Questions your new phone should be smart enough to to answer

These are practical questions, right?

  • Where was I @ 3:00 PM yesterday?
    • And on Tuesday?
    • How far apart are those?

My calendar is not the source of this information, augmenting it perhaps but the answer really should be an historical GPS location log converted to an address – looked up in contacts and calendar for additional context at the minimum.  Additional follow on questions should be default behaviour, does your phone follow along with the context and answers of your prior questions. That’d be nice.

  • How many miles did I drive last week?
    • And the week before?

C’mon you know when I am in a car (accelerometer data), you gotta!  Was I the driver – perhaps a difficult question to answer.

  • Did I take the Bus in February?
    • What Bus?

Right.  Maybe I take the bus infrequently and only once I recall in February. It went 6 stops and only 2 busses take that route.  I had googled bus routes and found the #314.  Perhaps the #314 was the bus I took as it is one of the 2 busses that have those stops.

  • When I last rode my bike how far did I go?
    • How many stops did I make?
    • Did I stop for lunch?

Coffee Shop Login 1.7 now on-line

This version will now properly bypass the Bell iPhone prompt for your Bell phone number. We don’t have a Bell phone and suspect most of you also don’t (yet). We now detect this annoying page and move on to the normal login page. iTouch users will not have seen this issue because it looks like Bell is able to tell the difference between a phone and a touch.

If anyone with a Bell iPhone can tell us what happens (how the login proceeds and if it remembers you next time) we’d like to try an enhancement so you can use this app too (if/when you switch from Rogers).

Get the new version now in the app store by checking for updates.  Buy it now if you don’t have it http://go.mcyork.com/coffee (opens iTunes).

Apple Approves Coffee Shop Login v1.6 – 300 update in first day.

Over 300 people have the new v1.6 already.  Combined with the Apple 3.1 OS this is the best version yet.

Added to this version is password blanking on the data entry screens.  Now your Starbucks passwords are no longer in the clear for others to see (or if your device is used by others).  This user requested feature made a lot of sense once Starbucks linked the wifi login to a real account and not an arbitrary card# and pin.

Also in this version we’ve taken care of “please wait” dialog issues.  This popup now properly goes away.  The page you end up on – wait a few seconds – and it should refresh to the login statistics page (time remaining).

Please note again: We have not been able to overcome issues with the Apple 3.0 OS and users of 3.0 OS should move to 3.1 where changes by Apple at the OS level restore our programs functionality.  In other words use any current Apple iPhone/iTouch OS other than the 3.0.x versions and you will find your logins to be simple and swift again.

Enjoy

Apple ships iPhone 3.1 OS – Coffee Shop benefits

The new 3.1 release of the iPhone / iTouch operating system brings with it great news for the coffee shop crowd.

The good news here is that the 3.1 OS seems to (now) realize we are an application and the OS popup login goes away gracefully to let us load the portal and log you in without incident.

Our application had been tested to work on 3.0 however it did in fact end up failing when the Apple login screen popped up to help out.  The pop up screen was not the issue (3.1 it may still pop up).  The issue we seem to think is that if the Apple login screen went away – the wifi was cut off.  This made our program unable to see wifi.  A lot of people have been seeing “no wifi connection – check settings”.  Again 3.1 OS seems to have this fixed.

Please if you have 3.0 you should upgrade to 3.1.  Those functional on 2.x should jump to 3.1 when they are ready.