The iPhone 3G. Mine arrived this morning and it’s been an interesting journey trying to set up all the new features and trying out various different applications for it.

GPS
Is very cool. Definitely a much needed feature to go with the already excellent Google Maps. There are a couple of improvements that could be made, such as maps that move automatically when you’re following a route, and setting the screen to stay on whilst in route mode. But other than that it works well.

MobileMe
Is slightly broken right now. It’s obviously been a big hit, which has either overwhelmed Apple, or they’ve discovered some serious bugs which is preventing it from working properly. With that said, this new service is going to be very very useful when it’s fully operational!

Apps
These have a lot of potential. When Apple gets its push notification service working correctly, that will be a very powerful addition to any application. At the moment I’ve only installed a handful of apps. I’m quite impressed with Shazam and Exposure.

Shazam listens to any music you point your iPhone at and tells you what the artist and track name is. It goes one step further by giving you links to the iTunes music store.
Exposure utilises the GPS features of the iPhone and allows you to find photos on Flickr close to you. Quite ironically I found a photo of someone I knew when I was driving nearby his house!

All I need now is my ShieldZone protective cover and I’ll be happier to use it out and about.

A little while back I had an issue when trying to sync my iPhone with my mac. Any calendar entries made inside iCal would sync across fine to the iPhone, but when done the other way the new entries wouldn’t appear in iCal.

I went through various solutions last time and the only way to make it work again was to reset the iPhone and re-sync everything. This morning I had the exact same problem and didn’t particularly fancy having to reset my phone again and go through the rigours of setting it up how I liked it again.

I came across many posts detailing different fixes but none of them seemed to work for me. I tried resetting the sync history using the button in iSync preferences, but a restart later and I still had the problem. Looking at the Apple support document for resetting the SyncServices folder showed another way to reset the information. Open terminal, copy and paste and then hit enter:

/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl full

When re-opening iTunes and the iPhone plugged in you’ll initially see no calendars, no email accounts and no address book groups. Select the options you want to sync again then click sync and that information should re-appear.

I have no idea why the calendars stopped syncing correctly, but I did notice that some old calendars that have been deleted still showed under the sync list. They weren’t being synced, but could have been a contributor to the problems I’ve had.

Since moving to Safari for most of my web browsing needs I’ve been using a replacement for the brilliant AdBlock Plus called PithHelmet.

PithHelmets default setup is fairly functional although some customisation is required to get it working with various websites that I use daily. There is however one default setting that annoys the hell out of me as it doesn’t seem to remember the last state.

Enabling plug-ins for every site is something I really want to maintain on by default. I only block plug-ins based on the website I’m visiting and if they annoy me or are in some way dangerous, although that’s very few as I use OpenDNS to keep the nasty stuff out!

If I toggle the Enable plug-ins option to on, PithHelmet remembers this until I close Safari and then it defaults back to being off. This can be a little annoying when reopening Safari after a reboot or when I’ve quit the application accidently.

Asides from that annoyance, PithHelmet is definitely worth getting if you use Safari.

I can’t work out why Apple’s applications don’t utilise Spotlights ability when it comes to searching for items within them. Take this as an example. If I search for Saft inside Mail, so that I can find my registration details, it returns nothing.

If I then do exactly the same search via Spotlight, it shows four results under the email messages.

I’m just wondering why one of Apples own applications would have such a discrepancy when it comes to searching?

I’ve found a massive flaw with the iPhone. It doesn’t sync email certificates held in the Mac OS X keychain to the iPhone.

Whilst this isn’t initially a problem if you just use it to sign emails as being from you, it poses a problem if someone else also uses an email certificate enabling you to encrypt emails.
The email ends up encrypted and the iPhone has no way to decrypt it because it doesn’t possess any of the certificates that Mail does. I’ve filed an enhancement request with Apple, let’s hope someone picks up on it.