iPhone Dispatch Blog

QuickBooks is my most hated piece of Mac software — that I still use anyway. It is difficult to use, buggy and unwieldy. But the alternatives are just as bad, and less compatible to what my accountant uses.
What is even more frustrating is that QuickBooks Online, which makes a lot of sense as an online app, only works on Windows! The Web should be the great equalizer, with standards for development, meaning that Web apps should work cross-platform. But Intuit decided not. They have been promising Mac compatibility for a long time.
But now they announce there is a Web app for looking at your QuickBooks Online account on your iPhone. So now you can use QuickBooks online with a Windows machine or an iPhone. But still not a Mac. I so want to give my money to someone else.

So we finally published a RSS feed for the free iPhone ringtones. So now you can subscribe to it in iTunes and automatically get any new ringtones we add. It’s really completely free, so there’s no down side.

So yesterday I did a sync of my old iPhone, the one I replaced with a 3G. I had pulled the old sim card out of it and was able to sync it, getting all the same media and apps on to it that my new iPhone had. I just couldn’t use the mobile or Edge network anymore. WiFi worked fine.
But I tried another sync and it prompted me to update to 2.0.1. I did. Then I couldn’t do anything with it. It was bricked, unable to sync or perform any function because the sim card was missing.
Fortunately, I kept the old sim card around. I put it in and now it seems to work again. To be safe, I set it to Airplane Mode, and then manually turned WiFi back on, leaving it in Airplane mode.

I added some new games to my iPhone Games collection. The games there are free and Web-based, so you play them on your iPhone or iPod Touch using Safari.
The first is Poker Solitaire, an unusual solitaire game that requires a lot of planning and luck to get a good score. The second is Astro-Blobs. This is a version of one of our very first Flash games, I think from around 1997 or so.

So my wife’s iPhone had to be replaced. The issue was connectivity. It would often show No Service when, standing next to her, I had 5 bars. Sometimes it would suddenly connect, only to loose it again a minute later. It seemed to get worse and worse.
So we took it into the Apple Store yesterday. They simply swapped it for another one. It took a bit, though. They said if e did it less than 14 days from purchase, it would have been quicker. But we had to make a Genius Bar appointment, which meant coming back later in the day.
Anyway, because we did a sync before leaving the house, it was easy to come back and sync the new phone with her laptop and she was back in business.
One note: The new phone she got was on iPhone OS 2.0. I had upgraded her old phone to 2.0.1. So we had to sync her new phone to her laptop as a “new phone.” Then, upgrade to 2.0.1. Then we did a “Restore from Backup” to complete the process.