based formats for static displays ie. an image sized at only 1024x780. However if some scaling maybe involved, one should always go for vector based formats, because it is redrawn at every size.