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This is my first post from my iPhone.

Apple filed a patent that revolves around delivery of mobile location based content to mobile users. This is a technology that I have long waited for and has the ability to change the world. First of all the idea of being able to walk into a store or restaurant and order what you want from your device, pay for it and be notified when it is ready is an awesome concept in and of itself.

The bigger deal comes when everything is wired. You walk into a bar and they know your favorite drink. You are also connected to the local matchmaking system at the the bar. You are then notified about the people in the bar that meet your criteria and that you meet theirs. How will that change the world?

What about the airport. You walk in and are instantly checked in. You are then free to walk around the airport and be notified that it is time to board. Lets say that you are on standby. You are notified if there is a slot available to you. The person that might be waiting to pick you up at your destination is kept abreast of flight status and your status so they know when they need to be at the airport and where your bags are going to be.

Now lets imagine that you check into a hotel. The hotel can make special offers to you, let you book spa packages, schedule a tour or order room service all from your phone. This will allow the hospitality industry to take service to the next level.

There are some downsides as well. This will allow more detailed tracking of your likes, dislikes, movements and habits. The question that we need to answer is if it is worth it. From my point of view, I think we are being tracked anyway so we might as well get some use out of it. What are your thoughts?

 

 
Apple released the iPhone SDK today. They also announced some pretty awesome technology to be in the next update of the iPhone software. I am really excited about this. This means that we can start working on community developed apps in a central location that will auto update!This means I am going to teach myself cocoa so that I can develop apps. I do not think I will be doing really advanced apps, but I want to learn. So the question is does anyone know of any good sites to help me out?I really would like to see kismet, nmap, aircrack and metasploit ported over to the iPhone.

Today I was looking around the Apple download site and found something interesting. This looks like iPhone apps are already out!!Does anyone know if there are more out?

I have been using gmail for my kenswain.com email for a long time now. Once I got my iPhone I grew tired of having the email show up to places and having to mark it read in one. This lead me to use my home desktop, which runs Ubuntu, as an email IMAP email server. The process is much easier then it sounds. I just had to run a few commands and it was up and running.

First there was installing postfix. Postfix is an mail transfer agent (MTA) that is used to deliver email. This is also called an SMTP server after the protocol that it uses to accomplish this task.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get update ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install postfix

After that you need to tell postfix to use a maildir. To do this you have to add a line to your /etc/postfix/main.cf.

ken@desktop: $ sudo echo "home_mailbox = Maildir/" >> /etc/postfix/main.cf

Next you need to chose an IMAP server to install. I chose dovecot for its good security record, and ease of configuration.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd

Once you have the install done you need to do some configuration for dovecot to use the correct protocol and also to use maildir. The two place in the file you need to be concerend with in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf are: protocols = imap imaps mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Those are the settings in mine, but make sure to adjust them to how you like.

Now with email access to your box and the ability to send and receive email it is time to get your email from gmail to your local box. You can do this with a product called fetchmail.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install fetchmail

Now it is time to configure fetchmail to get email automatically. This is a fairly easy process.

ken@desktop: $ sudo vim /etc/fetchmail.rc

and add

set daemon 15 set syslog set postmaster localuser

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns user 'someone@gmail.com' with pass "password" is 'localuser' here options ssl smtphost localhost

Once that is done you need to enable the fetchmail daemon to start. To do this just edit /etc/default/fetchmail and change

START_DAEMON=no to START_DAEMON=yes

Once that is done just start the fetchmail service and you are good to go. Open the imap port on your router and change your email account in mail.app and resync your phone and you should be ready to enjoy Email goodness.

Well, I had to do it. I just had to run out and buy an iPhone. I know I have said some pretty negative things about them in the past, but with the price drop and encouragement from some friends I had to try it. So this is a review from someone that did not want to get an iPhone and someone who thought it was a mistake for Apple to release it the way they did.

To start with lets talk about AT&T. I have never been a fan of Cingular or AT&T. I thought there customer service sucked and they where way to expensive. So when Apple made the iPhone AT&T only I was down hearted. Well so far I can tell you it has not been that bad, but I have only had the iPhone a few days so the jury is still out on this one.

The next issue I had was with the network speeds. They decided to go with EDGE instead of one of the W-CDMA bands such as HSDPA or UTMS. I felt this was a really bad idea for any new phone that was released and wanted to call itself a web phone. This was further compounded by the fact there where no 3rd party apps. So that meant you would be using a slow connection for web based apps. I have to tell you that I was surprised at how well this works. The web apps do tend to load slow on the first visit, but after that they seem snappy. I can only guess that this is due to some cache tricks.

I am an old time blackberry user. This means I can touch type pretty fast with the keyboards on most smart phones today. So when Apple said they where not going to have a tactile feedback keyboard I was very upset. I did not feel I would be able to type as fast and I knew I would not be able to type without looking. I have to say that my speeds have increased, but there is no way I will ever be able to type with out looking. This will be something I will just have to live with.

Push email has also been a big deal for me. Right now the iPhone only offers IMAP IDLE as a “push” type email solution. If you have ever used a system like this you will know that it is not all it is cracked up to be. It does kind of do push, but it falls short. This is due to some technical issues with the IMAP IDLE that better be explained by Daniel’s study piece on IMAP IDLE.

After all of this you might be asking yourself “Why is he keeping the phone?” Well there is not an easy answer to that. The best one I can give is that I think some of the biggest issues will be fixed with software updates. I even think that Apple will unlock the phone from AT&T in the near future. There is some speculation that they will release a 3g iPhone in November, but Apple would not do something that stupid. Instead they will fix bugs and release a new phone next year which will be when I am ready to buy again. So all in all I almost happy with my new gadget and am very hopeful they will fix the minor issues.