The General Theory of RIAtivity

A Letter to Steve Jobs

Dear Steve:

The word today from the blogosphere is that iPhone firmware update 1.1.1 not only re-locks iPhones unlocked from the AT&T network, but also prevents access to any third-party apps installed on the iPhone, such as installer.app and other community apps installed by installer.app.

For those of us trying to develop legitimate businesses and services for the iPhone and iPod Touch, this action by Apple turns us into casualties of war. While it can be argued that you, as a result of your committments to AT&T, must actively counter the efforts of hackers and developers who have released apps that unlock iPhones from the AT&T network, there is no argument for punishing legitimate developers from producing useful, in-demand services and applications for the iPhone by preventing the installation of third-party applications. If Microsoft prevented the installation of applications on Windows they would be subject to public rage in a matter of seconds and most likely a cadre of lawsuits; why has Apple taken this blanket offensive approach against developers who simply want to let consumers take full advantage of the “revolutionary Internet device” they carry in their hands? If Apple’s concern is that such apps might pose danger to the AT&T network, then create a protected mode for iPhone’s OS like was done with DOS years ago. Additionally, there should be no reason to prevent third-party apps on the iPod Touch since there is no connection to AT&T’s network.

iPhone developers are, indeed, some of your most vocal evangelists. If these tactics continue to impact legitimate development our current enthusiasm will quickly evaporate and cause us to devote our time and money to developing for other mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc.).

I urge you and Apple to reconsider your tactics against the iPhone unlocking effort and choose a course that doesn’t penalize legitimate development.

Sincerely,
Mike Brophy
CEO, Riactant Development
Seattle, WA

[Update 09.27.2007 14:08 PDT]
Gizmodo puts it perfectly in a post from today: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/iphone-re+reviewed-verdict-dont-buy-302075.php

Update November 2, 2007
We got back from Italy on October 19 — it will still be another month or so before all roaming charges come through on my AT&T bill, but I wanted to provide an update on my service experience with the iPhone in Europe.

While in the UK the service provider on the iPhone was Orange; while in Italy it was vodafone. Signal coverage wasn’t a problem, even when we were winding our way through rural Tuscany and Abruzzo. Outbound dialing was a little quirky; the AT&T rep told me before we left that while in Italy we dial as a local would, meaning no country code prefix, etc. However, that didn’t always prove true in practice. In some areas dialing as a local worked fine, in others I had to dial the full country code, city code, etc.

Text messaging was flawless and is how we communicated most with family we were visiting. I have the International Date Roaming plan and used my 20MB allotment of data pretty quickly towards the last few days of our trip as I was trying to catch up on email that was piling up. Data performance was worse than the standard EDGE connection in the USA, but was sufficient for what I needed to do.

Overall, my experience using the iPhone in Italy and the UK was as good as my experience using on a daily basis in the USA. Just remember to have that Data Roaming option turned off (if you’re running iPhone firmware 1.1.1)…it is off by default but you should double-check — this will save you from a data roaming bill that will send you into cardiac arrest. If you aren’t running 1.1.1 and aren’t comfortable hacking a config file on the iPhone then I suggest you upgrade to 1.1.1 so you toggle data roaming on/off as needed while overseas.

BTW, pics from the trip are here.

Original Post
I’m headed in to Italy in a few weeks and one of the most stressful parts of preparing for the trip has been whether my wife and I would be able to use our iPhones. The question isn’t one of technical compatibility with the Italian cell networks (they are GSM 900 and the iPhone is a quad-band phone which supports that protocol).

No, rather the looming worry is how we could disable data on our phones so we don’t get one of the many-thousand dollar roaming data bills folks have been blogging about over the past few months.

This lead me on a search for a way to disable the EDGE/GPRS connection on our iPhones, but still preserve the ability to make/receive calls. I found this posting http://www.blogsmith.com/profile/1353419/ which seemed logical so I tried it.

Thusfar it seems that the recipe for disabling EDGE/GPRS works. After making the edit to the configuration file using Mobile TextEdit, I reset my Usage Statistics via iPhone Settings. With the hack in place my EDGE transmit/receive stats still read zero. Also, I get the “Cannot connect to EDGE” error when I try browsing to a website in Safari.

Now I’m going to add the $5.99 International World Traveler service to my plan so I can make calls for the relatively low price of $0.99 minute while I’m in Italy (compared to $1.39 for Mobal, not to mention the cost of a phone rental/purchase).

I will post again once I’m in Italy and upon return to let you know if there are any hiccups or surprises.

[Updated 09-09-2009]

If you want to try retrieving deleted text messages from your iPhone check out the free Windows utility I wrote here.

[Original Post]
The other day I installed MobileFinder.app, a third-party, native iPhone application that allows browsing of the iPhone’s file system. While I was poking around the iPhone file system today I noticed a file called sms.db under the ~/Library/SMS directory. I opened the file in MobileTextEdit.app and saw that it was a SQLLite database file; no surprise there.

But what did surprise me was that every text message I had ever sent or received since I bought my iPhone on June 26 was stored in sms.db, despite the fact that I “deleted” these text messages via the iPhone SMS app user interface long ago.

It seems the iPhone SMS delete function is a soft delete. Perhaps Apple should implement a hard delete function similar to the Safari “Clear History” function, which incidentally now has me questioning whether “Clear History/Cache/Cookies” really deletes them.

[Updated 05-03-2009]

I figured I’d post this as a follow-up to my previous post a few years back mainly because I regularly get questioned on the topic of how to retrieve deleted text messages. Furthermore, I wanted to post a method which didn’t require JailBreaking a phone or that was overly technical. So here you go, a pretty straighforward method for accessing text messages from your iPhone which may have been deleted but might still be available in the iPhone’s SMS database.

ASSUMPTIONS: I assume you are running Windows of some flavor and have synched/backed up your iPhone using iTunes on said machine.

1. Download and install TextPad
2. Open TextPad.
3. Select Search > Find in Files…
4. Complete the “Find in Files” dialog as you see in the following screenshot. Make sure you’ve checked the Search subfolders checkbox or else this won’t work. Note: this was taken from a Windows 7 machine. The path value for the “In Folder” field should be the same for Windows Vista (of course, your username will appear instead of “mike” in the path. For pre-Windows Vista your path will be under c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

5. Click Find.
6. In the TextPad search results pane you should see at least one search result found (even though multiple results may have been returned, they all will point to the same SMS DB file per backup folder). Below is a screenshot of what might appear (your filename will likely be different):

7. Double-click on one of the search results and the SQLite file will open in the upper pane. Much of it will look like garbage, but there’s alot of human readable info in the file, particularly your text messages. Enjoy

Three men from Washington State and their trusty 44-foot sailboat, the S.V. SohCahToa, are about to complete a remarkable journey. The crew — Casey McNeese, Matt Smith and Jeff Stewart, who all met in college at Washington State University, shoved off from Seattle in August 2005 for an adventure that would take them to far away lands, almost land them in jail in Australia, and ultimately take them around the Earth plus some.

Technically, the crew of S.V. SohCahToa completed their circumnavigation of the globe a few months ago, but they will be pulling back into the port from which they left over two years ago in a matter of days.

Check out their ship logs — it’s compelling reading and the stuff of a great novel. And for goodness sake buy the guys a celebratory drink via their “Buy Us a Drink” page!