dilandau23 Wrote:

Ryuujin2 Wrote:I was under the impression that the guy who is making the official app is the same guy who had made the unofficial one

There are two Anki programs for the iPhone both currently require a jailbreak. Currently one is from Resolve and one is from inZania. Resolve is the creator of Anki. inZania claims to be developing a AppStore version of Anki. I am not sure how he can even get away with that. I suspect a lot of Anki libraries are published under GNU which I was led to believe is not AppStore compliant. This sort of confusion is why I think the inZania program should get a name change. It is going to get pretty confusing pretty fast.

Which is the one that syncs perfectly with the anki website and works smoothly with its own interface on the iphone/touch?

I thought resolve wasn't to keen on modding anki just to fit apple's needs. He made a separate anki for the iphone? Don't think I knew that... or I was confused.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Which is the one that syncs perfectly with the anki website and works smoothly with its own interface on the iphone/touch?

Please see http://ichi2.net/anki/download/ and http://www.inzania.com/ for more information.

What about Yahoo!? They offer free push and Yahoo! is much more popular in Japan than @mac.com addresses ever were.

I mean, you can sit here and tell me that, yeah, Apple purposely neutered the phone for one market in the world, but that makes a lot less sense to me than blaming incompetence. The fact that "no other carrier uses that notification" isn't evidence at all. Of course Softbank is the only country that uses that particular message: its a Japanese notification complete with grammar errors and all.

But I mean, how many other countries have you used an iPhone in for any length of time? Are you sure that no other carrier uses any sort of silent visual notification at all? I think its much more likely that the functionality was there and Softbank just chose to half-ass it (i.e. use it for email rather than system notifications) than it is to tell me that Apple, the company that wouldn't even put e-moji on their Japanese phone, designed a system for email notification with the express purpose of it sucking and forcing users to buy *another* one of their products just to get email properly.

What's unfortunate about the whole debacle is that Softbank's notifications are INSTANT. I get the notification 1-3 seconds after I send a mail to myself, whereas Yahoo's current push is sometimes seconds, minutes, or hours after the original mail arrives. (Not to mention that the notification seemingly never fails to appear, whereas I've found that sometimes my phone just doesn't get mail on Yahoo! pushed to it for some reason. This doesn't seem limited to Yahoo! though, according to all the people complaining on the MobileMe boards.)

As far as I understand it, open sourced stuff is allowed on Appstore as long as it doesn't violate the open source license. Many open source licenses are share alike which means the entire source of your derivative application must be opened, and Apple's libs are not only not opened, but they are NDA. I don't know the specifics of GNU, but there it is.

As far as I know inzania is not porting Anki though since it would require a complete language change (interpreted languages like Python are not allowed). I think he is re-implementing it from scratch, so it wouldn't impact licensing anyways. That said he hasn't shown anything of his work yet (his previous project is scrapped to be replaced by the Appstore one).

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Which is the one that syncs perfectly with the anki website and works smoothly with its own interface on the iphone/touch?

If you're asking which one you should put on your (jailbroken) iphone/touch, the answer is Ankimini, which resolve released. It will sync smoothly and work offline. http://ichi2.net/anki/download/ankimini/

The old inzania one doesn't even work with the latest firmwares, so it's defunct. I don't expect the new inzania one will be released for a long time if ever.

Don't worry about a warranty when you jailbreak your iphone. The process is completely reversible. All you have to do is "Restore" it, which will basically return it to factory settings (while deleting all of your music, etc.)

FutureBlues Wrote:What about Yahoo!? They offer free push and Yahoo! is much more popular in Japan than @mac.com addresses ever were...What's unfortunate about the whole debacle is that Softbank's notifications are INSTANT. I get the notification 1-3 seconds after I send a mail to myself, whereas Yahoo's current push is sometimes seconds, minutes, or hours after the original mail arrives.

