New Mac games from GameHouse

I don’t think the RSS feed for new releases is easily discoverable on the GameHouse site, so here it is: feed://www.gamehouse.com/rss/rss_macnewreleases.jsp.

Top Posting

One of my big complaints about email on the iPhone is that it’s virtually impossible to do anything except top posting.

This is an always controversial question. John Gruber has a good argument against.

BTW, I’ve filed a bug on the subject. If you don’t have access to Apple’s Radar system (all it takes is a free developer account — you don’t actually have to develop anything), you can use the iPhone Feedback page to ask for an improved email experience.

iPhone Security

iPhone lets you use a 4-digit password to lock your phone. I realize that’s not very secure, but I’d like to keep my e-mail and contacts from casual reading if I happen to lose my iPhone. It’s a little bit of a pain, but Apple helps lessen it.

For one thing, you can use the headphones to control the iPod without unlocking.

You can see the current date and time without unlocking — I know lots of people who use their phone as a clock, and I sometimes do myself.

And you can receive incoming calls without unlocking! (I just noticed this today.) This is hugely convenient. Once the call is over, the phone is still locked.

For better or worse, iPhone doesn’t save any web passwords. There’s no equivalent of the Mac’s keychain (which holds passwords and encrypted notes). I suppose this protects me if I lose the device, though I’d prefer the ability to set a strong password on a keychain.

Syncing New Events From iPhone

I ran into a bug where an event I created on my iPhone ended up in a read-only calendar (i.e. one I’d subscribed to) in iCal.

After filing the bug (rdar://5319313), I played around some more and found a workaround.

I had chosen (via iTunes) to sync “All calendars.” If I changed the setting to “Selected calendars” and then checked all the calendars, new events created on my iPhone ended up in the calendar I’d actually selected.

Presenting at Casual Connect

I will be giving a presentation at Casual Connect in a little over a week. I’m calling it “Secrets of Casual Game Development.”

Trying out Blogger

I'm mostly experimenting with Google’s Blogger, but I was also unhappy with the software I used to create my previous (and rather sporadic) weblog. And it looks like Google doesn’t index my weblog often enough, so that’s another incentive to move here. (Hmm, funny that...)

So I’ll duplicate my recent posts (with their original dates) and see how it goes from there.

iPhone Inside the Firewall

Apparently iPhone lacks Bonjour (Zeroconf) — I tried using a bookmark to my printer (which is a .local address), and the server couldn’t be found. So if you have internal servers which are only accessible as “intranet.local”, you’re out of luck. (But you can use a local IP address, like “192.168.1.2”.)