07.31.07
Posted in Application Ideas at 5:51 pm by David Sisson
Following up on the random ringtone idea from last week, I came up with another idea that could be useful if you’re out there setting up your custom ringtones — the silent ringtone.
When I first got my cell phone number I was getting calls for the previous owner for months. It’d be nice to give those callers (who I affectionately named “Block Me”) a silent ringtone so I could just ignore them outright. Another case I use more often is calls from the local gaming store. It’s just much easier for them (and me) to leave me a message about the item I ordered coming in.
I hope all of you are having as much fun with customizing your ringtones as I am!
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07.30.07
Posted in Application Ideas at 4:53 pm by David Sisson
Everyone’s heard about Sudoku by now — it’s that Japanese game based on a 3×3 grid of 3×3 boxes that vaguely resembles a magic square. Shinro appears to be a game in its infancy that might be the next craze. I first saw Shinro when riding Southwest Airlines through their Spirit magazine:
http://www.spiritmag.com/fun/pdf/shinro.pdf
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07.26.07
Posted in Application Ideas at 5:43 pm by David Sisson
If you’re like me, you like a little variety in your life. Sure ringtones are supposed to be the same so you can tell who’s calling, but I like the surprise to hear what new tune pops out (and I have a lot of great ringtones).
So this idea is random ringtones. And this time I even have a suggestion on how I’d implement it — named pipes. Remember those old programs that generate random signatures in UNIX? Well on the iPhone we should be able to do the same thing:
http://www.deez.info/sengelha/code/sigrandd/doc/
One more idea for random ringtones — groups. If you use all the ringtones I’m sure you’ll get a built-in one you don’t like. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if you could use a random ominous ringtone for anyone from work?
Have fun with this one — I’m looking forward to seeing it soon!
Updated: The users on #iphone-dev came up with an alternative way of implementing this which might be easier to implement (and safer than pipes) — just use a crontab to change the file every so often. Sure it doesn’t guarantee you get a new ringtone every call if the calls come in within the same minute but it certainly comes close!
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07.13.07
Posted in Reviews at 8:44 pm by David Sisson
July 13, 2007
One of the applications I’ve been loving on my Treo before I got an iPhone was
Sudoku by Andrew Gregory. So when Arcadiusz came out with
Sudoku for the iPhone, I rejoiced.
For a web application, it’s quite well implemented. It’s major lack of feature is persistence (which of course is no fault of Arcadiusz) — if something happens and Safari has to reload the page you’ve just lost the game you were playing. I would love to see pencilmarks, Red/Blue coloring, hints, and all the features that Andrew put into his version, but realistically that’s tough to do in an application that has to be downloaded each time you want to play it.
The only problem I had with Sudoku was one time I ended up with an unsolvable puzzle. I checked it against a solver and verified that it was indeed unsolvable. Obviously if I’m going to be spending time doing a puzzle I’d like it to be solvable.
All in all I’d give Sudoku for the iPhone a 3 out of 5. If this ever becomes a built-in application it would gain a point instantly.
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Posted in Application Ideas at 8:09 pm by David Sisson
A simple application that allowed you to schedule shows and movies on your TiVo. Extra points if the application allows you to see what’s showing and to delete shows you don’t need (say if you’re on vacation).
You can already do this via a Safari bookmark to the TiVo website, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice simple application for doing this instead?
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Posted in Site News at 7:58 pm by David Sisson
This blog is about ways to improve the iPhone. I’ll talk about application ideas, features, bugs, and much more!
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