Joseph Scott » iphone

New AT&T Data Plans

Joseph Scott — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 23:21:00 +0000

There has been much said about the new AT&T data plans, with particular emphasis on the iPhone, as it requires a data plan. Here are some numbers:

$15 / 200 MB = $0.075/MB
$25 / 2,000 MB = $0.0125/MB

Then there are the overage charges. This is silly. If they aren’t going to offer an unlimited plan any more then just move to a standard flat rate per MB charge. Here’s what I’d suggest:

$5 charge per month to enable a data plan
$0.025 per MB in usage fees

On the low end, for people on the 200MB per month plan it brings the price down even further, to $10. On the high end, 2,000MB per month, it jumps up to $55. Use more, pay more, while making it fairly cheap to use it reasonably.

And all that should include the tethering feature, no extra charge. So what if people use more data when they are tethered, at $0.025 per MB they’ll be making plenty off of it.

iPhone OS Feature Request – Longer ‘Fetch New Data’ Intervals

Joseph Scott — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:30:11 +0000

I’ve setup my iPhone to sync my calendar and contacts with my Google account. The sync process itself works fine, my complaint is with the ‘Fetch New Data’ options.

I don’t use push for this, I’m happy to get more battery life at the expense of not having immediate updates. That leaves me with these interval options:

Every 15 Minutes
Every 30 Minutes
Hourly
Manually

I really don’t need hourly updates for my calendar and contacts, so I’m left with ‘Manually’. What I’d really like is longer intervals to select from, more in the range of 8, 12 and 24 hours. Syncing in the background a few times day would be plenty for me.

WordPress Theme Authors, Don’t Forget The wp_head() Function

Joseph Scott — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:03:33 +0000

When creating a WordPress theme don’t forget to include a wp_head(); call in the HTML HEAD section of your theme. It’s very simple to do, just include:

Before the closing HEAD tag () in your HTML.

Why make such a fuss over a single function call? Because it does a fair bit of work behind the scenes and without it some WordPress features will not work properly. Take a look at the wp_head section of the wp-includes/default-filters.php file in WordPress, you’ll see a number of events that are tied to the wp_head action.

One area where this is a particular problem is for offline blog clients that make use of the XML-RPC and AtomPub APIs in WordPress. The “Really Simple Discoverability” (RSD) link that WordPress inserts instructs these clients on where to find the RSD URL, which contains information on how the clients can send XML-RPC and AtomPub requests. We’ve seen a number of times now where an error reported by a WordPress iPhone App user is caused because there is no RSD link in their WordPress blog. Looking a little deeper reveals that there was no RSD link because the theme they were using didn’t include a call to wp_head().

If you are writing a WordPress theme here is your reminder, make sure that the wp_head() function is being called at the end of your HEAD section.