Well as you may have read from my last blog post, i created my first iPhone app which was a rejigging of content from this website, in an iPhone app, for free. Well that got rejected because it was useless, i quite agree, so i gave it another shot.
I decided this time it was better to go with something a little more "native" so i decided to read some articles on creating iPhone apps and they were very helpful in teaching me the basics allowing me to create something useful.
I wouldn't say i was the only person on the internet who has a problem and tweets about it in the hope that venting the anger will speed up the resolution, it never does. This type of action is something i find interesting because lately tweeting about your problems can help resolve them quickly.
This article is about how Twitter can be the tool that saves your brand as a company, it is also an article about how Twitter can help you solve problems faster, and lastly it's a post about the damage Twitter can have on your brand.
The inspiration for this article comes from my experience with companies on Twitter and personally the majority of companies i have had contact with have been very helpful and their help has restored hope in their brand, for others it has not been quite a picnic.
I have been considering a review of my current hosting package for quite some time because i find that their service is often highly reliable but with some problems i have been having lately i didn't want my opinion to be skewed.
It has been a few month since then and i have decided that it is probably better for me to review them so that the same people don't get stung by the same problems that i did, time and time again.
Recently Lily Allen made a splash in the online media when she started a blog where she posted a letter regarding music piracy and how it affected smaller artists, she then went on to post replies she got from other artists.
The letter raised some interesting points from the perspective of the artists which is a new perspective because normally you only hear from the ISPs and record labels. The main point the letter makes is that piracy is not alright (probably why the blog got its name) and it only damages the music industry making it hard for smaller artists to make it big.
Incase you didn't know already i'm a web designer (and developer) and something all web designers come across at least once during the design of a website is cross-browser compatibility and i'm sure you can ask any website designer what they think of IE6 (Internet Explorer 6 - keep up with the acronyms) and they would throw so many obscenities at you that you would most likely cry.
It's no lie that web designers hates Internet Explorer especially Internet Explorer 6, simply because it has trouble rendering the simplest of things and when it does it normally renders them incorrectly. Below is my breakdown of common problems i face with the 3 versions of IE.
In the last couple of months Microsoft launched a new campaign to try and tempt Internet Explorer users to upgrade to the latest version of the browser, when you did Microsoft would give 8 meals to hungry americans and if you upgraded from Internet Explorer 6 they would double that to 16 meals.
This obviously is a good cause because I certainly don't want any fat american to have their body start consuming the large amounts of food stores around the body, so I immediately i jumped onto the cause and used it as a good way to get people to upgrade from the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 browser, a web designers worse nightmare.
As some of you may remember back in October of 2008 my beloved iPhone went into be fixed, this was done by Carphone Warehouse under the 12 month warranty because the screen went all weird and the accelerometer went all funny. Some of you may also remember i wrote several posts about how Carphone Warehouse sucked balls, today i follow that post with more Carphone warehouse failings.
So apparently something quite common with White iPhone 3Gs is cracking, these are small little hairline cracks in the areas where plastic is thin, typically around the speakers or headphone jack. My iPhone began to develop them around 4 months ago and it wasn't really a massive problem for me, however on Friday one of the cracks go worse, up to the point where the iPhone was almost in half.
Well it's been almost 1 week since i posted my disgust at The Carphone Warehouse for their poor customer service and repair package. Since then i have learnt new facts which only add to my annoyance.
First let me start by saying I have my iPhone back and it works like a treat but apart from that i'm disappointed at The Carphone Warehouse for their piss-poor customer service.
Sunday 2nd November 2008 - I gave them a call asking where my iPhone was and when i would have it back and they told me Wednesday which was 3 days overdue from the 14 days they promised me. Wednesday came along and i had heard nothing, but i waited for the length of the day to see if i got a text or phone as promised by the sales rep i called. No call ever came.
Let me set the scene. Sunday 19th October 2008, i spent the prior Friday in Burnley on one of my regular night outs taking various pictures with the piss-poor 2Mpixel camera on the iPhone 3G. Saturday i awake with a somewhat bad hangover (not the worst hangover), i come to marvel at the pictures i took the night before. I find myself looking shocked as my iPhone flips the photos around in any direction. The cause. A broken accelerometer inside the iPhone meaning that it didn't know what direction it was facing.