Well, Apple put the Application Store for iPhone/iPod Touch live yesterday as part of the iTunes 7.7 update.

Its a heck of a strong launch for them.  Although the initial aim had been to have 200 applications available at launch, the store actually has over 500, spanning multiple categories, and with a healthy amount of free applications, as well as inexpensive ones, going for only 59p or so.

Admittedly, personally speaking, from a quick look last night, there wasn’t a lot that I think I’ll nab.  I have grabbed the Facebook app to try out, but I’m not looking to spend a lot of money on games or applications, so I was mostly interested in the free applications.   I can especially however, see the benefit of a lot of those applications to iPhone owners, with their ability to access the web via Edge or 3G networks while on the move (whereas I’m limited by whatever free wifi I happen to be around).

Hopefully the 2.0 software update will be out tonight.  That’s what I’m really looking forward to, and I’m really hoping that it addresses some of the issues I’ve mentioned here before.

I’ve been using my iPod Touch for a good few weeks now, and with the v2 software due out imminently, I thought it’d be interesting to put together a wishlist for what kind of things I’d like to see, that haven’t already been mentioned.

• Better home screen customisation.  Currently, while you can re-order items on the home screen, and add Safari links, you can’t add quick links to different types of audio, in the same way you can on the other iPods.  I tend to use Playlists, Podcasts and Audiobooks a lot, so it’d be nice to have buttons on the home screen for them, rather than navigating to them via the Music section.
• Podcast syncing.  I’ve noticed there seems to be a bug with podcast syncing, in that sometimes podcasts I’ve listened to, aren’t marked as such, and removed from the iPod on the next sync.  However its an intermittant problem.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and I have to mark the podcasts as not new in iTunes manually.  It’d be nice to see this fixed.
• Podcast descriptions.   When first released neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch supported lyrics.  Apple added that functionality with the first software update, however they didn’t extend it to include podcast descriptions.  Viewing them is a feature I miss, as when I’m listening to Linux podcasts, its handy to be able to refer to the show notes to double-check the name of any interesting software they might be talking about.   Some podcasts have started copying their description to the lyrics section, but really it’d be good if Apple could just fix this properly.
• Radio Remote compatibility.  Everytime I’ve got to pull this iPod out just to skip to the next track, I tend to be worried that I’m painting a big “mug me!” sign above my head.  It’d be good if Apple could either tweak the software to allow the existing radio remote to work, or ship a new version with iPod Touch/iPhone compatibility.

Those are probably my top 4 niggles with any otherwise brilliant device.  They’re minor things, and these kinds of things are to be expected in the first generation of a new device, but I hope Apple addresses them.

The good news is that I’ve now done my bit for Firefox’s Download Day. I managed to nab it when I got home, just in time (I think there’s only half an hour or so left before time’s called on the record attempt).

In terms of using it, its pretty much the Beta 5 I’ve been running happily. Its a lot faster than v2.0 and definitely recommended to any other Firefox users out there.

I signed up to Firefox’s Download Day, world record attempt a few weeks ago, and was pleased to get the “download it now” email last night.

I’m assuming the attempt’s going well for them, as the servers seemed to have taken a major kicking, and I was completely unable to download the new version. I’ll try again when I get in tonight though, but I imagine I’ll be pushing my luck to make it within the 24hr window. I’ve been using the release candidates pretty much exclusively for a while now, so I’m looking forward to having the final version at last (although I believe its identical to the last release candidate).

I read as well, that there’s been various other problems, with people getting corrupted downloads, or the wrong version being downloaded.

Something like this was always going to entail a fair amount of carnage. The number of people trying to download the software at the same time was always going to result in a few horror stories. I’m happy to just get the update as soon as I can, and hopefully they’ll get a high number for the record books.

As I mentioned last night, I was surfing with my EeePC, by downgrading my wireless encryption to WEP.

I had also noticed that my EeePC didn’t like using my router as its DNS server, so I was able to fix that by swapping in the DNS servers for my ISP.   Once I’d done that, I installed updates using the EeePC’s add/remove software tool from the Easy Desktop.   However I noticed that the wireless updates were listed as a broken package.

At this point, the fact I’m an experienced Linux user kicked in, and I decided to just boot up Synaptic instead.  Its pre-installed on the EeePC, so sudo synaptic from the terminal launches it no bother.  I then used it to install all the available upgrades, which included a newer version of wpa_supplicant.

The great news is that this has made all the difference.   WPA now connects to my home network no bother, so I no longer have to worry about lowering my level of security to use my EeePC.  If anyone else buys one, I heartily recommend just using Synaptic to upgrade the software from the default repositories, it seems a bit more reliable than the Asus updater.

Well its been a good couple of days for gadgets. I’m now the proud owner of both an EeePC and an iPod Touch.

The EeePC (which I’m typing this on) is a great little gadget, but it suffers from the problems with my wifi that I’ve had with Linux on my other laptop. Linux and WPA really don’t seem to get on at all. I know from reading posts online that people have gotten it working, but it seems to come with a fair amount of grief. At the moment I’ve dropped my home wifi down to WEP encryption, but that’s not really a proper solution.

However, with my router switched to WEP the EeePC connected no bother and its been great to use tonight. I’ve been chatting to friends with Pidgin and surfing the web happily. I’m looking forward to parking myself in a coffee shop for lunch with it

The iPod Touch is also a cracking gizmo. It’ll make for a great PDA-lite for me, as well as giving me more music and audiobooks on the go. While I love my iPod Nano, I have found the 4Gb a bit restricting at times. Especially as I like my audiobooks.

