iOS 6? Not yet.

As I was returning from lunch today, sitting in the car, I saw Burlington Coat Factory. In fact, it was a very specific Burlington Coat Factory. It triggered a memory. Two years ago, When I was fresh in the US and our sweaters were proving to be no match for the Colorado Winter, I and a bunch of friends had come to this particular outlet to buy winter wear because it was supposed to be pretty cheap. We got great deals, of course, but the journey, both to and fro was arduous. We were required to change many buses and coordinate the timings of all of them to ensure that we had minimum exposure to the cold. Back then, I was totting an iPhone 4 with a 200 MB data plan. Needless to say, my WiFi toggle was always on and looking and my battery was the fastest to dry out. Some others in my group also had smart phones, but I was either the most careful one not to waste my 3G or the more adept one at finding routes and bus time tables, so the task of ensuring everyone walked fast enough and didn’t waste too much time shopping was entrusted to me. I cannot, of course, claim that I was much better than any other one of them. It was the magic of Google Maps that ensured that we knew exact what bus to take and when.

More recently, about five months ago, I was roaming the crazy, confusing streets of San Francisco and was having trouble understanding what bus to take or rather, if it was supposed to be a bus I had to take at all (electric-powered buses? Who would have thought?!). My friends were looking at the real world and trying to understand where to stand while I was zoomed deep into Google Maps, finding the virtual corollary. Unable to find a satisfactory answer, I asked a passerby. He whipped out his iPhone and started zooming in. I felt somewhat surprised. He looked at my face and immediately offered, “I have the beta of iOS6, so my Maps are very different from yours.” I understood and for a second, shared a glance at the latest and greatest piece of tech from Apple. He showed me where to go and what to look for (a yellow patch on one side of an electric pole will tell you, unsuspecting traveler, that this is the bus stop you are looking for) and went his way. My friends teased me about not having the coolest OS but I shrugged it off.

Actually, I am awfully fond of my jailbreak and the convenience that comes with it. I wait for months at a time even after the release to update, because I wanted to keep my jailbreak. I’ve even gone through the tethered jailbreak phase. All because I love the tweaks that Cydia offers. When I heard about iOS 6 and the features it offers, I was very happy and hoped to upgrade pretty soon. But then two things happened –

1. iOS 6 Maps is the worst software ever written. Yep, someone told me that. I take that on face value. In fact, I was told that the Maps don’t have proper public transit information. I rely heavily on public transport, despite Boulder being a small city. So for me, a world where I can’t get the bus timings at the click a button would be a nightmare.

2. The jailbreak Dream Team broke up. I don’t know exactly what’s happening in the jailbreak scene right now. I haven’t followed it in the past few months. But I know that not much is happening, except for an iconic tweet by @chpwn showing Cydia on an iPhone 5 and then confirming to @i0n1c that it’s a jailbreak. Apart from that, the community has gone silent on A5 and A6 devices, with a tethered jailbreak available on A4 devices. Either they’re working hard on something or they’ve departed an increasingly ugly scene where common users had no respect for these devs who put their time and money into the project.

Either ways, I’m on iOS 5 on my iPhone 4S right now. I’m jailbroken and happy about it (and it’s legal too! :P). I’m not going to upgrade until at least one of the above conditions are met. Till then, I’ll gladly wait.

Save yourself from the Ephemeral

As users of the Internet, we change a lot. We move email IDs, we jump from one social networking fad to another, we change bookmarking and read-it-later sites and even crash, delete or just forget blogs that we write on.

Most of the stuff I’ve done in the past 10 years or so on the Internet has been pretty personal. Emails, Orkut or Facebook where privacy settings allowed me to block external users or bookmarking sites that were private by default. But recently, most of my contribution to the Internet has been public – twitter and App.net, my blogs and even my bookmarking has been public. So is true for most of us out there. With the shift in social networks’ view of what data should be totally private, there’s a lot of data that’s in the public domain. This also means that there’s equally that much data that can be lost or can stagnate when an eventuality occurs – a web service shuts down because of acquisition or drying up of funds, your blog crashes and you have to start from scratch, you leave a social network and even though you download all your data and invite all your connections to the new one, some don’t join or you can’t upload any of that data anywhere else (how many social networks out there are interchangeable? None.) or maybe you just stop using a site or service and that data just sits there, alone and forgotten (just ask my bookmarks on del.icio.us). Continue reading →

Twitter isn’t as impartial as some expect

They’re on our turf now, not the airwaves.

via Moneyball for Votes | Jason Putorti.

Jason Putorti made this comment 3 days ago. I just read the post. The context is that Politicians have been spending massive amounts of money on print, TV and direct advertisements without caring about talking to their voters and having a real relationship with their constituents. That way, the politician with the most money wins because they cast the widest net on the most sources. He goes on to point that this is not longer the case because of the growth of the Internet and specifically, Twitter. Continue reading →

A New Age of Windows Apps

Windows, for it’s spread across the world and it’s presence on every other computer you see, has for the past few years, suffered from a terrible lack of apps and widgets. While the rest of the world grew sudden mobile roots, Windows remained largely grounded on laptops and desktops. This meant that the apps that were making waves in the iOS and Android world were ported to OS X and Linux, but Windows was largely ignored.

With the coming of Google Chrome, making small widgets and apps became fairly easy. It was now not a matter of learning a complex platform dependent language like C# or a platform independent but newer languages like Ruby or Python. It was all about HTML, JavaScript and some CSS thrown together. Google Chrome handled the rest. Continue reading →

ADN as a blogging tool

It has arrived. It’s not perfect, it’s not shippable, but it exists. A blogging engine that’s partly based on App.net infrastructure. It support’s Markdown and posts to alpha.app.net

Here’s a link to a post I wrote on it. ADN Hackathoners did a good job on this one!

Another look at Distributed Social Networks

I’ve been reading a lot about App.net online and only a few voices are truly against the idea. Most of them seem to accept that a social network without ads would be a great idea. But some talk about not just privacy from ads but total ownership of your data. How is that possible? Simple, to own your data, you should own the platform. Which means what? It means that I should be able to download a software package, upload it to my own server and soon, anything I post on it would be owned just by me, giving me absolute control over who sees it and who doesn’t. App.net could just have easily been that PHP-MySQL based software, but there are a few problems it would have to face – Continue reading →