macJasp

Cerulean RX and the iPhone 3GS

My in car iPod connection just got a whole lot smarter recently. It's frustrated me for a while that the iPod dock connector that's fitted into my car stereo wasn't fully compatible with my iPhone, being a cable and connector that was only compatible with older iPods it wouldn't charge the iPhone when docked.

After doing a bit of research I found a perfect option, the iSkin Cerulean RX.

It's a bluetooth receiver that fits onto a standard iPod dock connector and allows A2DP stereo bluetooth streaming from a compatible device, in this case my iPhone 3GS.

Once connected to my iPhone, within the iPod application the volume bar is replaced by the bluetooth device I'm streaming to and a bluetooth symbol appears (as seen above).

The sound quality is extremely good, there is no real noticeable distortion and as an added bonus I can get my Sat Nav software to give me instructions through the stereo using the device, getting around the poor external speaker the iPhone's have that is particularly annoying with Sat Nav Apps.

I'm also pleasantly suprised to find out that I can stream music to the Cerulean RX and also have a bluetooth headset connected at the same time, the iPhone is smart enough to cut out the music and root calls to the headset and once the call is ended it starts playing the music back through the stereo again. Perfect.

iPhone 3G DIY repair

I've taken ownership of my step daughters damaged iPhone 3G. A cracked screen and a missing power button is going to be expensive to put right. However, I may attempt a DIY job by purchasing the parts separately and trying to take it apart and repair myself.

There's obviously many tutorials available on the web and it looks reasonably straight forward, as long as there is a hair dryer available to melt the glue from the screen it seems….

Internet Tethering

Being away on business this week and stuck in a hotel with no Wifi I took the opportunity to enable Internet Tethering on my iPhone. However it’s taken o2 so long to enable that I’m almost done and ready to head home.

It would have been so useful to carry on developing and testing my latest iPhone App while stuck in the hotel room. The Apps reliance on an Internet connection to grab data from a particular site means I couldn’t do
any work on it without such a connection.

In terms of tethering itself, I do like the blue glow at the top of the iPhone screen and it works great over bluetooth with my MacBook Pro.

Mobile Blogging with the iPhone

I'm planning to blog more and more through 2010 and if I'm to do that effectively then taking advantage of the iPhone is the way forward. I really like the idea of posting a quick thought or something I've found of interest while out and about and generally increasing my blog's overall content while I'm not near my Mac.

So for this very reason I've purchased and/or installed what is seen as the three best blogging Apps available from the App Store;

WordPress 2

Being a WordPress user WordPress 2 would seem the most sensible choice and the big plus over the other two is that It's completely free, it's pretty solid too, allows moderation of comments, something the other two Apps don't do but..and it's an annoying but, any photos you add to your post are appended to the bottom of the post, there is no choice to move it anywhere else. I have heard that the developers are looking into improving the photo feature which I do look forward to.

BlogPress

BlogPress is a generally nice App from coollittlethings and reasonably priced at £1.79 at the time of writing. It doesn't have comment moderation but it does allow you to format your post more effectively than the WordPress App. I really like the Geo-Tagging feature, where it creates a link within your post to Google Maps, showing your current location, most useful if your visiting somewhere of interest and want to append it to the post. However, and this may only be specific to certain blogs but the three options you have with photo alignment just doesn't work well with my own WordPress theme (Modern Clix). I'm particularly fussy in terms of making every post layout the same where possible (photo first, then content) and no matter where I align the photo using BlogPress it doesn't come out right on screen, it's a disappointment as I favour this App over the other two. I do like the ability to post to flickr and your videos to youtube – very nice and something the other two Apps can't do and i'd love to use this App on a regular basis if it wasn't for the odd formatting.

iBlogger

iBlogger is certainly the most expensive App at the time of writing, £5.99 when I purhased it, but this particular App comes highly rated. Written by Illuminex, the makers of the Ecto blogging software, It has very similar features to BlogPress, including Geo-tagging your posts, in fact there is very little to tell the two apart, except the fact iBlogger doesn't allow multiple photo uploads in a post and doesn't pull back post tags that you already have setup on your site (and occasionally crashes) but in terms of how it formats the post it certainly works the best out of all three for me (as seen in this post here that used the iBlogger App). As stated, it is more expensive but it seems to be in active development. It does some extremely weird formatting of text if you have posted a photo but amending the html after posting and then re-submitting seems to do the trick.

What to choose?

There isn't one perfect mobile blogging application for the iPhone as yet. They all generally work well but all have their flaws. Out of the three i've tried and tested there is one i'll be using over the other two due to the fact it's final format once posted works well with this site, so future mobile content to macjasp.com will likely be posted courtesy of iBlogger for iPhone.

Momento for iPhone

This is one of the most gorgeous and enjoyable iPhone Apps i've seen and purchased in a while. It's so simple in it's conception, take your favourite social networking sites (so far they have integration with Facebook, Twitter, Last.Fm and Flickr), let it download your feeds from those sites and display them to you in diary form.

From there you can add your own private diary moments, star rate your entry, tag people from your contact list and geo-tag an entry. It's a joy to use and i've found it really interesting going back through the previous years calendar within the application and reviewing it through my social feeds.

I've heard the developers are quite active on enhancing the application on a regular basis, i'd personally like to see integration with any RSS feed (like a blog) in a future update

Momento is available via iTunes for £1.79