Got another chat client for the iPhone called beejive which I’ve set up with the usual chat logins, AIM, Googletalk, MS Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo and cute looking it is too, not that many people seem to use them things much these days. The new Facebook v2 is much better and now has most of the functionality of the desktop version.

There is a good free pool game called Vegas Lite though having played it twice I probably won’t play it again. There’s also a very rich looking slot machine game called iSlots but none of the icons match up. Digg has got an app but there are too many stories to read and no way to configure it to select just tech, well I can’t find a way. reQall has come out with another version and which I have sync’d to the iPhone to see if that works any better.

I’ve dowenloaded 3 RSS readers and they are all a bit wonky. Netnewswire, which is governed by your settings on the Newsgator page, sync’s all of those you subscribe to but doesn’t actually display them all. I had a feeling it was a bit light so with Netnewswire and Newstand and Byline I subscribed to the same feeds and they are all out of sync with each other. These are the sort of problems that kill these apps as they generate a flaky feeling in the user that stuff is missing, and it is missing.

The 2 football apps, iFutbol and My Football are great though and when Apple bring out the push functionality for the non Apple apps then you should be able to get immediate notification of goals scored, matches won, players bought etc. The push functionality already works with the phone and mail Apple written apps.

I also heard that someone has seen a streaming TV app and Apple are trying to figure out how to bring that out. There must be all sorts of problems with that. First off the amount of data consumed and can 3G keep up. Also what TV channels are you actually allowed to watch for free? I’m sure there’s some bright spark out there who has already figured out how he can get his hooks into broadcast Sky Sports live football feed and how to get an app to show it but it wouldn’t be legal unless Sky get into it. Hmm…there’s a thought, I bet they are thinking about it.

Testing at work is going well. Everybody keeps saying how few problems we’re having compared to usual which is nice to here. I’m finding lots of bits and pieces of not working too well functionality in code that’s been live for ages so we’ve been sorting those bugs out but the developer can only be pushed so far before he refuses to fix anything else, and he works for a 3rd party company supplying software to my company. He’s good for 6 fixes a day. When this version of the system is released to the users with the fixed old functionality and the newly added and working functionality their gonna love it.

I’m down to one blog entry a week and that’s rubbish.

QuotesRT is a US stock ticker application for the iPhone and does need a bit of testing. It’s not a free app and is really a US only app but for some reason Apple allow us to get confused by it over here in the UK.

It’s a single stock ticker in that the ticker price is displayed full screen and appears to update real time. For a start this can’t be legal as to get real time stock prices, as opposed to the usual 15 minutes delay variety, you have to pay for that service but with this app you don’t have to pay anything. Convenient for us users but don’t bet on it working for too long. The next version of this app will include European stock markets. To monitor Euro shares append .L to the share’s name i.e. RIO.L which will then display the Rio Tinto price, in sterling and in pence and percentage pence but unfortunately preceded with the $ sign. So a Rio Tinto price of 4007.25 pence which is actually £40.02 plus .25 of a pence is brilliantly displayed as $4007.25.

This app also has a tendency to crash a bit, in fact sometimes it doesn’t even start. If you are monitoring a stock who’s price fluctuates a lot then after awhile it falls over. Rio Tinto’s price was changing a lot yesterday, every couple of seconds sometimes, so this is a good stock for the developer to test against.

Just saw a review of a home wind turbine which is supposed to create wind generated electricity. Problem is it needs electricity to convert the wind power into erm…electricity and it uses more electricity than it generates. Sounds a bit chicken and eggy. What the heck, you can blow a few grand and let the neighbours think you are helping global warming.

Somebody did an ad-hoc regression test of a new version of one of our systems and found a hole in code that is already running live, but he won’t tell us what he did to generate the system crash. He says he just ran it with the usual data and it fell over. Not sure if I believe that. I think he’s been thinking of how to break it for a while and had a eureka moment when he thought of a scenario that would never work, ran it and reported that ‘it’s still a piece of horse manure’.

I’ve been trying to replicate this issue for the last day and can’t. I went to the hole finder and again asked he how he ran it but he wouldn’t tell me and what’s worse he won’t raise a defect against it. I suppose it is my responsibility to find every single bug but this guy’s also a tester and he does also have a responsibility to help the developers if he knows in what situation the code becomes a wobbly heap, or maybe he’s one of those people that like software being buggy.