Swiss German is not German

Writing Swiss German on a German keyboard on the iPhone is messy. Autocorrection gets into the way constantly. There is a property which allows you to switch autocorrection off or on but Apple simply doesn't show this switch if you choose german language (or its not offered preinstalled on the models sold here). In other words, you must jailbreak your phone to be able to switch off autocorrection by adding one single line into a .plist file.

Its so easy for apple to fix this but they did not think someone in Switzerland might want to write english,german,italian, swissgerman, french etc. on the same phone. While switching between german and english keyboard is ok to switch autocorrection to the corresponding language, when it comes to swiss german, it just messes up your text totally. And then there are other people from other countries living here who want to write their native language for which the iPhone might not have support for. Well autocorrection makes it very difficult, I can tell you.

I reported this problem to Apple back in August already as Bug #6162063 and it got marked as duplicate of Bug #6182799. However it did not get fixed in 2.1 firmware.

Now I realize I'm not the only one. There is a large protest against autocorrection in switzerland and 4'600 7'000 end users have already signed a petition against autocorrection not being able to be disabled! This is probably about 60% of the sold iPhone 3G owners (given after 1 year of iPhone "classic" there where about 15'0000-20'000 iPhones in the market in Switzerland)

So its time for Apple to THINK DIFFERENT....

http://please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com/

QTH

My second iPhone application is now under review.

QTH is an application useful for amateur radio operators. It shows you your current location in longitude/latitude and in QTH locator.

For those non radio amateurs among you, QTH is a shortcut used in morse code and stands for "My location is...". The QTH locator (sometimes referred to Maidenhead locator) is cutting the earth into squares. It is used in VHF contesting a lot to calculate the distance of the connections.

Karl's blog

Karl Kraft has written an excellent blogpost about his experience developing for the iPhone.
You might want to read his post here:

http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2008/09/12/hazmat-a-development-story/

SysInfo

My first iPhone App is done. Its not rocket science but its a tiny useful application which gives you all kinds of information about your system such as kernel version, IP addresses, Model number etc. I have more applications in the pipeline but this one is the first one to finish and make it to the AppStore. It's now available in the AppStore.

Apple slavery (also known as NDA) [# 6192802]

Others have complained about the Apple iPhone Developer NDA. I can only double back that opinion. I followed discussions why the NDA has not been lifted by now.

Some people say because of patents because things under NDA are not considered published.


If you take a look at the NDA though, you'll see that Apple not only forbids the use of private frameworks, but any unpublished API.

So if the NDA forbids use of any unpublished API and everything given out is considered not published, the conclusion is: Whatever you build your application on, is violating Apple's NDA in some argueable sense. In other words, whatever you do, Apple has a hook to kick you out of the door if they want to and if you're out, you will never come back. Apple has the right to do anything with you.

I call this a modern version of slavery.