I often talk to people about Voxer, a free app for smartphones that I find incredibly useful. I am going to describe it in a little more detail, because the official website can be slightly confusing.

The short version: Voxer is a free walkie-talkie app. But that’s just part of the story. Whereas a traditional walkie-talkie, by definition, requires that all parties involved are ‘tuned in’ at the same time, Voxer doesn’t have that requirement, and mixes live broadcasting with traditional audio messaging.

This sets it apart from any other app that supports voice messages, such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and whatnot. With those, a 3-minute message requires a 6-minute turnaround time, minimum: 3 minutes for the sender to record it and 3 minutes for the receiver to listen to it, plus whatever time it takes to transmit it. There’s no way around it, as the message needs to be fully delivered in order to be played, and it needs to be fully recorded in order to be delivered in the first place.

Voxer takes a completely different approach. Person A starts recording a message (with no set duration) and Person B receives a notification immediately. At this point, one of three things can happen:

• Person B already has the Voxer app open when Person A starts talking: the message is played live, with no delay.
• Person B has the Voxer app closed and only opens it only when Person A is done talking: the message is stored and is essentially a voicemail.
• Person B opens the Voxer app for instance 1 minute into the recording: Person B starts playing the message form the beginning while Person A keeps recording; of course, Person B will finish listening to the message 1 minute after Person A is done recording.

There are a few caveats, however. First of all, Voxer is not for phone calls: it’s half-duplex, meaning that you either talk or you listen. This is actually a good thing, because it’s more personal than text messages but way less invasive than calls. Also, while on iPhone the default setting is to use the record button in a “sticky” way (tap once to start recording, tap once to stop), which is arguably more convenient, on Android the default setting appears to be push-to-talk (tap and hold to start recording, release to stop); this can be changed in the settings for each individual chat, rather than for the app as a whole.

The app will automatically find your contacts who also use it when you first install it. On Android it does so by reading your contact list and own phone number automatically, while on iOS it asks for you for your number. If you don’t want to do this, you can just use a fake number, such as 555-111-2222 (note however that if anyone has that number in their list, you will show up as a contact to them.)

Other than by matching contacts, you can find people via their Voxer username. By default this is something really ugly such as “johnsmi1234”, but you can change it (or just find out what yours is) by going to “My profile”. Note that in previous versions of Voxer this required a paid subscription, but can now be done for free.

It also supports group chats up to 15 people and Apple Watch for iOS users, and you can exchange images and text messages within the app as well. As a bonus, if you have a headset with an action button (including Bluetooth ones) you can use that to control the recording.

There is also a Pro version that costs $2.99/mo and gives you additional features, but most people will be perfectly fine with the free version if they use Voxer for personal use.

Voxer is available for free for iOS (App Store), Android (Play Store) and Windows Phone (WP Store). Of course, it requires a data connection — Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G/LTE — in order to work.

My “Mobile Applications” folder contains 924 items, weighing a whopping 18.78 GB. iTunes only lists 920 apps, so something is out of sync already.
Obviously, I do not use that many apps. My iPhone 4 only has 163, and I could delete many of those as I don’t use them. My father’s iPad, which uses my Apple ID to get apps so that he doesn’t have to purchase the same ones I have already paid for, has about 250, most of them being games he tried once or twice and left there.

I’m about to phase out my glorious 2006 iMac in favor of a new Mac Mini and I’m going to just move the iTunes Library folder; this way, everything is retained and I don’t have to convince a brand new iTunes not to nuke the iPhone and iPad just because they have been synced to a different machines. As for the music itself, I could also use iTunes Match to carry it over, but I’d rather just drop the folder in and be happy about it. The point is that I really don’t want to waste about 20 GB on the new computer for apps I honestly don’t care about.

The most immediate method, deleting the apps from iTunes, kind of works… except that if you delete an app that’s used on your device, it will be removed from that device upon syncing. The proper way to do this would be to manually delete from iTunes the ones you’re not using. There’s a little problem with that: there is absolutely no way of knowing whether any local app is being synced to any device or not, unless you manually check whether every single app is on any of your devices. This sounds dreadful enough with my iPhone, with which I’m very familiar; doing it with my father’s iPad sounds like a nightmare.

Thankfully, after a little searching, I found the way to do it in a much easier fashion. Of course, if you follow these instructions and you delete important data or things like that, I’m not responsible. Do this at your own risk.

