The problem? Well, there are actually two:

First – It’s a violation of AT&T’s terms of service and you MIGHT get into a little trouble for enabling it.

Second – It’s nothing new. There have been hacks around for years that would allow you to use your Blackberry as a Bluetooth Modem for free, versus paying the $60 to enable a Smart Phone tethering plan through AT&T. What IS unique about this situation is that tethering was a HIGHLY PUBLICIZED missing feature from the iPhone 3.0 firmware for AT&T customers, so it’s compromise has drawn much more attention as previous “work arounds” have.

So what’s AT&T and iPhone owners everywhere to do?

The only solution I see to this problem would require AT&T to do something it hasn’t done…. I think ever: Put the customer first.

We all know that the “Unlimited” data plan you buy from AT&T for your iPhone (be it EDGE or 3G) really isn’t “Unlimited” and if you were to dig into your contract or Terms of Service (TOS), you would see that AT&T decides to not use the Marriam-Webster definition of “Unlimited”, but have decided on a new definition: “5GB/month”

I understand business involves some negotiation and some give and take, so as a consumer, I’d be willing to make the following agreement with AT&T:

I will agree to allow you to LOWER the bandwidth limit on the standard “unlimited” plan to 1GB, if you agree to not charge extra for tethering support and setup a tiered pricing plan for bandwidth where 5GB/mo is $40, 10GB/mo is $60, and so on.

Now honestly, AT&T, consumers of America, did that hurt too bad? No, of course not. It’s a perfectly fine compromise.

Do I think that’s what will ACTUALLY happen? No, of course not.

What I picture happening is AT&T will probably bring the iPhone tethering plan in line with their current Smart Phone tethering plans ($60/mo), and start charging people who are currently not signed up for this plan an astronomical gateway fee for using their “WAP” gateway on a per kilobyte bases (say, $1 per kilobyte).

Which would mean this picture would end up costing you $40 on your monthly bill:

AT&T will charge you for this!

Will AT&T cancel or suspend users who are currently using the “hack” to access tethering? Of course not! Why cut a paying customer from their base and give that money to a competitor, especially when they can charge you huge penalties!

So my suggestion to anyone using tethering is to just use at your own risk and know that what your does DOES violate your Terms Of Service. This way when you get a $1,000,000 bill from AT&T because you decided to bit torrent some Norwegian Porno while driving to Fresno, you won’t be left looking like our $40 man pictured above!

Cheers!

For example, I selected the new Ben Folds song Hiroshima and it created the following playlist based on the songs that are on my iPod:

1. Ben Folds – Hiroshima
2. William Shatner – It Hasn’t Happened Yet
3. Counting Crows – A Murder of One
4. Weezer – Only In Dreams
5. R.E.M. – Bad Day
6. Beck – Loser
7. The Offspring – Hammerhead
8. Cake – The Distance
9. Tom Petty – The Waiting
10. Ben Folds – Give Judy My Notice
11. Blues Traveler – Hook
12. Steve Miller Band – Take The Money and Run
13. Beck – Where It’s At
14. They Might Be Giants – Particle Man
15. Counting Crows – Raining in Baltimore
16. Weezer – Surf Wax America
17. R.E.M. – Imitation of Life
18. Oasis – Hey Now!
19. Green Day – Long View
20. No Doubt – Spider Webs
21. Disturbed – Down With the Sickness
22. Ben Folds – Rock This Bitch
23. Tom Petty – American Girl
24. Beck – Devil’s Haircut
25. William Shatner – That’s Me Trying

So as you can see, not only do I have a pretty diverse selection of music on my iPhone but the Genius Playilst generation is pretty smart! Big ups to Apple adding this because it’s 2008 and the ‘shuffle’ feature is soooooo 1995

I suggest everyone give it a shot! It does take a bit of time though. My modest selection of ~600 took about ten minutes to generate the information for. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with data transfer speeds because I was using my MacBook Pro over wireless while the music resided on my NAS.

Also as an additional point I have to also say that I’m a big fan of the new Ben Folds album, Way To Normal. This is probably one of the more FUN records he’s put out since Rockin’ The Suburbs in 2001. A few choice tracks are (of course) Hiroshima and also Bitch Went Nuts.

