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Today we (Roman and me) started our bachelor thesis. We had a first meeting with our advising professor, scheduled one with our external customer and already had some problems.

The thesis comprehends the development of a mobile payment application for the iPhone. With this application a customer should be able to pay parking lots from he’s iPhone as easy as possible. Our external customer called ePark24 has already a payment system. That system is a bit circumstantially. So our goal is to take the existing services and put them behind an iPhone application and expand it with some nice, useful and handy features.

Now that service is based on some 0900 numbers. You call them and then you enter your parking location and your license plate – or lot number. To do that automatically we need to dial so called DTMF codes. But that isn’t possible. Simple: Apple forbids to do that!.

The first version of that iPhone App should be available in the iPhone App Store by mid May 2009. I will try to keep you up to date about my thesis and that app on this blog. ePark24 announced our iPhone App already in their january newsletter. Have a look at the bottom of page two.

In this spirit, happy parking!

Do you find my Apps?

via: http://www.taptaptap.com/
full res. image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tap-tap-tap/3074199062/sizes/o/

My newest gadget is called “Solio Hybrid 1000″. It’s a solar powered Accu. So the sunn charges the accu in miy Solio H1000 and afterwards i can charge my iPhone, iPod, Mobile Phone and a lot more. It comes with a USB -, a USB-Mini – and a Nokia adapter so you can charge nearly every device. I bought this solar charger for our bicycle tour from St.Moritz to Wien. I hope it keeps my iPhone “alive” for three weeks.

Till now I have just charged my iPhone once with the it. But it worked great. The only critic point is the way you can check the charge status. The LED blinks 1-5x depending on the charge. I think it couldn’t be too hard to put 5 LED’s in it and show the status like the Apple notebook accu’s do it. For more info see the solio.com webpage.

For every solar power fan it’s a super gadget! Although it’s a bit expensive to import it from USA!

Rating:

Yesterday I was at home by my parents (Eastern Switzerland). There I used Twinkle to look what’s up around me in the twitter network. And I found some strange twitter posts. It’s a curious bug because the town “Oberdorf” is actually near the other towns e.g. Dornbirn, but something went wrong with the country .
The 2nd curiosity was my location. It was 8 Km away from where I was. So it’s definitely time for the new iPhone 3G with built in GPS!
That’s not to be sneezed at. Most time twinkle does a good job and it’s a handsome application.

Twinkle Developers: Polar Bear Farm

iPhoneNotes 0.6 is out now with a brandnew icon (thank you verry much Cola Sheep).
The bad appostrophe bug is fixed too. Check it out http://www.v1ru8.net/iphonenotes

I’m glad to release a new version of iPhoneNotes today. I fixed some bugs and since 0.1.1 I’ve added some new features like auto-update and a Bonjour browser. iPhoneNotes is now Universal Binary!
Download: iPhoneNotes 0.3
Changelog:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Since I’m developing the iPhoneNotes application i worked alot with the iPhone Notes database. This database is the data-source for my app. But it has a terrible layout:
CREATE TABLE Note (creation_date INTEGER, title TEXT, summary TEXT)
CREATE TABLE note_bodies (note_id INTEGER, data, UNIQUE(note_id))

• column note_id is assigned to the rowid from the Note table (don’t like that but it works)
• In the Note database is the title of the note stored. And in the summary column is the content of the note store if it isn’t too big (absolutely don’t understand why?!?!)
• the data column from the note_bodies database contains the content of the note always. But in a really strange pseudo HTML format. Every line is in a div element and sometimes it has a br element at the end of the line. The problem is that these div tags are not every time closed correct. So it is impossible to parse it with an XML parser.(I hate things like that)
• Because the content of the note is stored twice it has a terrible data redundancy! I don’t understand why that is needed.

So Apple please update the notes application in version 2.0. The actual note’s db is not how things should be done!

Since apple is building and updating the iPhone software they’ve forgotten to deal with the Notes on your iPhone. They’ve just backed up them and thats not enough for me. So today I release an application to manage the iPhone Notes on your Mac.
Currently implemented features:

• Download notes from your iPhone
• View the notes
• Edit (change,add and remove)
• Save them back to your iPhone

All that is currently just possible with a jailbroken iphone and installed OpneSSH over WiFi. But I’m trying to support a cable based notes transfer which should work with every iPhone.

Known issues:

• Works just with 1.1.3 or higher
• Only over WiFi with a jailbroken iPhone
• Sometimes nothing sows up. Just try to download the notes again and have a look at the log window

Download here: iPhoneNotes 0.1.1

This software is totally free and comes with absolutely no warranty

Update:
Version 0.1.1 added with fixed resizing problem.

Now I’m using the iPhone firmware 1.1.3 for almost three weeks. Now it’s time to write a short blog post about it.

It’s definitely the best update since the iPhone is on the market. It has a much improved stability and it’s much faster then all prior releases. The cover flow does not anymore crash all the times! I’m very happy with the new links in your springboard feature, that’s super! The lyrics feature is pretty good when you are watching podcasts!

The google maps locate me feature is not working very good. Most time it displays a radius of over 20km. But one time it helped me actually finding a location . Although i must say i love the paper scrolling effect in the new maps app. Please make more suggestive use of the core animation technology.

So now I’m waiting for the SDK. I have already an idea for an iPhone app but maybe it will take till summer to realize it because I will never have the time to work on it . However I hope i can release an other iPhone tool soon. Be patient!

Recapitulatory i can say the update was absolutely worth it. Till it is so easy to update with ZiPhone (actually it’s even easier then it was on my last blog post) everybody should update!

Yesterday evening I updated to 1.1.3 (with restore over iTunes). After that I used this new tool to activate and jailbreak my iPhone.

1. Boot Windows XP (The mac version doesn’t work)
2. Install iTunes 7.4.2
3. Download the ziphone
4. Execute somthing like ziphone.exe -j -a (i have bootloader 3.9, so unlock (-u) won’t work)
5. Folow the instructions on the screen
6. Use anySim (1.3 for firmware 1.1.3) in Airplane Mode!. Skip that if you have unlocked it already in step 4
7. Enjoy your new 1.1.3 iPhone

So now lets start arrange your icons however you want and locate yourself! In e few day’s I will write about my experience with 1.1.3.