Got an iPhone and hate how difficult it is to place Google Voice calls now that Apple has removed all the dialer apps from the App Store? Check out this “simple” howto:

This is a more thorough explanation of a previous post. In lieu of an GV app, I figured out a quick and easy way to dial your most frequent contacts using no more than 2 clicks. All we’re doing is adding a bookmark to your iPhone home page that links to a contact’s unique URL in your GV address book. Ready?

1. Load up the mobile GV site (https://www.google.com/voice/m). It works fine in Firefox — it doesn’t redirect to the non-mobile version like other Google sites.

2. Find your desired favorite in your contact list. Let’s use “Mom” for our example. Each contact has its own unique URL – something like https://www.google.com/voice/m/contact/793238491687864. Copy this link to your clipboard.

3. Use your favorite photo editing software to find the perfect headshot of mom. Crop it so it’s EXACTLY a square (I use Picasa).

4. Resize mom’s picture so it’s 57 × 57, and save as a PNG to your desktop. (I used http://www.resize2mail.com/advanced.php)

5. Fire up http://webclipicons.info/ Upload your 57 × 57 PNG, give it the shortcut name “mom” and paste the GV unique contact URL from step 2 into the “shortcut URL” prompt. Put in your email address, and uncheck “make public.” Hit “create shortcut.”

6. Check your iPhone email. You should receive a message with link — click on it. Safari should launch. Bookmark that page to your home screen. Your mom’s smiling face should appear along with your fart and other useless apps.

7. When it’s time to call mom, click on her face. Her contact page in your GV account will load in Safari. You can then call or SMS any number that you have stored for her.

While I’ve made some round-about howtos for accomplishing time-saving things, this one made me laugh out loud. That’s a helluva lot of work for initiating a call.

A much BETTER solution can be accomplished in just 3 steps:

1) tell Apple to go screw themselves

2) jailbreak your iPhone

3) install GV Mobile from Cydia (Cydia is like AppStore for non-AppStore apps.)

That’s a little bit of work — but you’ll only need to do it once. I guarantee you’ll like your iPhone a lot more when you do.

Remember me saying that I didn’t think we’d be seeing an official Google Voice dialer app for iPhone? Looks like I was right.

Today Apple yanked all the Google Voice dialer apps out of the App Store.

Now there’s no official or unofficial Google Voice dialers. Nice one, Apple.

While it’s still possible that an official Google client may turn up at some point, it’s not looking promising; Apple says that the reason they pulled the apps is that they ‘duplicate functionality already found in iPhone,’ namely ‘dialing.’ When Google submits their official app, it will also be ‘dialing’; consistency says that’ll be rejected as well.

Lucky for us, consistency is not high on Apple’s list of things to worry about. You may remember from the other day when they said they rejected Google’s Latitude app because they thought another app that draws maps would be ‘confusing.’ Yet the market is still chock full of GPS/mapping apps. Apps that, as far as I know, nobody’s ever been confused about.

It’s pretty clear that Apple doesn’t want any more Google present on its iPhone platform than there already is. If you want some more, you’re going to have to pick one of the many other platforms that doesn’t reject innovative apps.

UPDATE: Sean Kovacs, author of GV Mobile, one of the “unofficial” Google Voice apps which Apple pulled from their market, is now available via Cydia if your iPhone is jailbroken. Compelling enough reason to finally jailbreak?

For weeks now, there’ve been a number people on Twitter and blogs expressing disappointment with Google over leaving out iPhone when it comes to many of their key properties. One such article, by social media rockstar Wayne Sutton, does a pretty good job of summing up the feelings of many in the iPhone community, but unfortunately, manages to completely get the wrong end of the stick. He seems to be under the impression that Google just doesn’t feel like putting out apps for iPhone, forgetting that it’s Apple themselves who are both the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper when it comes to what iPhone users get to run on their handsets.

Meanwhile, just yesterday Google “finally got around to” — if you listen to the chatter on the Internet, anyway — releasing their Latitude for iPhone app — which is actually not a native app at all, but instead a web app that runs in Safari — along with a lengthy article on their mobile blog which makes it crystal clear that it’s Apple with whom we should be disappointed, not them.

We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

I’ve been saying all along that it was Apple’s 3-month+ wait approval queue, and/or the nature of Maps.app as a “core” app (that can only be updated via a firmware update) that’s the holdup, but it never occurred to me that Apple wouldn’t want Latitude on iPhone at all, which seems plainly clear now.

The brewing speculation suggests that Apple’s $99-a-year MobileMe service, which has some location aspects to it now, is going to be expanding to more directly compete with Latitude, Loopt, and other such social/location apps, and thus doesn’t want the early — not to mention free — competition from Google. This is purely speculation, but it’s based on the past times that Apple has rejected iPhone apps with features that they themselves were planning to implement, so I’m going to place my bets squarely on that being truth. We’ll have to wait and see.