I’m using iTunes 10.7 on OS X 10.7 Lion, but it should be the same on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. When iTunes 11 is released in a few days or weeks, it’s probably going to be much different.

The first, very important thing to do is to disable automatic syncing. To do this, open iTunes’s preferences, go to Devices, and check Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically. You can do this even when your device is not connected, but I recommend doing this when it’s already connected so it’s even less likely that something goes wrong.
After you’ve made sure that the new device does not start to sync automatically, go ahead and run a full backup, just in case something goes wrong. Find your device in the sidebar, right click on it, and choose Back Up. It will take a while.
After it’s done backing it up, it’s time to rock and roll.

Click Apps in the the Library section of the side bar, and either choose Select All from the Edit menu, or hit Command-A on your keyboard. Now all your bazillion apps will be selected. You can either delete them, which I do not recommend, or you can move them to a folder. With all of them selected, just drag them into a folder you previously created with the Finder to make a manual backup of all of them. Again, it will take a while. Once all the files are safely copied, you can delete them: just press backspace on your keyboard, or choose Delete from the Edit menu. At this point your may get a scary message warning you that the apps will be deleted from all devices to which they had been copied. Confirm the deletion and move to trash; that’s why you just copied them out.

Now, here’s the nice part. With your device still connected, right click on its name in the sidebar and choose Transfer Purchases. You may be asked for your Apple ID password, and iTunes will make a local copy of all the apps that are currently on your device.
Rinse and repeat for any other extra device, and you’re done: at the end you will only have a local copy of the apps that you currently have on your devices.

If you want to be extra sure that everything has been copied correctly, you may want to run Transfer Purchases again for each device. At the end, you can safely re-enable automatic syncing. If you start the syncing procedure immediately, it should not copy (nor delete!) any apps in any direction, meaning they are already synchronized.

At this point, if you want, you can delete the backup folder you had copied your apps to when you began this whole ordeal. I’d suggest keeping them on a backup disk just in case, but unless the apps are pulled from the App Store, you can safely download them again at no extra cost at any time.

Personally, I ended up recovering about 13 GB by doing this. Not bad, considering that from my point of view those 13 GB were filled with pointless fluff!

So, you’ve got the shiny new iOS 4.2 on your iPhone 4 and you have enabled AirPrint sharing on your Mac, using either the free Hacktivator or one of the commercial packages. You are very satisfied (albeit a bit doubtful about actually using it in the future), except for one thing: it prints in color, and you really wish it could print in grayscale, because toner is not cheap.

When printing on the Mac this is easy: in any application’s print dialog, you change the specific settings of your printer to convert to grayscale and save a new preset. Then you just select “use last selected preset” and you forget about it, limiting yourself to changing it to color whenever you feel like wasting money (or printing money, if you’re that kind of naughty boy.)

AirPrint, on the other hand, just doesn’t have any setting, aside from the number of copies. You can’t even choose which pages to print. It’s either all or nothing. And it prints in color. It all seems lost, but fear not! OS X’s print subsystem is based on — or rather, it actually is — CUPS, which stands for Common Unix Printing System. Therefore all you need to is fiddling with it to change the actual default settings. How do you do that? It’s very, very simple.

Go to http://localhost:631/ (the CUPS configuration runs via a pseudo-webserver on port 631; don’t worry, this only works on your own machine for your own machine), and click on Administration on top, then click on Manage Printers. Click on the name of the printer in question, and in the Administration pull-down menu choose Set Default Options. What you see now depends on the actual printer you have, but it should very closely resemble the options you get in the OS X print dialog. In my case, the General tab shows a setting called  Color Mode that lets me choose between Color and Grayscale. I set it to the latter, clicked the Set Default Options button, typed in my username and password, and off I went.

Note that you must have administrator rights, and you have use your short username, the one in lowercase with no spaces. It’s the same one that gives the name to your own home folder.

(Many thanks to Marco F. for the input.)

The installation was extremely simple, with no remote activation or anything like that. This is because the GM is essentially the very same that will be pushed to the masses in a week. I simply pressed the option key while clicking on ‘update’ in iTunes and I got a dialog window to choose the .ipsw file from the disk. After that, it took its sweet updating time and lo and behold, my two-year-old device was running the latest incarnation of iOS.

