Review: Ford Fusion with Microsoft SYNC

I just got back from a week-long road trip to Montana.  We rented a car, and got a nice change from the usual Chevy that Enterprise seems to rent non-stop: a Ford Fusion.  We had asked for a car with an auxiliary input to the stereo so that we could listen to our iPhones while driving, and so they gave us the Fusion.  However, we were in for a surprise as the fusion has Microsoft’s new foray into car stereo equipment: Microsoft Sync.

Sync is essentially a microcomputer running a custom version of Windows CE.  The idea is that you can play almost any portable music device through a built-in USB port, and Auxiliary line-in port or via Bluetooth Audio.  There is no display, rather the Sync system uses the built-in standard 1 line stereo LCD display.

The upside of using the Sync system versus a standard auxiliary port is that you can control the playback functions from the controls on the steering wheel, as well see the track names and artist information on the display.  The USB port is also powered, so you can charge your device while its plugged in.  Our iPhones were on the list of approved devices that work well with the system (surprising for Microsoft), so we were in business.

I was also excited because new to the iPhone OS 3.0 supports the AD2P stereo bluetooth protocol for streaming sound, as well as a partial implementation of the AVRCP protocol for controlling playback.  So, I paired the phone with the stereo using the fairly straightforward instructions.  Note: the system will only let you do this if the car isn’t moving, which is really frustrating if you are a passenger and trying to set up the system.  Soon enough, I had my iPhone playing music on the car stereo via bluetooth.  There were a few pretty sweet features that showed some forethought into the implementation.  First, whenever the key was removed from the ignition and the phone was playing music, the system would pause the music.  Then, when you turned the car on again, it would automatically resume the song where you left off when you exited the car.  Pretty slick!  And the whole time I didn’t have to take the iPhone out of my pocket.

There were also a couple of drawbacks to the bluetooth side of things.  First, no song information was transfered or displayed on the dashboard display.  Second, Apple only partially implemented the AVRCP protocol, so the Sync system can only send play/pause signals – no skipping forward or back between songs.  Given that this is a pretty big disadvantage, especially on a road trip when you are listening to music for hours on end, we decided to try the USB route.

Plugging the iPhone into the USB port (which is hidden inside the center console) brings up the Sync system.  It starts by trying to index all the songs on the device – not sure why really.  After about 5 minutes of a progress bar, the car announces (via a built in voice synthesizer) that indexing could not retrieve all the songs, and that I’d have to enter track metadata manually into the system.  Yeah right!  Nice idea, but no one in their right mind would try to do this without a keyboard, and especially not with a one line display and turn nobs to select all the letters.  Anyway, we hit cancel and were good to go.  We selected the playlist we wanted, and it the Sync system started playing the song and displaying the track information on the stereo’s display.  Great!

We were cruising along for about 5 hours this way, then stopped at a gas station.  We had to turn off the car, but when we turned it back on to get going again, the stereo froze.  No sound, but it was displaying the track information for the last song we played.  After a few minutes, the display unlocked and gave us an error ‘USB Empty’.  Hmmm.  The iPhone was definitely plugged in, but was no longer getting any power from the port.  We tried restarting the car, unplugging the cable – basically everything we could think of, but we kept getting the same error.

After a little sluething online – thank god for iPhone’s internet connection – we discovered that this was a fairly common problem with the Sync system, and exposed a major design flaw.  There was no way to do a hard reset of the system!  Apparently, the Windows version used in the system had a buggy USB driver which would shut down under certain circumstances.  The only solution was to reboot everything, however there was no way to reboot the Sync system from the controls.  We tried to do a soft reset through the menu system, but no such luck.  The computer even kept drawing power when the car was off.  After more sleuthing, we found a forum post that suggested removing the fuse from under the steering wheel that controlled the power to the dash (For those of you wondering, it was fuse #13 – use the provided tool on the inside of the cover, and remove the fuse for about 30 seconds.  Your trunk may pop open.)  Once we reinserted the fuse and started the car up again, everything worked fine!

That turned out to be the only major hiccup we ran into.  Overall, I think the system works great, and it is definitely nice to see some serious integration between cars and the devices we use all the time.  The system would be improved by a better display, and of course by a hard reset option that is more accessible than popping out a fuse.

