Have yourself a merry little Jazzmas

Jazzmas

Christmas and Jazz is a fun combination. If you fancy some jazzy X-mas tunes for your iPhone or iPod Touch, check out my first iPhone application: Jazzmas.

Ten of the most popular Christmas tunes packed in a neat little application for your iPhone (or iPod touch), together with a Christmas Countdown indicator over an original blue-ish X-mas illustration I’ve created just for this app.

The songs are performed by pianist / composer Manolis Gerempakanis in a jazzy, cozy and festive mood and are decorated with original improvisations as well as some bass and drums.

All this for just $0,99 (0,79€).

Get Jazzmas on the iTunes App Store

Jazzmas Website

Tracks included

• Christmas Tree
• Deck the Halls
• Feliz Navidad
• Jingle Bells
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• Silent Night, Holy Night
• The First Noel
• White Christmas
• We Wish you a Merry Christmas

How to tether your Cosmote iPhone

Update: MMS may not be functional after updating your carrier settings with this profile.

The latest update to the iPhone firmware (namely version 3.0) allows you to tether your iPhone, that is to share your 3G mobile Internet with your computer via USB or Bluetooth. The sad thing is that some carriers won’t allow you to enable tethering, while others allow this functionality but haven’t updated their carrier settings to support it.

Cosmote is one of those carriers in Greece. I called their customer support to get informed that they’re having technical problems in enabling tethering on the iPhone but assured me that they’re working on it and will let me know. Oh well, I’m not a fan of waiting so did a bit of research and found this how-to article for iPhone tethering. Guess what: it worked!

You can go ahead and follow the steps described in that article. Keep in mind that the carrier settings file for Cosmote is named TMobile_gr.ipcc, so that’s the file that you’ll been playing with. Also, note that you’ll have to compress the whole Payload folder into a zip file (not just the bundle). Last, if you can’t select the ipcc file from within iTunes, make sure you renamed it from within the info window (Cmd + i) and not via Finder (hidden file extensions may not allow you to properly change the filename).

Once you update the ipcc file, reboot your iPhone and go to settings. At first, you may see that you can’t enable tethering (it pops up an info note that you need to call Cosmote customer care), but miraculously after a few seconds, it goes on. I’ve tried it out an worked, with an average maximum speed of 1 Mb/s over 3G (in an area with poor signal). Over bluetooth. Nice.

If you don’t want to get into all this hassle, DM me on Twitter and I can send you the carrier settings (ipcc) file.

iPhone OS 3.0 Beta Finally Supports Greek Keyboard and Menus

Greek iPhone users (and all of you who wouldn’t buy an iPhone because of this… issue) rejoice! The upcoming iPhone upgrade will support writing in greek. Apple held an event last night, showcasing the new iPhone OS 3.0 (and the corresponding SDK), which is available to all users that have enrolled to the iPhone Developer Program.

Since my company has enrolled, I downloaded and install the beta to my iPhone 3G, and am happy to assure you that there is a greek keyboard (in the International Keyboards section in Settings) that you can enable and type in greek. The keyboard looks to be under development, but it works great (for example, the virtual buttons appear as uppercase all the time, but you can type in both uppercase and lowercase).

The keyboard comes with spell checking and correction too, which also corrects unaccented words to their accented form (which means that you don’t have to bother with accents, it does that automatically). I don’t think there’s much work left to do, so it’s pretty certain that when the new OS becomes available to all users, the greek keyboard will be included.

But that’s not all! The new version supports changing the language to greek as well. Once you choose it, the device seems to “soft rebooting”, and after a few seconds the interface is using the greek language (i.e. in the Settings app, E-mail, Messages etc). Not everything seems to have been translated by now, but I guess they’ll have this sorted out in time of public release.

I won’t go into more details or post any screenshots since I respect Apple keeping the beta stuff as “confidential” (after all some photos have been already posted online). Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis) about any questions.

