Hey gang. I’ll be in Bali, Indonesia for the next few days (business trip), and I don’t know my net situation there yet. So if I don’t get to post anything here until the weekend, you’ll know what happened. I hear bandwidth and availability there is worse than Manila’s (deliberately so, if my source is to be believed), but I’m hopeful.

Consider it a short break if you don’t hear from me. Then again, after last month’s long posting hiatus, you guys are probably used to it. In the meantime the signal is amazingly good here at the Centennial Airport while I wait to board for my flight to Jakarta.

Anyway, catch ya later.

Since this morning none of my graphics seem to be showing up on this blog. Hmm…

I have no idea why. They were ok yesterday. I have them on a popular photo server that I’ve been using for years for all my stuff, and this is the first time I’ve had a glitch. But I’ve searched the net for some sign of trouble with them  , and save for a site maintenance episode there today, nothing seems to be amiss. Just my blog pics here. (Glitch could be on our side, come to think of it.)

I uploaded one to the Inquirer server (which I should’ve been doing from the outset - but I’m a creature of habit) for the previous Java update post, and it seems to work. Double hmm…

Will get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, the Doodler begs your indulgence.

UPDATE (two days later): The pics are back. Cool.

With the constant trickle of TPAs (third party applications) for the iPhone and their quick and painless installs, you tend to try everything out - because it’s just as quick and painless to uninstall them. (And believe me, there have been a lot that don’t last ten seconds on mine; the ratio of crap to good stuff is heavily one-sided.) Whatever the case, updating Installer has become a daily routine, which I expect is the same for a lot of you guys.

At the moment I have four pages of apps on my iPhone (considering that the Apple-legal stuff takes up only over half a page, that’s a lot of TPAs). The number of pages grow and shrink as the weeks go by, and staying on the iPhone is survival of the fittest; the ones that stay are either really useful or fun, or are just really good conversation pieces. The common thread among most of them is, why didn’t Apple think of these? (The only one I haven’t yet come across, but was fully expecting to appear this year, was something that let me cut and paste text.)

It being year-end, people have a compulsion to make lists, and I’ve succumbed and made a listing of apps I’ve kept on my iPhone over the many weeks. Please take note that these are personal, subjective choices. I’m sure you have others you prefer, or some you feel are moronic. But hey, it’s my list. Why don’t you post some of yours in the comment box? Who knows, there might’ve been some we missed and should know about.

Anyway, here are some that have managed to stay on my screen this year:

weTool - There have been a few other apps that individually do all the small things that weTool does, but none all together, none as well, and none in a more professional looking package. You can delete specific items in the Call and SMS logs, you can forward texts (to multiple recipients!) and contacts, you can even save texts to Notes. You can even makes calls directly from it. One of the best parts is that it has a set of visually stunning page transitions you can select that Apple is only beginning to do (as the page curl transition seen in a screenshot of the 1.1.3 preview.) Nice one.

TuneWiki - This is for the karaoke lover in you. When connected online, it will search an online wiki database for the lyrics of the song currently being played in iPod mode and will show it to you line by line as the song plays, ostensibly so you can sing along. Of course you have to manually forward each line by tapping on the TuneWiki icon on the screen, but hey, it’s free. Who’s complaining?

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Mac-A-Doodle, as you might have noticed, has gone into forced hiatus for the past few days, and I just felt like apologizing and explaining why there haven’t been any recent postings.

It’s that digital bogeyman of the 21st century: interrupted internet service. My Provider, who wilL remain unnameD for The Moment to save them embarrassment, went offline inexplicablY at the same time yours truly was waylaiD by the flu and waS forced to stay home, hence our inabiLity to update. My provider has shown me erratic service through the year, and when it blinks off, it’s not just for a couple of hours, it goes off for days at a time, which has led to many raised-voice conversations with their call center people.

My apologies.

Upon coming home late tonight I was surprised that the net was inexplicably back up, my torrents have resumed and my iTunes is desperately trying to catch up with my podcast backlog. (I hope it’s back for good, although I will likely change providers in a couple of weeks anyway.)

So I’m back.

But I feel bad because I have had a five-month unbroken string of daily posts (sometimes as many as four or five a day) until this happened, and the streak is now effectively over. This is especially bad now that I’ve gotten a hundred-fold increase in readership since I transferred to the Inquirer.Net blog network a couple of months back.

I’ve also realized that it’s partially my fault too for insisting on doing this thing alone, which I have been since April this year, and if I had just opened the roster to fellow Mac bloggers I could have had guest posters who could have taken over while I was trapped at home with no net. So I have decided to have a few trusted friends in on some of the fun here, and take up some of the slack occasionally.

Now and then expect a couple of other people blogging on Mac-A-Doodle aside from myself.

So back to regular programming.

Yun lang po.

Whaddaya know? Looks like I must be doing something right. (Either that, or it’s really a slow news day.)

Was trolling the net tonight for news and info on the new iTunes 7.5 and if it would affect unlocked or jailbroken iPhones, so I googled the relevant keywords.

Surprised that I got back my own blog as the very first entry out of nearly a million other results. That must be worth something somewhere, somehow.

Cool, if I do say so myself.

Heh. Now back to regular programming.