People love to complain, and we think half of it is due to laziness. Or incompetence. And with the iPhone, it’s no different. Take MMS for example: thousands claimed it was silly for the iPhone not to support it, but we disagreed. MMS is an outdated technology for which there are plenty of modern-day solutions, ranging from e-mail to Twitter. To rely on yet another protocol for sharing multimedia, when more reliable solutions exist, is nonsense. With rock-solid Twitter integration thanks to the dozens of Twitter apps on the AppStore, we barely find a need for SMS anymore, let alone it’s bigger cousin. Never mind the fact that e-mail works just as well for sharing multimedia.

But then there’s Flash, arguments for which are even more ridiculous. Who needs Flash on their iPhone? Yes, some sites aren’t non-Flash friendly, and therefore can’t be browsed via Mobile Safari, but that’s less Apple’s fault, and more the fault of web developers who decide to use Flash instead of other, more accepted (and open) technologies. It’s not like Flash was always viewable from every browser anyway, so why do people argue that the iPhone should suddenly adopt Flash as a sort of multimedia standard? Even dismissing arguments about how Flash is burdensome on one’s CPU and battery, there remains the obvious distaste for a third-party plugin that’s not friendly to industry-wide standards.

What Flash is, is a luxury. A luxury you get to have if you’re on a system not constrained by smaller processors and batteries. A luxury you get when you don’t care about a common user interface for your apps, because you’re not using a heavily-integrated phone-computer. And that luxury is not a right just because a bunch of lazy developers refuse to use more modern technologies to reproduce the output of a commercial Adobe product.

What people should be complaining about is not that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, but that some sites are developed in Flash in the first place.

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With Apple’s market growth, everyone’s talking about what the company will do next. Daniel Eran Dilger makes his own predictions over at Roughly Drafted, and while we’re skeptical as to some of his points, we can’t help but be excited as to their prospects. From Bonjour discovery for mobile Safari (to control a variety of devices from the iPhone), to self-contained web apps, we love the idea of these possibilities.

Additionally, the company appears ready to deliver a mechanism for creating and syncing self contained web apps. I assumed this would appear before Apple released its Cocoa SDK, but the pressure to deliver high performance apps that would differentiate the iPhone (and iPod touch) clearly impacted the company’s priorities. Being able to create simple offline web apps that can work on the iPhone even without an active network connection would result in a flurry of HyperCard-like development of simple, useful applets built using HTML and JavaScript, taking advantage of the HTML5 support Apple has built into Safari and WebKit.

At present, iPhone development is relegated to the more hardcore developers, who are either seeking to obfuscate their code by compiling it, else make money on their products. The process for getting an application into the App Store is not for the casual developer, as quickly realized when we decided to take a look at the process. Writing web-apps, on the other hand, is much easier to do, since it requires little more than a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, and the ability to host one’s code online. The problem here is this latter limitation: users of a web application need to be online, and sadly, we’re not quite at the point where wireless internet access is ubiquitous.

Being able to prototype, nay, develop an application in HTML and JavaScript without requiring the user to be online means targeting a development audience that isn’t a dedicated coder, as well as people who simply aren’t coders but have the basic yearn to learn a language with a quick design-to-product life-cycle. In other words, self-contained web applications means anyone with the desire to write a reasonably simple application can spend a minimal amount of time learning how to code (using HTML and JavaScript) to bring their visions into the real world.

For this idea to really be worthwhile, however, Apple needs to include some sort of database framework for self-contained web applications to truly shine. For example, with PHP and mySQL, the possibilities for easy-to-develop applications on the iPhone really come to light. More importantly, mechanics can be established for such applications to attempt to access online servers in the case of connectivity, which means that developers can design applications for both online and offline use, just as Cocoa-based applications can.

While Apple hasn’t boasted much about iPhone web applications recently, it’s unlikely that Apple will ignore this arena in light of the industry’s slow creep towards Cloud-based applications. With this in mind, Apple would be smart to target developers on multiple fronts. Just as the console wars are greatly dependent on which platform boasts the best library of games, he who controls an application library controls the platform of the people.

