New war? UK in Panic

Ok, UK is mad at iceland because lots of savings where put into icelandic banks and now have vanished. However, as it is always the case with investments: know your risks before you invest. The UK authorities apparently didn't read the fineprint.

But is this the right reason to start a war?
UK is now using the terror law as a tool for revenge?

Trouble and panic in Iceland.

I have a big telecom's project in Iceland since a year. Iceland is a beautiful and amazing country. But it is in big trouble one might think. The 4 biggest icelandic banks have been taken over by the government over night. Icelandic companies of the finance sector are in big trouble due to that and the sector has big issues too.

Everyone thinks I must be mad to be in telecoms and into Iceland at this time. The reality is different. What's happening currently in the icelandic market is pure panic. Ok its for real that some people have lost or are going to loose big money or already have lost it. But does that have to do anything with my plans? It doesn't. It means my competitors get into trouble. They are already cutting jobs big time. It means a lot of people revise their budgets and will be looking for better deals to save. The result of this is that we might even get more customers than we thought. It means there might even be one or two competitors less. Have we lost money so far? No. As we only invested in our own infrastructure and didn't play games on the financial market, we have lost nothing. Our own infrastructure is still worth the same as before. Zero value lost. So why panic?

Quintessence: Generalizing trouble in panic situations is bad. One guy's trouble is the other guy's opportunity. Trouble and panic as it happens right now is just shifting money around quickly. Some will loose and some will win. And this time we won't bee on the loosing side.

NDA dropped

Apple has finally dropped the NDA for iPhone development!
Its abut time developers can now talk freely between them!

Long live free speech...

Swiss German is not German

Writing Swiss German on a German keyboard on the iPhone is messy. Autocorrection gets into the way constantly. There is a property which allows you to switch autocorrection off or on but Apple simply doesn't show this switch if you choose german language (or its not offered preinstalled on the models sold here). In other words, you must jailbreak your phone to be able to switch off autocorrection by adding one single line into a .plist file.

Its so easy for apple to fix this but they did not think someone in Switzerland might want to write english,german,italian, swissgerman, french etc. on the same phone. While switching between german and english keyboard is ok to switch autocorrection to the corresponding language, when it comes to swiss german, it just messes up your text totally. And then there are other people from other countries living here who want to write their native language for which the iPhone might not have support for. Well autocorrection makes it very difficult, I can tell you.

I reported this problem to Apple back in August already as Bug #6162063 and it got marked as duplicate of Bug #6182799. However it did not get fixed in 2.1 firmware.

Now I realize I'm not the only one. There is a large protest against autocorrection in switzerland and 4'600 7'000 end users have already signed a petition against autocorrection not being able to be disabled! This is probably about 60% of the sold iPhone 3G owners (given after 1 year of iPhone "classic" there where about 15'0000-20'000 iPhones in the market in Switzerland)

So its time for Apple to THINK DIFFERENT....

http://please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com/

QTH

My second iPhone application is now under review.

QTH is an application useful for amateur radio operators. It shows you your current location in longitude/latitude and in QTH locator.

For those non radio amateurs among you, QTH is a shortcut used in morse code and stands for "My location is...". The QTH locator (sometimes referred to Maidenhead locator) is cutting the earth into squares. It is used in VHF contesting a lot to calculate the distance of the connections.

Karl's blog

Karl Kraft has written an excellent blogpost about his experience developing for the iPhone.
You might want to read his post here:

http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2008/09/12/hazmat-a-development-story/

SysInfo

My first iPhone App is done. Its not rocket science but its a tiny useful application which gives you all kinds of information about your system such as kernel version, IP addresses, Model number etc. I have more applications in the pipeline but this one is the first one to finish and make it to the AppStore. It's now available in the AppStore.