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.

我們今日可以，因為當年不是一個

我們今日可以沒有民主，其實因為自己當年不是一個政治 related iPhone posted iPads。

Extracted by 文字雲 http://timc.idv.tw/wordcloud/

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six®: Shadow Vanguard – Interactive Trailer

Gameloft is launching the new Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard on iPhone tomorrow.

Now this is the sneakpeak of how the gameplay is done on iPhone via Youtube. The best part of this trailer is how the viewers (you and me) could make the decision of how the team enter the room. A kind of interactive movie (well, not exactly “interactive” as it would just jump to another clip based on what you’ve clicked) to promote new game for the first time. A nice start.

The interactive part starts at 0:30. Anything afterwards is just waiting for your click on that blue box.

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.

3AM

Here I am. 3:47am. After the second shot of Ristretto, I don’t think I would be heading back to bed too soon. Oh well. I got plenty of things on my list anyway. Writing something here is one of them. But of course not like this. I didn’t plan to be this way anyway.

By the way, my problem of not updating here has been tackled. Kinda. My excuse was to find an easier way to type. I mean Chinese, particularly on my Mac.

Now, I have found the way out. I would either use my iPhone as the wireless numpad to type qcode (which I have learnt already in 90 seconds two days ago) on my MBP, or to simply switch myself back to pure English. The later could be a better choice because eventually I need to write something formally in English with perhaps a quarter million of words. And I better start practicing it from now.

hmm… finally it is the WordBooker who got me. Now I am sleepy enough to go back to the bed.