Link Love or Holy Crap Sites Keep Linking iPlayPhone

I want to shout out a couple of the sites that have been promoting iPlayPhone recently.

Matt Howie – creator of metafilter -  gave iPlayPhone mention in his roundup of Recommended Kid Games.

AssociatedContent – a site I’d never heard of, but one that evidently gets over 24,000,000 visitors per month – ranked iPlayPhone #2 “Best Phone App for Kids on the iPhone.”

First Impressions of an iPhone Developer

I haven’t see a whole lot of information around the intertubes about what it’s actually like to deploy an iPhone App. Sure there are stories every other week about Apple’s ridiculously inconsistent censorship, and talk of developers not being paid. But there is not a lot of information about the actual process of getting App into the iTunes Store.

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

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iPlayPhone: My First iPhone App

I’ve just released my first iPhone app – iPlayPhone – it’s a toy phone for toddlers. I built it for my 1yr old son who’s always running off with my phone. It’s simplictic but super fun. All the buttons play goofy sounds. The onShake sound totally baffles my son, he’s like “woah, i shake it and is makes sounds…weird.”

Here’s the iTunes link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308425921

Yahoo Pipes Is Useful

I actually found a use for yahoo pipes!

Problem: I import my blog posts to facebook as Notes via their import settings. I find that a lot of friends and family comment on those posts, these people don’t typically follow me anywhere else and – I can admit it – I’m a comment whore. I apprieciate the feedback. Unfortunately facebook only allows you to import one RSS feed. 

Solution: Create a Yahoo! pipe that includes all my blog feeds and sorts them by pubDate. Import that Yahoo! Pipes feed into facebook. 

Here is a link to my feed (you’ll need a Yahoo! account to view the source)

Google Chrome Bypasses OpenDNS (and How To Fix It)

I started using OpenDNS again for the first time since Google released Chrome.

When I ran Chrome, I noticed a curious little quirk, Chrome was ignoring OpenDNS’ shortcuts and auto typo correction. I whipped out wireshark and took at what was going on.

By default, every time you enter a character into Chrome’s toolbar it fetches results from google.com/complete/search. Since google knows about every single website, Chrome is able to decide if you’re typing a valid domain without querying DNS. That is, it’s actually redirecting you to a google search results page at the HTTP layer, before your request queries any DNS info.
While it’s not neccessarily a bad way of doing things, it is somewhat annoying. 

Luckily, google actually built a great product!
This feature is totally customizable. 

To turn it off; pull up “options” under the wrench menu, click the “under the hood tab and uncheck “show suggestions for navigation errors.”