I still have a lot of development to do to finish this app up, but here’s a short update on progress.

The check creation (list display + price entering) screens are ready, so is the screen to set up tip and tax values with persistent data storage. The split itself is the last thing that needs implementation, but it’s probably going to be the easiest step now.

On Saturday we gave it a real life test on entering information only to find out that the original idea was flawed. Read more…

1

ufly says:
August 13, 2008 @ 15:56

Great, dude! So when is next real life testing?

2

Eldar says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:44

Hehe sounds like a good little app, too bad that majority of waiters/waitresses we encountered are so bad at math that people have to come out with such utilities.

3

Daniel says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:51

Yeah, it’s impossible to get them to do the math for you. And it becomes even more complicated if people shared an appetizer or something.

Strangely enough when we were in Canada waiters would ALWAYS ask if we want to have the check split or we want a single check.

4

Daniel says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:51

Oh yeah, and the next test probably will be this Saturday and hopefully with a fully working version already.

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I’ve never had a case for a phone before. But then again I never had a phone that seems so fragile to a drop. Don’t get me wrong, the build of iPhone seems sturdy and solid, but because of the huge glass display it seems it won’t live through a fall.

After reading a number of reviews on different sites I decided to trust iLounge and their opinion. Out of several B+ graded¹ cases they had Griffin Wave seemed the most visually appealing, yet slim, to me.

We ended up picking up a pair of these at BestBuy yesterday. They didn’t have any color choices and they were sold as a pair — one was black and white and another one was green. Both of these are translucent to some degree.

After putting the case on one thing becomes apparent — it feels amazingly good in hand compared to the naked plastic of iPhone. It stops being slippery and it won’t collect grease the way iPhone does.

The cases came with a screen protector, but I decided not to install it. It’s very unlikely that glass is going to get scratched, and I don’t want to sacrifice even a small portion of touch screen sensitivity.

The fit of the case is also very nice, except for one corner where there is no locking mechanism of any kind is present. There is a 1/3 of a milliliter gap between the top and bottom parts there which annoys me slightly. Otherwise I think it’s a very good buy.

I installed an iPhone specific theme for the blog. Developers at Content Robot provided a good starting point. I made several modification to it to work better with our particular blog. Now everyone opening the blog with an iPhone will automatically get this theme. It’s much more lightweight compared to our regular one, so that should make for faster loading times.

I guess it’s basically for Alena, Maruk and myself at the moment.

I’ll start with the pleasant part. On July 11th we bought a pair of iPhones 3G. Mine is a 16GB white model and Alena’s is an 8GB black model. They both look great.

Here’s the box of my iPhone 3G right after we got home.

In the box we find what? Yes, iPhone, how did you guess?

And here’s its flip side. White one. It doesn’t collect finger prints as the black ones do. The screen however is another story.

Here are the boxes from 2 iPhones with a white phone on top. As you can guess the box color corresponds to the color of iPhone’s back side.

And here I have the phone hooked up to my Mac, trying to activate it through iTunes. This actually took quite a while to get done which brings me to the first part of the whole story. The actual process of buying the phones. And that part was not so much fun.

We arrived to the local AT&T store 15 minutes to 8. Yes, in the morning. When we got there were greeted by a rather long line. On the other hand this is probably considered a very short line when compared to some that were formed around Apple stores in Manhattan.

At 8am they let in several people and that’s pretty much when the fun part ends. After that it was 4 hours of waiting under a brutal sun. The line was not moving because AT&T couldn’t process any orders. We were told that iTunes and AT&T internal system went down. At some point they just started selling the phones without activation. Then the system came back, but was moving extremely slowly. They were letting 1 person at time into the store and it was taking hours upon hours. Then we were told that they are running out of 16GB models and we weren’t even sure if we’ll be able to get any.

By the time we got to the door I was pissed and wasn’t even sure if I’ll get what I want. We let Maruk go in first, since it seemed he would get a heart attack if he ended up without one. But once we were inside all went well. I actually ended up with the very last white iPhone they had. Some poor bastard after me had to go with a black one.

The whole buying process went very smoothly. We got our numbers transferred, accounts set up and so on. I even managed to apply 18% service fee discount, but we won’t know if it will work before we get our first bill.

After having the phone for a couple of days I must say that it lived up to the hype and my huge expectations. It’s as great as everyone said it was. The hardware is great and the software is just awesome. I’m glad we did this the first day and waited until the end so we didn’t have to go searching for it somewhere else the day after. That’s all.

1

Alena says:
July 15, 2008 @ 18:12

I am happy with the phone too!

2

Alex says:
July 16, 2008 @ 11:44

I was impressed by how responsive / accurate the accelerometer input is

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Today I’ve met up with Alena after school near the local Apple store. I’ve got to give it to Apple — even the design of the store itself is nice.

Now this is going to be embarrassing — I touched the iPhone today, for the first time. It is as nice as I thought it was. I was especially impressed with Read more…