On monday Meebo released their client for iPhone. They had announced this well over a year ago during the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event saying how they needed Push Notifications to do what they really wanted to do. The first time they presented the app for aproval was last week.

After using it for a few days I am willing to replace my copy of AIM with it. The colors are very light and it feels inviting to type. The client can save and read your history online, this is what I thought even Trillian was missing (on the mac at least, never tried to play with the iPhone version).

My biggest problem with it so far is that it still doesn’t have metacontacts. Hopefully that’s coming sooner, rather than later.

While I’ve been waiting for this App for a while, it has outdone my expectations. The other mobile IM applications have been put on notice… specially the $10+ dollar ones.

Apple told everyone that they had to wait until 3.1 for Augmented Reality apps to be approved on the iPhone 3GS. Yelp, did it anyways in the form of an easter egg.

I am so happy about this and at the same time I am having a very severe case of iPhone 3GS envy… I have convinced myself that I do not need the new phone because my 3G is good enough but it is just so cool to see these applications start to leak out.

When Apple announces 3.1 (My bet is during the iPod event that’s been rumored on 9.9.9) all of these little apps are going to take over. I mean remember three years ago when all of the talk was on Jeff Han’s multitouch TED presentation? Then we got the iPhone and it became reality. Then the dream was to have applications to do everything from banking to gaming inside of your little-wonder device. That is now also true. Augmented Reality is just as big of a jump and we are getting right against it now.

Source: Mashable

Well that was then. Now we have the app store and I have purchased more than $50 worth of apps helping Apples profit margins that much more. It is really a shame that I cant justify supporting Apple anymore even though they were the ones that finally cracked the smartphone code. The reason for this is once again AT&T.

Ive been talking to a few people in the last few weeks and I completely understand the argument that they have to defend their network and ward against bandwidth hogs, but there is no excuse if theres a cap. Additionally where are the upgrades they’ve been promising? As Apple keeps selling iPhones, AT&T has positioned itself as the paragon of mediocrity from the start by failing to keep up with network demands.

If you have a Blackberry on AT&T your sling player works through 3G, on iPhone they waited until the app was in for approval to change the T.O.S. and disallow apps like those and then tapped Apple. If you have a Blackberry on AT&T, you got Google Voice as an app a few weeks ago, on iPhone they asked Apple to go on a witch hunt for anything that said Google Voice on it. The idea that people might find that their prices are artificially high and might switch to an innovative new service scares the shit out of them. This however will be AT&T’s undoing.

The reason why the problem is with AT&T and not with Apple is because I am sure Apple doesn’t care.
Apple’s main problems are with apps resembling each other and causing confusion. Other than that Apple should want all these applications to run on their platform but AT&T has been meddlesome and has created more problems than Apple could have ever imagined. That is why Apple’s inability to come up with a fair approval process that rewards innovation and doesn’t punish it has made many uneasy and has spawned competition. Cydia.

Cydia is an app store for jailbroken apps that spawned after the team behind the original jailbroken app store Installer.App took their sweet ass time releasing the code as open source (as they had promised) and sparked fears of another walled garden. They have a pay model that accepts Paypal and Amazon Payments. There is no approval process and if one repository goes down there’s a million more.

The best part of this is that AT&T has no power to do anything about it. They disallowed GVmobile on the App Store? It went FREE on Cydia the day after. They don’t allow bandwidth hogs from using the 3G network? There’s an app that disables the switch that tells apps what network they are on and always claims you are on WiFi.

AT&T needs to know its role as a dumb pipe and give up its sad excuse for an argument that they bring anything to the table. This would allow them to stop concocting plans that limit the iPhone’s true potential and gives them a strategic advantage of having the most open network for a nominal fee. The iPhone runs great on T-Mobile and would run great on any other GSM carrier if we had any others. Others will come however and once LTE starts rolling out this illusion of competition that the CDMA and GSM carriers have been able to keep up for so long will slowly fade away.

