Last week, I jailbroke my iPhone. This means that I can install applications without having to use the Apple appstore. Of course, this is nice. Outside of the appstore, there are lots of packages that you can install and applications that haven't been published by Apple (yet). I mainly jailbroke it because I wanted to use SyncJe for SyncML stuff.
When the first generation iPhone was there (without SDK) I understand that there was a need for jailbreaking, but nowadays, with a huge appstore, this need seems to be less, at least for normal users. iPhone hackers obviously want to be able to install additional tools on the device, but what I noticed is that the software that you can dowload on a jailbroken iPhone is often pretty crappy. Stuff crashes or doesn't really work the way you want it to (if you can install it at all; SyncJe doesn't on my phone). Since there are lots of free packages at the appstore, I prefer using them, in favour of the ones you can download from other sources. Another problem with these non-appstore packages is that there seems to be a huge number of sources, all providing different packages. Currently there are 2 installer packages (Installer.app and Cydia) which both contain a subset of available packages.
I like centralized repositories that contain packages that went through a quality check. The same applies for my Linux systems, where I don't want to add 100 extra sources to my apt config, just to run specific software, from which I don't know the quality. Of course, the whole appstore thing creates a vendor lock-in, which in a way is kind of bad, but on the other hand often guarantees some sort of quality control.
Today, I got an iPhone 3g! And yes, it's very very very sexy. I hadn't played a lot with iPhones from friends, but I must say that it rocks. The interface is so nice and snappy. The only thing I don't like it that it seems that Apple doesn't really care about integrating with other systems than with their own platform. I happen to own an iMac, but even then, I had to jump through hoops to get my stuff migrated from my 'old' Nokia n61i.
I happen to use Zyb.com as an online backup for my contacts and calendars. My Nokia played nice with it and synced things with SyncML, but Apple decided not to support this. 3rd party apps aren't really that great or don't support syncing calendars. What I finally did was using the "Funambol" application to sync my contacts with Zyb, but because Apple closed the format of the iCal database, Funambol only does the contacts (same for Synthesis SyncML2iPhone). Then I exported my calendars from the Zyb site to vcalendars and imported them in Apple's desktop iCal application. From there, I could sync my calendar with iTunes.
The problem I'm facing is that I now can sync my contacts from my phone to Zyb, but not my calendar, which kind of sucks. I'm still trying to figure out a way to (except from installing an Exchange server) sync all my things (calendar, notes, etc).
Just a quick update on life. Currently, I'm very busy finishing a project for one of my customers, which will be done by the 14th of October. A new project is already in the pipeline, for which I'm very eager to start with. The project will be about implementing a brand new Ruby on Rails application and I really can't wait to do some hardcore coding again. Being a freelance developer allows me to pick the projects I really like and after 6 months of managing people and talking a lot in meetings, it's time to dive into some code again. Next to that, there is another upcoming project that I started with a good friend of mine last year, but is now getting very serious. The planning is to rent some office space and start coding to finish the product before January.
For the rest, things are going well. Last weekend I travelled to St. Petersburg again (for obvious reasons). The weekend was so great. The only thing we did was visit a birthday party of some friends and the rest was just spending time together. I decided to fly from Dusseldorf this time, since it was a lot cheaper than from Amsterdam and the scheduled times were also much better (Friday in the afternoon and back on late Sunday evening). I flew with BlueWings, a German budget company, and the service was nice.
The day after returning, I suffered my usual post-Russia depression, but now I'm doing fine. I know that this was not the last time.
Recent Comments