I am extremely pleased to report that my iPhone 3G has come back to life. After using it extensively, to the extent of purposefully opening all sorts of apps in rapid succession to make it crumble, it stood strong. I can assure you that this is not placebo: it’s pleasant to use again. Most importantly, it doesn’t randomly freeze for a random amount of time in a random fashion in random apps. Sometimes it does take its time when the lock screen comes up (perhaps it does some cleaning when it automatically locks, and it reloads something?), but other than that, it’s completely different from 4.0.x.

Mind you, this is still a two-year-old phone and there have been two major revisions since it came out, so do not expect The Flash in your iPhone (hey! that’s a geeky double-entendre! neat!), but it’s definitely a major improvement. One disappointment stands, though: 3G units just don’t have the hardware to run the Epic Citadel demo, but — once again — is anybody really surprised by that?

The real irony is that my iPhone 3G was such a pain to use in the past couple of months (especially with the annoying freezes) that I honestly can’t even say whether 4.1 makes it as fast as 3.1.2, or if it’s still slower than that. All I know is that it’s faster than 4.0.2, and that’s all I care about.

This leads me to think that these new units may require iOS 4.1 at minimum, and the new firmware could therefore be made available to iPhones (and older generations of iPod Touches — ok now that’s a weird plural) on the same day.

Of course, the new units may be shipped with a particular version that won’t be made available to other devices, as it was with the iPad: iPhone OS 3.2 was never made available for iPhones, and iPads won’t see iOS 4 until the fall. Apple may also release iOS 4 for iPad on Wednesday, or give a release date. Or perhaps introduce iPad 2 whilst lowering the price of the current iPad, probably giving a refund to angry customers (it has already happened with the original iPhone.) Besides, Apple would get to use the line they love so much: our competitors are still trying to copy version 1, and we have already released version 2.

Personally, I don’t care what new hardware is on the horizon. I just want iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and I want it to make my 3G decent again.

I still think that Apple shouldn’t have allowed 3G units to run iOS 4. The advantages are negligible: aside from folders, unified inbox and very little extra things, the list of what’s missing is huge. No multitasking, because the phone just can’t handle it; no wallpaper, because the phone just can’t handle drop shadows in real time (well, why not pre-render them once?); no screen lock (why, Apple, WHY?) and so on. Latest news is that it won’t even have Game Center, but then again, most games will probably soon drop support for the 3G entirely. The question remains: why did they let us upgrade? My educated guess is that they can push iAds to our devices, but I cringe at the thought of how pathetic the experience must be. We’re not even getting wallpapers, and they really expect us to navigate ads that are “as fun as apps”? Give me a break.

Going back to 3.2 is possible, but it’s a messy and unsupported procedure, not to mention that most apps have been updated to run on iOS 4 and that can be difficult to circumvent. Sticking with iOS 4 is a painful experience on its own.

This is not the geek in me who wants the latest toy, trust me. I do admit that the iPhone 4 is nice, especially coming from a sorry-I-don’-t-do-videos-at-all iPhone 3G. I am not making up excuses with myself to go and buy an iPhone 4. The truth is the 3G has gotten so slow that it’s impossible to use. I honestly hope I will never need to make an emergency call with it, because I may as well start crying for help instead of wasting time.

It has to be said that not all 3G units are created equal, it seems. Some people have very few problems, while others have pretty much given up. A friend of mine was so fed up that he ditched it and got an HTC Desire (which is a very sweet phone, by the way.)

The general opinion, however, is that iOS on the iPhone 3G, well, sucks. Remedies popped up all over the web, ranging from confirmable attempts, such as disabling Spotlight, to the voodoo ritual of  the “double hard reboot” to clear any leftover cache (which kind of works, but why do it twice? nobody really knows; then again, it’s a ritual.) It seems that a simple reboot does not really help. Rebooting normally apparently saves the state of the phone onto the flash memory as a disk image, similarly to the “deep sleep” feature of modern Macbooks. The hard reboot is much more brutal, and works better.

