I hate to have to report this, but it’s just sad how crappy the current experience is on 3.0-JB. In some order:
- Cydia crashes like crashing is its job. Tap search then manage – boom, crash. Uninstall an app – 50% likely crash. click too many items in a row because cydia is slow but you know your way around – crash. In fact, you can really just imagine crashing for a split second, and it will happen, wherever you are. Restoring my phone to its previous state of installed apps was failing so badly that I installed apt and did it from an SSH session. Only to find out that Aptitude is broken. At least there is apt-get, too. But alas, I still didn’t get very far, since NONE of the apps I previously had work. Starting, most obviously, with Backgrounder.
- Backgrounder is (temporarily) dead. This isn’t that critical, per se, since apps usually crash while in the background anyway, but I’m annoyed not to have it because at least Pandora would reliably stay alive while you emailed or, to a lesser extent, texted. Now, no matter which method you use to invoke Backgrounder, the invocation tanks MobileSubstrate and sends it into safe mode. Bummer. And Pandora Controls was a nice pairing for backgrounder since you could use it to control Pandora from other apps just like the iPod. Kind of a moot point, if backgrounder is dead, but
- Pandora Controls just doesn’t work, at all. Worse, it causes Pandora to crash on launch. Yay safe mode. Don’t install it.
- I could probably survive in the time being before repairs to the above by using one of my FAVORITE iPod apps, Instinctiv Shuffle. It is basically a smart shuffle hooked into the iPod app that attempts to shuffle your full library based on your mood, and it seems to work pretty well. It pretty much just makes shuffle less random, playing similar songs to the ones you recently didn’t-skip, but it’s a nice addition for the car. But it doesn’t install on 3.0. Boo.
- hClipboard straight doesn’t work. Yeah, there’s official copy/paste now, but I liked the templates feature, not having to re-enter email addresses all the time. And I liked a multiple-entry clipboard. And iKeyEx had other cool features.
- ICY is cool, but also buggy: So far, I’ve found that you can reliably crash it by cancelling an app install.
And then there are a ton of other stupid issues. Like what’s up with this screenshot?
There’s no text entry field there, guys. And in general, things seem slower (though some faster). Overall, this could be going better.
All I can say is thank god PdaNet works, since AT&T will inevitably break the official tethering channel. I will admit, the iPhone interface for it is cooler and less goofy, but it also doesn’t work (for me, won’t connect). And when it does, you’ll get charged out the ass for it, which is key too.
The fact that almost all of these developers you are complaining about didn’t get access to a fully working (vm_map-capable jailbreak) until Friday, the same time you got access to it, makes these complaints look a little, well, impatient/ungrateful ;P. Think of all the things that /are/ working, and how these all have been coming together in real-time as users report problems, and suddenly it all looks incredibly impressive. I’d say in another week or two everything will be fully operational again.
You know, you’re absolutely right, and I’m really sorry that you took my comments this way because that’s not actually what I mean at all. Trust me, my day job involves both IT support and coding, and I’m intimately familiar with the fact that neither of those two things ever goes as fast as you expect it to. I also certainly understand that, especially on the jailbreak side of things (where the general rule is that the coding is harder/less documented and the pay mostly doesn’t exist), developers have serious day jobs too and can only support these kinds of things in their spare time.
Of course, speaking to the guy who wrote much of the basis for jailbreak software, I’m sure I don’t have to explain that to you :).
Unfortunately, I don’t think this was clear, but my BIGGEST source of frustration is the double whammy of Apple’s largely lackluster announcements re: iPhone and AT&T’s GIANT middle fingers to just about everyone in the developer community. To start things off, consider what 3.0 brings us:
copy/paste. What device DOESN’T have copy/paste? My freaking motorola feature phone had that when I first got a cell at age 14. Moreover, KennyTM took care of it alreay with hClipboard, and his implementation is, in my eyes, better. His only failing point is that the selection mechanism feels kind of jury-rigged, and nobody can blame him since Apple never provided any real APIs for that. Much less for implementing it globally.
