五師兄字

I am all alone with iMessage @iOS 5.0

I am all alone.

I mean, in the iMessage world.

Some might say iMessage could be the WhatsApp killer.

I would say, without friends on the list, I could only iMessaging to my own self. Useless on my iPhone. At least for now.

Anyone out there also brave enough to have iOS 5.0 installed on his/her iDevices? Please iMessage me, so that I know I am not alone. Find me at mail@ngszehin.net or any email that you could link me with.

On the other hand, I must say it has a great [Note: not great anymore] some value on my iPad. Now I could send normal SMS (before I could find someone that I could iSMS with) directly from my iPad with the Messages (between non-iOS 5.0 dude, I have to take away the “i”, for now) [Note: I have to take away the whole SMS thing for now, because after the testing I found out that basically it works only with iMessage but not normal SMS].

Well, I have (sort of) signed the NDA, so I should speak less. Nonetheless, I could let you have a sneak peak of the shots I have done without me saying too much: The notification center function is cool. The camera button is convenient but I am sticking with Instagram. iCloud is not working coz I haven’t set it up yet. Reading List could be a good function but I haven’t appreciate it too much yet coz it is not always working. Reminders is clean, but if it is not syncing with the one on my iPad or the cloud, it becomes useless to me and I would stick back to my pretty TeuxDeux.

Software on this iPhone has expired

Sick leave at home. The best thing to do is to sleep all the way from 9 to 5. The second best thing to do is to update my devices to iOS 4.3.

That was fun. And the fun were two parts. The first part was about how I love the cool new feature of iOS 4.3 on iPad: new multi-touch gestures. If you swipe the screen sideways with 4 fingers, than you could jump directly to the next opened app. And this is very handy. More, if you swipe up, the multitasking bar would be revealed; and if you pinch the screen with four fingers, the home screen would be revealed. For the latter two, they were also cool, but not something you can’t do without.

The second part was even more exciting. I upgraded my iPhone4 to iOS 4.3 Beta 3 some weeks ago (and has been enjoying creating my own “Personal Hotspot” with it every since). On the day of the official release of iOS 4.3 I did try to plug my iPhone with iTunes on my Mac to detect the upgrade, but nothing had happened. Yesterday morning suddenly my iPhone stopped working and asked me to plug it in to iTunes again. I did, and it said: “The software on the iPhone XXX has expired and must be updated to a newer version.”. However, when I pressed the update button, nothing happened. It became a brick (well, not for the first time).

People from the forum said that the iTunes cannot detect the difference between Beta 3 and the officially release, and thought they were both iOS4.3, and so no upgrade is needed although the beta has expired already. What to do? I could either wait for Apple to release 4.3.1 (and by then I guess iTunes could really tell the difference), or I could do what I have done. I acted like a pro, search around on the Apple forum alongside with those real developers who are holding the same iphone-bricks with me, and found the solution:

1. Download the ipsw file directly from somewhere.
2. Force the iTunes to upgrade the iPhone by Option-Click the iTunes’ “update” button, and select the downloaded file.

iOS 4.3 for iPhone 4:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iPhone4/041-0330.20110311.Cswe3/iPhone3,1_4.3_8F190_Restore.ipsw
iOS 4.3 for iPad:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iPhone4/041-0329.20110311.Cvfre/iPad1,1_4.3_8F190_Restore.ipsw
iOS 4.3 for iPhone 3GS:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iPhone4/041-0328.20110311.Lkhy6/iPhone2,1_4.3_8F190_Restore.ipsw
iOS 4.3 for iPod Touch 3G:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iPhone4/061-8366.20110311.Fr45t/iPod3,1_4.3_8F190_Restore.ipsw
iOS 4.3 for iPod Touch 4G:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iPhone4/061-9588.20110311.GtP7y/iPod4,1_4.3_8F190_Restore.ipsw
iOS 4.3 for Apple TV:
http://appldnld.apple.com/AppleTV/061-9584.20110308.Cxdew/AppleTV2,1_4.3_8F191m_Restore.ipsw

The “somewhere” depends on what you want to get, all links to Apple download site. However, the site developer.apple.com doesn’t reveal this link to us. Lucky that someone found them and provided them on the forum. Device upgraded at a blink. Everything’s back to normal.

Now, on top of how I am feeling good using iOS 4.3, I also feel very proud of being a pretended-to-be Apple-developer-pro, for a limited period of 120 minutes.

More iPads!!

That was the highest moment, in terms of iPad sake. 5 iPads appeared in my home at the same time. Crazy.

我唔會買 iPad 2

寫開「我唔會買 i… …」系列多年，不想斷纜。但今次其實真的沒有其他甚麼東西好說，只得一句到尾：我一定買！

點解？很簡單，因為我近日為公司開發了一個 App 來推廣公司生意和產品。但現時的 iPad 1 沒有 Video Mirroring 功能，用家和客戶只可以擠在一起於那 9.7 吋顯示屏上看。但用了 iPad 2 大家就可以在 projector 甚至 HDTV 分享這 App 的內容。對於我來說，這甚或可以說是現有 iPad 1 用家升呢上 iPad 2 唯一的理由！我也會想像到眾教書的和常做商務簡報的朋友也會對這功能一見鍾情！

至於有人說擁雙鏡頭、可用 FaceTime、薄了輕了快了、再加 Smart Cover，等等也都不算是很革命性的突破。純在用家功能的角度來看，我同意。但做過電子產品開發的人如我，就會驚嘆蘋果如何能於短短一年內可以加快 CPU / GPU 但電池照舊之餘甚至仍可將機身厚度再縮三份一，簡直是鬼斧神工，神乎其技！買這 iPad 2 回來單是當其是件「藝術品」來欣賞也不為過！

那為何我仍命這題為「我唔會買 iPad 2 」呢？我在嘗試延續這個「不買傳統」嘛！但說實在，我已找不到什麼好點子來自圓其說了。各位還是等待看我日後的第一手用後感吧！

iPad ~ Will It Blend?

今天 iPad 於香港正式上市。唔知道有幾多人買 iPad 黎係用黎咁樣用既呢？

【Warning！Don’t try this at home without adults around or without a deep pocket avaialble！】

Other readings about iPad:
What is iPad?
Meet iPad
我唔會買 iPad！