Ben Folds - Way To Normal

Also as a little window into my life, Ben Folds – The Luckiest was our wedding song. It WAS going to be Andrew W.K. – Really In Love … but we changed it at the last minute in an effort to not take years off my in-laws life

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro for the sole purpose of developing software for the Mac/iPhone platform. It’s completely unknown to me and currently the XCode IDE looks nothing if not completely confusing compared to the friently intuitive interface of Microsoft Visual Studio that I’m used to

What brought me to this point? Well, two things.

First, I’ve been wanting to dive into Objective-C for a little over a year now and started dabbling with it a while back on my old G4 Powerbook. I was impressed with the coolness of it, but being that I was developing on a G4 Powerbook, I was limited as by this time Apple had begun the mass migration to Intel based systems.

Second is that I want to develop applications for the iPhone. Not to make a mint or anything, more or less because I think I have some good ideas on programs people would use. Like how Apple provided the iTunes controller, well, hows about a WWWinamp controller for the iPhone? Perhaps one that lets you search your library locally on the iPhone without even connecting to WWWinamp?

I started down this path because there’s currently a program for sale on the iTunes App Store that lets you control your instance of WinAmp remotely… for $4.99!!! What the crap?! I was floored that the author would expect that kinda money for a program when there are PLENTY of other FREE alternatives out on the web (like WinAmp Remote, AjaxAmp or WWWinamp). I made it my mission to release a comparable program

It’s just going to take a month or so to ramp up on the new IDE and learn how to do SOAP calls and whatnot. Should be a fun adventure though! My wife begins the final semester of her Teaching Credential program in a couple weeks, so I’ll have four nights a week alone to myself to nerd out and gorge on Hot Pockets!

I have another version of WWWinamp in the works as well. This is basically some code modernization for sections that I wrote over a year ago. Updating things to use Generic Methods and whatnot. You know, fun .NET stuff

Cheers!

I’ve taken the “beta” tag off of it as it seems the recode of the HTTP request processing seemed to work without issue and no bugs were reported (other than the ‘paging’ issue, which really was a defect in the script parser).

Changes for this version are:

• [HTTP] Daemon will now start if a WinAmp instance is not found
• [HTTP] Able to specify max number of HTTP threads to process (Default 25)
• [Script Parser] Fixed “Paging” issue when searching through the Libary
• [Script Parser] Script Files (*.wwa) will be run from the same folder as the file requesting them
• WinAmp Handles will be updated if a new instance is detected

Be sure to use the latest config file included with this release as it has a new key value, WWWinamp.HTTP.ListeningThreads, which tells the HTTP daemon how many threads to use max. This is set to 25 by default if no key is found, but it will throw an error. So if you don’t want to use the packaged configuration file because you’ve hacked together your own, you can manually add this key with any value you’d like.

This value isn’t a huge addition but it can help maintain system stability under heavy load. This way WWWinamp won’t spin up an infinite amount of threads if there’s heavy resource contention or there’s a problem that is causing threads to hang.

Also, the other ‘fixes’ were requests made by? ‘dawolf’ here in my blog so I suggest more people get involved and we can make WWWinamp better!

In addition, if you’ve made your own skin and want to share it, please feel free to contact me and I can post it here to my blog for others to use.

As for future releases, they may be a little slow in the coming month. I’m going to be diving into the iPhone SDK and Objective-C programming using XCode on my Apple. I think a remote media interface would be totally awsome if I can have a native WWWinamp application on the iPhone talk to the WWWinamp server using WCF/SOAP. It’d be way easier than using the webkit crap and I could make it have a lot more functionality (perhaps tuning in to a shoutcast stream VIA the iPhone?). Anyways, just thought I’d give you guys a little bit of information on that.

Cheers!

WWWinamp v4.2 Build 2990 – Download (56k)

Along with a quick bug fix version of WWWinamp, I’m also releasing an iPhone compatible skin for WWWinamp! This skin will make controlling your copy of Winamp from an iPhone quick and easy! A big thanks to the guys over at Google and Joe Hewitt for providing such a great set of iPhone web functions in their iUI interface library for the iPhone. Made development very quick and easy so I suggest anyone interested in iPhone Web Development hop over and give this great collection of JavaScript and CSS functions a look!