AT&T either positions itself as the first open carrier or it dies when somebody does it and leaves them in the dust as the antiquated steam of shit that they are.

Stop developing for the App Store, start developing for iPhone through Cydia.

That was a while ago and there is still no Meebo for iPhone.

Why does this matter when there is AIM and Beejive already? Well AIM has ads, those are a dealbreaker. Theres a pay version without ads but it only has AIM and if im going to pay itd better be more functionality than something that should have been there fron day one (I still chaim iChat should have been a launch app).

So that brings us to Beejive. Im definetly not paying $10 for a chatting app. Im happy that they can get away with that but I dont think thats a reasonable price point. (It used to be $15, totally outrageous.)

Then theres the issue that it just doesnt seem to look good. Call me elitist, but I like my apps to look like they belong and Beejive seems a bit cluttered.

Then theres the free, all-network plus SIP app: Fring

If it had not been designed by a 5 year old I would use it all the time. Oh and whoever decided not to include a dialpad on the sip in-call screen should be taken out back and shot. It makes the application 80% useless, 100% useless if you want to use it with Google Voice since it has prompts for call recording and Listen In.

All in all It boils down to I want the clean interface that they showed in that keynote and transcript sync with the Meebo online service and only Meebo can give me that.

I never actually purchased GVmobile because I thought that Google would release an official app and it would be free in no time. That app was submitted to the App Store 6 weeks ago. Now we know it was denied. The GVmobile people have said that the Apple statement was that it “Duplicates functionality” with the iPhone… which is complete utter bullshit because the iPhone does not have Google Voice integration and thats all that the App did.

Additionally, if its that the iPhone already has SMS… theres a ton of other Apps they have to ban. Same situation with the dialer, there’s a billion of them already.

Now, last time I remember that they just lied like that to everyone that I can remember this vividly, where a high-profile app got denied access to the App Store was with Podcaster. For the same reason “it duplicates functionality”. This didnt turn to be true, until the next update in which Apple did include very similar functionality straight into the iTunes App. Hopefully this is the same deal and Apple integrates it straight into the phone and while they’re at it they should also enable Google Latitude.

Of course, these things are not likely to happen and they make me wish I had an Android phone. There… I said it.

It shows you the persons address and mugshot in addition to the charges. Although I would argue it should not show the low level offenders like kids that were caught sexting.

The other problem is if this is considered selling public records. Which would make it illegal in some states.

Lets just hope nobody uses this as a ‘hit list’.

I include the iTunes link below:

Offender Locator link : iTunes

Update (08/07/2009) : The application has been pulled from the App Store for ‘legal reasons’. There is a free version that is still on the app store as well as a competing application  that seems to still be on sale (Allen pointed this application out in the comments).  More about the removal at CNET.

Update (08/10/2009) : The application is back in the app store. Source AppleInsider.

The application is $6.99 but honestly, if you have a SIP account ( Gizmo5 provides you with this ) this should open so many doors for you the price should be negligible.

Get it before AT&T complains!

iTunes Store Link
Company Website

I mean GizmoProject has applications for every other device out there, yet they have not talked about doing a iPhone application. There is incredible demand for such an application specially if it is paired with some sort of multi-ring solution such as the now hidden (dead?) Grand Central. I do not understand why this application is not available. Fring is out, and it has SIP calling, but it inexplicably doesnt have a keypad on the call screen so any of the applications that ask you to press any key are unusable. Calling your bank? Sorry!

If you could get a Grand Central number (sigh… Grand Central) you could connect to Gizmo5 and have your Grand Central number ring your Gizmo5 number on your iPhone. Imagine that. You don’t give out your mobile phone number and people would be able to call you anywhere you are as long as you are in WiFi range.

Perhaps the main failure here is actually Apple’s. There is no way to have the phone have a background process that would be able to recieve the call unless you run the application and then lock your phone.

