Rawkes Weekly – 13 July 2008
Stardate July 13th, 2008 – 10 CommentsThis week started with some absolutely torrential rain in Surrey, someone must’ve pulled the plug on the clouds over here! I was up at 7:30 on Monday morning, to be greeted by an email from O2 at which caused me to spend the next hour stressfully trying to pre-order my iPhone 3G. It turns out their website doesn’t like Safari very much so I had to switch to FireFox, finally becoming one of the lucky few to receive an iPhone 3G on launch day. I must say, it certainly lives up to the hype!
You can probably guess that this is going to be an iPhone themed Rawkes Weekly, so if you’ve had enough of that this week then feel free to skip past the news.
This week’s news
At 8am on Monday O2 started accepting iPhone 3G pre-orders. The site went down fairly quickly after O2 estimated they were sometimes receiving over 13,000 orders a second. The entire process was a mess and it resulted in hundreds of complaints on the o2 forums. Paul Boag (of Boagworld) summed up most of O2’s failures on his blog.
Tuesday saw the BBC announce an updated version of the BBC iPlayer, with radio and TV all in one place. I have to admit I really like the new layout and feel that it’s looking like a great resource for people in the UK – It certainly trumps the options for the other terrestrial channels!
Further into the week Apple released iTunes 7.7 and opened up the App Store. There are some great apps on there; it’s definitely going to play a major part in the future of mobile technology. I’ve actually been inspired by the app store to get into application development for the iPhone. Watch this space!
Following the launch of the app store came a flurry of announcements from iPhone developers. My favourite was Cultured Code with the release of their GTD app Things for the iPhone. I absolutely love this application on the Mac and having it on the iPhone is going to be a lifesaver. You can’t sync anything yet, but it will be coming soon apparently.
Another one to look out for is the official iPhone app for WordPress – a very promising application that has got me really exciting about mobile blogging.
With big hopes and a lot of drama, the release of the iPhone 3G brought this week to a climatic end. Needless to say I pre-ordered mine earlier in the week so wasn’t caught up in the whole activation debacle. Personally I haven’t had any major mishaps with my journey to the iPhone, and I must say it’s an absolutely stunning piece of kit which is going to seriously shake up the mobile industry. I’d recommend everyone to head down to their local Apple, O2 or Carphone Warehouse store (or AT&T in the US) and give it a try. Even if you don’t buy one it’s a good idea to get hands on with the future of mobile technology, or at least for usability and accessibility reasons!
Links of the week
- How to get in on early betas – Lifehacker shares how to get into those popular betas that everyone seems to be desperate for
- Google Maps without Javascript – An excellent implementation for getting Google Maps to degrade gracefully
- Cheat sheets for front-end developers – Anyone who uses programming languages on a regular basis should print out these cheet sheets and keep them on your desk
- Bgpatterns – Create your own background patterns with this generator
- This isn’t England – An interesting article about how countries are portrayed differently on certain maps
- Pinvoke mini icons – You can never have too many mini icons, and these even come close to FamFamFam!
Site of the week
DivVoted
Lovely illustrations on this website. I like how it looks like the island at the bottom is going to be expanded in the future.
Lesson(s) of the week
If you attack a fear head-on you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about
iPhones are all they’re cracked up to be!
Track of the week
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes. This little beauty has been keeping me soothed all week!
Predictions for next week
More iPhone madness, including loads of new applications and plenty of bugs being found in the 2.0 software.
Tags: weekly
Comments
10 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 13 July 2008”
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Jaysgirl says: [perma]
Told you I would write something :)
Yup - you, me, iphone madness, Friday was awesome!
Can’t believe how screwed over people were by O2. Then again, sod them - I just walked into CPW at 8am and got one straight away, no que or anything. O2 suck.Thanks for the mobileme help - its still acting up now, but meh … will give it a couple hours.
Oh, forgot to tell you, my second iphone turned up on saturday, with the third coming tomorrow! bloody insane. Second one got sent back the same day, and the one coming tomorrow is going the same way lol. I think I got a lil iphone happy when trying to secure one.
Anyway … nice post, love reading ‘em whilst in work.
Also … got some interesting news about Canada too!
Over n’ out robface x
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Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
@Dizi: There’s nothing wrong with a bit of iPhone madness! You gotta love the Fleet Foxes, though. Absolutely stella tunes in that album.
@Ruth: Yay you came out of the shadows and showed your face! No worries about the MobileMe help. I still can’t believe you got 3 iPhones… Some people can’t even get one! You greedy thing, you!
Make sure to tell me about this Canadia news! If I told you to email me on my iPhone would that be sad? ^_^
@Curvball: Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve actually known about the admin interface and WP plugins for the iPhone for a while now. They looks great! I’m still waiting on the official app, though. Somehow I reckon it’ll be more polished that the other solutions out at the moment.
@Rob: Damn that sucks! My old phone was on Vodafone and I can’t say I was happy with them. The signal was great but the customer service was appalling! Can’t you get a personal iPhone? You definitely wouldn’t regret it.
@Stefaan: Is the iPhone out yet in Belgium? or have you just not been able to get hold of it yet? Either way, you’ll love it when you finally get your hands on one. I think I should be getting referral fees from Apple at this rate!
@Brandi: Fleet Foxes are great aren’t they?! They are going straight on my iPhone tomorrow for some musical loving with my ears. Now without being sexist, it’s great to see more female web designers around! I hope things are going well for you.
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jaysgirl says: [perma]
I was gona email you - then I released I like your site too much so I am abusing your contact form :)
… canada - i’m off there for my 21st! … 2 weeks leaving on Valentines day with Jay :) - yay!
Its finally happening lol, after all this time. Sorry about msn last night btw - internet fooked up, then I just lost patience with it :) will text you later anywhos.
Love ya x
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Russell Bishop says: [perma]
Great post this week (hadn’t heard of all this o2 hassle) - the link to the England on the Map comparance is broken (ttp:// instead of http://)
Keep it up Rob!
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Great as always…although a little iphone crazy. Nice pick for track of the week though as fleet foxes are great :)