Getting Notes to Sync in Mail from iPhone OS 3.0

One feature I am really excited about in the new iPhone 3.0 OS released on Wednesday is the ability to sync your notes with the Mail application in Leopard.  However, it took me a few tries to figure out how to get this to work exactly.  I realized that I ran into this problem because I had never created a note on my Mac in Mail, so this walkthrough assumes you are in the same position.  I’ve outlined the steps below:

1. Enable Notes syncing in iTunes.  You can do this by going to the ‘Info’ tab when you have your iPhone/iPod attached to your computer.  Check the ‘Sync Notes’ checkbox about halfway down the page.
2. If you go ahead sync your iPhone now, and you’ll notice that none of the Notes show up in mail.  If you have multiple mailboxes, they’ll be listed under the ‘Reminders’ heading in the Mail sidebar, with little note icons, but you won’t see any from your iPhone.  What you have to do is create a note in Mail now, by going to File > New Note.  Type something in and save it, and you’ll see a new note icon under ‘Reminders/Notes’ labeled ‘On My Mac’. 
3. Sync your iPhone one more time.  After its completed, you should see all your notes under the ‘On My Mac’.

iPhone Web Applications with iUI and Ruby on Rails – Part 1

Since my last post outlining the different iPhone web apps, I’ve had a chance to play around with iUI a little more and get a successful app (for my side project, Notes/Tasks) up and running.  As there still is not a lot of documentation on using iUI, I figured I would sit and write down some of what I’ve learned.  As I’ve been developing the backend in Ruby on Rails, I figured I’d also add some tips and tricks for getting iUI to work well with dynamic content.  This article will cover the basic of creating a web application with iUI, including creating buttons, using forms and lists, and also how to integrate it with rails’ MVC framework.

Background
The app I’m using for demonstration is a side project of mine – building a web interface for a notes and tasks desktop application that synchs with an online server.  The desired functionality for the web is fairly simple: it needs restrict access to uses who have logged in, be able to display lists of notes and tasks, details for each individual note or task, edit the text of a note, mark a task as completed, and create new notes and tasks.  I’ve already written the API for the server (also in rails) so this project will focus on creating the user front end, rather than the backend application code.

iPhone Web Development Tools

I’ve been looking for an easy set of stylesheets and javascripts to create nice looking iPhone enabled web apps.  After some cursory searching, I’ve found a couple of resources, listed below, with my thoughts.

There seem to be a few toolkits out there, but nothing that has been developed into a stable version.  I think that most people bailed on the web apps when the real iPhone SDK came out in January, so there doesn’t seem to be much action.  However, I still see a big use for iPhone web apps as a prototyping tool for the real thing – at least that’s what I’m interested in.

iUI

A good start to a generic iPhone web app library.  Hasn’t been updated in a while (since November, 2007) but looks like the 0.30 version is scheduled to come out any day now.  This project has the laudable goal of making developement for the iPhone as easy as coding HTML – no knowledge of javascript or css necessary.  Sounds great, and they’ve made good progress, but I ran into quite a few problems.  First, there were quite a few rendering bugs – background images appeared all over the place, forms didn’t work, links were spotty and the text rendering looked terrible.  My guess is there hasn’t been any active development since the 2.0 firmware was realased which include updates to the WebKit rendering engine.  Also, the lack of any documentation was really frustrating.

iPhone Sample Code and Examples

This isn’t really a library, and I have a sinking suspision that it was based on the early work of the iUI folks, but is a helpful resource nonetheless.  Basically, the site provides examples of different iPhone web pages that can be used to fake the look of a real app.  I found that this site was in generally better shape than the iUI library, but was very kludgy.  Again, very little documentation didn’t help matters.  For example, the way the javascript is written removes any link functionality – <a> tags are repurposed for displaying in-page divs which gives it the sliding effect.  However, to link to an outside site, one has to add an ‘onclick’ javascript function to manually change the window.location.href url to the link you want to follow.  Very annoying.

iPhone Toolbox

This is a general resource rather than a library.  But, they provide a bunch of useful links to other sites and iPhone emulators which can be helpful.  Also, the site provides lists of cool webapps, and for you folks with hacked phones, icon sets and wallpapers.