The World According to Tim Skipper

Since I got my iPhone I’ve been really enjoying its slick user interface and ease of web browsing, but I started to notice that Safari was for some web sites loading pages very slowly. In fact for some web sites Safari would not load pages at all.

I found that if I switched WiFi off I could load these stubborn pages no problem over GPRS/EDGE. I thought I had found the iPhone Achilles Heel; WiFi browsing was just not all that it was cracked up to be. I could browse these web sites just fine using Firefox or IE on my Sony Vaio Laptop over the same WiFi connection. It had to be the iPhone that was at fault.

Resetting the Safari cache, cookies and history made no difference. I tried turning off Javascript too, to no avail.

Now my WiFi network router is an old Buffalo unit I’ve had years. I wondered if it was somehow not compatible with the iPhone, but it supports 802.11g so why should that be the case? Most odd.

I started going through the configuration for the WiFi router one setting at a time and considering how it might affect the iPhone differently to my Laptop. Nothing jumped out at me, until I got to the network settings.

No DNS information!

My network looks like this: Broadband Router –> CISCO Firewall –> WiFi Router –> PCs/Laptops/Consoles etc (either using WiFi or hard wired into the WiFi router).

Once I had filled in the IP address of the Broadband Router into the WiFi Router’s configuration, it resolved my problem. Safari on the iPhone was browsing any web site I liked at full speed.

I’m curious to know why none of our WiFi laptops or Nitendo Wii etc have had a problem with this, but I guess the iPhone is just very sensitive to DNS information.

So If you are experiencing slow page load times in Safari over WiFi on your iPhone, double-check ALL the DNS settings throughout your network.

Tags: DNS, Safari, WiFi

So a few days ago my wife Francesca upgraded her N95 to an iPhone. She likes new gadgety phones and usually upgrades when something new and whizzy comes out. I was a bit “meh” about it to be honest. It’s just a phone, after all. Right?

Until I played with it for a while.

Now I have one too!

I didn’t mind ditching Vodafone for O2 as there’s better O2 reception in rural Norfolk/Suffolk than with Vodafone (although Orange is better still), so the single provider wasn’t really an issue.

The touch interface is amazing. My previous experience with a touch-sensitive phone was the truly awful LG Chocolate my wife had, but this is a vastly different proposition. Even fine control of cursors is easy and accurate, and the pinch-zoom feature works incredibly well.

Web browsing is not a problem, in fact I’m posting this from my iPhone right now. As we have come to expect from Apple, everything just works in an intuitive and natural way. I am impressed.

So, what don’t I like about it? There’s a few things:

Bluetooth. Although it syncs seamlessly with my Parrot CK3100 car kit, and my TomTom 710, it will only interact with headsets and hands-free devices. So I can’t sync it to another phone (even another iPhone) or my laptop, or more disappointingly the TomTom Traffic feature. The O2 contract for iPhones has an unlimited data use, which would make TomTom Traffic a very attractive feature as it’s more accurate and reliable than the RDS based signal. I hope Apple upgrade Bluetooth to allow data transfer with future software releases.

SMS. With a new phone number, the first thing I wanted to do was send everyone in my contacts list an SMS with my new number. Unfortunately you cannot send SMS messages to multiple recipients, so I had to do it one at a time. As a result, I only told the most important people in my list rather than everyone. It is also not possible to forward SMS messages, but this isn’t something I’ve ever used before or likely to need.

Safari Web Browser. Why no home page? It just shows you whatever page you previously browsed, but I would really like a Home setting, or at least a button. The ability to remember logins & passwords would also be really useful.

In the big scheme of things these are small gripes, and things which I hope will come into play with later updates. Overall, the iPhone is a big winner in our household.

Tags: Apple, Bluetooth, SMS

What’s happened to Google Adsense earnings?

I run Google Adsense on all of my non-eCommerce web sites. It’s been a nice little earner with fairly consistent monthly results over the past couple of years.

Last month, Google changed Adsense so that the clickable area was restricted to just the ad title and url lines, instead of the whole ad block.

It’s devastated my earnings, which for November were down by a factor of 10 over September & October, despite increased impressions. Has anyone else seen this since the change? It won’t be long I’m sure before people start to abandon Adsense because of it. What knock-on effect will this have on Adwords prices I wonder?

Tags: Google Adsense, Google Adwords

So David Yu thinks the BMW E30 M3 is not worthy of its iconic status.

Some say; he’s been driving too many Ferraris, and that his web site is rubbish. All I know is, the E30 M3 is every bit as good as it’s reputation suggests.

I think David just drove a dud. Mine certainly never understeered - not a bit, and whilst it’s not the most powerful of cars (especially if you knock about in two Ferraris and a Corvette for fun), but the S14 engine in the E30 M3 is a peach. I loved mine.

You can read all about my BMW E30 M3 throughout this blog. Check out Auto-Journals too, it’s a good read, despite what some people think.

Also why not spend a few minutes admiring David’s skill as a driver (hehe, sorry David).

Tags: auto-journals

I was reminded this morning, whilst browsing the Microsoft MSDN site looking for MSDN Subscription info, just how important it is to tell the customer what it is they want to know as clearly and as simply as possible.

I was reminded of this, because Microsoft was doing a very poor job of it. I wanted to know what the current MSDN Subscription packages are and a comparison table of what they contain. It must have taken me 15 minutes of clicking before I eventually found the page I was looking for. That’s insane!

Microsoft can get away with this poor customer experience because of their sheer size and industry position. But for the rest of us with commercial web sites who do not enjoy being a household name, the clarity of key product information is an important aspect which should not be overlooked.

If you’ve not captured visitors’ attention within 30 seconds, you’re done for. So make sure the key selling points of your product or service are not hidden 15 layers deep off of some obscure page.

Clarity = conversions!

Tags: Microsoft, MSDN