Answered your own question there. In Japan, for corresponding with Japanese people, keitai mail must be instant. Furthermore, yahoo.co.jp and yahoo.com are totally different companies. No one uses "Yahoo!" in Japan they use "Yahoo! Japan". Try and log into your @yahoo.com account from the mail.yahoo.co.jp site or better yet try to add your @yahoo.co.jp account to your iPhone using the Yahoo button. Yahoo.co.jp is not push as far as I can tell, I just checked my account and all you can do is connect to it via pop from the iPhone. I think I am going to stop the debate here I could go on but there is no point when we both agree that the system we have in place sucks. I get the feeling you may have more passionate feelings on the topic anyway. Sorry if I hit a nerve. Bottom line, SBankNotify solved the #2 problem I had with the iPhone and 2.1 solved the #1 problem.

Jarvik7 Wrote:As far as I know inzania is not porting Anki though since it would require a complete language change (interpreted languages like Python are not allowed). I think he is re-implementing it from scratch, so it wouldn't impact licensing anyways. That said he hasn't shown anything of his work yet (his previous project is scrapped to be replaced by the Appstore one).

As he is going to be looking at the Anki source in order to reimplement it in C, I expect him to release the code under a similarly liberal license to Anki.

vgambit Wrote:Don't worry about a warranty when you jailbreak your iphone. The process is completely reversible. All you have to do is "Restore" it, which will basically return it to factory settings (while deleting all of your music, etc.)

Usually when my iPods break they can't be restored. My fear is that it just won't turn on one day. I will take it in they will find out it was jailbroken during repair and I will get a have a nice day letter. However, every time up till now that I have taken a broken iPod in to the Apple store they have swapped it out for a new one no questions asked, so I am hoping things will stay the same. It's best not to assume it will though. All that aside, I don't care. I am happy I jailbroke my phone.

FutureBlues Wrote:Given that no one I know has more than 60 minutes (I have 0 minutes prepaid) or so on their plan (but does have unlimited or near so email) everyone here usually just emails when we start making plans, or if we're looking for someone, or trying to meet somewhere.

In which case presumably you'll be looking at your screen more often. Those pop-up notifications are hard to miss...

Jarvik7 Wrote:Every Japanese person I know uses their keitai 90% for email, generally only making a call when it's to their (non keitai owning) parents or a business. The idea isn't to use it for your main email address but as a more functional version of SMS.

Being distracted by SMS can be equally annoying. But everyone's free to choose whether to follow the rules or set their own, I guess. I just fail to see how this mail thing becomes the Big Issue overshadowing all the good things about iPhone.

I am curious just how long have you been in Tokyo Serge?

Serge Wrote:

FutureBlues Wrote:Given that no one I know has more than 60 minutes (I have 0 minutes prepaid) or so on their plan (but does have unlimited or near so email) everyone here usually just emails when we start making plans, or if we're looking for someone, or trying to meet somewhere.

In which case presumably you'll be looking at your screen more often. Those pop-up notifications are hard to miss...

Jarvik7 Wrote:Every Japanese person I know uses their keitai 90% for email, generally only making a call when it's to their (non keitai owning) parents or a business. The idea isn't to use it for your main email address but as a more functional version of SMS.

Being distracted by SMS can be equally annoying. But everyone's free to choose whether to follow the rules or set their own, I guess. I just fail to see how this mail thing becomes the Big Issue overshadowing all the good things about iPhone.

Well, I mean, if you look at it that way, then why bother with ringtones or sound or vibration at all. If it's really important, they'll hunt you down in person, right?

dilandau23 Wrote:I am curious just how long have you been in Tokyo Serge?

Just under three months. Is that under the minimum level required for having an opinion on this subject? :-)

FutureBlues Wrote:Well, I mean, if you look at it that way, then why bother with ringtones or sound or vibration at all. If it's really important, they'll hunt you down in person, right?

Very true. First and foremost, my phone is there for ME to contact whoever I need to contact. Having other people contact me on it is optional - that's what voicemail is for, it helps them stick to the point, too.

But as I mentioned above, everyone sets their own rules.

