Three months of iPhone usage and with the new 2.0 firmware coming out just over a week from now, it's good to look back and see what my favorite 3rd party apps are. My favorites are:

1. Twinkle: Twitter client that allows you to include picture and location info in tweets.
2. AutoMode: Put the iPhone to airplane mode at night and wakeup from airplane mode in the morning. Saves some battery and on the side gives you undisturbed nights.
3. IntelliScreen: View your next appointments, SMSs, news headlines, etc. at a glimpse in the "Slide to unlock" screen.
4. Finder: An OS X like finder to navigate the file system
5. Terminal: Terminal clients that allows me to ssh into other machines remotely (already saved my a couple of times when I had no other way to ssh into my server to fix stuff)
6. ParkingLot: Nice puzzle game to kill time
7. ContraSense: Car racing game to show off the accelorometer

I wonder which of these apps will become available from the AppStore and if there will remain a market for  apps that can only be installed if you jailbreak the iPhone. I suspect there will remain such a market because some of the apps installed via the jailbreak path run in the background and that's a feature which is not allowed for apps in the AppStore.

What am I missing?
Number one missing feature for me is a ToDo list that is integrated with iCal on OS X. I've looked at a couple of other options but found nothing that integrates with iCal. The MobileToDo app was promising to do this, but they quit development and referred to OmniFocus as the app to use. However, you'd also need to buy the OmniFocus desktop app at $79 and buy the iPhone app separately (price unknown yet) and IMO that's way to much money for simple to do list requirements that I have. I'm hoping the guys behind MobileToDo will pick up the work again. I don't mind paying, but it should be in the $20 range for me.

I've been using the iPhone for a couple of months now and one thing that kept bugging me was that iTunes does not allow you to specify a server based calendar as the calendar to sync events created on the iPhone to. It only allows to sync events created on the iPhone to local calendars in iCal. Since I'm using Zimbra as my server for mail, calendar, etc. and I want to be able to update it also when I'm not near my MacBook Pro that becomes pretty annoying. In OS X Leopards iCal you can subscribe to server based calendar and also update them, so it's a mistery to my why the iPhone events can't be synced to a CalDAV server.

Anyways, a nice challenge to solve and it's actually pretty easy using Applescript. I've set up iCal to subscribe to the CalDAV server. So from iCal (and the Zimbra web client) I'm working on the same data. Then there an iCal local calendar defined (named iPhone) and in iTunes this calendar is specified as the one where new events created on the iPhone should be stored. The server based Calendar that iCal is subscribed to is also selected in iTunes to be sync to the iPhone.

So now the only we need to accomplish is get the events created on the iPhone into the CalDAV server. The following Applescript does this for me:

tell application "iCal"
  set allEvents to every event in calendar "iPhone"
    repeat with theEvent in allEvents
      make new event at end of events of calendar "Calendar" 
        with data theEvent
      delete theEvent
    end repeat
  reload calendars
end tell

 

This script is scheduled to run eveny 15 minutes and simply copies all events found in the iPhone calendar to the server Calendar and then removes it from the iPhone. Works nicely and the only drawback left is that events are not sync-ed in realtime, I have to do a sync between the MacBook and the iPhone... but who knows, maybe that can be improved using the push capabilities that are part of iPhone 2.0.

[English below]
Sinds een poosje gebruik ik OpenGTS om routes op te nemen (zie eerdere blog) en daarmee kan ik dus ook skeeler routes vastleggen. Leek me leuk om deze te delen met anderen en dat ga ik dus doen via m'n blog. In eerste instantie wilde ik alleen wat statische pagina's met de routes op internet zetten, maar het leek me uiteindelijk toch leuker als mensen ook commentaar kunnen toevoegen etc. En daar is een blog meer geschikt voor.

De blog entry die je nu leest bevat een overzicht van de routes die ik in de omgeving van Woerden rij.  Door op het skeelerwiel in een route te klikken, krijg je meer details over een route en van daaruit kun je weer doorklikken naar de route details.

I've been using OpenGTS for a while to track skeeler routes and it seemed like fin to share these using my blog. Advantage (compared to static HTML pages) is that you can leave comments and suggestions.

This blog entry provides and overview of all skeeler routes around Woerden, The Netherlands. Click on one of the skeelerwheels to get a description of the route and from thereon you can jump to the route details.

[English below]
Op de fiets noemde ik deze ronde vroeger "de hel van het Noorden", het ligt immers te noorden van Woerden en ik had altijd het gevoel tegenwind te  hebben op het stuk van Zegveld naar Woerdense Verlaat. Deze keer op skeelers had ik dat stuk een stevige wind mee en liep de snelheid lekker op.  Net uit Woerden richting Zegveld en de eerste KM uit Zegveld naar Woerdense Verlaat is het wegdek wat minder, maar verder goed.

When I did this route by bike years ago I always had headwinds on the part from Zegveld to Woerdense Verlaat. This time on skeelers I was surprised by a nice supporting wind and could reach nice speeds. Leaving Woerden towards Zegveld en just outside Zegveld the road is a bit bumpy but for the rest  the road is good.