Syncing/recharging, no Delicious app, and no Flash! Sometimes all I want to do is charge the iPhone. I thought several years after buying the Razr, battery life would have improved substantially. Not really...the iPhone appears to have to be charged overnight, just like my old cell phone. Ok, I can live with that, just means remembering to plug it in before going to bed, whether it's at home or on the road. But when to sync and with what machine? I initially had the USB cable hooked up to two Macs, one at work, the other at home. The home Mac has more songs on it, which might be nice to put on the iPhone occasionally, seeing how it's basically a phone and an iPod. But the school Mac has other songs on it as well...and now Apps. Well, the trouble is that when you "purchase" apps on one Mac, sync to the iPhone, when you plug in to the other Mac, your apps get removed, even though they may have been free! I've had this happen several times now. Some apps, like eBay, like to record your user id, which is fine, they should be doing that, but if my home Mac nukes the app, I have to re-install and re-initialize. It's an annoyance. Syncing among multiple computers just doesn't work very well, mainly due to copyright paranoia I suppose. But apart from music, why bother syncing at all? The apps can be downloaded by the iPhone directly, so why bother having to get them via a sync at all? I dunno... I think my strategy will now be to not bother with music on the iPhone, sync to only one machine, and just plug it in to power at home so it recharges at night. In other words, don't bother syncing. (iPhone screenshots are obtained by holding the home button and pressing the power button...got that off the web somewhere, neat trick!)
Speaking of apps, we wanted an app that could store our DVD info so that we could consult it when looking at DVDs in the store. So that we don't buy duplicates... We've been using Delicious Library at home for a long while now to hold all of our DVD collection. If we didn't have any Netflix vids to watch, just peruse the library to see what we had and pick from that. With the advent of the iPhone SDK, you'd think that the folks over at Delicious Monster would have written up a simple database-like app that could sync to the main library on the workstation. Indeed, the Delicious Library 2.0 web pages suggest that viewing your library on the iPhone is possible. Thus far, it's not via an app, but rather via iPhone's browser. Delicious Library publishes your entire collection to the web, which you can then view on the iPhone. Several problems with this: privacy issues (everyone can view your collection), sluggish download due to image files associated with each DVD title. It's slow on our DSL connection at home, slower on the iPhone (via wifi), and I imagine dog slow via an EDGE connection. A local app on the iPhone would be way better...even in plain text. I've got 13G free on the iPhone, I don't think a plain text database file would consume a lot of space...
Finally, no Flash? WTF? The only way to view YouTube vids is via the YouTube application. Because this allows viewing videos in H.264 encoding. But what about all the other web pages out there that show videos in Flash format? I didn't know this till just now, but for the moment, iPhone doesn't support Flash. Adobe claims they're working on it, even though Steve Jobs says the iPhone doesn't need Flash (concern for battery life?). On the one hand, it is a phone after all, so being able to view web pages is kind of a bonus to begin with (I never viewed web pages on my old phone). On the other hand, if you're going to provide a kind of mini network appliance, I suppose it should support everything, no? I suppose we'll see more of this kind of stuff showing up in software updates...
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