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After reading Apple Gazette’s fairly positive overview of Blogo 1.2, we decided to give the stand-alone blogging application a try. (We tried out ecto and MarsEdit in the past, and ecto still stands as our victor.) From Blogo‘s screenshots, we were hopeful that the application could seriously stand against ecto, as it looks quite polished, with a nice feature-set and much better-looking UI than ecto, albeit one that could still use some polish.

One of the first things we noticed when we started Blogo up is that after easily adding mendax.org to our list of blogs, Blogo imported a number of recently published posts. While ecto does this also, the key difference is that Blogo imports saved drafts at the top of the list, whereas ecto drops them to the bottom as if they were posted weeks, months, or years ago. The ecto team claims that this is a WordPress issue, but it’s clearly surmountable.

Blogo also has a nice full-screen editing window that can be toggled. This feature makes Blogo great for authors who post longer entries on their respective blogs, or authors who like to keep their desktop free of distractions while writing. Also, Blogo has a nice preview mode for blog posts, which actually generates a template of your site by connecting to the site in question and grabbing the requisite style-sheets and related documents. All in all, were quite impressed with Blogo up to this point.

Sadly, this is where Blogo’s strengths end, for even with a nicer aesthetic to the interface than ecto, our experiences with Blogo went downhill quickly. Firstly, there’s little image manipulation that can be done. While some may argue that margin sizes should be handled by a blog’s style-sheet, we still like the fact that ecto lets one adjust image margins without hacking up the HTML code for a blog post. We also like that after aligning an image to the left or right in ecto, that text is automatically wrapped around the image. In Blogo, the HTML tags inserted didn’t display the word-wrapping well at all, and we couldn’t find a way to fix it without getting down to the raw HTML.

Blogo also doesn’t show a list of tags previously used. While typing a letter brings up a small window of tags starting with that letter, it’s not as simple as visually check-marking the tags you want assigned to a new post. In this respect, ecto’s implementation is better, though Blogo could run with both ideas and make the tag list an optional, detached window (like the comments window it sports).

Before submitting our first test post, we changed the time-stamp to the following day, so as to queue the post for later publishing. Unfortunately, Blogo ignored our preference and published right away, which is a bug that shouldn’t have made it out of beta testing. A similarly annoying bug was noticed during the editing process itself, in which italicizing or bolding text via command-I and command-B, respectively, did not work unless text was selected.

Finally, after publishing a post, we retrieved it with ecto to make changes. Immediately, ecto complained about HTML syntax errors. After fixing them, we took a look at the image we uploaded, and noticed that Blogo automatically changed the left and bottom margins to 10 (the image was right-aligned). It’s silly that Blogo doesn’t let users change this value easily.

All said and done, Blogo is a stand-alone blogging application with promise, though very simple bugs are making it to release, and that’s really unfortunate. As it stands, the application needs more testing, and more refinement, before it can really stand up to ecto or MarsEdit. For $25, Blogo shouldn’t sport a version number of 1.2 with these kinds of shortcomings.

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When we recently upgraded our unlocked iPhone to firmware version 1.1.4, we found that the third-party application SummerBoard refused to display any of the themes we downloaded. We had this same problem when we upgraded to 1.1.3 months back, but the third-party patch “SMB Themes Fix” did exactly what it was named.

Unfortunately, even after installing the Installer.app sources that we believed held SMB Themes Fix, the patch was nowhere to be found, nor was any similar patch that various sites claimed were available. Nonetheless, we found a quick fix over at the MacRumors fora, which involves running a simple command as root:

mv /private/var/root/Library/SummerBoard/Themes/* /private/var/mobile/Library/SummerBoard/Themes

One should be able to run this command by SSHing into one’s iPhone, but we simply installed mobileterminal [sic] and “SUID Lib Fix” to enable a root login locally. Thus, no need for a nearby computer.

After running the command, the requisite files are moved to the proper place for SummerBoard to find them, and they can then be selected accordingly.

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When a Mac user walked into a room of gamers and started talking games, he was laughed at, beaten, bloodied, and dragged to the nearest ditch to die.

Well, he was laughed at, anyway.

