[Wavytone]

Two steps forward, one back, and a hack:

iPhone update 2.01... the iPhone is noticeably snappier, more responsive all round.

Uranus has been updated, its more responsive to the pinch (zooming) and dragging - almost useable, but still has two annoying habits - text is upside down for southern hemisphere, and when zoomed in it displays far too much text. Looks like it uses the Hipparchos catalogue, too.

A-Level has been updated, but its gone backwards; "calibration" is only temporary which basically defeats the whole point of the thing (where am I going to find a dead horizontal surface in the bush in the dark, huh ?)

On the hack side, some inspired nut reverse-engineered what goes on between the iPhone and Google Maps when Apple's "Location" app is displaying maps, then turned his attention to Google Sky. Turns out Google Sky uses 6 levels of zoom, and tiles the sky using small jpegs. The fellow then decided to download all the tiles and stuff that lot into the cache of the iPhone used by the "Location" app so instead of displaying earth, it displays the sky - so long as you don't zoom in too far in which case you get a streetmap of some place in Morocco where the LMC should be.

While not exactly useable it raises a lot of possibilities about how best to do celestial navigation stuff on the iPhone and what else it could do.

It's very very early days for the iPhone, reminiscent of the dawn of DOS.