AppStore is now active for Spain, which is very cool. And yes, the first app I downloaded was PhoneSaber. My wife thinks I'm a strange sad little man, waving my phone around. They'll never truly understand the power of The Force .
Ok, that last sentence was lame…
I've been really impressed with Safari on my iPhone. All my favorite web sites look good and work correctly. Even Web Access to Outlook Exchange. Since I dropped Firefox a couple of weeks ago, I have been desperately looking for a replacement browser for Internet Explorer. There are many things of IE that are most annoying, specially in regard to tabbed browsing, password management and that it just doesn't seem to like the auto-type feature of KeePass. Having had success with Safari on the phone, I decided to give it a try. Wow. It's great. All the features I like of Firefox are there, but even better than Firefox, it works with Sharepoint sites (TFS) perfectly. However, for some odd reason, it won't authenticate my Web Access to Exchange…WTF???
I have a tendency of dropping and scratching my phones (also known as having two kids). So I decided to be cautious this time. Seeing how new the device is, and nearly all shops are out of stock, there was little chance of finding a cover for it. I had a better chance to pick an iPod case. First shop I went to, I found one. Tried it on, a little tight, but overall fit. So decided to take it.
Next day I notice a strange behavior while making a call. I dial the number and the screen goes black. I can't get the damn thing to come back on. I click the sleep/wake-up button and it hangs up the phone. WTF!!! Well turns out that the iPhone comes with some sensors on the top left part to detect when your phone is next to your ear and save backlight (battery). My cover is iPod focused, not iPhone focused, and therefore, the sensors, as well as the camera and the receiver are covered by the case. Now the camera is obvious, but not the sensors (unless you hold it at a specific angle and correct lighting). So if you buy a iPod case, "hack" it for the iPhone.
I'm mostly happy with the device. The biggest issue I see right now is the AppStore, being tied to your iTunes account limits what applications you can buy or get for free. In fact, so far, every app I've tried to install is denied. It tells me I can only access products from the Spanish store. This is going to be a major show stopper IMHO, unless it's just a matter of time for the apps to be available worldwide. Also, there's no support for Skype directly, but you can buy a IM+ Skype subscription for $30 for lifetime. I've tried it. Can't tell if it works or not since every message I've sent out I've never gotten a reply for. Again, could be it doesn't work or as usual people ignore me.
(I had a slight issue with battery duration. If it turns out to be a real problem, I'll blog about it…)
I read something interesting on Scott Hanselman's blog the other day regarding WPF. It was in relation to activating and dis-activating some controls based on the value of other ones. And I "quote": 
His proposed solution is taking advantage of WPF's extremely powerful binding capabilities. I "quote" again:
He's happy with that. I'm not! He's putting business logic inside the view. And it scares me to see things like this because it tends to non-testable and "obscure" problems.
It was released in Spain yesterday, and I managed to pick one up today. The best way to describe it, is "it just works!". The really know their stuff on user experience. I'm really impressed.
I've been using Firefox for a long time now…longer than I remember, and before that I was using other NON-IE browsers. Why? Because of the security issues that IE. With the appearance of Firefox and it´s cool features, and more importantly support for plugins, it grew on me. However, I've always had to launch IE because some sites just wouldn't work. It's not Firefox's fault, it's the site's fault. It's not designed to work with browsers other than Internet Explorer. Some of these sites I use frequently, such as online banking, and now recently Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange Web Access. Things just don't work.
I've put up with it until today. I finally uninstalled Firefox. I made the terrible mistake of installing Firefox 3.0 a couple of weeks back when it was released and I must say, I'm very disappointed. Great looking skin, but in terms of stability, it's just not there. I get at least 10 crashes a day and I'm just tired of it. So for now I've gone back to IE 7 which is decent enough, and although I'll miss many of Firefox's features, at least I don't lose time or work.
Maybe someday…
I'm testing out a new IoC container framework (more on that later), and so I decided to setup some tests to see how it works. As a "newbie" to MSTest (MbUnit / xUnit rules!), I wrote my tests, tried to run them and was presented with an error message:
Failed to queue test run 'Hadi Hariri 2008-07-08 10:06:31': Test Run deployment issue: The location of the file or directory 'd:\…..\someAssembly.dll' is not trusted.
Now D is my local drive, so go figure why suddenly an assembly I reference on my local disk is not trusted. Wel lit turns out that Vista, in all it's glory (I have a love-hate relationship with Vista, I love hating it all the time), decided to block this assembly and all other files I extracted from a zip file I downloaded.
So if it happens to you, go to the assembly and unblock it. And of course, this is not something you can do by selecting multiple files at once. No, that would be WAY too dangerous! You need to do it one by one. Alternatively, delete the whole folder, unblock the zip file and then extract it.