Serge Wrote:Just under three months. Is that under the minimum level required for having an opinion on this subject? :-)

Not at all, I just found some of your comments, a little odd coming from someone living in Japan is all. It's great to be your own person. I encourage you to also be open to the status quo(aka culture). Closing yourself off to what the majority thinks can be just as dangerous as unquestioningly accepting it. I suspect that if you end up staying in Japan for the long term, you might possibly take a different stance on the issue. I wasn't trying to offend, just trying to put what you said into a context.

This thread is all over the place now.

Anyway, I got a recent Ipod touch 2G and love it. I just wish I could jailbreak it, but I'll still have to wait.

Japanese typing is super fast for me. I didn't notice the Japanese keyboard at first, so I was using apple's nine touch interface, but have switched now. I don't find any delay. For words I want to practice kanji with, I type them in hiragana in the memo, then later open the type interface and use the chinese input to finger draw the kanji. I spend about an hour and 20 minutes on the bus every day, so it's nice to be able to practice everything with only one hand.

I also liked that when I first turned it on it synced up all in Japanese since my Itunes was Japanese. I thought I was going to have to fiddle with lots of options, but this was not the case.

dilandau23 Wrote:Not at all, I just found some of your comments, a little odd coming from someone living in Japan is all. It's great to be your own person. I encourage you to also be open to the status quo(aka culture). Closing yourself off to what the majority thinks can be just as dangerous as unquestioningly accepting it. I suspect that if you end up staying in Japan for the long term, you might possibly take a different stance on the issue. I wasn't trying to offend, just trying to put what you said into a context.

No offense taken and there are too many ways to define Culture... Back to the topic: I downloaded 2.1 last night and it definitely is an improvement. Not so sure about iTunes 8 that came with it, though, but I haven't had time to play with it properly yet.

alyks Wrote:Neat. I was thinking of getting an iPhone because I can't find other phones that can display JP characters, so this is helpful.

I've got an HTC touch, It works fine with Japanese (once you install a Japanese font), it can even do really basic stuff like copy & paste which is well beyond the over-hyped iPhone.

~Mex

If this turns out to be true, I will be quite happy. Seems Apple may have realized the error of their ways. http://www.macotakara.jp/blog/index.php?ID=1307

Too bad that even if it is true, the rumor that it can't do emoji will probably persist for years anyway.

Emoji would be nice, BUT THE NOTIFICATION IS NECESSARY!
I really don't want to jailbreak, but watching that video of the phone vibrate and beep when it gets a message was just so alluring. I just HATE hacking my hardware becaus it can be so unpredictable.

Don't hold your breath on that. Emoji is one thing, but undermining the whole reason for getting MobileMe? That's not going to happen, even if the entire market is already past that. Apple can be pretty hard-headed about some things.

That said, I have an iPhone 3G in the US and I love it. But if I were living in Japan, I'd probably use something else.

I have a friend with an iPhone who said that yahoo mail supports push, and by giving out his yahoo address to people it would automatically be pushed to his phone in real time. He said it drained the battery quite quickly, though.

In other news, I've released a new version of Anki for jailbroken devices. Sound and image support included now.

That's impressive. I thought that Apple had crippled push on the iPhone so that only mobileme accounts were supported.

Yahoo mail has been "push" on iPhones since Day One. I don't find that it is hard on the battery at all (miniscule compared to the default setting of searching for wireless networks every 15 seconds!).

(ETA: I should have said "in the USA"... apparently, this isn't true globally.)

Yahoo accounts are push, but not Japanese Yahoo accounts. Also, I have heard that they don't always push properly from someone in this very thread. And to further my conspiracy theory, I think the reason Yahoo was aloud to offer push for the iPhone is maybe because they were the only push option for pre 2.0 phones. There is no science there just a guess. If that is wrong and consequently my conspiracy theory wrong too, then there really is no logic to what Softbank and Apple did with the mail. I am just trying to see logic in the stupidity.

After my jailbreak I turned off fetch (which hasn't been working properly since 2.1 anyway) installed SBankNotify and my battery life extended for what I would say is about a quarter of a charge spread across the day.



Also I am pretty sure that the iPhone does not search for wireless networks when it is locked.