Bluetooth profiles that are ACTUALLY up to par with a 2.0+EDR chip. Yeah, I’m pumped I can use wireless headphones but let’s think back to how pissed I was when I bought my 3G in the first place only to find out that “Bluetooth 2.0+EDR” meant “Sorry, this part’s mostly useless.”
Tethering. It’s kind of a joke. Yeah, the tethering interface is nice by virtue of the fact that apple had full reign to integrate it into the OS, but how much do you expect we’ll pay for that? I’ll take PdaNet. It’s freer and less ATT-y, and for that I will (and have) paid $30.
Spotlight. This is most useful for mail, and who HADN’T thought of searching in mail.
But I digress. Point is, 3.0 is a whole lot of things that always should have been around. More to the point is the big fuck-you of an iPhone 3G S. Basically, it adds Video, 7.2mbit 3G, a much faster processor, and OpenGL 2.0. What does that mean? It means that I still would have bought it if only for the faster processor, but instead, I’m stuck running 3.0 on something that was intended to only barely chug through it tolerably. Once things get tweaked up, it might not be so bad, but I have a feeling I’ll be hurting for that 600mhz for a while. 7.2 mbit is a joke, since no city in the US actually has it. But here’s the real kicker, OpenGL 2. Basically it means that developers want to program for the 3gs only, because the result looks better an is more fun. But that means two things. First, it means developers have to upgrade to the 3gs. In the case of most single-developer operations, that means doing so via AT&T. Developers, being a very specific group of people almost universally ineligible for the normal upgrade pricing. Moreover, it means there will be a drive to get the 3gs simply because some higher-quality games will run exclusively on it and not the 3g. A drive costing $500 for the majority of current-users.
So mostly, I’m pissed about that. It’s just that I can live without that so long as everything I’m used to in the jailbreak works, because the jailbreak ecosystem is so developed now that pretty much every issue that the phone originally had is solved. But I was bummed, because obviously everything doesn’t work. It’s not that I BLAME anyone, far from it. It’s just that for now, it sucks.
Also, as an aside, I should thank you directly for doing so much for the iPhone community in general. I noticed that you released an updated MobileSubstrate earlier today or last night, and it’s impressive that you’re still so responsive given all the other things you have to do, and given that you also develop for Android.
Why don’t you stop bothering yourself and just sell your iphone to someone that may appreciate what kind of nice device is, and hopefully that is smart enought to avoid to upgrade right after the release of an “unofficial patch” for an official software that’s out since a few days?
Think about it.. even a newbie that just finished reading “using iphone for dummies (with jailbreaking in appendix A)” should know that upgrading now is not a good idea, because 3.0 is very recent and, as saurik said, the underground community just started working on it.
You wrote you’re an IT guy, so you shouldn’t be a complete newbie about this stuff.. are you surprised that something that came to life days ago is still not perfect ? Don’t think someone that claims to work on IT seriously would be so crazy to upgrade his production system (server, desktop, phone, or whatever) to the new software version that have been released 48 hours earlier.. if you want to play with the latest version, you should know what you’re playing with reading lots of docs, and don’t complain when something doesn’t work.
Reading this post, what i understood of you point of view is: new iphone sucks, apple sucks, at&t sucks, jailbreaking sucks.. everything sucks. I liked my older version, but now i have the new one and this sucks.
Well, in my opinion, doing something without knowing enough and thinking enough about it sucks… and looks like that’s what you did before writing this page
I just want to say that i started writing my post before the post at June 21, 2009 at 10:53 am appeared. btw, looks like you got what i was meaning, so there is nothing more to say i guess
d, It is true that you never upgrade a production system without knowing exactly what is likely to happen, which is why, at work, I never do that. That said, on my own time, I usually like to be the guy that finds out what should happen, which is why I always upgrade right away. Of course, usually with a backup in place. In this case, the worst thing that could have happened is that my phone stopped making calls (which, at first, it did, because I accidentally enabled hacktivate even though I’m a legit customer), and as such, I have at least two other unlocked GSM phones on hand so that I don’t lose my ability to get in touch with people.