On the Wednesday myself and @matttakhar had done some calling to see which stores had received their stocks of iPhones.

I was shooting for Vodafone network but could be persuaded to O2 if it was really bad in needing and iPhone 4.

I managed to persuade my better half that I could go early on Thursday morning to the O2 local with @matttakhar, where they had stashed 40 devices….

Arrived at that O2 store at approx 7:30am and already there were 10 people infront, 1 had been there since 2am. Madness.

I’m telling you, this was not an Apple store. This was an O2 store in a provincial town in Hampshire, UK.

The queue were all friendly, boyant, and excited with the prospect that in 45 mins, they would have a new iPhone 4 in their grubby mits.

I started to check quickly online to see if there was a Vodafone store nearby, but the nearest was Portsmouth or Fareham or even Winchester and rush hour was fast approaching.

I stayed loyal in the queue for another 10 mins before really making my mind up that I did not want to be signed up to a 18 month contract and not be able to make or recieve calls in my house (bad O2 reception).

So I left my queue position and hung out down the front of the queue with fellow ADGoT team member @matttakhar and laughed and  joked with the rest of the queue.

To give O2 credit, the sales staff were really nice, handed out tickets to the queue for 16GB or 32GB, and made sure everyone understood the tarriffs.

The doors opened and the first 3 people entered the shop.

We watched keypad entry doors open and the assistant return with the 1st iPhone 4 in its box for the first shopper. It was the father of the boy who had been there since 2am drinking Red Bull and other high sugar drinks. The father seemed very pleased.

I watched @matttakhar go in to claim his prize and left to make a quick journey to Fareham to see what Vodafone would have in store.

I parked, walked briskly into the shopping centre. Shops mostly closed, fine as it was before 9am. Walk to the area with the collection of network operator shops and……. No queues. Hmmm

I walk straight into Vodafone, people were inside, a sales assistant greeted me and said he had iPhone 4′s. Praise the lord. At last, Thank you god!!!….

But not in 32GB. They only got 1 sent and a gentleman in front of me was just signing it up. Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Gutted. For the rest of the day sulked at my desk. Beaten. So close!!

In the end I ordered one online from Vodafone and will have to wait and wait until stocks are replenished.

I hope you all managed to get what you wanted. I have since seen 3 iPhone 4 devices and they are incredibly nice.

I quickly rip open the envelope and inside was a lovely marketing piece from O2 titled “On your marks…” and attached was a micro SIM and a micro SIM adapter.

Top marks for effort O2. I have not seen anything to woo me from Vodafone yet. This is still a 2 horse race as far as I’m concerned. 1GB data cap vs cool marketing.

Now if the backup portion of the upgrade process to iOS4 on my wife’s iPhone would just speed up a tad (I will have to leave over night) I might be happy boy tonight.

Right where are my freshly pick strawberries!

I thought I’ll take a few minutes away from the compiler to update you on a bug fix I have just corrected in ParentHelper.

First some background; In ParentHelper we display the right “type” of keyboard when you needed it. For example if you are using the Maths Board then you will need the Numeric Keyboard however if you are Sharing the app via, Email, Facebook or Twitter then you need the Full Keyboard. On top of making sure you have the correct keyboard we also overlay custom buttons on the keyboard, like a NEXT button, Symbols button and Done button. The reason we do this is to make the User Interface (UI) clean, making sure you have everything you need to use the application in front of you.

The first version of the application (1.0.0 due out any day now!!!) has been developed and tested against the current iPhone operating system, OS 3.2 and earlier. However as we are registered on the iPhone Dev Center we are allowed to download BETA software from Apple. More importantly the upcoming iOS 4.0 which you will all be installing next week when its officially released.

So we downloaded the new iOS 4.0 GM BETA and iTunes 9.2 BETA and the new 4.0 Software Development Kit to find our keyboard code no longer works correctly

The custom buttons simply didn’t appear! You will be pleased to know after several hours of debugging and testing we have implemented a fix which will be available in Version 1.0.1 as soon as it has been signed off by the rest of the team.

