This is something I’ve only just spotted, probably because I’m actually stating to use a calendar for the first time ever !

If you fire up the calendar on your iPhone, what is the first day of the week? Is it a Sunday, or a Monday?

I currently have iCal set to start a week on a Sunday, as that’s how my work does things, so it just makes sense. That’s all well and good, everything’s laid out just as it should be - until I use my iPhone.

For some unbeknown reason, the guys in Cupertino saw fit to start the days of the week on a Monday. That’s all well and good if that’s how you work, but a complete pain in the posterior if you don’t. The best bit? You can’t directly change it !

After a spot of Googling (is that even a word?!) it turns out there is a way to change the starting day for a week, but it’s not ideal.

If you have a gander under Settings->General->International you’ll see you can change the ‘Region Format’ to whatever you like. Change it to United States, you get a week starting with Sunday. Change it to UK and you get a week starting with Monday ! WHY!? How dificult would it have been to either a) give us a simple option like in iCal, or b) make it sync such options when it pulls all your details through from your desktop calendar software?

So it looks like I have a choice. Either I have my weeks starting when they shouldn’t, or have all my measurements, times etc show up as US ones. Thanks Apple. Nice one !

Rant over.

Facebook

Despite my love of all things social media, I’ve never really taken to Facebook. I’ve just never really seen the point. However, since I got my hands on the iPhone application I’ve found myself using it more and more. It’s made this list simply due to the huge Facebook userbase: if you’re reading this the chances are you’re on facebook. If you are, you need this app ! As far as I can tell, everything you can do on the full-fledged web site you can do through the iPhone application (bar the silly apps that you can add to your profile!) You can see what all your friends are up to, write on their wall and read what others have written on yours. There’s also a decent chat feature in there too. Very neat.

Having said all that, I know more than a few people aren’t too impressed with the interface of the Facebook app. I think it’s great personally.

There’s just one thing I’d really like them to implement in an update. Imagine if the Facebook app could use Core Location to tell you where you and your friends are ! Plleeeeaasse Facebook !

Taking the ‘most expensive App Store app’ crown with some style, I Am Rich is now available for download through iTunes. Priced at a bargainous £599, how could you resist?

So, what does it do? According to the item description, not a lot !

So, how long before Apple pull it? Answers on a postcard !

Check it out for youself here ! (iTunes link)

You’re never going to believe this ! Apprently, MobileMe isn’t quite up to scratch ! No, really !

Right, now that’s the sarcasm out of the way, feast your eyes on this email from Steve Jobs to his Apple minions. Jobs basically admits that MobileMe SHOULDN’T have been released at the same time as the iPhone 3G, App Store and the 2.0 firmware. Instead, he says, the whole thing should have been staggered.

The email reads:

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve

While it’s good to see Apple, and Jobs himself no-less, admitting that things aren’t right I do wonder why it’s taken a month for this to happen. At this point some are STILL without working email, and there’s STILL some glaring bugs that really shouldn’t be there.

Thankfully I’ve got a nice long trial to play with. I’d be mighty peeved if I was paying for it !

Are you paying for your MobileMe subscription? What do you think to Steve Jobs’ admission things aren’t as they should be? Let us know below.

Email and original story from Ars Technica

If you’re a follower of GTD (Getting Things Done), chances are you also use OmniFocus. I’m a relative newcomer to the scene, but when I saw the iPhone app I was chuffed to bits. It worked great for a while, but then slow syncing crept in. A couple of possible fixes I tried didn’t improve matters, so I dropped OmniGroup tech support a line. Here’s the reply I got:

Hi Oliver,
Thanks for your email. We’re really sorry for the inconvenience this causes; we’ll have a fix in the 1.0.3 release (coming very soon!), but for the time being, you can do the following to work around the problem:

Sync all your desktop computers, then run the attached applescript on whichever one has the most up-to-date info.
(You can run an applescript by opening the “Script Editor” application, opening the script file, and pressing the “Run” button.)
Next, open up sync server and rename its copy of the OmniFocus database to “OmniFocus-Old”.
Do a sync from the machine that you ran the applescript on.
Launch OmniFocus on your phone and start a sync; when asked whether to use the ‘local’ or ’server’ copy, choose ’server’.

Your syncs should now take a reasonable amount of time again.

Sincerely,

Monica R.
Support Ninja
Omni Group

I’ve included the AppleScript for download here

I’ve tried this myself and my OmniFocus iPhone syncing is now much quicker using my MobileMe storage. Hopefully it’ll help you.

Be sure to let me know how you get on, it’s always nice to hear from you !

Oh, and thanks Monica !

EDIT: It seems this fix is working for quite a few others too.  Be sure to help others by spreading the word. DIGG, Stumbleupon, carrier pigeon…..(buttons below, bar the carrier pigeon one obviously)

A quick iTunes update check shows that 2.0.1 is indeed available. I’m downloading it now. It appears that we’re in for bug fixes as expected, lets hope it makes the whole thing a little more stable !

How’s everyone’s update going?

UPDATE: Well it downloading nice and quickly, maxing out my connection nicely. Now though, I’m sat looking at the backup screen. It’s been about 20 minutes already. This could take a while…..

UPDATE AGAIN: All done, finally. Posting this from my iPhone. The whole thing just feels snappier. Contacts open faster, keyboard lag gone. All in all, I’m happy. 3G might even be slightly better, but I’ll see what it’s like out and about tomorrow.

I’ve had a chance to play around with 2.0 on both my old 2.5G iPhone and my spanky new iPhone 3G for a while now. The novelty of the App Store has worn off, and I’ve tried some pretty poor applications. Over the next few posts I’ll be detailing the apps that, despite not being perfect, have managed to survive the great app cull of 2008.
Read more »