There has been a lot of talk about how dumb Apple was with this new headphone jack design, that is recessed and needs an adaptor to work with 99% of the headphones in the market.

Today, being one who could not listen to audio into his car due to said jack, took my dremel to my AUX extension cable and trimmed, oh 1/8″ of the plastic shealth off. The connector is still protected, no exposed wires and it fits snugly.

Observations:

• Apple may have done this on purpose, to strengthen the jack via the narrower, metal top. I can’t tell that there is any play, and that seems like it would be less likely to break the solder on the headphone jack and mean fewer repairs.

• The audio pops loud if I plug the cable in when the radio is on. I think my old ipod did this also, but I rarely used the headphone jack in the car due to my (now non-working) Monster charger/line out adaptor. Turn down the radio first!

• The iPhonePod keeps different volume settings for headphones compared to the built in speaker, just like the Mac does. Nice.

• The iPhonePod pauses the music when you disconnect the headphones, like iPods do.

“This cnn.com feature is optimized for Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher. You are currently using Flash Player 0″

I suppose that is indeed accurate.

TUAW has a nice tip for adding contractions.

This is a great job of inlaying video onto an iPhone screen! Very cool.

I spent $15 at The Beaverton Mac Store on a Invisible Shield for my iPhone.

You essentially:

1. Clean your ipod with a lint free cloth
2. Wash your hands very well
3. Spray your fingers with their solution (essentially soap)
4. Peel the skin off and place in hand, smooth side down
5. Spray the skin, both sides.
6. Slide around on phone, until speaker hole and button hole align.
7. Use included squigee to get bubbles off.
8. Wipe off excess water
9. Let dry 24 hours (took only 6 in this warm weather)

I have two very small vertical anomalies, like little cuts, that I can see when the screen is white beneath them, other than that you can’t tell its there.

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What if the iPhone had a biometric screen on top of the multi-touch support? Assuming the biometric worked and was not easily spoofed, that is.

Then you would not need a passcode. As you swiped to unlock, the iPhone would authenticate you as well.

So my friends and I are in a debate about what Apple said when about Flash support on the iPhone.

I did some searching but in the process I found this, on the site now:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/questionsandanswers.html

Can I view regular websites on iPhone or just mobile websites?

With the Safari web browser on iPhone, you can surf websites just as you do on your personal computer. You’re not limited to mobile WAP sites.

The first sentence does seem misleading. I can’t surf sites just as I do on my personal computer. Without Flash, Java or Quicktime, content is missing.

I wonder if a consumer agency will take Apple to task on this?

A little video shot with my MacBook Pro (video flipped in Quicktime Pro) on how the iPhone represents popup menus in Safari. On another note, does anyone know of shock therapy to keep me from saying “uhm” during silence?

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I called jott.com and left myself a message while the music was playing at 90db using my jawbone and the iPhone. Its not as good of a test as I had hoped because if you pause at all Jott thinks you are done and stops recording. However, compared to the Mac Book Pro using bluetooth, its clear (pun intended) that the iPhone’s bluetooth is much, much better.

Here is the text of what Jott thought I said with 90 decibels of music playing at times:

Okay, so I am going to use Jott to record a second test this is a silent room just talking on the job on[1] I am going to get some audio going with iTunes at 19 decimal[2], okay the audio was[3] playing now and now I am going to go head[4] and turn off the no[5] active noise cancellation so now the actual noise cancellation is off, I am going to go ahead and send[6] it back and I will check on and we will see what it sounds like a[7] Jott.

You can listen to the original audio from jott (snagged via wiretap pro from jott’s website) here.

[1] Jawbone [2] 90 decibels [3] is [4] ahead [5] noise (hey I had no script) [6] set [7] through

Here is an audio example of the Jawbone bluetooth headset being used in conjunction with my Mac Book Pro while iTunes blasted 90db of music 6 feet away through my stereo.

Listen

It seems as though the noise cancellation needs a few seconds to settle, so its best to not start talking right away. Let the headset settle and then start talking.

Apparently my MacBook Pro sucks for bluetooth audio. Before you use this demonstration as an example of Jawbone’s audio quality for a phone, please see this post

Macintosh users have been dreading the day that our platform becomes popular enough to warrant enough scrutiny from hackers that our machines are compromised. While this day is yet to arrive, it may have arrived in a different form factor - the iPhone.

According to the register, the first Safari vulnerability has been found, which could be used to let a malicious site run code on the iPhone, potentially for example to make the phone dial 900 numbers and rack up unwarranted numbers.

Being an Apple fan, I say the solution is simple - Don’t allow charges to be made by simply dialing a phone number.

It will be interesting to see how Apple handles security risks on this new platform.

I wanted to record a replacement voicemail greeting so I went to Visual Voicemail, tapped greeting and then record. The button quickly hilited but nothing else happened. After several taps, I went to the home screen and then back to visual voicemail. No change.

I then powered off the phone, powered it back on and then I could record a new greeting.

The iPhone auto hopped to a wifi network called “wireless” that had no internet access. It must have been some goofy mall network, but we could not surf at all. It should have realized the network was bogus and switch to Edge.

When playing back a visual voicemail for the second time, dragging the time slider playhead jumped the voicemail to the proper time, but it then stuck at that time. The voicemail played properly, but the playhead no longer moved, unlike the initial playback of the voicemail. I tried a second time by going home and trying again. This time it worked fine.

If you use the drag to zoom in on text near the top of the screen, the loupe does not flip downwards, so you can’t see what you are selecting.

I had received an email from the Apple Discussions Boards that a new post was waiting for me. I tapped the url in the email (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4827578#4827578) but I ended up on an error page at apple discussions.

From what I can tell, the # in the url gets escaped to %23 (I think) so you end up with http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4827578%234827578 and thus the page fails to load.

I had synced two photos from the phone to iPhoto. Then I restored the phone, which wipes the photos. Then I took two more photos. Now, when I sync, iPhoto tells me that i have downloaded the photos already, but it shows the “new” photos as blank. If I sync anyway, I get corrupted photo messages.

If I use Image Capture to download the photos, they too are corrupted. If I email the photos to myself, they are fine.

Emails should rotate when the phone rotates

The iPhone should not enable mail accounts that were not enabled in mail.app

From Matt: 1. Insert iPhone into Dock 1. iTunes comes up 1. Click on iPhone in the list 1. Click the Info tab 1. Under Calendars… at the bottom, Change “new events created on this iPhone into the calendar:” to something other than “Home” 1. Note that the popup menu never changes from Home