My AT&T contract expires in August and am considering what phone I should get. The progress of the iPhone is practically stagnating compared to how much Android is making progress. Not to mention the incredibly sucky service AT&T provides and how much cash you have to shell out for it. So I’m considering getting away from the iPhone. Anyways, for my next phone, I’m looking for:

• Good reception
• 4G
• Act as a hotspot
• Android or iPhone OS
• The phone must have headphones that function as a remote to control songs (pause/play)
• Physical Keyboard

That’s really it. Also, I’m looking for a platform that provides the following apps:

• PDF reader
• Chm reader
• Weather
• Google maps
• Lirr schedule + map
• Subway map
• Rss reader
• Twitter app
• Fandango
• Chat
• YouTube
• Radio podcasts
• Wikipedia
• Yelp
• Imdb
• Taxi
• Soundhound
• Facebook
• Linkedin
• Amazon

Which both the Android and iPhone OS provide. I would’ve gotten the EVO 4G except it didn’t have a physical keyboard. We’ll see what comes out this year.

I often use both Winamp and my iPhone to listen to music. These two, unfortunately, show the time differently in the songs. Winamp displays the time in minutes (mm) while the iPhone does it hour/minutes (hh:mm). Here’s a quick little script I whipped together because I’m too lazy to do this in my head, especially for audio books where an audio book can be over 500 minutes, and I need to convert to iPhone time because I want to continue listening where I had just left off on Winamp.

use POSIX qw(ceil floor); # used for the floor function
 
sub GetToken {
  # @_ = flatten args list from an array
  # @_[0] = first argument
 
  $data      = @_[0];
  $delimiter = @_[1];
  $token     = @_[2] - 1;
 
  @tokens_array = split($delimiter, $data);   
 
  return @tokens_array[$token]; 
}
 
sub chr_conver_min {  
  if (length(@_[0]) == 1) {
    return "0".@_[0];
  }
  else {
    return @_[0];
  }   
}
 
 
sub iphone_time_convert {
 
  # converts winamp time to iphone - winamp stores time only in minutes.  
  # @_[0]   =  winamp_time, e.g. 124:34
  # $hour   = floor($winamp_time/60);
  # $minute = $winamp_time % 60;
 
  $winamp_hour_min = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 1);  
  $winamp_seconds  = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 2);  
 
  return floor($winamp_hour_min/60).":".chr_conver_min( ($winamp_hour_min % 60) ).":".$winamp_seconds;
 
}
 
 
sub winamp_time_convert {  
 
  # converts iphone time to winamp  
  # @_[0] = iphone_time, e.g. 3:43:34    
  $iphone_hour     = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 1);  
  $iphone_min      = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 2);    
  $iphone_seconds  = GetToken(@_[0], ":", 3);
 
  return (($iphone_hour * 60) + $iphone_min).":".$iphone_seconds;
 
}
 
sub show_help {
  print "\nDisplays the conversion of time between winamp and iPhone.\n\n";
  print "   winamptime [-w2i|-i2p] [mm:ss][hh:mm:ss]\n\n";
  print "Example to convert winamp time to iPhone: \n\n";
  print "   winamptime -w2i 212:41\n\n";
  print "Example to convert iPhone time to winamp, seconds being optional: \n\n";
  print "   winamptime -i2w 2:31:41\n";
  print "   winamptime -i2w 2:31\n\n";
}
 
 
# START
 
# Optimize this:
if( $ARGV[0] eq "-w2i" ) 
{
  # winamp to iphone time
  if ( length($ARGV[1]) > 0 ) {
    print "iPhone Time: ".iphone_time_convert( $ARGV[1] )."\n";
  }
}
elsif( $ARGV[0] eq "-i2w" ) 
{
  # iphone to winamp time
  if ( length($ARGV[1]) > 0 ) {
    print "Winamp Time: ".winamp_time_convert( $ARGV[1] )."\n";
  }
}
else 
{
  show_help();
}

Output:

The M4P format is proprietary to iPhones/iPods. I needed to modify some songs that I got from the iTunes store. First I used Sharepod to remove the M4P files from my iPhone. Then I used SoundForge to record the song from Winamp playback. Winamp does not play M4P files natively, so you’ll have to install the M4P plugin. Also, you may have to run the Windows Master Volume tool to properly unmute the audio source.

If you want to burn M4P files from iTunes, create a local playlist, and drag-and-drop the M4P files you got from Sharepod into the local iTunes playlist.

Just tried out Sharepod. It’s a great free program to extract songs from your device. No installation needed, since it’s a standalone executable. No ads or sign-ups. I did come across some quirks though.

I was able to:

• Delete MP3s from my iPhone
• Copy MP3s from my computer onto my iPhone
• Copy MP3s from my iPhone onto my computer

I was not able to:

• Update a playlist when I copied an MP3 from my computer to the iPhone – still need iTunes
• Do anything with the Photos options on Sharepod – when I click on  ”Photos” the application locks up.

I needed a program to convert movie files to iPhone. I found this great tool called FLV to AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod Converter. I found the best settings for an DivX encoded .AVI that was 22 minutes (an episode of The Office) at 176MB was as follows (which surprisingly generated a file that was 175 MB):

So there’s a few ways so far to develop native apps for the iPhone. Let’s count the ways:

1. The Apple Way: These technologies are the native tools that Apple encourages developers to use. They include Objective-C, Cocoa, XCode and Interface Builder. You can find more information at the Apple Developer website.

2. The .NET Way: The Mono project’s version of the .NET framework. You can use C# and the .NET framework to make native apps. Check out MonoTouch for more information.

3. The Titanium Mobile Way: It’s a framework that lets you code native apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Check it out!

4. The Adobe Way: In Flash Professional CS5 (not out yet). You can use ActionScript to create Flash applications that will compile natively to the iPhone. Read more about it in Adobe’s FAQ.

The biggest downside is if you’re a Windows user, you’re mostly out of luck. Flash Professional CS5 is the only one so far that lets you develop on a Windows machine. The rest are for MacOS’s.