Until then, I think there’s a huge oportunity for whoever comes out to market first. Figure the background process later.

Sadly the name, out of context, can also be read in english as something quite different. Unfortunate indeed.

What I will talk about is the lack of a Shopping Cart and the ridiculous pricing scheme concocted by the people at Apple. I understand why Apple decided against the shopping cart it is not a streamlined process and actually gives people an opportunity to think about the purchase before doing it. That is a big problem if you are trying to sell as many things as possible as -fast- as possible. I deal with user interaction on a everyday basis, I know this. This is about as far as they thought it through however, take a look at this:

These are all the applications by My Accounts To Go, a page you can see for yourself by clicking here. Appart from the completely hideous un-imaginative icon, you can notice that while one application is free the other two applications are $449.99. Yes, you read that right, these applications are four hundred fourty nine dollars and ninetynine cents… each. In the description of all 3 of the applications they specify the following “Customer information from Microsoft Dynamics GP or SAP BusinessOne accounting systems are now directly accessible fro your Apple iPhone”. Even though there is clearly one for Dynamics GP and another for SAP BusinessOne, there is only one demo for the two which means they are fairly similar looks wise, but their inner workings are entirely different.

Before you start hating on the price point please understand. These are enterprise applications. These are serious, mission critical, applications and My Accounts To Go will most likely give them support as such. When you buy enterprise applications you are paying for the support and the knowledge that the system is not going to randomly go down. For instance, if tomorrow I check this blog and its not there, I’m going to call my provider, Host Gator and ask them whats up and hopefully they can explain and give me a refund or some credit or something. If I get to work on monday and our server is down, Rackspace actually has some liability in that case. It is an enterprise class application. Same difference, and judging from some reviews the applications warrant the $449.99 price point, so that is not an issue.

The issue is that they are in the App Store to begin with and this is something that Apple needs to address soon. My Accounts To Go is too busy making enterprise applications to give their three applications different icons. So there is actually no way for you to identify them without reading the name. The name is ‘MyAccountsToGo – *’, meaning you have to get through the name of the company to get to what you really want to read which is what version it is that you are getting. Which is not a problem unless you are trying to buy it on the iPhone itself (imagine that…) where it looks like this:

Yes, the price is there, but I never want to be less than two taps away from buying a $449.99 application, and If I did want to buy such an application, I would not like It to be so easy to confuse it with the version I do not want.

I really do not understand if the My Accounts To Go team is unaware that this is how their applications are showing up in the store… or if they are expecting you to make that mistake. Do they not know that their name shows up on top of the application? That if you search, their company name is also a field that the search looks in so therefore the applications can be called different things? Why is this allowed in the App Store?

When Apple set out to create an App Store they wanted to create something where you can buy applications on a whim, but they also wanted to allow serious applications to be available and I applaud them for that because the iPhone is now, not a phone, it is a mobile platform and that is just a remarkable achievement, but this is ridiculous. Can’t they set a cap on the price of items that they show me? I dont want any application that is more than $20 dollars to show up on my iPhone if I am unable to turn off this 1-tap purchase thing. If not give me a switch, and make enterprise applications harder to get to, so I don’t randomly stumble across them during my every-day browsing. You know what? Just give me a SHOPPING CART.

The one application I bought on iTunes (for those of you interested, it was Things, which I talked about in an earlier post) was $9.99  plus about $0.30 cents of tax. What will this end up being with taxes? Why can’t I review my purchase in a screen that details what I’m buying, for how much and what tax will be involved in the transaction? This is an oversight by Apple and they should seriously fix it.

All is fun and games at the App Store until somebody accidentally taps on the purchase button, which is conveniently the price button on the iPhone after one tap, and ends up with a $500 dollar app he/she has no use for whatsoever.

Also… My Accounts To Go, at $450 a pop, you can afford distinct icons for each one of those applications, get on it.