Last.fm, iScrobbler, and iPhone

It’s been just over a day since I brought home my iPhone 3G, and I am absolutely in love. But there is one thing that’s annoyed me about the device so far, and that’s the way that it interacts with Last.fm and iScrobbler. To put it simply, iPhone doesn’t play nicely with iScrobbler, at least not without some encouragement.

I am a Last.fm addict, and I go crazy whenever I realize that something I listen to hasn’t been tracked by the service. I actually find myself saying ‘Darn it’ when I’m in the car, listening to the radio, realizing that nobody will ever know that I just listened to the latest cut by Miley Cyrus. Seriously. I actually swore off of Pandora for a while because there was no way to make Last.fm track the songs I was hearing through it (then I found PandoraFM, and all was well). And one of the first things I did, once we bought our Apple TV at Christmastime, was to figure out how to make sure songs played on that device were tracked (Sync Apple TV with Mac, play one song on iPod, then sync iPod).

Yes, I have a problem.

Anyway, I was more than a little disappointed this morning when I synced my iPhone and all of the songs I played yesterday weren’t immediately tracked. I found a solution via the iScrobbler discussion boards, and that made me happy for a little while. Then I realized that the problem still wasn’t entirely solved. Only the songs I listened to late in the day had been tracked. The songs I’d listened to in the morning had been lost. Ugh.

I searched some more and discovered that I wasn’t the only one having the issue. In order to feed information on songs played on iPhone and iPod to Last.fm, iScrobbler uses the “Recently Played” playlist in iTunes. It turns out that, if you plug the iPhone into any power source before syncing it back to your computer, it loses all its playcount information. This bug happens whether you’re plugging it into a car charger, which is what the person on Apple’s discussion boards did, or an AC outlet, which is what I did. Avoid doing either of those things, and you’re all set.

I’m sure that this won’t even be an issue, once Apple allows developers to build apps for iPhone that can ping servers in the background (a feature enhancement scheduled for the fall, if I remember correctly). For now, it’s the sort of thing that you just need to bear with. And the great thing about having the Internet at your disposal is that, if you search for the right things, and if you’re diligent in your searching, you can almost always find a solution, however temporary, however jerry-rigged, to whatever problem is troubling you.

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My iPhone Is On A Shelf, And Not In My Hands

The iPhone 3G that I ordered just about two weeks ago is on a FedEx truck right now, about to be delivered to my local AT&T store. Am I excited? In a word, yes! But I’m also sad. You see, my wife and I lead such busy lives that we probably won’t be able to get down to the AT&T store until Wednesday. That’s two whole days that my iPhone is going to be sitting on a shelf, within driving distance of my house, and not in my pocket, where it belongs (four days, if you count the fact that it’s been sitting in a nearby FedEx sorting facility since Saturday evening).

To keep myself occupied, and to get myself prepared, I spent some time over the weekend backing up the contact lists from both my phone and my wife’s. I also cleaned up our iCal calendars and organized our Safari bookmarks. Tonight, assuming that a miracle does not happen and that Stephanie and I do not end up home early enough to hit the AT&T store before dinner and bed, I am going to sign up for a free trial of Apple’s MobileMe service. MobileMe got off to a rocky start, as I wrote about on Friday, but over the weekend Apple launched an official MobileMe status blog (Mashable weighs in on this development) that reports many of the services major issues have been resolved or are finally in the process of being resolved. An online Apple Store support person reiterated that message to me during a chat about iPhone cases on Saturday evening.

My hope is that MobileMe will be ready for primetime by the time my birthday rolls around at the beginning of October, which will be, coincidentally enough, right around the time that my free trial runs out. We’ll see.

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Worth Your Consideration 012 - A GF5 Linkdump

• I really, really, really hope that Marco Zaldivar wins his lawsuit against T-Mobile over “mandatory” text-message fees. I think it’s ridiculous that the company told Zaldivar that turning off text-messaging was “impossible,” especially when, according to Red Tape Chronicle writer Bob Sullivan, “Verizon, AT&T and Sprint allow consumers to shut down delivery of unwanted text messages.” Me, while I’ve sent and received a few text messages in my time, I wish I had known I could turn them off altogether. I think they’re relatively useless when free alternatives such as e-mail, instant messaging, and Twitter exist. But maybe that just means I’m old.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine star Hugh Jackman made an unannounced appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, and he brought footage from the forthcoming film with him, footage which apparently included a fan-favorite from the comic books who has thusfar not appeared in the X-Men film-franchise: Gambit. I’ve never been as nuts about Gambit as some of my contemporaries, but Newsarama’s description of the trailer as a whole does have me excited. I really dig the X-Men film-franchise (including the oft-hated-upon third installment), and I can’t wait for this one.
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog thinks apps for the AppleTV are a good idea and I wholeheartedly agree. I probably wouldn’t turn on regular cable TV at all if my AppleTV could tell me the weather and get me some other basic information like that. And I would be giddy like a schoolgirl if I could watch Viddler videos on my TV (a suggestion that TUAW makes). Apple, are you listening?
• ...apparently not. Apple continues to face major problems with the rollout of its new MobileMe service. While MacWorld gives MobileMe a relatively good review, known Apple enthusiast David Pogue (New York Times) has some serious concerns about the way that Apple is handling a crisis that’s affecting some 20,000 MobileMe users: “This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’” I intend to give the new service a spin over the weekend, despite the bad reviews, but I’d been hoping that Apple would bowl me over with this service, and I’m not so sure that’s going to happen now.

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Where’s My Darn iPhone?!? (Video)

The world is out of iPhones, according to research conducted by Internet superstar iJustine. She called more than thirty-five Apple stores recently, and not a single one of them had an iPhone 3G in stock.

I ordered my iPhone at the AT&T Store in Manchester, NH last Wednesday, and I am still waiting. I was told that it would be 10-21 days, so I’m not really all that upset. But the people over on this AT&T message board are far less patient than me. They’re up to 516 pages worth of bitching over there, so far. I’m not even kidding.

According to Where’s My Damn iPhone, which I found on that AT&T thread, I am currently the 53rd person in the AT&T Manchester direct fulfillment line (which includes all phones, not just iPhones). I was the 48th about an hour ago, so I’m guessing the site’s not all that reliable. Still, it’s fun to poke around there and see what all the people on the AT&T thread are going nuts over.

In other iPhone news, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has interesting pieces on cluttered home screens and the applications one writer is actually still using, two weeks after the launch of the App Store.

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Geek Force FiveCast 017 (Video)

This week, I geek out about Wine Library TV wristbands, ordering an iPhone 3G, and PodCamp Boston 3.

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