Those of you who are interested in the technical detail, here it is:

Our code was hooking into the keyBoardWillShow event to check if the subview will contain a view with a prefix of UIKeyboard or UIPeripheralHostView. Like so:

if([[keyboard description] hasPrefix:@”<UIKeyboard”] == YES || [[keyboard description] hasPrefix:@”<UIPeripheralHostView”] == YES)

This code is no longer supported in iOS 4.0. After a lot of research I have found a lot of developers have found their applications with custom keyboards are now broken.

I’ve worked around this in ParentHelper by hooking into the keyboardDidShow event and adding the button dynamically after the keyboard has been displayed.

The only downside to this approach is the button gets drawn after the keyboard appears so you can briefly see it appear, but it is very very quick.

Bye for now, Matt

Where's My iPhone

In an effort to be thrifty I decided to recycle my iPhone and use the proceeds to finance the new iPhone 4, all in advance of the launch of the new phone.

I did my homework, I watched the decreasing prices for recycled iPhone’s and took the plunge.

The company in question that I used to recycle the phone was (as suggested by Matt, thanks) Fonebak. They kindly sent me an envelope and labels and I dutifully wiped the iPhone of data and apps.

I added some postal insurance and popped it in the post.

Oh and the SIM was removed and popped into a…. hmm… well….. it must be a 5 year old Sony Ericsson K800i.

All good I hear you say. Well yes and no. I hope I get the cheque for the amount I struck at, as the phone was immaculate. But the biggest problem is life without an iPhone.

Call me an addict but I am sitting at a desk or lying in bed or sitting at the sofa and I find myself reaching out for the iPhone. Sad I know.

But I want to see what the latest news is, see what people I follow on Twitter are saying. Look at GIST for a complete social media mashup. Even check how my fantasy World Cup 2010 team are doing. Even simple things like checking the weather I cannot do. Let alone do testing of our app ParentHelper.

Arrrrrrgghhhh. I cannot believe how integrated the iPhone has become to my life.

So I am now counting down the days until June 24, checking daily online to see if the 4 UK mobile networks revise their costs or data caps.

On that note, scum buckets. On one hand they givith us a nice phone, on the otherhand they take away functionality and value that we had for the same price in the previous contract. What the hell are they thinking. I wonder if O2 will see a huge wave of iPhone customers leaving them over the next 6-12 months.

If data usage is going to get higher why put road blocks in the way. Surely they want to encourage us to use the data networks. Surely capping the data usage means stifling of great apps and innovation. By putting caps in place it is surely discouraging us to use lots of data intensive apps over the month which defeats the use of the smart phone. Or are they hoping we will all make expensive mistakes.

How about showing us the investment you are putting into your network for high speed data transfer first and then perhaps I might be willing to pay for that privilege and the data.

So I have a trouble some 6 days before having the chance to lay my hands on a new phone. Choices to make though is O2 or Vodafone? Black or White?

What do you think?

Meanwhile we are testing ParentHelper ready for iOS4 release.

Catch you soon.

Hello world. Funny that!

I just delete a post titled that said just that.

Anyway I just wanted to say ‘Hello World’!!!!

So what are we doing?

Well we are just around the corner with our first app from our humble team. We are all very keen to get this iPhone app out. Not least because we are passionate about what it can do in helping parents like me for instance to help teach our children how to do maths.

I am 37, part of the MTV generation, but old enough to see technology take off in leaps and bounds as per Moore’s Law and appreciate what my generation and the previous generation have gone through to get to where we are today.

However one thing I believe is not going in the right direction is the education of some of our kids. They are not being taught the basic skills so they can do  simple arithmetic in their heads. Computers are doing it for them and they expect them to do it for them.

So this app is going back to basics to help you remember how to do simple arithmetic.

When the app launches, please download it and feel free to drop by and give us feedback on what you like about the app, how we can improve it and any new features you think should be included.