amr
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What happened: AT&T on iTunes activation problems
CIO.com interviewed AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel, who confirmed that Friday's activation server outage was due to massive worldwide demand. This may not come as a surprise, but it's the only official comment we've heard. "The iTunes software appeared to have been so overwhelmed by demand [Friday] that customers were not able to go through that final stage and sync their iPhones," Siegel said. Apple has not commented on their servers' performance on Friday. Nor have we learned any more about the other great mystery: the details behind the rocky MobileMe transition that lasted Wednesday through the weekend. The CIO article also discusses Apple's physical supply chain for the iPhone 3G, and how it performed for the rollout. Analyst consensus: top notch. "Good job to Apple for mastering the physical supply chain so well that you have this high-profile launch and your problems are not on the physical side -- you have product in stock," said Kevin O'Marah, chief strategy officer at AMR Research. [Via Reddit.]
1.1.1 iPhone firmware offers low-rent Push-to-Talk
Although I knew that the 1.1.1 firmware update introduced more attachment viewing support, I didn't realize until now that it added AMR playback. AMR, if you don't recall, refers to Adaptive Multi-rate Compression. It's the audio data compression format used by the iPhone for both voice memos and (if you've installed my Voice Notes application) voice recording. AMR is used primarily to store spoken audio. So why is this big news? Well, if you're very very patient and you don't mind waiting for long gaps within a conversation, you can now use your iPhone as a very low-end push-to-talk device. By this I mean, you can install VoiceNotes and use it to record short messages. You can then email those short messages to a friend and they can play it back on their iPhone. To respond, they do the same: record and email. This is obviously a long way from VOIP but as a stop-gap measure it works pretty well. I tested out a voice-only conversation the other evening and, while slow, the recording and playback quality was just fine for communicating. Right now, the slowest part of the process involves addressing the message in Mobile Mail. If people show an interest, I'm considering either updating VNotes or writing an app that allows you to add the recipient's email once and then handles the addressing bit. Let me know in the comments.
iPhone Voice Recorder Utility
My iPhone broke. The screen just died a slow death, getting brighter and brighter and then very hot and then...nothing...over the course of a morning. With no phone to play with this morning, I did a lot of thinking and hunting through iPhone foundation files instead. And I seemed to find quite a lot of interesting calls in the Celestial framework, specifically the AVRecorder class. I was pretty sure the capability was in there to begin with--after all, didn't the Steve promise us one back in the January Keynote? So that certainty made the class hunt go a little quicker. When I returned home from the Apple Store Genius Bar with my new loaner, I put all that thought into code and this is what turned up: my newly written iPhone Voice Recorder utility. Yes, it is little more than a proof-of-concept but (a) it works, and (b) is the first step towards iPhone VOIP. The recorder saves in Adaptive Multi-rate format (.amr files) that you can play back in QuickTime. I put them into the /tmp folder and tell you the name of the file when you finish your recording. As always, I'd love to hear feedback and questions.Update: Improved version with app wrapper is here
