Sharing the Internet to your iPhone from your MacBook (securely)
OK so the iPhone doesn’t use your computers internet when connected via USB. Why? I dunno it’s one of the sadly lacking features on an otherwise awesome device.
Sharing the net however via ad-hoc wifi is easy. In System Preferences, go to “Sharing”, select Internet Sharing (don’t tick it yet), tick ‘Airport’ then tick ‘Internet Sharing’.
After you’re done – go into the Network Settings -> AirPort, and create a new network with a password (to stop those leechers). By default it is shared without a password which is dangerous (unless you’re in the desert or something). This new network should have the sharing on it if you did it right – but go back to the sharing tab and double check that it’s still enabled. Then on your iphone connect to your new ad-hoc network and enter the password.
Update: at least in Snow Leopard there is a button on the Internet Sharing settings named “AirPort Options” which allows you to setup the Wifi password in a better (more permanent) way than the one I described.
Update2: I have had some issues with sharing certain networks in Hotels – the iPhone can connect to my computer, but not the internet. One option is to install the proxy server Squid. This isn’t easy, and unless you are a developer with bash experiance I don’t recommend it (if you know what you are doing though it’s easy – just install the unix build tools, download squid, then ./configure, make and run it… default settings are fine – and just set the proxy IP in the iPhone to be that of your computer)
If you have no Wifi card (e.g. on a PC) then bad luck. If you’re on windows I’ll leave it up to you to figure out I’m sure there’s a way :-)
Vodafone Epic FAIL
Vodafone’s global roaming isn’t global… >:(
yep it’s not.
So I was planning to blog about Vodafone and how awesome they are being the only Australian company to offer global roaming with Pre-Paid – alleviating the need to pay $29 a month for a plan when you can’t even use the credit (because it only applies to non-global roaming and you are out of the country).
Instead I am blogging about how crap they are. Little did I realise – and no information on the website or at the shop led me to believe otherwise that Vodafone’s prepaid Global Roaming isn’t quite Global. And it’s not like I hid the fact I wanted Global Roaming – I got the guy to set it up when I bought the SIM.
Japan and China are two countries for example that do not work on the pre-paid roaming (note this distinction ‘pre-paid roaming’ – Vodafone do NOT use that distinction anywhere…). Hey that’s OK – who would want to go to China or Japan anyway…? :-S
My next step while on the phone to Vodafone was to then find out if I can change my plan to one that offers truly global roaming. Oh of course you have to go INTO A SHOP. And it must be an AUSTRALIAN shop. GEE maybe I DID that last week, trying to get everything set up like the good little traveller I am.
OMFG. So I asked if I could log a complaint, which I did. And they lady said they would call me to discuss it.
call me
on my vodafone
which does not work in China
wow
they really are smart
… NO CARRIER
Fowarding Contact Info (iPhone)
The iPhone really really needs the ability to forward a contact (or part thereof) to someone by SMS (or even email). The ability to forward an SMS might be nice too (or the ability to copy/paste text so as to do it manually, not to mention other things).
The SMS feature is one of the iPhone’s best – chat style display really really works (reviewing old messages is awesome – how did Nokia not think of this?) – but this is sorely lacking, I hate having to pull out a pen and paper just to forward a number.
iPhone Call Divert
The iPhone doesn’t have a nice GUI to set/change Call Diverts (why not?? most people have voicemail right? more on that later perhaps). Here’s how to do it manually (enter into the keypad).
Call Divert – all calls – activate *21*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – all calls – to check *#21#
Call Divert – all calls – to cancel #21#Call Divert – on busy – to activate *67*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on busy – to check *#67#
Call Divert – on busy – to cancel #67#Call Divert – on no reply – to activate *61*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on no reply – to check *#61#
Call Divert – on no reply – to cancel #61#
Neonscape
Announcing Neonscape – a retro puzzle/arcade game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
This is my first foray into iPhone game dev. I teamed up with my mate Ben Kosmina to create the game with me doing the coding, and him creating the original concept and doing many other aspects like the sound and sprites. It was great fun to create; learning objective-c, workshopping the idea with Ben to add some cool goals and dangers (watch out for the dreaded über tanks!).
So far sales are a little sluggish – but the Neonscape publicity machine is just cranking into gear so hopefully the press will drive some sales and help pay for my RTW trip ;-)
Grab it on the iPhone store now for only US$1.99 (or your local equivalent).
iPhone URL Encoding
How to get an URL string from a normal string:
[aString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]
Now to go implement this retrospectively :-S
