rolfsky's personal blog

Is it possible to skip a version of an iPhone app you particularly dislike? Yes!

The background:
Occasionally, iPhone app developers release an update that you don't like, for whatever reason. Maybe they deleted or broke your favorite features, maybe they had Apple strong-arm them into removing a button that violates their terms of service. Whatever the reason, you have one version of an app you don't want to update.

If you are compulsive about keeping your other apps up to date, this can be a real pain. Yes, you can go into the appstore, and click into each app and tap "Update", but this is tedious, kicking you out of the appstore. If you have a lot of apps to update, this could take a long time.

How to update all iPhone apps except one:

• what you need:
• • your iPhone
  • the Mac you sync your phone to
  • a sync cable
  • the old version of the app you like currently installed on your phone or iPad
  •       - if you *just* updated and hate the new version, you may still be in luck, skip to the bottom of the post to find your old version

Here you go, this is how to skip an app version while updating all apps:

1. connect your iPhone, and launch iTunes if necessary
2. when you see your iPhone in the left nav, right click and choose "Transfer Purchases from..."
3. within iTunes, click your apps section, and update all the apps within iTunes, DO NOT SYNC YET.
4. in the list of apps in iTunes, find the new version that you don't like (the version number is listed in one of the columns)
5. delete the new version from your iTunes, and send it to the trash
6. do the "Transfer Purchases" command again, this should now move only your app that you want to keep to iTunes (the old one)
7. now that you have the old version in iTunes, now you can sync
8. doing a normal sync at this point will update all your other apps on the phone, but not touch the old version you like
9. viola! all your other apps updated, the offending update version skipped
10. you'll have to do this every time you sync, if you want to keep this old version

What's going on here:
iTunes is a strange and mythical beast, but what we're doing isn't too complicated. Essentially, we're updating all the apps in iTunes, deleting the new version of the app we just downloaded without syncing it, transferring the old version we like back to iTunes, and then grabbing all the "new" stuff back. Because the version in iTunes we just got from the phone, nothing happens to that specific app, while all others get update.

But what if I already upgraded?! Am I stuck?
You are probably in luck, and the old version is still in your trash can.

To recover an old version from your trash:

1. find the old .IPA file in the trash, it should be there if you just updated your apps in iTunes
2. move this file out of the trash, and keep it somewhere safe
3. in your iTunes library, delete the new version
4. on your iPhone, delete app (this means you may lose all your settings! but it has to be done)
5. drag and drop the old .IPA file onto iTunes
6. sync with your iPhone, and magic!

Today, November 4th, 2008. Marking the day of a new era.

Howdy all!

I've moved my professional blog over to http://rolfskyberg.wordpress.com

In the future, all my newest posts will go there.

Thanks!

We have a mouse.

He lives in our cupboard and taunts our cats by being someplace they can't catch him, but still within earshot of their food dishes. For the record, our mouse likes to eat only certain things. Imagine if you will, a small stocked pantry of a house. Whatever thinking might be in there, you might be right. However, apparently only SOME of them are good for a mouse to eat.

Things mice don't bother with:
- a huge bar of bakers chocolate
- oats, in a cardboard tube
- saltine crackers, still sealed
- mushroom, or beef gravy mix
- spaghetti sauce mix
- dried pasta of any form
- hand-dried fruits barely concealed in a baggie: apple, banana, persimmon
- dried hot peppers

Things mice go WILD about:
- LUNA bars, especially anything with peanut butter, or chocolate (FOUR of these eaten, so far)
- chicken gravy mix
- au jus gravy mix
- saltine crackers, opened
- water crackers, in a baggie
- cocoa mix

Ok, here goes folks, and it's a doozy:

1) blood gets EVERYwhere


So, the backstory: my (adopted) cat Oscar is a scrapper. He fairly routinely gets involved in one scuffle or another, usually without serious damage. So, the other day, I think he got a bite to the ear, because he developed some type of small festering abscess. I, being a "trained" (read: scrubbed floors in a veterinary hospital) animal medecine professional, decided that we should squeeze it.

We did this once, and then once again the next morning. The first time, just some blood. The second time, a "pop" and some pus. The third time, he comes in at 11pm to our bedroom, obviously bothered by something. So, having trouble sleeping anyway, Cindy and I decide to squeeze it again. I get the rag soaked in peroxide, and we squeeze the hell out of his poor ear.

Of course, this enrages the cat, and he runs off wildly into the house. I return to the bathroom to rinse out my now disgusting rag, and hang it to dry. In the mean time, Oscar has returned to perch atop our dresser next to the bathroom, and is looking in on me plaintively.

And it's then when I notice the blood. No, not just the blood you'd associate with a scratch, but the kind of thick, surreally red blood that you see in lion fur when one lion has just beat the crap out of another lion. It's covering a good quarter of his head AND he's dripping it everywhere in bright red polka dots about our house. So, we capture and sequester the cat in a towel (much to his chagrin), and hold the towel to his head, staunching the bleeding. After this, we proceed to clean up the blood that we can see in the middle-hours of the night.

