Notes on the iPhone on IOS4 is broken

Apple recently released IOS4 for the iPhone which updated a number of things (mostly for the better).

One of the less obvious changes was to synchronise notes from the Notes app automatically with your gmail account. The iphone will automatically create a "Notes" label in gmail and file your notes there.

Anyway this would have passed unnoticed for me except that the Notes app is now bugged and anything after the first few lines of a note will be lost when you close and re-open the app. This makes the Notes app unusable and is apparently down to a bug in the gmail synchronisation.

Fine so I just turn off this feature that I didn't want anyway and everything will be OK right? Wrong. Turn off the note syncing (in the settings app under the mail settings) and any notes written since you updated your phone will vanish from the Notes app completely. Brilliant.

Fortunately they don't get deleted from gmail so you can still get at them and paste them back into the Notes app where they ought to have stayed in the first place.

So be warned, if you use the Notes app at all then turn off the gmail synching ASAP and be prepared to retrieve your newest notes from gmail.

Customer Service

It's nice to get a good bit of customer service every now and again. A while back we bought an AeroBed, which is a nice, comfortable air bed with a built in mains powered pump. Recently it sprung a leak so I went to AeroBed site and requested a puncture repair kit which were listed as free. A couple of days later I got an email asking for proof purchase which I didn't have (having bought the bed some years ago), so I sent a reply saying that and that I would be happy to pay for a kit. They replied to say that they'd send out a kit anyway, still free.

In the end I actually received two kits so I have to wonder whether they'd sent out the first kit before even getting in touch to ask for proof of purchase.

Anyway, the fact that they are still around and providing free customer support for old customers is nice thing, and I think deserves to be reported, given how often people get on the internet just to complain.

Cycling

A while ago I looked for a site that could plot out a cycle friendly route for me for my commute to work but failed to find one. I have now found CycleStreets.net and whilst I haven't actually tried the route they suggest yet I am very impressed with the (free) route planner they have on the site. Well worth a look if you want to plan a route through unfamiliar territory.