Bill Buchan's Blog

If you have a problem with bad language - well- then your going to have a problem. Funny though.

Imagine living in a corporate world where you had no choice. All for very good reasons, of course, but here is where software (and dreams) come to die.

For instance, the IM client in operation is something called 'Mindalign' (in this case v6.5). Its a POS in almost every sense of the word. Unreliable,. buggy, non-persistent, unfriendly. And today, just to put the chery on the poo-cake that is Mindalign, I got this:

Wait. So if I log out, I lose messages ?

Classy. I guess what I'm saying is before you engage on a long term basis, do one of two things. Either check in advance and make a decision on how much you can tolerate this rubbish, or just lower your expectations. And I mean IBM-Marketing-Lotus-Notes-low, or even Microsoft-reliable-software-low.

After all, its only work.

I recently got the Scirocco fitted with a VW branded car kit - on the invoice, it was called an iTouch. In reality, its a rebranded Bury CC9060. A fantastic car kit, and Barnetts in Dundee did an excellent job in fitting it. It worked really well with my temporary BlackBerry and SWMBO's iPhone 3Gs.

However.

When I got my new iPhone 4, it started: 

• Resetting the car kit
• Flipping between the car kit and the phone speaker
• Not ringing on incoming calls
• Dropping calls
• Calls where my microphone didnt work

All in all, very frustrating. It would appear that Apple iOS v4.0.0, v4.0.1, and v4.0.2 all have the same issue. There is apparently an update from Bury which might fix it, but when I wasted three hours over the weekend (farting around with Bluetooth drivers, windows XP, The Bury Update manager, bad documentation, etc), the upgrade program (on the PC) denied that it had the correct firmware downloaded from the Bury site.

Bury, if you ever read this: 

• The COM port service on the bluetooth device only ever works whilst the car kit is in UPDATE mode. Took me an hour to figure that one out
• You should be able to NOT HAVE TO DOWNLOAD the firmware kit every time you do an update - especially as during the update itself most folks will be off-net. Using a laptop in their car. In the street. You should at least remember the last kit you connected to, and download the correct firmware for it. Even if its VW branded!
• Not everyone wants to have a PC. A Mac version of your software might be far easier than the pain I had in getting my Vmware PC talking over my Mac bluetooth port. 
• When I hit Bury.com, it defaults to German language, despite my browser telling you that I'm using English. A small point, but a very disconcerting one to less technical users. 
• Why dont you TELL folks with rebadged VW kits to contact their dealers instead of wasting TWO days messing with this stuff? 

I called Barnetts this morning, and they're taking the car back on Friday AM to check it out. They've not seen this yet.

In the meantime, using my Apple developer ID, I'm upgrading my iPhone to iOS 4.1 (beta 3) to see if this irons it out. (Hint: Pay $100 for the iPhone developer stuff, register your device on the developer portal, download the firmware from the site, hold down 'Ctrl' whilst clicking on 'Restore' to select the new firmware, reload phone, restore from backup. Amazingly, I got almost all of those steps completely wrong the first time and it still worked fine).

So. Finally. Does iOS 4.1 (Beta 3) solve the issues ? 

Ah. No. Bugger.

With all this excitement over new API's in the 8.5x code stream, I thought I'd go and have a peek at the latest copy of the C-API toolkit. Its over here. 

Well, it should be. There's last been a public release in March 2009. When 8.5.0 was released. Whilst its a little soon for 8.5.2 to be out, I would have thought 8.5.1 would have been released by now.

Ah well. Even my lowest of the low expectations have been dashed.

A weekend of Painting, and a day of working, followed by a bank-holiday day of working. Rock and roll.

Stil, the chocolate-coloured bedroom is now done: