Push Notification
This is the big one. Push Notification is supposed to allow background notifications of events like new Twitter messages, IMs, eBay bid updates, Facebook status updates, etc. Apple announced it would be available by September 2008. It’s still not here, but the worst part is that Apple has not said a freaking word about where it stands – for all we know, it’s been shelved. How can something this big, affecting millions of customers, and being offered by a publicy-traded company not be discussed by the company after a four month delay?

Video
Video recording for the iPhone has been around awhile. Qik has been running on jailbroken iPhones for months and there have been rumors that it was coming to the App Store for a while. So where is it? Why do we even have to rely on a third-party solution to handle something while the company that makes the phone is itself a giant in video media (Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, video editing studios everywhere).

The Rest

• Cut & Paste – I’m not all that worked up over cut & paste, but a lot of people are.
• Running 3rd party GPS apps without the display being on. This is a big battery hog and a pain in the ass.
• GPS apps with LOCALLY STORED MAPS. It’s ridiculous to expect that we’ll always have data access thru the cell network whenever we want/need to access GPS.

I’ve been avoiding jailbreaking the phone in order to get Qik and some semblance of background notifictions, but I’ve about reached the end of my rope.

From their announcement:

“Support for multiple, separate calendars on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices is here!  Now you can tell which appointment belongs in which calendar, add appointments to the calendar of your choosing, and filter your display to show only events from a specific calendar.  What is most important of all, your calendars each get their own color.  We are currently phasing this feature in: if you don’t see it on your phone yet, you will very shortly.”

You can now also select read-only calendars like holidays, sports schedules, etc. for inclusion on the iPhone calendar.

I’ve been using Nuevasync for a while, and in spite of a few short service glitches, it’s a great service. It essentially gives you Exchange-like calendar syncing, but with Google Calendar.

Note: The information here is not new. However, from reading forums, etc., it seems as though that a lot of people still aren’t informed as to the best way to utilize Gmail/gCal with the iPhone.

If you don’t use Exchange with your iPhone and want cloud-based email and calendaring, Apple’s solution is MobileMe. Known startup problems notwithstanding, there’s nothing really wrong with MobileMe if you don’t mind paying $100/year. However, if all you need out of MobileMe are email and calendar syncing between your desktop, iPhone, and a web client, then Gmail and gCal already have it covered.

Before going any further, it should be noted that Gmail cannot be “pushed” to the iPhone as of this writing without a less than elegant solution. However, before you dismiss the rest of this article, ask yourself – do I really need push email? Is a maximum of 15 minutes too much time to wait for new mail? Am I really that lonely? I guess if you want to avoid SMS due to the costs and use email in it’s place with other “pushers”, then maybe you do need push. Otherwise, read on.

Setting up a Gmail account on the iPhone:

Under Settings | Mail, Contacts, Calendars, tap on Add Account….

And there it is, and nice big Gmail logo ready to help you set up your Gmail account.

Stop! Don’t tap it!

Note: In order to get the most out of Gmail, you want to set up your account to use IMAP so your mail is maintained via the “cloud”. This will keep your mail synced automatically between your phone, the Gmail web application, and your desktop mail client of choice (Mail.app, Outlook, etc.). For instance, emails shown as ‘read’ on your phone will instantly (well, almost) show up as ‘read’ in your email client as well. Better yet, emails deleted in one environment will be deleted in all environments. You get the picture.

The default setup for Gmail on the iPhone will use POP instead of IMAP. So instead, choose Other.

The settings needed for the account can be found on this Google help page: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77702&topic=12814

If you have other email accounts you want to receive email from on your phone and you’re like me and want only one Inbox (hey Apple, give us a unified inbox, please!), you can log in to your Gmail account via a browser and ask Gmail to check your other email account(s) via POP. Gmail will periodically check the additional account(s) and add any received emails to your Gmail inbox. You can even set your reply-to email to your POP account’s address.

This works fine, but I’ve settled on a solution I like even better – Google Apps.

With Google Apps, it’s possible to use Google to maintain your own domain’s email (jdoe@mydomain.com), set up and maintain additional email accounts, share calendars, etc.

I’ve set up my primary domain for email to point to Gmail, and in order to maintain a single inbox, I’m having my Google Apps email check my @gmail.com account via POP.

If you can wait up to 15 minutes to get you email, I think the Gmail/IMAP/iPhone setup is a good solution for both personal and small business use.

In Part 2 of this discussion, I’ll talk about synchronizing your Google Calendar with your iPhone (and iCal) via the cloud.

Boingo Wi-Fi for the iPhone and iPod touch lets you use your iPhone at about 85,000 locations worldwide after entering your user name and password only once. Boingo offers unlimited service for smartphones and handhelds through its Boingo Mobile service, which is $7.95 per month. Boingo’s software is already available for Nokia and other smartphones and tablets.

More

iPhoney simply runs Safari in the form of an iPhone, and allows you to choose between Webkit, iPhone, and custom user agents.

Here are the full “iPhacts” from the iPhoney home page:

• Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
• Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
• Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
• Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
• Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
• Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
• Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
• Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
• And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.

Washington Mutual (WaMu) has rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of their web site. It pretty much lets you do all of the basic account management stuff the full version of the site allows, except you can’t view canceled checks. This is a great example of why web apps for the iPhone aren’t going away as some have contended.

iPhone web apps have a number of advantages over native apps, including but not limited to:

• Rapid development using existing web development skills/bodies.
• Use of existing web application infrastructure (i.e., no additional costs).
• Avoidance of the time consuming and magic-8 ball logic of the App Store vetting process.
• Seemless application updating.
• Things like phonegap will eventually help bridge the divide between web apps and native apps by taking advantage of the iPhone’s hardware features.

I currently have home screen icons for 5 different iPhone-optimized Web Apps (Digg.com, ESPN, WaMu, Flickr, and Dropbox), plus a few other mobile web sites that are in need of an iPhone-optimized version, including the DirecTV Scheduler and cnn.com.

Source

So can we assume this will show up in the next iteration of the iPhone? I hope so.

What gives?

It was supposed to be released in September, but we’ve heard nothing out of Apple since the WWDC.

Assuming it does see the light of day at some point, I’m starting to wonder how many iPhone apps will actually be able to incorporate it. If I understand correctly, the Push Notification Service will require a “3rd party” server for sending data to Apple’s servers, which will then send it on to an iPhone that has a persistent IP connection.

The question is…how many iPhone developers have the infrastructure to become middlemen in this data transfer? Are any of the Twitter app developers (Twittelator, Twitterific, Tweetie, etc.) set up to handle this? Facebook and AIM, sure – but I’m wondering if a lot of apps out there might be left in the cold.