Mophie Juice Pack Air still has problems

Well, although the Apple store refused to replace the Mophie JPA that I bought in their store, Mophie themselves were more responsive. They didn’t actually reply to my customer support mail, but 3 working days after I sent it, I got an email from UPS saying a new JPA had been shipped.. from Illinois, USA! I received it a few days later.

A little suspicious that they replaced it unquestioningly – makes me wonder if it’s a common fault. I was also annoyed to see that they’ve changed the cap design slightly – it makes it easier to remove, but the two spare caps I bought for £15 now won’t fit.

As for the JPA? Yep, it’s charging my iPhone fine now. BUT – it’s still showing strange behaviour. Now I get the following combinations:

- Using the supplied Mophie microUSB cable with my laptop, will charge the JPA, but not the iPhone. Windows says “unknown device”.
- Using the Mophie cable with my Apple mains USB charger, also charges the JPA, but not the iPhone
- Using a microUSB cable bought off eBay, DOES charge both iPhone and JPA.

This is in contrast to my last JPA, which was more or less the other way around. To coin a phrase.. WTF?!?

I’ll do some more testing to see if perhaps the cable’s faulty. Anyway, my retracting USB cable charges both, which is good for now.

Yahoo Autosync (Intellisync) no longer working

Yahoo Autosync seems to be another of those services that Yahoo paid for during the boom times, but seem to have forgotten about long ago (like Yahoo Desktop Search). As with YDS, it was possible to find old installers lying around, and the service itself still worked, but it now seems to be having problems.

I depend on YDS for syncing the Yahoo Mail/Calendar account that my partner and I share, with a secondary Outlook calendar (my primary one being my main work Exchange account). That way, I can easily view what both I, and we, are up to, and copy across appointments so that my partner knows which flights I’m taking, etc. etc.

However, Yahoo Sync now reports “Connection to Yahoo Server was lost”, and the log file shows:

LOG_ERROR 2009:07:24_17:33:44 File: XMLHelper.cpp (line 95)
Error while parsing response from server:junk after document element at line 1
LOG_ERROR 2009:07:24_17:34:03 File: ErrorMessage.cpp (line 191)
0012DEA4

Not good!

So I’m now up Relationship Creek without an calendar sync paddle. How long before I miss an appointment, and end up on the rocks? I can get by with my iPhone, which does great sync with Yahoos’ beta CalDAV servers, but then the entry’s in one or the other – iPhone doesn’t support copy/pasting an entry so that it’s in BOTH.

Sad lack of diagram / drawing applcation in iPhone

While there are many great apps for the iPhone, there appears to be a lack of quality drawing apps.

There’s 101 painting apps, but very few vector drawing apps – and as an engineer, that’s something that would e very useful for me. Of those that do exist, they tend to be very basic – not created by experienced programmers – and are at the mercy of the accuracy of your finger.

What would be great would be a vector-based diagram creation program, where you could move and edit shapes, create objects, and drag them around. Snappable grids and zoom for fine editing should also help overcome fat-finger inaccuracies.

And – export to a format where you can continue editing on your PC or Mac – rather than only exporting as a photo (although that’s still useful) would also be great.

But… For the moment, the best on offer is iDrawing. And the author’s own screenshots in the App Store show what a long way this has to go!