The great thing is that WPA works flawlessly, so I had it connected to my wifi network in no time. There’s probably not much more I can say about it, but its been great fun, checking my email on-the-fly via the mail application.

One thing I’m really looking forward to is the app store launching. I think the release of user-written applications will really open the device up. It’ll be interesting to see what’s included in the first batch. Among other things, I’m hoping to see an IM application, as I think that could be really handy.

So, I decided to take the plunge, and partition off a small (couple of Gb) Linux system on my laptop, to see if it would be usable enough to replace Windows on it.

So, I put on Ubuntu 8.04, and in fairness to it (you can tell this is going to end well ;-)), most stuff worked perfectly. Graphics and sound worked no problem, although by default the switch to enable headphone jack sensing was switched to off. However once I found the option in the mixer, it worked perfectly. Graphics (intel-based) ran fine at 1024×768, with even Compiz working fine (although I switched it off as its not really needed on my laptop).

However, there was a big problem. Wifi.

Now, Ethernet worked fine. I plugged in a cable, set the IP address etc, and the laptop was online no problem. However my wifi light remained dark. A quick bit of reading up, and I found out my wireless card (Broadcom 4306) needed to use either ndiswrapper or the new B43-fwcutter to use the Windows driver/access the firmware code. Fair enough. I tried both, and in both cases the blue light came on. However also in both cases, I couldn’t connect to my WPA-secured network.

After spending an afternoon messing about with it. I admitted defeat.

In the evening though, I thought, as a last-ditch attempt, I’ll try Mandriva just to see if another distro can sort it out.  I installed the system, and was very happy to see that one of the last steps in the installation was to select the driver (I picked B43-fwcutter) and enter all your wireless settings.  Something I must admit I prefer to Ubuntu’s (sort it out after you’ve rebooted approach, although there’s no real benefit to either).

Much to my surprise, the wifi sprung to life.  The blue light came on, and it connected.   I was pretty happy.

However, I do prefer Ubuntu’s package management.  So I thought that perhaps KDE made the difference.  So I tried installing Kubuntu.  Long story short, I must admit, I found Kubuntu much less polished than the main distro, but I also was back to having a non-working wifi.

Currently I’ve reinstalled Mandriva.  However, big surprise, the wifi’s playing up again.   I’m pretty much at the point of sticking to Windows, and just trying to ensure that my next laptop (which is probably a while away) has a natively-supported wifi chipset.

I am wondering however if part of the problem is me trying out different drivers (ndiswrapper and b43-fwcutter) and if they’re causing problems for each other.   Of course, installing one uninstalls the other, and I update the blacklist as appropriate, but given that I did get it working under Mandriva at one point, I am stuck wondering what exactly is going on.

That was typical.   No sooner had I finished that last post, and my Ubuntu updates dialog popped up again.   I let it grab the latest Gnome updates, and then it went about configuring everything.  Including the kernel updates that hadn’t been properly configured last time.

Turns out the issue was that when they’d first installed, I tried to select some of the other options regarding the menu.lst file (display diffs etc).  That seemed to confuse issues.  This time, knowing my current menu.lst file was backed up, I simply let it write the default package one to the boot folder.   Once it was finished setting everything up, I went in and put back in the entries I needed (mainly Windows at the top of the list).  One reboot later, and everything’s working fine on the new kernel.

The new options to try and deal more sensibly with the menu.lst clashes are certainly welcome, but I guess there’s still a few bugs to be worked out there.

So, as I’d mentioned previously, following my system rebuild, my LAMP server wasn’t quite playing ball.

I finally had time to look into it the other week, and it came down to the MySQL administration.

Previously, I’d been using the MySQL-admin GUI to setup my local databases and users, but for some reason, when setting them up under my current installation, the GUI wasn’t assigning the login credentials properly.  This meant that whenever I tried to install phpBB or Joomla or something locally, the database connection kept complaining.

So, I installed the trusted phpMyAdmin and tried setting the users up with that.   It was slightly less user-friendly I thought, but ultimately, it also worked.  Login credentials were correctly assigned, and the php applications were much happier connecting to the database.

Weird one though.  The MySQL-admin package shouldn’t be any different from the one I was using previously, which worked fine.   But nonetheless I’ve got the system working now, which is the main thing for me.

Now I just need to figure out what went wrong with the latest kernel update from Ubuntu.   I installed all the latest updates the other day, and when I try and boot off the new kernel image, the NVidia driver throws a wobbly.  Fortunately I can boot off the previous image and get a perfectly usable system until I get it fixed though.

Ok, its half 1 in the morning, and I’m knackered.

I’ve now got my Windows system pretty much usable again. I had to spend all afternoon going through my iTunes library, removing dud duplicates it created when reimporting my (sadly several months old and missing stuff) backup though. And I’m still bitter about it nuking music on my iPod that it should’ve just transferred back to the PC like it was supposed to.

I’ve been in general quite happy with how smooth Ubuntu was to get back to a usable state. Granted, extra Window Managers and the like still need to be reinstalled, but that’s going to be trivial with Synaptic.

The only problem I’m having is with the LAMP server. I used the same tutorial as before, however now, whenever I create a new MySQL user, despite setting a password, they only connect to the database when the password field is blank. Plus the PHP installation doesn’t seem to like talking to MySQL at all. Its a bit of a contrast to the first time I set it up, where it went really smoothly.

However, that stuff is low priority thankfully. This isn’t a work PC, so that can always be fixed during the week.

Doctor Who was good though. Must post on that tomorrow.