IT Werkz Sometimes

iTrain is an app that allows you to search for trains times between cities of Europe.

There is a date and time section of the screen which the user can change, which I assume to be how the user lets the app what date and time to search by. I have entered a departure and destination city and clicked on the Search control but nothing ever happens. The 3G or Wi-fi icon spins away for a while and then after about 5 seconds that stops as if it has finished searching for train times. Maybe it has, it’s just forgotten to display any of its found data, or maybe it couldn’t find any train times at all and gave up in disgust. If that was the case it could have informed the user, or done something to make the user think that something has happened.

I have no doubt I was ‘running it all wrong’ and the developer would probably be able to give me a demo of his product that was super smooth and the app then displayed numerous relevant train times, or maybe not. Maybe it never has worked and never will. I wonder if I paid for that app? If so how do I go about getting a refund from Apple? (Not sure if Apple believes in that kinda thing. Ed).

I’ve been playing around with Orb, a sort of Slingbox Free, on the PC and iPhone and have got the usual remote login issues in that it tends to not connect more than it does connect, problems which I’ve had with all remote login apps.

But when it does connect it’s good. On the PC the software can be pointed at your iTunes folder and all of your media on iTunes is read into the Orb app. Takes a while but with 10’s of thousands of tracks, films, podcasts what do you expect. You can also sign up for internet TV stations and subscribe to them but this isn’t live TV but specially made content ready for streaming. If you’ve got a tuner card in your PC then you can stream live TV.

What is great though is that you can play any movies that you have ripped to iTunes which isn’t bound by any iPhone memory limit as it is streamed whilst you watch. That and access to 250gb of music on iTunes and played back on a 8gb iPhone is impressive. Then there’s access to your photo’s and documents. The picture quality isn’t perfect but what the….

I suppose we are all pioneers at this stuff at the moment but in a few years when they have got 4g out the door (Try several years. Ed) then the picture quality should be just about perfect and we will have high quality sound and video access to everything in iTunes and live TV. What comes after that, heaven knows.

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.