truphone: Killer iPhone app for international travel

Two days after the iPhone 2.0 software and the iTunes app store were released, I went on a family trip to Europe. So of course, in the days prior to my trip, I frantically installed, then reinstalled, the 2.0 software. This would make my phone much more useful during my trip, I reasoned. Well, it turns out I was right, and the main reason for that was the truphone application.

Truphone is a VOIP application, with one version running on Nokia phones and one iPhone version. The iPhone version appears as a separate application on the iPhone, providing buttons at the bottom of the display that provide access to your contacts, a keypad, a truphone web page for buying account credit, a list of recent calls, and a list of favorites (which, unfortunately, are specific to truphone and not copied from the Phone app). The application is exceedingly simple in operation:

1. Sign up for an account and buy credit (when I signed up, they gave $8 credit for free; now they give $1 credit).
2. Be someplace that has wifi that you can access.
3. Make a call to one of your contacts, or dial on the keypad. These are calls to regular phones (landlines or mobiles), not to other other iPhones running truphone -- it's like SkypeOut.
4. Pay $0.06/minute (now they've got packages that provide $0.015/minute to the US and Canada).

Perhaps paradoxically, this simplicity has caused some confusion among the commenters on the iTunes store. Part of this is truphone's fault, as they don't distinguish well in their online documentation between the Nokia and iPhone features. The Nokia app includes free truphone-to-truphone calling, SMS, etc. -- much more like a full Skype implementation. It also appears to integrate into the Nokia calling software, so that the phone automatically switches from regular cell to VOIP, depending on circumstances. The iPhone application is simpler, only including calls to regular phones and requiring you to consciously select wifi calling (by running the truphone app, rather than the Phone app).

I actually prefer the iPhone implementation. At this point, truphone doesn't have much market penetration, and besides I don't know that many people I might call who have iPhones or Nokia N95s. So being able to call other truphone users wouldn't have been useful during my trip (with one small exception: you know who you are). More importantly, I wanted to be 100% certain that I was making a VOIP call, and not a $2 or more per minute cell call. I didn't want my phone switching to regular cell calling because of a software glitch or because of some problem connecting to a hotel's wifi network. The fact that I was running the truphone application, not the Phone application, and that truphone only works with wifi, was very reassuring.

I spent at least a couple hours calling various phones here in the Seattle area, Philadelphia, south Florida, and China, from hotels in Prague, Venice, and Rome. Generally, call quality was quite good, equal to the best we've experienced using Skype, with the only issues being a weak signal in one hotel that required me to sit in a particular chair in the lobby that happened to be in a good spot. Also, I tried at one point to add credit to my account using my MacBook, but the truphone web site was abysmally slow; I connected to the mobile version of their add credit page and the transaction went off without a hitch. And it was great to be able to call relatives to let them know we arrived safely and keep them updated on our wanderings without having to deal with phone cards or similar unfamiliar contact methods.

So, is truphone useful for calls within the US? Probably not, unless you've somehow gotten yourself a plan with very few minutes and very high costs for additional minute usage. But, if you need to travel internationally, then calls using truphone are approximately 1/30 the cost of AT&T calls. You could easily pay for the purchase cost of an iPhone 3G with the savings from one international trip.

A brilliant strategic move

Microsoft is making their software development tools free downloads for all students.

"It's a brilliant strategic move on the part of Microsoft," said Chris Swenson, a software industry analyst with NPD Group. "This is one of the core audiences you have to hit if you really want to make a difference in the rich Internet application market going forward."

Hmm. Aren't there many other software development tools available for free to anyone? Like Apple's XCode and Eclipse? And didn't Microsoft already arrange nearly-free licensing agreements with many schools? What are the qualifications one needs to become a software industry analyst? Enough free time to read a range of trade publications?

This is cool

A first-person shooter for the iPhone, written in JavaScript. It doesn't require jailbreaking, as it runs in Safari. I especially like the pencil-and-paper drawings for the opening scenes; they make the game feel personal, like you're reading someone's diary.

Remote access via iPhone

It's hard to describe how neat it is to see your computer's desktop on your cell phone. Or to browse your files there. I know, there are other ways to accomplish this, and it's not too different than VNC. But, still very cool.

Vienna

I've been along time user of the NewsFire RSS reader. Unfortunately, newer versions require OS X 10.4, and I have delayed upgrading my machines long enough that I'm just waiting for 10.5. Additionally, NewsFire is just incredibly slow (at least, the older version I can use) and crashes frequently. It might have something to do with the 360 or so feeds I track.

Anyway, I've left all my troubles behind, now that I've adopted the Vienna RSS reader. Fast and reliable. And free.

Roll your own syndication

I generally try to make my course web pages act as web portals for the course, with all the information students need (except, of course, for the pearls of wisdom contained in their textbooks and my lectures) there. I've also been increasing my use of blogs (and now, podcasts). Therein lies my desire to syndicate RSS feeds onto my web pages. Previously, I had been using RSS-to-JavaScript.com (there are other similar services), which provides the ability to includes JavaScript on your web page that will generate customizable HTML summarizes from RSS feeds. The problem I had with this was increased page load time: I was dependent on responses from their server. Now, I've found a new tool that works much better: RSS2HTML, which is a free PHP script that generates HTML according to a template that you write. There are three ways that I've been using it:

1. As a "complete web page generator". I use the PHP script, customized to hard-code the RSS feed and template file URLs, as my web page (for example, renamed as "index.php"). This is useful when the only feature available to you on your web site is PHP script execution.
2. As a server-side include. For example, the SSI code on one of my course pages will cause the PHP script to generate suitable HTML to be included for the course blog's RSS feed. The template file here is just an HTML snippet. This requires both PHP script and SSI support on the web server.
3. The third approach is what I'm using as of this date for the list of upcoming conference deadlines I place in this blog's sidebar. In this case, I can't make use of either local PHP scripts or SSI, as Blogger doesn't support them. So, I rolled my own RSS to JavaScript service by placing a modified rss2html.php script on another server, and use it to generate JavaScript output, rather than HTML (the script doesn't care what's in the template, other than the variables that it replaces with feed information). So, the template contains lines like:

   document.writeln('  ~~~ItemDescription~~~');
     

   There was one problem: the RSS fields can contain single quotes, which will of course screw up the generated JavaScript. To fix this, the PHP script must be modified. Specifically, lines like these:

   $this->ItemTitle[] = trim($this->title);
   $this->ItemDescription[] = trim($this->description)
     

   must be replaced with lines like these:

   $this->ItemTitle[] = str_replace("'", "’", trim($this->title));
   $this->ItemDescription[] = str_replace("'", "’", trim($this->description));
     

   This will replace single quotes with HTML entities that display as quotes but won't act to close the strings in the document.write() calls.

Topics: RSS, web software.

David Pogue on Windows Vista

Click on the title above for a humorous video in which New York Times columnist David Pogue explains that Windows Vista isn't a copy of Mac OS X.

The price paid for wasted cycles

The title above links to a Linux World article on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. That project aims to produce a laptop that is cheap enough to make its way into the hands of schoolchildren around the world. the biggest obstacle is the insatiable need for computer cycles by today's software. As I've written before, a large chunk of these cycles -- if not most -- are burned to make software more profitable for software companies, not to benefit the user.

The OLPC people seem to agree with me:

Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.
     OLPC FAQ

Fast processors and inexpensive memory have made tidy programming a low priority, Gettys [Jim Gettys, vice president, Software Engineering] said. "A lot of people in the past decade or so have gotten quite sloppy."