I have been using an iPhone 3G for a little over two years, and a year before that I was using a first generation iPod Touch. For those 3 years the iPhone (and its operating system) has been my handy companion, helping to keep me entertained, and on track with every aspect of my life. It _was_ the ultimate smart phone.

I have spent many years using various Palm PDAs and they always left me felt wanting – I didn’t know what I wanted, but the iPhone filled that spot perfectly.

I have been completely satisfied until recently, and this week signed up for a new 2 year verizon wireless contract, and bought a Motorola Droid.

What led me to do this?
- iPhone 3G was becoming increasingly slow. (Jailbroken or not). In an effort to speed it up, I restored it to stock firmware and lost 90% of the functionality that is important to me in a smart phone. iPhone 3G stock is useless to me.
- AT&T reception. Where I work, and spend most of my weekends, AT&T reception is poor at best. In most cases it would be faster to go to an Apple Store, buy an iMac, then hand carry that iMac to a starbucks to check my email then wait for the iPhone to find service and launch the email application.
- Boring, and nothing new in sight. 2 years is a long time to have a phone. Last year’s update to the iPhone (iPhone 3GS) wasn’t enough for me to extend my AT&T contract another 2 years, or plop down $500 for an unsubsidized phone. This last apple event apple announced the iPad. There was no discussion of the iPhone, or even the operating system they share in common. This disturbed me. Concentrate on the product everyone loves, dont split your focus to another product that doesn’t solve a problem for me…

What do I want in a smart phone?

The Droid so far does _almost_ everything my jailbroken iPhone could do (and with speed and service). There of course are some gaps.

First, what do I do with my iPhone exactly? What is important to me in a smart phone that I keep with me 24/7?

- Calendar Notifications. I NEED my phone to sync with whatever calendaring system I am using (Google Calendar currently), and even more important I NEED it to notify me of events that are on that calendar. (iPhone: Stock calendar application)
- Calendar Agenda. Again, I am all about calendar support. I NEED to see what the days ahead have in store for me. (iPhone: Jailbroken LockCalendar)
- To Do List. I try to be a very organized person. I like lists. I keep extensive to do lists to organize my life. My phone needs to be able to sync with whatever solution I am using for To Do lists, even if I have to hand write it myself.(iPhone: Things)
- Note Syncing. I write notes about a lot of things that I need to remember. Same as above. (iPhone: simpleNote)
- Easy access to all of my email accounts. I get a lot of email (who doesnt) (iPhone: stock email)
- Real web browsing. I can stand stupid phone web browsers. The iPhone MobileSafari has spoiled me. I need that in a phone.(iPhone: stock browser)
- Reliable phone service. I work on an air force facility. I frequently need to make important phone calls. I need reliable phone service.(iPhone: I wish)
- Music playing. My phone is my iPod. I do not wish to carry multiple devices around.(iPhone: stock mp3 application)
- Terminal/SSH ability. I like to be able to access remote servers that I own at free will.(iPhone: Jailbroken MobileTerminal)
- Customization. I hate it when my phone looks exactly like everyone else’s. My phone is mine, it needs to feel like home. (iPhone: jailbroken WinterBoard)

So why didn’t I just get an iPhone 3GS and jailbreak it? It’s faster than the iPhone 3G, and it meshes with my current environment, BUT the current model of the iPhone 3GS can’t be jailbroken reliably. It currently requires to be tethered to a computer EVERYTIME you reboot it. Phones suck, they aren’t stable, their batteries die, they get rebooted occasionally. This is a deal breaker for me.

Week 1

Android does everything Google under the box (makes sense). To even activate your phone you have to give it a gmail address.

It automatically sucked down my Google Voice contacts, and it was a chinch to setup Google Voice on it. The market place isn’t as plentiful as the AppStore, but it does seem to have a lot of the quality applications covered.