This rejection now makes it pretty clear that the other native Google apps that people like Wayne are eagerly awaiting are simply never going to come. Sorry, Wayne :(

The upside to all of this, though, is that, judging by the comments on Google’s Latitude for iPhone announcement post, iPhone users and developers alike are starting to become more aware of how bad an idea it is to tie themselves to a platform that’s actively stifling the innovations its users want. How much time and money did Google spend writing a native Latitude app for iPhone that will never see the light of day? Now imagine it was your time and money down the crapper. Fun.

If you’re dying for a native Latitude app on your iPhone, you shouldn’t give up completely; Apple does have a bit of a track record of caving on stupid decisions under pressure from large vocal minority groups, so it’s possible that they may one day let Google put a native maps app on iPhone. It’s not very probable. There is only Zuul.

Hello Internet. Long time no see.

Since it’s been so long since we’ve spoken, I’ve amassed a number of things I wanted to share with you. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of them. Here’s the first one I remember.

1) I can no longer live under the protective mantra of “Oh, I’d never BUY an iPhone, I just use this one because I won it in a contest.” That’s right. I bought an iPhone 3G. Go ahead, mock — I’ll wait. So the purchasal of the 3G is noteworthy for another reason: it marked my first venture into an Apple Store.

Know how when, walking into a skyscraper or something, there’s often an air pressure differential? Where, you can feel the conditioned air ruffling your clothes and hair as you open the door? That’s what the Apple Store is like, except that the pressure differential is not with the air, it’s with SMUG. You can sort of smell the smug leaking out around the doorframe as you approach, but when you open that door… it’s almost overpowering. If my hair weren’t firmly glazed up in a mohawk prior to entering, the blast of smug would surely have formed a fauxhawk of some sort. Those hipster glasses? They’re not so much for fashion as they are EYE PROTECTION from the smug.

The first thing you notice about the Apple Store is just how many employees there are. The second thing you notice is that none of them can actually HELP you. I asked if they had any 3Gs in stock and was told:

“Yep! We sure do!”

I let a full beat pass before adding:

“Well, can I BUY one?”

This required her flagging down some other hipster employee, who passed me off at least 3 more times. Then I was left standing for 5 minutes while the latest hipster went to go try to find a 3G for me to purchase. While Hipster #5 was in search of my iPhone, I got to witness a conversation that nearly made my head explode. It was between a Typical Mac Owner and an Apple Store Hipster, and it went like this:

TMO: “Hi, I bought this iPhone and I can’t get it to work.”

ASH: “Oh? What happened?”

TMO: “Well, I plugged it into my Mac and iTunes said it needed to upgrade itself to version 7.7”

ASH: “Right.”

TMO: “So I tried to do that, but it said it couldn’t.”

ASH: “Right. You must be running Kitten.”

TMO: “Yeah. I am.”

ASH: “WELL, iTunes 7.7 requires that you be running Sabretooth, not Kitten.”

TMO: “Oh. So I need to upgrade in order to use this $200 phone I just bought?”

ASH: “Yep!”

TMO: “So I just run Mac Update —”

ASH: “Oh, no, you have to BUY Sabretooth. That’ll be $299.”

TMO: “Wait… so, in order to use this $200 phone I just bought, I have to spend like another $300 to upgrade my operating system first?”

ASH: “Yep!”

TMO: “... ... OK! Let’s do that! HERE ARE MY CREDIT CARDS!”

That conversation ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Geez. Apple customers…

Anyway, all said and done, I got out of there with an iPhone 3G. Most of the smug did eventually come off — not all of it, mind you; Apple smug can never really be completely removed. I still catch my internal monologue mocking people without iPhones sometimes.

After getting home, I proceeded to get all the contacts from my old iPhone to show up on the new one. This took 45 minutes of frustrated fighting with iTunes on D’s machine. In the end, after only ending up with the contents of D’s Outlook contacts on my phone, I decided to try letting iTunes sync my contacts to Google Contacts. That did the trick. Except that now every email address that has ever sent mail to my gmail account is now a contact on my iPhone. Good thing the phone app filters contacts to show only the ones that have phone numbers associated — wait? It DOESN’T filter them? Whose stupid frakking idea was THAT? So now, in addition to thousands of contacts on my phone, all the people who have both a phone number AND were in my Google Contacts have duplicate entries in my address book. Well, not DUPLICATE, per se; one has phone number, another has email address. Thanks, Apple.

So the iPhone 3G has GPS capability that is quite awesome. Many apps support it, allowing you to, for instance, look up movie listings without having to put in a location. Find which of the five Starbuckses that you can currently see is the closest. Stuff like that. It’s really great — or WOULD be, if it didn’t always think I was in Houston, Texas whenever 3G is turned on. (Which is pretty much always… why would you turn it OFF?)

Despite this annoying crap, a jailbroken iPhone is by far the most “open” internet device/phone I’ve ever used, so I’m unapologetic about my love for it. It does make me feel a little funny, though, being seen with one. The anti-hipster in me cringes and can only be quieted by showing it all the awesome stuff MY iPhone can do that Apple doesn’t approve of.

That preposition at the end of that sentence means it’s time for me to once again bid you adieu.

Dear Apple,

Would it have killed you to have made the ‘new tab’ button in Mobile Safari automatically put the new tab into URL entry mode? I mean, what else could I possibly want to do with a new tab other than go to a URL?