After a while, though, things start going wrong again. Be it an hour or two days, the slowness creeps back. It becomes unbearable. Sure, you can do the hard reboot again, you can close any Safari window before moving on to other things, but at the end of the day you may be in a rush to do something with your phone, and that’s when Murphy’s law strikes. The problem, in fact, is not just a general sense of sluggishness: it’s that it literally freezes up for a random period of time. Sometimes it’s a few seconds, other times it can stay in its coma for a solid two or three minutes. Again: I am not making this up, and this may be different from phone to phone, but that’s my experience. What’s worst is that it happens in a completely random fashion, and I cannot reproduce it on demand. Sometimes it happens when I’m writing a text message, other times when I’m using Safari, or even as I’m opening up the Settings app to put the phone into airplane mode for the night.

The only consistency I can mention is that gaving the keyboard on the screen makes the phone especially prone to sleepiness. I am able to blindly write a full text message; thankfully, at least with that, it usually catches up and doesn’t miss anything; however, I usually end up making several typos because, being unresponsive, it gives me no suggestions until it wakes up.

Yesterday night I wanted to show a website — ZooBorns — to my father. Bad idea. I was over wi-fi, but bandwidth was limited because my iMac was busy with the network. After noticing it was slow at loading data (it was exclusively a network problem up to that point), I went to the Settings app to disable wi-fi, and it fell asleep after I tapped “Wi-fi”: it had even made the item blue because it had recognized the tap, but it took about 45 seconds to load the next page. I disabled it, tapped the home button, and re-opened Safari. IT started to load over 3G and all was fine, until I scrolled down. I understand that it’s a huge page with lots of pictures, and I can live with the fact that I get the “checkered background” as it’s re-rendering parts of it. But if the whole phone falls completely asleep for over three minutes, and fails to respond to any tap or button press — effectively making it impossible to even force a shutdown — well, it’s a bit too much. I can tell that the phone is completely numb because it doesn’t even dim the screen, which should happen after one minute of inactivity (yes, I am that conservative when it comes to battery life.)

So, are 3G units destined to be useless? No, not necessarily. I think that, while the hardware isn’t up to par with its younger siblings, it can still be decent. I think that iOS 4 has some fundamental flaws on 3G, and maybe even on the 3GS and the iPhone 4; on those units, though, it may not be as easily visible. Of course, it may also be that the problems in question are limited to the 3G. I am talking about memory leaks. Something is extremely wrong in the way memory is handled in iOS 4, but this is my own speculation. I do not develop for the iOS platform, and I don’t know much about its internals. Yet, I have a very concrete way of seeing that memory isn’t released properly: MemoryInfo. It’s a cheap little app that shows the most memory-hungry processes running on an iPhone, and automatically frees memory by killing those processes that it deems killable. Well, with 3.2 my inactive memory count usually went from 7-10 to 35 MB; now it goes from 1-2 to 45-50 MB, even though it quickly decreases to 30 MB free again without even exiting the app.

Whether the culprit is Safari or iOS itself, a memory leak is occurring somewhere for sure, and it manifests itself at random times with freezes that can make everything difficult. Apple is investigating the problem, and that’s a good thing. I’m not sure what their approach will be, but given that the OS is going to grow bigger anyway, they could simply allow it to swap on the flash memory. Right now iOS has no support for virtual memory: the actual RAM is the only memory it can use. Why they decided to do that beats me: sure, smaller units with just 8 GB of flash space can’t really reserve that much for potential swap, but even 5% would be an acceptable trade-off. Back in the old days of Linux, the rule to calculate how much space to reserve for the swap partition was: no less than twice as much as the physical RAM. With 128 MB of physical memory, an extra 400 MB would do wonders, and it wouldn’t even be too slow. It would certainly be faster than using a spinning hard drive, anyway. Let’s see what they come up with. In the meantime, enjoy a sad but true video:

For the sake of completeness, here are the machines by Apple I have owned over the better part of the last decade: iMac G3 “Blue Dalmatian”, iBook G3, Airport “Snow” Base Station, PowerMac Dual G4, iBook G4, iMac Intel, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPhone 3G. What can I say, I am very satisfied with their products, even though I have nothing against alternatives: my current wireless network is provided by a Netgear router and a D-Link access point, for instance.

I didn’t get the original iPhone because it was never officially available in Italy, and I didn’t want to play the cat and mouse game of jailbreaking to make it work. I got the unlocked 3G in September 2008, and have been quite happy with it. Sure, it did have a few strange limitations (tethering, just to name one; something that any Nokia phone has been able to do for years when it was simply called “using your phone as a modem”), but I was quite happy.