But times have changed. Not because Apple has really strengthened their Mac lineup to support games (despite Apple’s random announcements over the years implying otherwise), but because of the numbers of former PC users now flocking to the OS X platform. Admittedly, a huge part of this diaspora wasn’t because OS X is simply a solid operating system, but because Vista isn’t. Of course, there’s still much to be desired regarding Apple’s hardware lineup as far as gamers are concerned, particularly because there aren’t any good middle-of-the-road options price-wise, but OS X has proven itself capable for running games, even if much of that proof is in ported titles.

The real truth is in Blizzard’s cash-cow, World of Warcraft (WoW), which had a simultaneous release on OS X. In fact, only one version of the game was ever sold, with both Windows and OS X versions on the same discs. Blizzard has been a forerunner in this regard for years now, having released previous Warcraft games on both Microsoft and Apple platforms, including their other franchises (Starcraft and Diablo).

This is an important thing for gaming companies to consider, because despite the rumblings among the development community that it’s not easy to port Direct-X code to OS X, oftentimes even considering the licensing of frameworks and APIs to ease in this porting, Blizzard was vastly successful in supporting OS X, even going so far as to add unique features to their OS X branch (such as native video recording).

Our personal experiences are such that we’ve had much less issues running WoW under OS X compared to Windows, to the point where we could count out WoW crashes under OS X on one hand, whereas under Windows, summing the crashes and restarts would require too much time than we have in a given day.

The real consideration for developers isn’t how well a game can run under OS X, however, but rather the number of gamers a developer will ultimately abandon if they don’t develop OS X versions of their games. In massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), not only is supporting the OS X crowd a boon, but supporting them from the get-go is nigh mandatory to win their allegiance.

Over the past six years or so, we’ve slowly migrated away from PCs, to the point where we recently sold out last gaming box and are now without Windows outside a virtualized form. And even virtualized, we rarely give Windows a look unless it’s to access legacy hardware (like our Garmin GPS). The point is, after WoW, it would take a significant revolution in gaming to make us even think about buying another PC, particularly since that PC would only serve to run the game in question. And let’s face it: with even die-hard PC gaming developers supporting consoles these days, we’re tempted to finally agree that PC gaming (relegated to Windows-only, that is) has its days numbered.

We’re not alone in our abandonment of PCs, either. Over the last couple years, we’ve witnessed many of our post-collegiate colleagues shedding their PCs, and either replacing them with Apple machines, else turning to consoles for their gaming needs. Like us, many have returned to their console roots, even if that’s one area that Microsoft still has our attention.

Yet despite the exodus we’re seeing from Windows, it still seems that most PC gaming developers are ignoring OS X. Aside from WoW, the only other “major” MMOG to support the OS X platform is EVE Online, which was only recently ported to OS X after years of successful operation in a Windows-only world. Given the number of gamers playing both EVE and WoW on Macs, it would appear that there’s some profit to be made here, even if the PC world is what’s jump-starting sales.

To say that developers of upcoming games have learned their lesson would be a major overstatement, however. Age of Conan, nor the upcoming Warhammer MMOG, will support OS X upon release. This is particularly odd for the latter, given it’s expected sales and already-hyped appeal. While Mac gamers may not even make up a quarter of sales upon release, why bother cutting them out at all, given that development of simultaneous platforms shouldn’t be that taxing now that Apple is using Intel hardware, and that there are actually options out there for porting Direct-X code. After all, in order to conquer the giant that is WoW, developers of future MMOGs should certainly be leveraging every possible opportunity they can.

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This morning, the site wasn’t rendering because of an “unexpected T_STRING” on line 6 of the Ultimate Category Cloud plugin that the site uses. When I looked at the respective file, it turns out that a random opening quotation mark was inserted in the file’s first line. Removing this quotation fixed the page, but unexpectedly caused a file path to display on the top of the page. Rather than dig deeper into the problem, I simply re-downloaded the Ultimate Category Cloud plugin, and all was again fine.

I’m not sure who or what inserted the quotation mark mentioned above – strange server hijinks, sleep-coding, or whatnot. Either way, things look to be working again, but if anything else looks amiss, let me know.

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