muthu arumugam blog

There are so many US centric applications available already in App Store which are really great and most of them are free. But there were no applications targeted Indians to use this great technology with their Mobile experience. The following apps are great and simple to start with and the updates are getting posted quite often. These applications are more towards what users requested and wanted rather than what the developer thinks.

India News - This application provides simple UI for reading news from various sources. Particularly Indians check The Hindu, Times of India, and other sites quite often. But considering other free RSS readers, you may need to configure them and set lots of other options for you to get a feel of a seperate software to read news related to India. It’s almost like Outlook email folder after they start growing. This small application targets only those newspapers which are specific for India and it has lots of cool features. It stores the stories for a daily use. Loading will be faster or you can read it when you are not in a coverage area. Good if you have limited Data Plan. Also, you can read lots of other pages from those favorite news papers. Lot more to come. Keep checking the site at URL.

Cricket - This is a game which stays all the time with Indian Blood. Most of the people in India listen or track cricket all the time. There are several paid Scoring application using SMS and Web. What if you are driving and wanted to spend less and get the scores right on your phone. There is this simple solution which provides Live Cricket scores in a simple way from CricInfo feed. It’s a 2 minute delayed content and you can have it refresh automatically or manually. It’s really cool to jump into the site when you require more information. Also, it provides news from other sources like ABC Australia, BBC and more to come. This application caches the headlines from those feeds on a daily basic. So, if you are traveling to a place with low signal or wanted not to use mobile minutes, this is a great choice. Check it out at URL.

Tamil Daily - This is a one page application which make the life easy when you wanted to see Tamil calendar immediately when you are not close to one. It has the daily sheets scanned and displayed from the wall calendar. It covers year 2008 and you can easily navigate from day to day or month to month. Simple way is to swipe left or right to move forward or backward. Very simple to use and a handy tool. Please check here for more information.

Man, being in iPhone SDK Developer program is like having no sex after getting married. Whole fun is gone. Its like fight club. “Do not talk about iPhone SDK…”. Anyway, i installed 2.1 on my phone and i had several issues on my phone. I desperately wanted to get back to iPhone OS 2.0. I tried all possible ways and this worked.

CRASH THE PHONE. Try to restore the phone back to 2.1 and disconnect it at the middle of it. Now connect iTunes and get the recent 2.0 update automatically when you sync.

Easy !!!

I am running a PHPBB forum for iPhone. I wanted to do SEO work for that for a while. I recently found out the good one to do it as mod for phpBB 3.0. The site is at PHPBB 3 - SEO checklist and it had a good review too. I did all those things described there. My current search listing in google is low and my google pagerank is zero right now. I will update the status sometime in the future. Good work.

I liked the way the first generation phones were. I hardly had a crash or hang ups. Recently, Apple updated with iPhone OS 2.0. I installed several applications (which are free) to try it out myself. Whenever, i try to do anything to image related application or using internet resources in them (obviously, most of them are), the phone reboots itself.

I was worried about this before. This will be a great invite for hackers and competitors. I tried several application and most of them reboot my iPhone. I hope apple is looking at it for clearing out those show stoppers. It’s really ugly to see a Phone (~ $500) reboots itself handling simple Hello World style programs.

The OS didn’t look stable because of the memory management issues. It looks like it’s all because of Memory Management. Objective-C added lots of things for Garbage collection though. Hope to see Apple fixes the iPhone OS 2.0 with a new one iPhone OS 2.1 (assuming…).

What to consider before you buy iPhone 3G?

Battery is not exchangeable - So if you are using phone a lot and on travel, this will not work. You will be frustrated after few hours of usage.

MS Exchange support - We have to wait and see how many corporates are allowing its users to get push services on their new iPhone. My company doesn’t…

MobileMe - This is a killer. It was really unreliable. I had issues before and i cancelled for couple of years and got recently. There are some advantages if you are a beginner. But if you use computers often, i wouldn’t recommend buying it.

AppStore - There are some joke applications which take some time out of you. There are few good applications and i am not sure the direction where they are heading towards. There were more social web applications and tip calculators than anything else. And some of the paid applications are not that great. So far, there is no WOW on any free applications.

GPS - Drains your battery and no existing application to help you start getting thrilled. There are some “WHERE am i” applications and the accuracy is questionable as of now. I guess Apple will fix those issues soon. One of those applications show me that i am in Seattle even though i am in Boston (slight mistake !!!).

PUSH services - It’s not pushing upto the minute like blackberry. Instead it does it every 15 minutes. Well, do we still call this PUSH service ? I guess Apply must be working on this. Let’s wait and see.

There are lots of other glitches. I have the old iPhone and i exchanged it 4 times already and i am on the 5th phone. So, please get the warranty to keep it smooth (actually, one of those phones stopped working on the next of my 1st year warranty).

There are several other missing feature on the hardware, phone and software side. I guess they may come back with iPhone OS 3.0 for Christmas which can fix quite a set of bugs and features.

I had Rails 2.0.2 before i started my upgrade. When i executed the typical “sudo gem install rails”, i got the following error:

Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/

Updating metadata for 13 gems from http://gems.rubyonrails.org/
………….
complete
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
ERROR:  Error installing rails:
        invalid gem format for /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/cache/activesupport-2.1.0.gem

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