Things changed slightly with the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. It was essentially the same phone, other than better hardware specs, the ability to shoot video and a digital compass. Not a big deal for me, and I never felt the need to upgrade, as I knew it was just an incremental upgrade and that the next one would be big. I was however disappointed when I noticed that iPhone OS 3.0 made my iPhone 3G a bit slower. Ah well.

Fast forward about a year, and the iPhone 4 is introduced, together with iOS 4. (Incidentally, I personally find the name iOS hideous; why not call it Apple Mobile OS or something like that?) It was clear that people with an iPhone 3G were considered pretty much an afterthought. Our hardware is, apparently, not powerful enough for multitasking, for background pictures (?!) and for the screen orientation lock (?!?), so why update? Folders, unified inbox and some other minor things. Oh, and iAds. There is enough power for that, isn’t there?

I do realize that iPhones are subsidized in the US, and that people with a 3G have a contract that’s about to expire; that they can therefore jump to the iPhone 4 bandwagon for a very low entry price. However, testing iOS 4 on iPhone 3G units would have been very much appreciated by those of us who cannot, or do not want to, upgrade.

See, iOS 4 made my iPhone 3G so slow that I am considering going to a random store a get one of those extra-basic €19.90 black and white phones. Ok, maybe it’s not that radical, but it’s frustrating. While swiping across the menu is faster (caching, maybe?), everything else is slow. Sometimes it takes up to 15 seconds for the phone to wake up from sleep and start responding to my touch. I get an SMS, I tap ‘view’, and it takes at least 5-6 seconds to show it. Forget about snapping a quick picture, for the Camera app has gotten very, very lazy. Mind you, my 16 GB iPhone 3G has 5 GB free and I only have 48 apps on it, so I’m not sure what’s the culprit here. I tried restoring rather than upgrading, and then did a double hard reset; that seems to help, but after 12 hours, it feels like it’s reverting to being slow as hell.

It seems that nobody cared to see how older units perform. Which leads me to the iPhone 4 itself. It is a fact that Apple appears to favor appearance over functionality at times: take the Mighty Mouse, or the Magic Mouse. The iPhone 4 is gorgeous, elegant, sleek and sexy. But it’s amazing messy.

The front and the back are entirely made of glass. The same glass used for helicopters’ windows, it seems; however, the latter is as thick as a whole iPhone. The result? Units cracking and crashing from falling from a couple of feet, or even as low as one foot.

Then you get the amazing signal loss if you happen to short-circuit the two antennas on the lower-left corner. This would be quite a mess for me, because even though I’m right-handed, I’m left-eared. I just can’t use a phone on my right ear, it feels extremely unnatural to me. Then again, I also unscrew bottles’ caps with my left hand and I would fail miserably if I were to use my right hand. In any case, if you bridge the two antennas with your fingers, you’re doomed: signal goes to zero and calls drop. There are many videos demonstrating the problem. Considering that I also hold my iPhone 3G with my left hand and use my right index finger as a “stylus” of sorts, I’d be unable to use the thing.

Who’s forcing me to buy one, you ask? Nobody, and in any case it won’t be available in Europe until late Summer. Yet it’s amazing that such a big issue was not discovered. While it is true that all cell phones — or any radio device, actually — will have a harder time staying connected if something interferes with its antenna, it just should not be this bad in every day use. Steve Jobs’ alleged own response is that people are just holding it wrong. Might be, but it’s just the way people hold it in commercials, and how even he himself used it during the keynote last month. Perhaps it’s a plot to sell the infamous $30 rubber bumpers, which sound like a good idea anyway, considering the glass issue.

There is speculation of a software fix coming as soon as tomorrow, but many are skeptical about it. It feels like a hardware problem indeed, but it seems that the same behavior is appearing on iPhone 3G and 3GS units as well, so there might indeed be some software component. Perhaps the system fails to increase the transmission power when the signal is attenuated? Or maybe it just shuts down the radio subsystem whenever a shortcircuit is detected on the iPhone 4?

It would also be very interesting to understand why this happens when the gap itself is bridged. If the two antennas are made of metal, they are conductive all along. The bug should therefore be reproducible by touching them even on distant points.

In any case, we will see. I just hope that they make the performance on the iPhone 3G somewhat better, or I may just have to go back to 3.1.3.