Mobile pony

December 15, 2010 1:33 AM

I maybe asking too much but being able to change my profile pic from my iPhone would save me from waiting for an ancient OS to boot.

I'd take care of the pony and feed it pancakes, everyday, I promise.

posted by Samuel Farrow to Feature Requests at 1:33 AM (32 comments total)

Mobile Safari doesn't provide a way to select a file from the iPhone filesystem. I'm afraid you're going to have use something that supports file uploading to change your profile pic. Luckily that's a relatively minor feature of the site that you only need to touch once in a while.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:08 AM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

pb: What are you doing up?
posted by vacapinta at 3:43 AM on December 15, 2010

Christmas tree mishap.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:46 AM on December 15, 2010 [15 favorites]

thanks for the laugh, pb! this is why i love metafilter!

and sorry you had a mess to clean up.
posted by msconduct at 4:10 AM on December 15, 2010

Doing damn near anything with an iThing that Apple can't find a business case for is indeed apparently asking too much. Ditch your vendor lock-in ankle bracelets and go Android.
posted by flabdablet at 4:29 AM on December 15, 2010

Goddammmmmit, why does twitter break the back button??
posted by DU at 4:41 AM on December 15, 2010 [6 favorites]

The pb tree incident woke up mathowie too! That must have been one hell of a crash.
posted by vacapinta at 5:24 AM on December 15, 2010

pb decorates the Ur-tree for Christmas.
posted by Plutor at 5:30 AM on December 15, 2010

Goddamit Matt, let pb sleep!
posted by nomadicink at 5:33 AM on December 15, 2010

Ditch your vendor lock-in ankle bracelets and go Android

Someone at Android's ad agency should really turn out a parody of Apple's iconic 1984 ad.
posted by zarq at 6:18 AM on December 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

If someone wanted to code a native metafilter iphone app, this would be doable.
posted by empath at 6:22 AM on December 15, 2010

YOUR MOM WOULD BE DOABLE
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:36 AM on December 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Tell me more about your your fetish for sexagenerians.
posted by empath at 6:45 AM on December 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

It is a little over a foot tall, hand-carved by Zuni tribesman, and lurking within the body of Karen Black after a mishap with the gold chain that keeps it in check.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:49 AM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

...would save me from waiting for an ancient OS to boot.

Those magnetic tape spools take a while to warm up. Have patience.
posted by rocket88 at 7:10 AM on December 15, 2010

MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!

Tell me more about your your fetish for sexagenerians

k!
posted by nomadicink at 7:10 AM on December 15, 2010

See, people always say stupid shit like, "Apple takes away your choices," but in reality they just know what you'll want before you do. When surfing the web on my iPhone was a more pleasurable experience than doing it on my desktop I uninstalled Flash and put in an adblock. Now the internet isn't a bunch of crap ads, pop ups and under, moving distractions, and shit that obscures the content because you happened to move a cursor somewhere within 5 inches of an ad. Sure, smart people had done that stuff already, but for those of us frogs that are too lazy to get out of the slowly boiling water it was the shock I needed to make me realize the world is a better place without Flash, Floppy Drives, and built-in optical drives.

If this means i can't update my metafilter profile picture on-the-go then I'll just have to live with the tyranny.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:18 AM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!

Lana? Is that you?
posted by kmz at 7:18 AM on December 15, 2010

Doesn't iCab Mobile let you upload files?

I hate this fucking OS so much, the things I will do for a 300dpi display, it's disgusting
posted by enn at 7:43 AM on December 15, 2010

Thanks pb. I hope you get your Chistmas Tree up again soon. In the lead up to my wedding I've been in the gym, and wanted to share the results of that here.

I'll spin up a disk later today (tomorrow your time).
posted by Samuel Farrow at 7:46 AM on December 15, 2010

If you use the Atomic browser (the full version, not the lite version), you identify your browser as Firefox, IE, or various flavours of Safari. It's a bit of a pain to deal with the default version of the site on the iPhone screen (pinch! stretch! pinch! stretch!) but you can get to your profile and upload a new pic.

I'd like to see pb as a wide-eyed and innocent cat, please.
posted by maudlin at 7:50 AM on December 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

maudlin, does the Atomic browser support file uploads? Because the problem isn't the User Agent string.
posted by Deathalicious at 8:07 AM on December 15, 2010

Crap. No, it apparently doesn't. You can get to the page, but the Browse button doesn't appear. And Opera displays the button as Choose, but it doesn't work.

You can apparently remove your profile pic, but that's it.

(Opera is really slow and renders poorly on the iPhone, laying stuiff on the screen seemingly at random, and you have to touch some links several times to get them to work. Atomic is much nicer.)
posted by maudlin at 8:42 AM on December 15, 2010

Just tried it on Android and it works (almost) without a hitch. When you hit the "choose a photo" button it opens up the gallery instead of a file manager which works fine. The only issue is that once you upload it, the cropping interface doesn't seem to work on the Android browser.
posted by octothorpe at 9:19 AM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

pb: I saw John Waters Christmas show last night, and in it, he talks about how, because of the bit where the Christmas tree falls over on the grandmother in Female Trouble and how he's told that story many times that it is an exaggerated version of what happened to his own grandmother in real life, people come up to him all the time with their own "Christmas tree falling over" tragedies. He said 99% of them involve "pets or drinking."

The most memorable story, according to Waters, was the woman whose mother had stopped drinking and then, after the Christmas tree fell over on her after her first sober Christmas in years, she got drunk and left and never came back.

Wow, that story was a lot funnier when he told it.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:30 AM on December 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wow, that story was a lot funnier when he told it.

Pretty much sums of the oeuvre of John Waters, no?
posted by Rock Steady at 12:10 PM on December 15, 2010

Someone at Android's ad agency should really turn out a parody of Apple's iconic 1984 ad.

That would be great. Meanwhile, there's this.
posted by exogenous at 1:33 PM on December 15, 2010

I know that you and Frank were planning to jailbreak me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
posted by exogenous at 1:34 PM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ditch your vendor lock-in ankle bracelets and go Android.

They have Android fanboys now? How weird is that?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:55 PM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

They have Android fanboys now? How weird is that?

Not any weirder than having Android fangirls, I suspect. (That's because I'm one!)
posted by Lynsey at 9:45 PM on December 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

PeterMcDermott: "Ditch your vendor lock-in ankle bracelets and go Android.

They have Android fanboys now? How weird is that"

The proper term is Fandroid. Not really clear why you'd think being a fan of a pretty awesome OS is weird but whatever.
posted by octothorpe at 8:41 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure it's weird because "fanboy" is what they call people who are fans of things that aren't awesome. It's more accurate to call fans of Android "right".
posted by Plutor at 11:34 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]