I remember when I first got my iPhone 3G. It was a gleaming treasure — beautiful to behold and snappy in performance. It’s still a gleaming treasure and beautiful to behold. But the snap is gone — it stutters, pauses, and apps frequently crash and burn — even Apple apps such as e-mail. Boink! Damn, again.
Rebooting the phone helps, but it’s inconvenient and sometimes not an option. I’m not saying I don’t like my iPhone anymore, I do. When it works it rocks! But what had exuded elegance and performance now feels clumsy and occasionally verges on demented. What happened?!
The answer is iVista, aka iOS 4, the latest iPhone OS that Apple more-or-less requires you to install through iTunes. This isn’t the first major upgrade to the OS, there have been several. But iVista hit my phone like a load of bricks. Bam–my iPhone 3G groaned under the load.
It’s fair to say that each major version of the iOS is tuned for the latest & greatest iPhone hardware platform. My 3G is now two years and two hardware versions behind. Left alone, running the original OS (including minor revisions) my iPhone would still be supercharged. Missing the latest features, for sure, but as energetic as the day it arrived.
It turns out it is possible to downgrade from iOS 4, but the process is extremely technical and not for the weak of heart. I’m sure it’s not Apple sanctioned. That said, here’s how to do it.
Having invested time organizing all my apps into folders (an iOS 4 feature I like), I’m not sure I’m going to ditch iOS 4 just yet… but there have been times I’ve been ready to take a hammer to my little friend so that day may come soon.
Or, I may fall prey to Apple’s sinister ways. With my iPhone now poisoned with iVista, I’m starting to jones for a gleaming treasure; beautiful to behold and snappy in performance. An iPhone 4! (Steve Jobs: It’s all going according to my plans. Moi-haha!)
I’ve been testing Facebook’s Open Graph “Like” buttons since they launched in April, and wanted to post an update. I think Open Graph has merit for users and publishers, but there are latency issues causing me to rethink how I implement the protocol.
Overall it’s clear that you can do all kinds of things with Open Graph, including those bordering on the creepy. I’m not a fan of creepy so staying clear of spooky games that would freak out my visitors. (Surprise! Betcha you didn’t know I knew that about you!)
But, as long as publishers make it opt-in and transparent, it has the potential for great stuff. It makes for an efficient use of the social graph–it makes sharing easy and sharing drives traffic. In fact, in just one month on my site Facebook went from rank #4 to #1 in referring sites, beating out Google. Facebook has maintained the #1 position since. Google has always been my #1 traffic source (and that traffic isn’t going down) so this is quite interesting.
The downside is that there are latency issues involved in Open Graph, since a tagged page can’t fully load until Facebook responds. Nothing new here — every external tag has the potential for latency. I already have multiple third party javascript tags on every page (for Google Analytics and Google Checkout) but haven’t found them to be a problem. However, on a “photo roll” page on my site there might be a dozen or more photos, and each photo has its own Like button. So, while the latency for each button load is small, a dozen buttons (or more!) on a single page add up. My photo roll pages load but don’t scroll until all the buttons are loaded. That’s not a great user experience(!)
So, I plan to keep testing the Like buttons, but new sections will only have Like buttons on individual photo pages (not the roll). This should make latency a non-issue. However, it will also hide the buttons from most users, since my visitors tend to browse photos on the photo roll pages, and less often view the detail (photo enlargement) pages. I thought it was cool to scan a photo roll and instantly see all the “liked” photos… now you’ll have to view a photo’s detail page to see if that photo is liked. In a perfect world without latency, I’d continue with multiple buttons on the photo roll (fun and useful) but I can’t have pages acting wonky.
Once I see how this use of the Like buttons compares with my previous implementation, I’ll standardize on one approach. More later!
