rob's blog

My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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I ditched my Blackberry Curve and picked up an black 16 gigabyte 3g iPhone last week.  It had been a great experience so far, with only a handful of complaints.

[Note: Since this entry was written, I have been releasing iPhone applications to the iTunes store.  You may be interested in checking out our iPhone and iPod Touch Applications. -rob]

Yesterday, however I had a serious problem with the phone.  I was at Rock the Bells in Mansfield, MA and reached for my phone only to find that it had a solid white screen.  It would not respond to the sleep or home button.  I tried the hard restart (reset), and it would go blank, then if I did it again, flash the white briefly.  I did the hard restart (10 seconds home and sleep) a few more times and got to the Apple logo.

The device then boot up normally to the home screen, however the moment it went to sleep it would not come back to life.  It would just be a dead screen.  I could get it to come back to the home screen again by doing multiple hard restarts (not every one was successful in getting to the Apple loading screen, sometimes holding the two buttons only resulted in a vibration) but even then it required multiple attempts. If I missed the home screen and it went to sleep then the process had to be repeated.

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This music video comes from Pete Miser, founding member of the Five Fingers of Funk. Pete hails from Portland, Oregon and his band had a following in the PDX area back when I was in high school.

Apparently, Pete was actually asked to fly to LA for an iPhone commercial and was inspired to create his own. He wrote and recorded the song and then got some help from Merritt Duff and Arrow Kruse putting it together.

With the video remixing you might think it is another parody, but if you listen to his words you’ll come away seeing unique satire. Either way, I’m now officially sold on the iPhone and now intend to liquidate my Blackberry Curve. Continue Reading »