Brief notes about the iPhone Tech Talks

The banner for the event

Last week I’ve been in Rome for the iPhone Tech Talks, Apple’s so-called worldwide event promoting iPhone development. Apparently the moto “Stay where you are. We’re coming to you.” didn’t apply to Greece, so I decided to fly to Rome and attend the one-day seminar. In the beginning of the day, we were informed that the event was considered to be confidential and we shouldn’t blog/tweet/facebook about it, but I think it’s ok to express my impressions about the event as well as my (probably useless) comments about my trip.

Roaming with the iPhone

Apart from the original frustration of not being able to connect to any cellular network (because for some stupid reason my carried switched roaming off when I upgraded my plan), the iPhone’s done well roaming into a foreign country. I don’t know if italian 3G networks are slow or if it was the roaming, but even on 3G everything was pretty slow.

Getting to the event

When I walked to the La Sapienza University, I thought I’d spot the familiar Apple logo on a banner or something, directing me to the place where the event was held, but as much as I looked around, I saw no apples at all. And almost everyone I asked was either unaware of it, didn’t speak english or would rather not talk to a stranger. I spent about 15 minutes asking and going from one place to the other, until I finally found it. They had a banner, but it was up on a balcony at some place.

A few minutes before the first session began

Event sessions

The day consisted of many sessions, some of which were more informative than the others. I’d rather like it if all sessions were tech talk, but hey, it’s their promotional event. Information on the actual technical stuff was coming fast enough so you can keep up and yet include as much as possible. Some people were taking notes but I think it wasn’t really useful to do so. I wouldn’t consider most of the talk being confidential, since in essence it’s all written down in the Apple documentation about the iPhone, but oh well.

One of the reasons I wanted to attend the event was to get to ask some questions to an Apple evangelist, but I wasn’t that lucky. The only chance to ask a question was to find the one Apple guy during the breaks, but that means fighting your way through the crowds that engulfed him instantly the minute the sessions ended. And all this talk between the developers and the Apple guy was in italian, so it was useless to me. Well, at least I had time to visit the buffet, but hey- don’t forget it was a free event.

It was funny that I was the only non-italian person attending, so the host had to speak in english throughout the sessions even though he was italian as well. Sorry guys!

Some interesting notes

Being there among all those italian developers, I quickly came to notice some stuff (most of which I Tweeted about anyway). First, I thought everyone would have an iPhone, but that was not the case. However, almost all laptops were Macs, I didn’t spot a PC in there. New MacBooks could be seen, but old aluminum Pro’s, plastic MacBooks and even my 12″ PowerBook G4 diversified the gamut.

When the audience was asked, quite an impressive amount of people raised hands about using Xcode and Objective-C. Less people were actually developing an iPhone app, and about a dozen and half already had an app deployed on the app store. I wonder how many of the rest of the developers are actually going to build an app, since it was a free event and it was obvious that some people attended maybe out of curiosity only.

Evaluation time

So was it worth it? Well, if they come to your city, it’s definitely worth it to go if you’re interested in developing for the iPhone. But flying abroad just to attend the event (at least the European schedules) wasn’t something I’d recommend, since most of the stuff is readily available in the documentation. The event was probably a good chance to hook up with other developers (an italian start-up was looking for developers there) and often great start-ups form out of such meetings. So if you’re an upcoming developer that haven’t dug deep yet into iPhone development, you should definitely go since it puts you into a mood and briefs you about the technical difficulties involved (i.e. memory management etc.)

Night shot of the Pantheon using the iPhone's camera

As for me, I tried to increase the value of my trip to Rome to make it par with the money I’ve spent, so I took a nice walk the evening after the event, re-visiting most major sites in the historic center. Piazza Di Spagna, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo Di Fiori, Fontana Di Trevi and other small piazzas here and there, a taste of italian pizza and buying souvenirs and gifts for my wife made that evening worth the trip! And since it’s all about the iPhone, here’s a (slightly enhanced) night shot of the Pantheon using the iPhone’s built-in camera.