Of course, controlling WWWinamp from a mobile device is nothing new as I’m sure most of you have been using the default skin through the iPhone/iPod Touch Web Browser anyways, but this will give your copy of WWWinamp a more ‘iPhone-ish’ feel This of course is in addition to the already existing mobile skin which I developed for use with my Nokia 6682

The new build of WWWinamp is just a quick bug fix to handle some strange socket behavior caused by Safari trying to switch between Edge and a WiFi connection when trying to access a private IP (such as 10.0.0.1). Previously it would have caused an unhandled exception and WWWinamp would just bite the dust. This has now been fixed and it can gracefully handle Safari’s connectivity issues

Please keep in mind this is the first version of the iPhone skin and it’s still a work in progress. There are currently several features still missing (playlist re-order, and a few others). To use the iPhone skin you must set ALL commands usable by guest, as I haven’t incorporated admin login functionality yet. You can do this in your WWWINAMP.CONFIG file by setting all the commands under the WWWinamp.HTTP.Commands namespace to “true”. Be warned that this will open all functionality of your WWWinamp instance to all users, so be careful if you’re using this on a publicly visible instance of WWWinamp!

I’ve also added an icon so when you add it to your home screen using the new bookmarking functionality in iPhone firmware v1.1.3, it’ll display a cool little WWWinamp icon rather than a screen shot.

I look forward to your feedback!

WWWinamp v4.2 Build 2953 (Beta) – Download (56k)

WWWinamp iPhone Skin v1.0 – Download (39k)

It was then announced that the official iPhone SDK which runs natively on the iPhone will be released later this month. So soon you’ll have a host of local applications which will most likely include 3rd party media players. It then dawned on me, if a user could use WWWinamp from the iPhone with an interface that interacted nicely on the iPhone, then someone’s iPhone could act as a remote control from ANYWHERE allowing them access to their home media library.

Well, this is just a heads up that I’m currently working on a skin for WWWinamp that will let it work on the iPhone (better)! Soon you all will be able to control your media center or home copy of WWWinamp from anywhere using your Apple iPhone!

I’m still working on the organizing the data on the screen in a manner that makes sense and is easy to use. All the functionality that comes with the default skin will be included in the iPhone version, including cover art and all the Winamp Playlist functions.

It’s actually pretty sweet controlling Winamp from an Apple iPhone and I hope I can polish this up and put out a beta version this weekend. I’m still trying to fish up some resources on the WebKit API and the WebKit specific tags to make things integrate nicely.

Keep your browsers posted here for updates in the coming days!

I thought it would be interesting to just share my experience over the past week of iPhone ownership. A first hand accounting of my experiences and thoughts of the new Apple iPhone. Keep in mind that my previous cell phone was a Blackberry 8100 Pearl.

My overall experience with the iPhone has been very, very pleasant. It’s the perfect combination of smart phone and multimedia device. I don’t use the term PDA because I don’t think the iPhone is intended to replace devices such as a Treo or your Dell Axim. What I think the iPhone is going to do is replace your previous iPod (which ever version you may have) and your cell phone. Two devices that have never been successful at performing the others duties as well.

As a phone, it’s super easy to use. Contacts are the most accessible I’ve ever seen them thanks to Apple’s scrolling Rolodex style of keeping your contacts, and during calls every feature you’d need is right at your finger tips.

As a multimedia player, it does what the Video iPod did but only better. A larger screen, build in speakers and touch screen controls. Seriously, what more can you ask for?

I’ve seen people compiling wishlists across the Web on features they want in their phone, such as SD Card slot, removable battery or some other outlandish request. That’s not a wishlist for your current phone, that’s a feature request for a future device. Here is -MY- Wishlist of things I hope to see on -MY- iPhone in the future:

• More Configuration Options
  • Ability to change event sounds
  • Custom Ring Tones
  • Ability to add/remove applications (I’ll never use the stock ticker)
• More Features with the Camera
  • Movies
  • Digital Zoom
• Browser Enhancement
  • Full support for Flash
  • Render speed and overall performance

Other than that, Bravo Apple! I couldn’t be happier with my purchase.