So far I use the following to replace features of my iPhone:

- Handcent. Text messaging application at its finest. This is almost equivalent to biteSMS on a jailbroken iPhone.
- Astrid. Pretty solid to do list software supporting tags and due dates. Doesn’t quite replace Things for me, as I rely fairly heavily on the syncing capability. Astrid does seem to sync with RememberTheMilk, so I will give that a whirl.
- KeePassDroid. There’s too many passwords for me to remember. On my desktop I use KeePassX (http://keepass.info/ is free and open source for all platforms). iKeePass on the iPhone kind of sucked. KeePassDroid is pretty sweet.
- Haven’t found a note syncing solution yet.
- BetterTerminal. Pretty great terminal.

Android lets me configure every notification sound to my content. Everything can have its own noise, no hacking required.

Best part of the new phone so far? The speaker is incredibly louder than my iPhone 3G so I can actually here phone calls and text messages.

I think I will keep it for now….

UPDATE: Three weeks later, I have decided to keep the droid, and even ported my AT&T number to VZW!  Goodbye iPhone!

This is something that always bothered me while designing an iPhone UI in Interface Builder: When making a “Tab Bar Application”, my child/tab views were always messed up, and not rendered the same as what I would make in Interface Builder.

Of course the whole thing was a big neophyte mistake on my part, but I figured I would share my findings for others that have such a problem.

For the sake of this post, I am building an application called “DemoApp”, from the “Tab Bar Application” template in XCode.  My UI design in Interface Builder looks like this:

For the sake of this demo, I have also thrown away the default “SecondView” that comes with the template, in favor of using my own custom one as an example.

So how does this render on the iPhone?  Not at all how it looks in Interface Builder…

It took me FOREVER to figure out why my Views were getting clipped, and generally rendered incorrectly whenever I made a custom view to go inside of a TabBarController.  The secret?  On your custom view, enable the bottom bar!

So now your interface should look like this in InterfaceBuilder:

Which makes it MUCH easier to arrange your UI to render correctly inside of a TabBarController.  This little checkbox and my own carelessness caused me much stress and anger towards Interface Builder – hopefully this post will help someone resolve the problem more quickly than it took me!

So really haven’t been in the right frame of mind these past few days to do any sort of creative/constructive work, let alone work on my iPhone applications…  but I did have a burst of creative energy today to make some updates:

Hopefully once I get my life back together, and feel more comfortable with Apple’s stupid Interface Builder, I will be posting screenshots of my other highly anticipated titles, like MobileTwitter.  Until then, I do appologize to everyone for the delay.. hit a big big unexpected roadbump in life.

I am at about 80% completed (all major features done, just bug fixes and usability enhancements).

Some new screenshots:

(your feed + followers)

(When you tap a tweet, this is the action menu you get)

There are many great iPhone web applications for using Twitter on the go – but the selection of native iPhone applications is surprisingly lacking.   The iPhone rocks for easing access to your data on the go – A streamlined, clean, and functional Twitter application just feels like a natural fit.

MobileTwitter is written using the iPhone SDK – so it runs smoothly on your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Features:

• View the timeline of the yourself, and the friends you follow
• View the public time line – keep tabs on the internet world!
• Send updates to Twitter on-the-go  (Over wifi or EDGE) with the iPhone’s awesome touch screen

Many more features are planned and will be implemented – suggestions are welcome.

Where can I get MobileTwitter?  You’ll have to wait for it to appear on Installer.app  (can take some time for a trusted repository to add a new application) .  More screenshots available here.

Download now available!

More screenshots, and the official alpha download link are located on the Google Code project that I have setup.

http://code.google.com/p/npike-touch-xboxlive/

Features:

• List your favorite Xbox Live buddies
• See their online status wherever you have a network connection
  • Displays their gamer picture

Planned/Future Features:

• Tapping a gamertag will slide out their full gamer card, allowing you to easily see scores, reputation, and recently played games
• Display current game being played if online
• Your Suggestions Here