Nearly a year ago I hired a bright young man by the name of Will Sutton. Over the course of the following months Will and I made this – the official Saint Louis University iPhone App. (Which you are most welcome to download at iphone.slu.edu)

Will initially started from scratch, learning Objective-C and his way around XCode. Even more impressive was the fact that he really never used a Mac much before.

Like a fish to water he quickly had a rough prototype up and running. It was serviceable, but very, shall we say, rickety.

Then we were alerted to the existence of a great open-source app framework created at West Virgina University by then student Jared Crawford.

Will set about updating the framework with SLU specific data sources. We had to meet with legal, create icons and vet our data sources for reliability. With Jared’s awesome framework we were able to quickly turn around a tight first release of what I’m sure will be a vital asset to any SLU student.

Meanwhile the IT department was preparing to launch a mobile portal for some of the very same services. Like some superhero wonder group we joined forces and released our apps simultaneously. Being web-based their app has a much larger reach, but our app allows us to perform some hardware specific feats.

Our next step is to squash a few 1.0 bugs, update the app for the new Retina display and start adding additional features like dining information and athletic reports.

You can read more about the apps from this nice press release.

Four months later and it appears we kinda have working Smart Playlists on the ol’ iPhone. No more workaround!

After updating to iPhone firmware 3.1.3 and iTunes 9.0.3 it appears that changes to the status of smart playlists on the iPhone sync back to iTunes. No need to add ‘Playlist is Music’ to get the playlists to update!

*Note: According to new discussion on Apple’s support site changes on the iPhone aren’t reflected on the iPhone. Which means it’s not totally kosher.

I hope this is true for other folks as well.

Update #3: I was playing around with my smart playlists this morning and discovered an additional tidbit of information that may be useful for some. When syncing smart playlists, pay attention to which column you have the ordered the music by.

As you can see in the above screenshot I have my playlist sorted by ‘Date Added’ which is exactly how I want things ordered. Once I synced my iPhone playlist showed my music sorted by ‘Date Added’ as well.

If I were to have ‘Play Count’ selected as the column to sort by and then synced my iPhone, then that playlist would display the songs ordered by ‘Play Count’

I found this out while playing with the Apple Remote app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The selected column to sort by also effects how playlists are displayed in the iPhone Remote App.

Update #2: New updates that came out kinda fix this problem. Read more here.

I noticed the other day that Smart Playlists were not syncing correctly to both my wife and my own iPhone.

I found one fix that allowed the sort order to be correct, but disabled the Live updating function of the Smart Playlists. Which meant that every time an attribute of the playlist was updated (Such as rating a new song for my ’5 Stars’ playlist) nothing was updated upon syncing with my iPhone.

This totally defeats the purpose of a playlist that automagically updates my iPhone with the last 100 added, or top rated songs. ARGH!

Alas, after following a suggestion from this discussion thread (Thanks Dave Jelfs!) we now have a solution. In fact there’s even a bonus side effect for those who only want to sync music, and not video within your playlists.

Update: Joel S points out that this is not totally accurate. “In my own testing, these playlists will still include Music Videos.”

First find your Smart Playlist in the sidebar.

Ctrl + Click on the playlist and select “Edit Smart Playlist”

A new window will appear with all the settings for that particular playlist. Add a new rule  of ‘Playlist is Music’

Click to view

You’ll notice ‘Live updating’ is still on.

Now sync your playlist with your phone. TaDa!

While is is a workaround it does allow for the playlist to be synced, auto updated and appear sorted as you wish on the iPhone.

Like my previous troubleshooting articles I hope this post will be quickly updated when Apple roles out a fix. Until then, happy Smart Playlist syncing!

As with everything YMMV. I was using the following setup.

Macbook Pro 1.83 Ghz
Snow Leopard 10.6.1
iTunes 9.0.1
iPhone OS 3.1

If you have an improvement please leave a comment.

Taken out at Suson Park.

Found out what was eating our chickens. Add this to the list of things we’ve seen in our yard.

They kept the site running for all of Lent with over 5,000 visitors and daily updates. The project was a success and something that I’m proud of.

As it was nearing it’s end I started studying the analytics and noticed a trend.  It quickly became apparent that the length of time on the site was exceptionally long due to the type of content being written.  The average time on site was over four and a half minutes. Longer than any other site I’ve maintained.

I thought to myself, “Wow, these daily reflections would be about a page and a half if printed.”

And in fact I was correct.

Interested in brushing up my InDesign skills* I looked into self-publishing options and found Lulu.

Learning a bit about how to format my document, page numeration, margins and all the other fun elements of layout I created a 91 page soft cover edition of the Lent website.  All 45 daily reflections seperated by the approprate weekly reflections. The end of the book even contains a list of all the Lenten pledeges that users submitted to the website.

I printed off 4 of these at about $6 a pop. Having enjoyed the professionalism and dedication during this project I gave them as gifts to the key members involved. I think they all liked them – as much as I did while creating it.

*The last time I used InDesign it was called Pagemaker.

After an apropos search on Twitter about the error I came across this tweet.

rbieber: @frumpa thats odd. This time I entered the password first (where focus defaults) and then username and authenticated fine. Bug?

A quick test confirmed that the order in which you enter your credentials for secondary accounts is a bug.  It appears  you need to enter your password first and then your username.

If this doesn’t make any sense, see the video below.

I should mention despite this small bug I’m enjoying Tweetie very much and am sure the developers will remedy this. Most likely right after I hit the Publish button.

Update: Well pretty close, atebits updated Tweetie today to 1.0.2, which fixes this problem.

Very abstract.

Opened up the new Safari 4 beta and was greeted with this screen.

From the BTTF Wiki

Look familiar? Wrong medium, but spot on.  GIVE ME MORE MEDIA, OM NOM NOM!

Athough, I was disappointed when I could only watch 2 channels on my video glasses.

My friends Matt and Mandy just welcomed their 2 new boys into the world. Congrats Mom and Dad!