Tag Archives: iPhone

Dumb iPhone NetShare Conspiracy Theory

Yesterday an app showed up on the iPhone Application Store called “NetShare.” NetShare, which is a product of Nullriver, is a SOCKS proxy which let’s your Laptop connect to your iPhone over WiFi and share its EDGE or 3G Internet connection.

This arrangement is typically called tethering. It is a common feature with a lot of other phones. You are supposed to pay $30 or so on top of your standard data plan to use it, though a lot of people get away with using it with basic data plans. There is no tethering plan for the iPhone.

It was a little suprising to see such an app on the application store. So, it wasn’t much of a suprise when it registered as unavailable a few hours later.

Then it showed up again this afternoon, before disappearing again. I managed to snag a copy before it vanished again. It seems to work pretty much as promised.

I don’t know what is going on. One of nullriver’s other apps, Tuner, which plays streaming audio, had a similar on-again-off again presence early in it’s existance, but it has been solidly available for a while.

My theory is that this is just a glitch, and that Apple let the product through on the first place because they aren’t ready with their own tethering app. I think a later version of the firmware will bring tethering and the opportunity to give AT&T even more more money every month. As a consolation, AT&T will finally turn on free wifi at their Hotspota for iPhone owners with an appropriate data plan.

Yeah yeah yeah. I know, it’s a lame theory but at least I did it in a fee thousand fewer words than Cringley would have spent on it.

WordPress iPhone app

Automattic has posted their WordPress iPhone app to the iTunes application store. I’m using it to write this post. It seems straightforward and functional and allows posting of photos, which is cool.

It would be nice if it supported automatically adding some sort geotag.

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