I have recently been looking at using online services to see if they would ‘enhance’ my workflow, back up strategy etc. I have written already about MobileMe and the total mess that Apple have made of it (and still are doing by the way!) but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of adding value. Having recently upgraded, jailbroken, and handed over my iPhone to Sands I am starting to figure out how we will benefit from it.

Yesterday I ‘took the plunge’ and upgraded the iPhone from 1.0.1 to 2.0 and then used the Pwnage Tool to jailbreak it.

My main (probably irrational) fear was that as the iPhone was still on the 1.0.1 upgrading it would be a problem, but that as it turned out was the easy bit. I used iTunes to upgrade to 2.0 (as Pwnage requires the original .ipsw file) and that was fine, got the expected SIM card error message as the phone was now expecting an AT&T card.

With the news that the iPhone Dev Team have jailbroken 2.0 my plans are a little clearer!

As I understand it the current position is that the Pwange Tool 2.0 will unlock a 3G phone but not allow it to use a wireless carrier other than the official Apple one. I am not 100% sure what they mean by that. I am assuming it means you can’t use it with a SIM card from another carrier at the moment?

Spent part of last Friday guesting on the excellent Screen Casts Online that are produced by Don McAllister.

He wanted to show people iChat and how it worked so we have a brief IM followed by a brief audio chat. If you haven’t seen the work that Don does take a look – it is very professionally done and he covers some good information.

When I reviewed Crossover 6.0 I was impressed but overall thought that it was all a little complicated with all the ‘bottles’ involved, and somewhat limited in the applications that it could run.

To be honest I had forgotten all about it partly it has to be said because I have next to no reason to run any windows application on the Mac. Then as is very often the case a couple of things coincided:

Well I have finally got round to trying out MobileMe and like a lot of things recently released my Apple it appears great in theory but the actuality is a different story!!!

Now I don’t have a iPhone running V2 yet so that bit I can’t comment on, but both Sands and I have .me accounts and we both have a Mac desktop and a Notebook, so MobileMe should be great for us.

All our emails are set up as IMAP as well.

6 of the best – a phrase that will bring back memories for a number of the UK readers I imagine!!!

A friend of Sands recently returned to live in the UK and left a bag of books for us to read/sell at on eof the many local books sales that they run in the pubs, or basically do as we wanted with.

I decided to treat it as a lucky dip!!! So far the 5 books that I have ‘dipped’ have all been really great. None of them are serious or meaningful books – all very simple summer reads:

Reluctant as I am to be ‘forced’ into a workflow by Steve and the boys at Apple I think there is a certain inevitability that I will be in the next couple of weeks.

Assuming that I get a 3G iPhone (no idea when they will be available here outside of Madrid – and yes they had the same activation issues as the rest of the world) AND I can restore, upgrade and jailbreak the existing iPhone to 2.0 (I saw that it had already been jailbroken but not ‘out officially yet’) then as Sands and both have .me accounts I reckon we will need to figure out the best way to utilise them, not least getting some sense out or having a .mac and .me email address …….

“It could only happen to me”. “You wont believe it but it is true!”. “Someone is trying to tell you something”

All of the above are relevant to this ‘news’. This morning, the day before the 3G iPhone is released (the phone I don’t want), I have gone and lost my Nokia N95!!!

I have been looking at the prices for the iPhone here in Spain, and think I have figured it out!!!

Naturally there are the two options – 8GB and 16GB, but only in black.

No I haven’t suddenly lost my mind overnight, or moved to some backwater place where they don’t have Macs!!!

What I mean is, do you remember the company Apple Computers? You know the one that used to be Apple before the Keynote in 2007.

‘Back in the day’ it seemed that everything was under their control – the product, the packaging, the price etc. In fact about the only thing that people griped about was the price variations between countries, that was a bit ‘win some, lose some’ based on the exchange rate. Oh, and some gripes about what was and wasn’t available on the iTunes store from country to country, but looking back maybe that was the start of the consumer era?