iphone signal testing with code

Closest cell tower 1 Km, iPhone 3G, Wi-fi mode, iOS 4.0, Orange network.

With device held gently by edges:

signal avg 90 (outdoor, line of sight to cell tower, same altitude)
signal avg 😯 (indoor, line of sight to cell tower, same altitude)
signal avg 60 (indoor, no line of sight to cell tower, same altitude)
signal avg 4O (outdoor, no line of sight to cell tower, ground level)

With device cradled in hand a average decrease of signal by about 20 in all cases and whatever finger configuration.

Turning 3G on causes a average decrease of signal by 5 in all cases.

The connection strength bars shows 5 bars in all cases.

Absolute minimum experienced : 19, absolute maximum 96.

The thing to take away from all this is that if  you already had a very bad connection under 20 and subtract the hand attenuation of about 20 you are left with no signal, and it did not hep that until iOS 4.0.1  a bad connection with a 20 strength would have shown 4 or even 5 bars.

The application used to test gets the signal strength from private calls to apple’s CoreTelephony framework, in a effort to help the iphone signal testing going on share a common base i am providing the application to anyone, please let me know what are the results of your tests and feel free to contribute to the code on github.

The application is named  VAFieldTest , it’s code is under a open source license and can be found at http://github.com/valexa/VAFieldTest , you need Xcode and a iPhone developer account to compile and run it.

iOS 4.0.1 update
same behavior as before, with the difference that now the connection bars properly reflect changes in the strength (I 1-19, II 20-29, III 30-39, IIII 40-49, IIIII 50-99 ) , with previous versions they just show 5 bars for any signal strengths above 25.

how to make your iOS device read stuff

Here is a little handy tip to make your device speak textual content with almost acceptable computer voice:

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Triple-click home to “Toggle VoiceOver” or “Ask” if you want to get a dialog asking wether to turn it On/Off (remember that tapping is done by double-tapping when voiceover is on).

Optionally go into Settings > General > Accessibility > Voiceover and set the “Speaking Rate” slider to around 20%, i found that speed to work best for me when reading papers.

Now go to your book or webpage or anything you want read and triple-click home and behold the machine start speaking your currently selected element,

Remember to turn voiceover off when you are done or else you will have to interact with the phone interface in a a whole different way (if by any chance you lock the device as i did you can unlock it by tapping the swipe bar to select it then tapping it again to unlock).

The major pitfalls besides the surprisingly hard to perform triple-tap home is that you have to select any text blocks you want read, and while this might be acceptable for pdf books where you can select a whole page in basically everything else you have to select individual paragraphs, even sentences, so do not expect a audiobook experience, and do not expect it to speak the contents of apps that do not have selectable text like WSJ, NYT etc (BBC/Reuters/AP work).

It is a shame Apple did not make it possible for this to be implemented as a book/content speaker with a consistent behavior and without relying on voiceover tricks, as it will even support reading in a lot of other languages than English, (for the full list see this for iPad and this for the other devices)

Voiceover is only available on iPhone 3GS, 4, iPad and 3rd generation iPod touch.

enforcing iAd implementations

There seems to be a significant issue with the iAd implementation at the moment, the ads themselves are not cached on the operating system, and that has two major implications:
1 – ads can be disabled by the user by just turning off the network connection
2 – the user has incentive to disable ads under pricy data plans as every load adds to their data quota

To a developer this gives a strong incentive to both give the user the ability to purchase a removal of ads and make sure the user does not turn adds off otherwise (i am even starting to see places advising users to do so) i will go on showing how to do both and all the code is given as a xcode project attached.

Wether you have a free application and your business model depends solely on iAd’s or you monetize in other ways, if you implemented iAd you have to acknowledge the next thing:
People will want to remove the ads if at all possible, if you implemented iAd you should also allow the user to make an in app purchase for removing the ads, i will also show you how to do that in the code attached as a xcode project.

Do not get me wrong, i believe that some of the users will make the right choice and pay compensation in return of removing the ads if you give them that option, but a lot of the people will make the choice of depriving you of your ad income if they can make them stop loading.
So i will also show you how to implement a way to check if a ad was loaded after a amount of time and effectively disable the application otherwise, you can find the code in the xcode project attached.

I want to end with saying that this is clearly not a ideal situation and i hope that Apple will move quickly to address both issues 1 and 2 from within the operating system which would make a lot of sense and is a case of how they should have leveraged the fact that they built it within the operating system in the first place.

Now i will give you some details about the code, it supports all interface orientations, all devices, it requires 2 frameworks (iAd and StoreKit with iAd being weak linked) , the bulk of the code is in iAdAppViewController, this is the only one you need to edit to suit your interface and change com.foo.bar.removeads to your ProductID, besides that there is a PaymentObserver class that handles the in-app purchasing.

AdAppViewController must implement the PaymentObserverDelegate and ADBannerViewDelegate protocols, it subclasses viewDidLoad to do the initializations, viewDidAppear to position the elements, adLoadCheck to check if the ad was loaded, adsButtonPressed for when the user buys, removedAdsPurchased for when the purchase is confirmed, bannerViewDidLoadAd fires when an ad loads and willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation when the device orientation is changed, resizeBanner is the code called to position/reposition the ad and the other elements in your interface.

ADBannerView *adBanner is the banner itself,  UIButton *adButton is the button above the ad to purchase ad removal, UIView *adBlockView is the view presented over the interface as shown in the image to the right.

I will not go into more detail than this other than to say it was all tested and should work as expected, but i did not implement this myself and i give no absolute guarantees , if you have any specific question leave it as a comment.