A sad tale of MobileMe and the iPhone

I lost all my contacts information on my iPhone recently. Sad tale this is.

I signed up with MobileMe when it first came out. My iPhone was then setup to sync contact and other info with MobileMe via their "Push" mechanism. It worked worderfully for a while, and I should have gone into MobileMe and exported everything every once in a while.

This last week the free account that I had with MobileMe ended, and I decided I did not want to pay for the service. So, I logged in, and canceled my account. Nothing seemed to be affected on my phone.

This morning I tried to make a call from one of my "Favorites", and found that my "Favorites" list only had phone numbers, with no names attached. I opened my "Contacts", and.... well, like they say, the rest is history. I tried to restory from a previous full system backup, but it didn't help any. I'm guessing that the backup only stored the fact that my contacts where up in MobileMe.

Lesson: ALWAYS backup your data somewhere where _YOU_ have full access to it. I guess this goes for the stuff that I have with google too. I'm going to have to find a way to back my email, calendar, docs, etc., to a location where it cannot be beyond my reach. Sad.

I emailed a bunch of people today asking for their bits, and have gotten a ton of them back. Now I have my contact data backed up to 3 different locations: iPhone backup, windows address book, plain text vCard data.

Best iPhone text editor?

Well, IMHO... Are you ready? No, I don't think you are! So, a friend and I had to fix some xml file on the iPhone. We opened this marvelous text editor and were able to get the thing fixed in no time. We could move up and down, move to the exact line, search very easily, all of this from the main 2 keyboards (letters and numbers). Can you guess yet? No need for funky C-u 8 C-n command to go down a couple of lines, no need for arrow keys, no need for mouse commands! The editor with all the Ctrl command would have been a pain to use, since Ctrl sequences are a pain do execute. Arrow movements are slow and imprecise. Do you give in?

jjjjjjddO(fix the text)[esc]:x

Pure w00tness! P.S. If you still don't know, don't worry, it wouldn't have made a difference :(

Calendar: MobilMe vs. iPhone

Haven't used either that much, but by the looks of it, I won't be using them exclusively in thenear future.  Two things that are rubbing me the wrong way, can't figure out how to:

• Ssee the "todo" list from the iPhone interface.
• Add "alerts" from the MobilMe interface.  I have to go to my phone to add those.

Granted, I haven't spent a lot of time researching these issues, but I feel I shouldn't have to.  They seem pretty basic.  Either they are not there, or they weren't obvious enough for this user to find them.

Apple pulls yet another app from the store

I wonder how much more of this kind of behavior the market will allow. How can we depend on an app if it seems that Apple can just pull them from the repository? I wasn't sure I liked the idea of jailbreakers, but now I'm convinced. I was hoping to start developing on the iPhone. I had even priced iBooks so that I could use their fancy dev tools. All of that is gone. I will try to develop something for my w00t toy, I mean phone, but it will not be the way Apple would have liked me to do it.