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At this weeks “iPhone Software Roadmap” event Apple will supposedly announce information on the SDK, enterprise support and software updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch. After those announcements I think will see is a new rash of complaints that the iPhone is no alternative for a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile devices from the other side of the aisle after the details are released.
Even with the recent job postings for a Windows Outlook / Exchange QA engineer maybe we will see more than just Exchange support added to fulfill the “Enterprise” slot. I would love to see support for Zimbra added, Apple is a strategic partner with them, though we probably won’t see it with the take over maneuver by Microsoft since Zimbra is a Yahoo! company.
But that won’t be the next thing that Microsoft / corporate IT centric writers will be complaining about. When the details for the software distribution are announced they will be crying foul, because both the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices support remotely pushing applications to the devices from their respective servers. So your accounting, inventory or what ever department has an application written it can then be sent to the mobile device in their own internal network, over a VPN or whatever they think best meets their needs.
I do not doubt that the reports of how the distribution model will look is correct and that type of outside control of what is allowed to be installed or not will be the hurdle for larger adoption of it as an “approved” device by many corporate IT departments. I don’t even think the idea of a tiered access to the SDK would encourage Apple to budge and allow an additional method to install applications to the devices that say only had Wi-Fi access.
Thursday I will be looking forward to see what the SDK will include, hearing from various Mac developers what they have planned and not so much into a new phase of anti-iPhone rhetoric.
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After trying a few different methods (QuickTime Pro, iSquint) of encoding video for the Curve I’ve found a simple tool that works. Using Alec Peden’s Universal Build of mencoder and his Automator Workflow; converting a video for the Curve was as simple as right clicking the file.
QuickTime Pro took too long and seemed to hang, while iSquint worked fine except for the audio was out of sync. Menucoder worked perfectly the first time and in a reasonable amount of time too. Took an 173M AVI file down to 57M, plugged the Curve and now that I have the 2GB microSD card in it mounts as an external drive leaving me just the task of copying it over.
Having never messed around with Automator before this I’m thinking that between it and PocketMac I might not need to try any other Blackberry to Mac syncing applications. If I can get Automator to recognize when a drive is mounted then I should be able to get it to copy audio, pictures or videos that I’ve recently re-encoded.
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I picked up a new Blackberry Curve (8300) last week as my new phone. Besides using it for work, its great to have IM with me as Carol can ping me when she is up and able to chat while she is in China.
PocketMac was included on the CD, but it still lags behind the native Windows Blackberry application. There is no way to manage the music, video, pictures or ring tones like you can with the native application and so far I’ve not been able to transfer files over Bluetooth originating from either the Curve or MacBook. So when the makers of PocketMac say:
“14 months of hard work, engineering and testing PocketMac For BlackBerry means you’ll never need a Windows-based PC to sync your crucial data with your BlackBerry device and that synching is fast and rock-solid. “
That is not necessarily the case. This included installing Google Talk, while the other Google service can be installed over the air it requires IE to install it. But having a camera readily available again is nice (Carol took ours to China), maybe I can upload some action shoots from the next baseball game? I’m hoping when the microSD card comes in later today I’ll be able to mount the card through the terminal.
Tethering it as a Bluetooth modem was pretty simple; I used the script and instructions from here. Only thing I changed was updated the script to identify it as a 8300 instead of the 8800. It has worked fine except for this morning I’ve not been able to connect, but I made a change to the data plan yesterday (added the tethering option) and I think that has something to do with it.
Over a great phone and probably one of the better alternatives to the iPhone right now, it even includes a SDK.
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