Four Island

So, as you may have noticed, Four Island was just down for about a week. Nearly. Well, you may have not in fact noticed this because you may have instead noticed that I haven't posted for about four months. Yikes. I have some weak, barely feasible excuses that I will talk about later, but I first want to talk about Four Island's recent downtime.

As you may know, Hurricane Irene recently hit New York, bringing with it a huge reaction of "WHAT THE FRUGALITY IS GOING ON I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY" from virulent New Yorkers who have never seen a hurricane before and really just wanted something to overreact about. Sure, if you add the earthquake a couple of weeks ago, we have been experiencing some natural phenomena that we aren't really used to as East Coasters, but Irene was just downright exploitable. I'm getting kind of sick of the "HURT BY IRENE? WE'VE GOT YOUR BACK--AND YOUR TORSO TOO! LOL" commercials all over the radio. Oh, and I don't care that Irene was only a category 1 tropical storm by the time it reached New York, it has an official name. That name is Hurricane Irene. Stop trying to be so smart.

Irene did have quite an impact on Four Island, anyway, as it caused a record number of power outages across Long Island. Yeah, we were all quite angry at LIPA. I've never been in a power outage longer than a day before and this was pretty ridiculous, especially considering LIPA completely refused to give out any information to anyone. I walked down the street I live on (since by the third day, everyone around us (we live on a corner) had regained power and it was pretty much just our street that was still out) and saw a broken box with severed wires hanging from the power line and took a picture of it, as can be seen to the right, but apparently that can't possibly cause a power outage. :| The actual problem was a whole bunch of fallen power lines down at the end of the street, but still. At least power has finally been restored.

Now, on a completely different subject, as an official iOS developer (check out the business my friends and I set up! Apathetic Ink), I have access to some neat prerelease stuff. This includes iOS 5 beta, which has been tempting me for a while and god I just have to try it out. My dilemma? No untethered jailbreak. I wasn't really sure if I would be cool with a tethered jailbreak, but I eventually figured that the main and almost only reason I jailbreak is for scrobbling, right? Well, if I tethered jailbreak, it's A) unlikely that I'll ever really be more than a day away from my computer, so I'll always be able to rejailbreak pretty quickly and B) I could find some ugly app on the App Store that scrobbled in the foreground and use that when I lost my jailbreak. Sounds okay, right? Besides, iOS 5 just sounded so great and I had to have it.

Well, how did it go? Well, first of all, iOS 5 is just amazing. Can't wait until Apple releases it, hoping they first polish some stuff up. Notification Center? Freaking amazing. I love you, I love you Notification Center! iMessage, too, is amazing and makes me wonder why I even installed WhatsApp. Syncing in the background, though I already had that functionality through my jailbreak, is another great feature and all the other little features Apple has sprinkled over this update really just... make it difficult for me to go back to 4.3. Why would I do that? Well, remember when I said I would only have a tethered jailbreak? Yeah, barely. Somehow, before upgrading to iOS 5 (perhaps because I hadn't read it yet), I missed this paragraph in the text about redsn0w for iOS 5 beta:

THIS JAILBREAK IS INTENDED ONLY FOR DEVELOPERS OF JAILBROKEN APPS! There are just too many broken components (Apple’s official apps, 3rd-party App Store apps, Cydia apps, MobileSubstrate apps, etc) for this to be useful to anyone but those truly looking to fix bugs in their iOS 5 jailbroken apps. (Seriously!)

iPhone Dev Team

There was one app, ONLY ONE APP that I needed to work on jailbroken iOS 5... and Scrobbl disappointed. Gah. I tried to find some way to survive; I downloaded iScrob from the App Store, and as you can see to the left, it is rather ugly. Sorry developer. Sitting here, listening to Adele (darn this is catchy), I decided I really was not very happy with it, and I was especially not very happy with having to break away from the official Music app. I'm fairly sure now that after I'm done writing this post, I'm going to restore to iOS 4.3.3. Thank god for SHSHes.

Apple, please listen to me: INTEGRATE LAST.FM INTO iOS. You integrated Twitter, why not last.fm? Spotify has it, please join the party. You would make a lot of people very happy and I probably wouldn't even jailbreak if I could scrobble songs from the official Music app.

Now, finally, I'm going to talk a little about Four Island 3. I've been mentioning the new version of my website for quite a while now and while I don't want to get any hopes up, it may be coming out fairly soon. As soon as I get a good upgrade plan down (god I'm busy), it should be good to go. The reasons I haven't really been posting lately are A) April-June was an ehh time for me and posting wasn't really my first priority and B) once I finally had some free time around August, I decided I didn't want to post until Four Island 3 came out. Then, Irene and iOS 5 happened and I realized that, ugly as my website is at the moment, I really want to write stuff and have other people read it. I'm really hoping, though, that I'll get around to releasing Four Island 3 soon because it will be great and awesome. Expect a massive post explaining a whole ton of superfluous stuff when it gets released. :P