Following on from a week or so of my phone crashing when receiving calls dropping after upgrading my 3GS to iOS4 I decided enough was enough. I had tried restoring the phone from a backup several times to no avail. I also deleted the iOS4 download to force a new download and install of it, which again, proved fruitless.

So that’s when I called O2 to see what they had to say about it. In short nothing. “Have you tried restoring it from a backup?”, was about as helpful as they got. After that in-depth assistance, they gave up and told me to call Apple.

I called AppleCare who asked me to delete the previously downloaded iOS4 update to force the download of it again. “Yeah, I’ve done that – three times.”, “Oh, OK.”. That was the end of their usefulness. Just glad it was an 0800 number.

AppleCare then made an appointment for me to take the phone to an Apple store the next day. So dutifully I rolled down to the Apple store where the “Genius” listened intently to my plight, and whilst claiming they hadn’t heard of this problem before, without any further question just told that they would just replace the phone with a new one.

Now being a big cynic in life I really don’t believe that Apple aren’t aware of this issue. Why? Well the post on their own discussion board on the Apple website which has a countless number of people with exactly the same issue for one, and for two why would you just replace a phone with no question asked if it’s a problem you’re not aware of?

You could say it was just good customer service, and to a degree it is. But denying that an problem exists when it clearly does is a bit galling.

As I was leaving the “Genius” said “I hope this new phone resolves the problem for you”, to which I replied “I’m sure it will – because I’m not going to upgrade it to iOS4″.

I don’t know why I do it. Why do I always get suckered into believing that software updates are always going to make things better? Maybe it’s my experience and perspective as a developer, which is that if you’re fixing stuff to put out in a patch or an update then whatever it is you’re updating is always going to somehow end up better.

Unfortunately that just isn’t the case. Twice in the last week I’ve fallen into this trap, once with SmartAssembly, which since Red Gate bought it seems to be going downhill fast (I found three serious flaws within ten minutes of using v5), and now more seriously with iOS4.

I’m not a gullible man, so I don’t buy into the hype that guys like Steve Jobs spout when they’re announcing things to the world, but I am a believer that large companies are going to put time and effort into testing things thoroughly before chucking them out the door for the great unwashed. That’s what you’d like to think anyway.

So when iOS4 was announced, I dutifully plugged in my iPhone 3GS to iTunes and let rip at the upgrade process. ten minutes later all I had to show for that was an error message telling me that something had gone wrong and I had to do it all again.

So nervously I kicked it off again, and within about 30 minutes or so, I was back up and running. Sporting a shiny new iOS4, or at least so I thought, until I got a call.

Within about 60 seconds of being in a call the phone completely locked up. When I looked at the screen all I had showing was a shiny Apple logo. No matter what buttons I pushed all I could see was the logo. Finally it decided to boot back up, as if nothing had happened.

Well, the first time it happened I thought nothing of it really as these things happen. However a week later I can tell you that it’s not just one of those things because now it’s happening all the time. Randomly during calls the whole phone will lock itself up and be about as much use as a three inch floppy disk drive.

To put it bluntly, this is piss poor. What good is a phone on which you can’t make calls?

Oh well, that’s OK I thought, I can just roll it back to one of my backups. Yeah, dream on. That option isn’t a reality. Once you enter the world of iOS4 there’s no going back.

So this morning I did a bit of a search around and found out that I am far from the only one with this issue. A look at a post on the Apple Discussion board revealed a thread with nearly 20,000 visitors in one week. Seems I’m not alone.

There seems to be no official answer from Apple yet, but if anybody’s ready this: SORT IT OUT.

Despite my dad’s best efforts to drag me along to see Bristol Rovers play when I was a kid, football never grabbed me, but nowadays as an adult, when a hi-stakes game is on it’s (generally) an interesting watch, and the stakes have never been higher for England than their do or die match against Slovenia this Wednesday.

But with a 15:00 kick-off it’s pretty much a given that a pretty big chunk of England’s working population will be either pulling a sickie (or if their employer has any sense – watching the match in work on a supplied TV set). But what happens if you’re going to be out and about?

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One of the things that has been niggling me with MonoDevelop – and to be fair it’s more an issue with the Finder – is that by default it’s difficult to run multiple instances of it. It’s always useful to have more than one solution open when you want to compare or copy and paste code from one project to another.

A quick search on Stack Overflow found a nice simple solution, which involves kicking off the app from the terminal using -n to tell the Finder to run a new instance. But being lazy, I can’t be bothered typing stuff unnecessarily, so a quick solution is to wrap it in an AppleScript app wrapper.

Fire up Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor, type in:

do shell script “open -n /Applications/MonoDevelop.app”

Then select File > Save As, on the save dialog change the File Format to Application and save it somewhere safe (not in the applications folder), using the name MonoDevelop.

Then for a nice finishing touch, go back to the Applications folder and click on the MonoDevelop icon, press CMD + I to bring up the Get Info screen, click on the application icon in the top left of the screen and CMD + C to copy it.

Go back and find where you saved the AppleScript file, bring up the Get Info window with CMD + I, click on the application icon and paste in the MonoDevelop one with a CMD + V.

Then all you need to do is to drag the new AppleScript app to the Dock and you have a quick and easy way of firing up multiple instances of MonoDevelop.

Following on from the post about iPhone development using MonoTouch and C#, I thought I would point out the fact that at the moment MonoTouch doesn’t support Visual Basic for iPhone development. Mono and MonoDevelop themselves do support VB, but just not for iPhone dev just yet. The MonoTouch team say it is on the roadmap, just no date as of yet.

So where does that leave the Visual Basic developer? Well, if they want to write iPhone apps using the .NET framework, then needing to learn some C#.

For many VB developers, who came to .NET from VB6 (and below), stepping up to a fully object orientated language and the .NET framework was tough enough to grasp, let alone taking on dealing with curly braces as well. Whilst VB.NET is not the same language as VB6, Microsoft did a pretty good job at smoothing the upgrade path for developers (certainly with VS2005 and .NET 2.0 upwards anyway).

Many developers will probably have some exposure to other languages, such as PHP, JavaScript, or even Java (remember that?), all of which would make learning C# a bit easier, but if you haven’t then don’t worry too much. If you know the .NET framework, then you’re already halfway there.

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