iPhone Push Notification & WiFi Bug

This post is slightly geeky and more for my own benefit just in case I come across this problem again and need to fix it.

There is a bug in iPhone OS 3.0 and 3.0.1 that stops push notifications from working when the phone is connected to the internet over wifi. I could only ever receive push notifications when outside my home connected to the cell network.  Despite having cell reception in my home the very fact the phone had a wifi connection seemed to kill push.

The solution (and I have no idea why this works) is to manually change the iPhone’s wifi DNS settings to use a public DNS server (like OpenDNS) and not allow it to receive it’s DNS settings from the wireless router.

I changed this setting and the notifications flooded in!

Facebook 2.0

I downloaded the Facebook v2.0 application onto my iPhone this lunch time.  While I haven’t had too long to play with it first impressions are VERY good.

This is a definite improvment and worth downloading!  Much of the functionality of the Facebook.com website has been added to the application which in v1.x was very basic and did not allow you to do much at all.

Highly recommended.

iPhone 2.0 & MobileMe

After the chaos of Friday I chose the quiet time of Saturday morning to finally download the iPhone 2.0 software and apply it to my first generation phone.  I figured if I caught the servers early enough everything would run smoothly.

For the most part everything did work. The software downloaded and installed and although activation took slightly longer than normal I didn’t have to wait long.  However unfortunately my iPhone did not want to resync its contacts and content.  In situations like this I figure a reboot is what is needed…. which caused a Blue Screen of Death. Only the second one I have seen on my Vista machine in nearly two years. Cheers iTunes

The iPhone software seems relatively stable in the couple of days I have been using it. My iPhone seems slightly more sluggish than before although I cleared some content from it and that seems to have sped things up slightly.   The only external apps so far installed are Facebook and Twitterific. While they are both fairly thin on the features side of things they’re not bad for apps you do not have to pay for.

My experience of MobileMe on the other hand has so far been lacking due to the amount of the downtime the service has been experiencing.  On paper the service sounds like a great idea however only time will tell whether or not that is the case. I’ve briefly tested syncing calendars and contacts between Outlook, MobileMe and the iPhone and it seems to work while they service is up.

Time will tell.