iPhone MMS, a love / hate story

iphone_messages_iconToday AT&T unlocked MMS (multi media) messaging on the iPhone. Most of the world had had MMS messaging for YEARS now on their iPhone, but due to AT&T’s restrictions and fear of the data crushing their network they have limited the number of people that you can message at a single time to 10. This includes MMS and SMS (standard text messages)!

To most people, sending a single message to 10 people might be excessive, for me, it severely limiting. I am in charge of organizing activities for several organizations, social groups, and occasionally my church. The ability to send a single message to a large group of people has been so handy. Now if I need to send a txt message to 50 people, I’m going to have to send the same message 5 times. Talk about a step backwards!

Apple has also modified the messaging applications so you have to pick the phone number for the person you are trying to text, even if the contact only has one number. Before the MMS update, if only one phone number was in the contact, it would be used. The number of clicks has increased from 1 to 2. So, texting 10 people now requires 20 clicks instead of 10. Double the effort. I can’t see how this is progress. It feels like AT&T and Apple don’t want people to send as many text messages, so they are making it harder to do.

Dear AT&T thank you for giving up MMS messaging after all these year, but please give us back our mass texting abilities!

RotoPhoto, my first iPhone app

WOW, here I am about to release my second iPhone app, and I realized that I haven’t blogged about my first iPhone app!

“RotoPhoto” is my first iPhone app. It’s a simple tool that allows you to rotate the orientation of a photo taken with the iPhone. The internal sensors of the iPhone are designed to know what direction is up at all times and auto rotate the iPhone camera for you, so no matter the angle you take the picture they are facing up. If you have owned an iPhone for an extended period of time, then you know that the iPhone can get confused when you take a picture when the camera is pointed down or up, and your picture comes out sideways. The iPhone doesnt have any built in facilities for adjusting your photos. RotoPhoto is a tool that fills that gap.

With RotoPhoto you can fix your photos orientation before sharing them with friends.

RotoPhoto is avaliable for $0.99 USD on the iTunes store.

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You can check out http://RotoPhotoApp.com for more information

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIPvURe_AcE[/youtube]

I upgraded my mac!

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A few months ago I bought a Mac mini so I could start to develop iPhone applications. I must say that I am growing to be more of a Mac user then I thought i would be. I purposly bought a cheap Mac to get started with, but I’m starting to regret it. One of the downsides of buying a low end computer is the lack of RAM. RAM is the area of the computer where th.e work gets done. Think of RAM as a work bench. The larger the work bench you have, the more things you can be working on at the same time. It boils down to this, more ram, more speed due to less reading and writing to the hard drive. My Mac had 1 Gig of RAM, no where near enough RAM for a power user/programmer.

Coming from a PC and Linux world, I have build all of my own computers since 1996. I’m comfortable working with computer hardware and the Mac mini is just another computer, except its wrapped up in a tiny package. I did some research and realized that it wouldn’t be hard to upgrade the RAM in my Mac. I found that MacSales.com had some great prices on RAM so I went for it and got 4 gigs worth.

I documented the whole upgrade process, and launched a new website, MacMiniRamUpgrade.com. It’s a Do-It-Yourself site to help inspire and walk people through the upgrade process.

Adding the RAM to my Mac mini is one of the best upgrades I have ever done. So much bang for buck. You should do it also! http://macminiramupgrade.com