IT Werkz Sometimes

Someone foolishly recommended me as a bit of an expert on iPhones to someone who had just got an iPhone.

Thought I knew pretty much everything to know about the iPhone and oh boy was I wrong. The guy with the new iPhone had only had it for 24 hours and reckoned that he’d figured it all out (Oh yeah. Ed), apart from 2 issues . The two issues, typically, being about functionality I really didn’t know anything about. The first one was about ringtones and how was he supposed to change his iPhone ringtone. I have never changed a ringtone on any mobile phone in my life, so shame on me and my lack of smarts there. His second issue was about jail breaking his iPhone. I’ve also never done that, or even considered it, so my iPhone expertise was pretty much smashed right from the get-go. He wanted to use his iPhone as a modem. I mentioned waiting for v3 of the iPhone O/S when tethering may be an option but he was determined to jailbreak it as soon as possible.

If Apple does release tethering, it’s still up to the networks whether they allow customers to use iPhones as modems. The very people that want the tethering functionality are those that will use the iPhone as a modem for a net book and probably have that streaming TV programs all day long and bringing the network to its knees. Those people are the very users that the networks don’t want to have using tethering. I suggested he may as well jailbreak the darn thing and cause as much havoc as possible.

He also wanted to load 150 games onto his iPhone. I would have thought that if he was that much of a gamer, and it did show a bit, that he’d probably already played those games to death and why the heck did he want to load them all onto an iPhone. Go figure. Not sure the iPhone has enough memory for loading 150 games.

The whole conversation was just becoming an exercise in logic chopping when I asked him whether he used to hate iPhones. He did and now he was lumbered it was obvious he was determined to find reasons it was no good. After about the 3rd time he had told me that he was an IT wiz and spoken very patronisingly to all and sundry I asked him whether he had to talk to people like that as I also am in IT and almost certainly have worked in IT longer than him. That made him think, and he responded ‘how old are you?’ when it was obvious I was older than him. What a dreary conversation. He was at least 10 years younger than me and, apparently, had been working in IT since he was 8 years old and had designed and written Duke Nukem. Priceless.

This conversation should have been conducted on a forum somewhere where it would have denigrated into a flame war.

I’d been looking for an iPhone tennis app and had tried one called Tennis and which did show both ATP and WTA rankings and tournament schedules but was slow and the screens were a bit old fashioned.

I then tried an app called iTennis and again the screens weren’t very well designed. The first ‘news’ screen does display the latest tennis news regarding players and tournaments but they aren’t in date order. Currently the first couple of displayed stories are for the 1st February, followed by a story from the 25th February and then a whole load of stories which are older and in the correct order. Then there’s suddenly a story from the 26th February and the 25th. Groan, the developer really should have picked this sort problem out when testing this app.

There is a Schedule tab which displays tabs for Scheduled, In Progress and Completed tournaments and defaults to those In Progress. There is a banner advert at the top then a whole lot of big blocky headings and right at the bottom of the screen a couple of tournaments are displayed. This screen needs some redesigning. There is also a Rankings tab which does sometimes work and other times just gets lost and displays squat. I’m also not convinced that the displayed rankings and players ranking points are correct.

I was keen to get a decent tennis app and this isn’t it just yet and it cost £2.99s. Now this app really isn’t fit for purpose as it barely works. If I bought this in a shop in a box and loaded the app from a CD into iTunes and then to the iPhone I would be tempted to take the app (box with CD) back to the shop and say it doesn’t work and I want my money back.

How do I get my money back from Apple? Is there someone I can phone. Is there hell. It’s all a bit one way, you give them money and that’s that.

One of the iPhone apps I have been testing is called TV Forecast and it is supposed to let you know when a TV program is due to be shown.

This is a relatively easy app to test as you can check when it thinks a TV program is on against any TV guide that is around. The first programme I tried was a program that is currently being broadcast and has been on for the last 3 months, every Saturday and Sunday. I’ve just checked and TV Forecast only shows the Sunday edition of the show, it completely missed about the Saturday edition. Next I tried a programme that is only broadcast on Sunday and this time it did show the correct date and time.

I then tried an old TV programme that hasn’t been broadcast for years as far as I can tell and TV Forecast did have ‘TBA’ against it, so that was OK. Lastly I entered the name of a soap that is broadcast 4 times a week, including the day I added it to TV Forecast to search for. That also was displayed ‘TBA’ against it. So not only did it not inform the user that it was on that very day but also didn’t notice that it was broadcast 3 other times in the following week. Where a TV programme is marked as ‘TBA’ then it is displayed on a screen in a section labelled ‘To Be Announced’. Programmes where it has found a broadcast date and time and has displayed it for the user then these programmes are displayed in a separate section.

I have just re-run this app and all 4 programmes, that is including the two that it found or partially found, are now all displayed with ‘TBA’ against them, so it has lost all knowledge of the programmes that it did have dates and times for, and yes there was an internet connection.

This app is just hopeless and hasn’t been tested very well at all.