iPhone tethering - how to restore after updating to 3.0b5 and iTunes8.2b10(13)

Breaking my extended blog silence (I've been busy, you know, starting my full time job at Mozilla!) to tell you about the quagmire I went into when I tried to set up tethering on my iPhone.

So here's the story - with links that will help you avoid what happened to me.

I purchased and ADC membership so I could download and install the iPhone 3.0 SDK and OS. When Beta 5 came out I eagerly updated since my phone had been crashing regularly and went into restore mode. As soon as the 3.0b5 update went live on my phone, iTunes said it needed 8.2 to work so I downloaded the most recent version from ADC. This turned out to be 8.2b10(13) which disables the ability to change carrier settings and thus, to enable tethering if you didn't already do it before the update.

So - after many (failed!) attempts to go back to 3.0b3 and 3.0b4 so that I could use iTunes 8.1 - I did eventually (10 hours and many blog tips later) work out my tethering issues with this extremely simple set of steps:

Simple Steps to restoring tethering:
Download: http://www.adammcnamara.com/CanadianCarriersTetheringPatch.zip
Download: iTunes 8.2b7(10) http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4874487/

* Delete iTunes 8.2b10(13) from your computer, install the older version - as the torrent description points out, it says that it installs as an 8.1.1 but it is in fact 8.2.

* When you connect your phone in iTunes, Option-click the “Check for Updates” and pick the.ipcc file for your carrier (from the carriers patch you downloaded). It will update the carrier settings.

* Reboot (NOT RESPRING) the phone. You can now tether over USB or BlueTooth (unless you have a new Mac Unibody Mac where apparently the Bluetooth stack is broken and so you're relegated to only sharing via USB).

To activate tethering, go to “Settings->General->Network->Internet Tethering”. The first time you do so it may say “Contact Rogers to enable this feature”, but a few second later it should allow you to enable it. If not, restart the phone again.

Thanks to many blogs out there but more specifically to Adam Mcnamara where the bulk of the steps are from.

Learning from Lab 1 in Mac OS and iPhone development

Just finished my Lab 1 for Peter's Mac class and I want to keep track of the little bumps along the way.

Things I learned:

1. If you want the keyboard to hide after you are finished inputting text into a field - basically once the field loses focus you need to do this:
   [txtControl resignFirstResponder];
   thanks to iCodeBlog for that one. That site also has the best tutorial that I could find for getting started on iPhone apps.


2. It's much easier to do a View-based application with the iPhone SDK template, but this means you have fewer UI objects to play with. I still have not figured out why this is. In the regular application template there is a wide variety of inputs, pickers, etc. But in that template you have to create custom views and though I read up on this a bit, it seemed like overkill for Lab 1.


3. Looking at the existing apps in the iTunes store is a good way to see what UI designs are working already in the real world. I like to think I'm pretty good at laying out apps, but it's amazing how much better they can be and it's very helpful to look at what people are doing in the store since they have probably gotten a lot more feedback on their UI.

The amount of information out there about iPhone code, especially for beginners is really sparse still. It seems like every time I google about an issue I'm hitting the same few blogs/sites. I'll post the code for my apps when the due date has passed so that there's just a little more out there. Remind me if I forget.