Truth is, we got 2 of the major locations, with 4 more insane massacre sites dotted about the house where he'd run, sat, dripped a huge pile of blood, flicked his head (thereby spreading it to the nearby walls and furniture), and run off to another site.

Good news is, we think he should be OK. He didn't let us squeeze it again this morning, but he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed... so I think he's feeling better.

Let this be a reminder to any would-be psycho-killers out there.

Ok, so, I'm no longer bored with the internet.

And in that vein, who would like to be invited to the beta test of Lala.com?

It's a music site that works vaguely like Netflix, except that there's no "central library", it's all peer to peer. SO, list the CDs that you have (and are willing to part with), and note the CDs you want. As you ship out CDs (in pre-paid, delivered envelopes), you gain karma and CDs get shipped to you. After that, the CDs are for you to keep (completely legally! you bought them!) or to be listened to, and then passed back into the system.

I currently have 5 cds waiting to be shipped, and 5 incoming at me right now. :)

So, anybody want an invite? I have 5 to dole out. ;)

-Rolf

(Addendum: you pay $1.40 for each CD that you receive. 20 cents of that goes back to the artist (!!), and $0.49 goes to postage for the next person's envelope.)

This morning, I am posting with my "hidden camera" pic.

And why?

Well.... this morning, I became bored with the internet.

I'm working on some cool things at eBay, perhaps affecting some company-wide change, trying to shake the lumbering giant a little to get it to wake up. This morning, I was talking with Cindy about all of it. She said, "well that's what my company is doing!", which is fine. I'm glad that I'm not way out on a limb here. :)

But I realized that I hadn't really been keeping up on my usual tech-reading... so I did about a half hour this morning on Digg, Slashdot, and TechCrunch.

And whaddya get? Disappointed.

Sorry folks, AJAX, CSS, and Ruby on Rails aren't going to save the world. Oh, and by the way, nobody cares about social networking anymore. The technologies that rock my world aren't going to be one-word encapsulated, they'll be the system-based and thoughful integration of enough things to make my life easier.

To the Internet: "Please call me back when you have something interesting to say."

I'm going to the gym for a run. (Hey, tdw, I can run two miles now!)

OK, so you should go watch this video:

http://bellsandspurs.com/_video

It's a pretty freakin' cool example of machimina done within Second Life. I am seriously impressed.

[ I just read your recent LJ post regarding your birthday party, but I would like to state that I was going to write this entry BEFORE I read yours. So there. :) ]

And my message is short and sweet. Happy Birthday my dear friend Titus. I know that sometimes, we are out of touch, and it has been a long time since we really sat down and chatted. But as it says in that Baz Lurhman remix, "keep close the good [friends], because in the long run it's the people who you grew up with who will help you out the most."

ok, ok. So that's not a good paraphrase, but I still mean it.

And, I love you man. ;^)

-Rolf

PS: Don't fret about the job hunt. I have learned that all you need to do, is keep being who you are and your right life, will find you.

So, this morning, I came in early to work to create some mockups of a concept that I'd discussed with some folks yesterday. I've got a vested interest in making sure that they don't build something that IsLame, so I thought that pretty pictures would give everybody an idea of the middle ground. To do this, I plugged in my Wacom Graphire4 graphics tablet. I hadn't used it in a few months, and this was a good use for it.

On to the real meat:
My tablet pen stylus was stuck at some level (maybe 25%), and therefore, in the Windows world, it was registering always as MouseDown. I fussed with it a bit (Gimp was critical to showing me that the pressure-sensitivity was reading incorrectly), and finally decided that it was a hardware issue. I'd stored it 2 months previous in the little gripper on the top of the tablet, and most likely, I'd unintentionally forced the nib up against the end of the cradle, which apparently, can permanently damage the sensor. (Wacom specifically sends you a little "inkwell" lucite cradle that holds it upright, nib-unencumbered for when you're not using it and warns not to store it in a pen cup.)

But here's the good news, I fixed it!

Steps to revive your stuck Wacom pen stylus:

1) determine that it's really stuck:
- open up the Gimp, or Photoshop or other pressure sensitive aware app
- if it is indeed stuck, it will register as "on" as soon as you get it near enough the tablet to be recognized
- you should be able to press HARDER and make it register 100%

2) decide that it's really broken, so the following step is OK with you
- go to Wacom's site, and see that replacement pens are $30, and out of stock
- convince yourself, that if it's not working 100%, you don't want it to work at all

3) The THWACK
- get your painting app open again (or, maybe you still have it open)
- make a nice vertical line with the broken pen
- now, here's the hard part: grab you pen at the "eraser" end, between your thumb and forefinger like a wand, and give it a resolute THWACK against the thumb-pad of your other hand.
- try your app again, hopefully, the line is lighter (less saturated)

4) rinse and repeat
- go back and look at step three
- keep repeating step three (THWACK) until your nib is completely un-stuck
- send me half of the $30 you would have spent on a new stylus

Cheers!