Personal Hotspot through USB stopped working after upgraded to iOS 5.1.1?? [Fixed in iOS 6!]

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 5.1.1 about 2 weeks ago. I always use Bluetooth to connect to Personal Hotspot from my MacBook Pro, and everything seems ok.

However a few days ago, I connected the phone to a Windows 7 laptop using USB cable to share the connection, but it wouldn't work. Thought it's because iTunes version a bit old, updated it to the latest 10.6.3, but still won't work. Tried to connect through Bluetooth but keep getting this "Bluetooth Peripheral Device driver is not found." error....

Strange, must be a Microsoft Windows issue then, right :-) ?  Not exactly, as I tried connecting the iPhone to my MacBook Pro using USB cable, and it doesn't work either, WTF???!! Upgraded to iTunes 10.6.3, still the same. Hmmm....

Searched the net and found quite a few people have the same problem too.

Ok, as I can still connect using Bluetooth to MacBook Pro, so not a major issue. But then none of the other Windows laptop could connect using Bluetooth or USB, which is a pain...

[Update 14/Sep/2012]
Upgraded iTune to the latest V10.7.0.21 today, still not working...
If you ask me the most important feature I need for iOS 6, that would be - please fix the USB Personal Hotspot problem!!

[Update 20/Sep/2012]
Upgraded my phone to iOS6 and good to know that Apple finally got the Personal Hotspot through USB issue fixed. Yeah!

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Unity 3D is more difficult than expected :-(

Time really flies... Just realised July almost passed and I haven't post anything for the whole July yet - this is probably the first time since started this blog last June...

My focus during end of June was on updating my 2 games. "Mespfi V1.01" is now live with the new Nextpeer V1.1.9 SDK, and "Where Is It Ver 1.02" been greatly enhanced with all images re-created.

July has been quite painful and challenging, as the learning curve for Unity 3D was a lot steeper than I expected.

First need to get familiar with the 3D interface - finding an object in the new 3D interface is still quite challenging, and still not quite use to the hundreds of options for different objects.

Next the concept of Material, Texture, Mesh, Prefab, ....etc, all quite new and don't think I can tell the difference or explain when should each of them be used yet.

Tried a few books, at first I started with "Unity iOS Game Development Beginner's Guide", but half way through it, the example no longer works and the author doesn't seem to respond to lots of questions been raised on the net. Also quickly browsed through "Unity iOS Essentials", but the content was a bit too advanced for beginner's like me. Finally settled with "Unity 3.x Game Development By Example - Beginner's Guide" and although the book doesn't focus on iOS as the previous two, the content is easy to understand/follow and more suitable for my level. Currently on chapter 10 and felt more confident now. If you are also interested in learning Unity 3D, would strongly recommend this book.

Still have a long way to go with Unity 3D, but the vision of able to publish games in 3D, and most importantly - not just limited to iOS platform, definitely worth all the effort!

As this path seems to slowly move away from Objective-C, start wondering if I should start another blog call "New 2 Unity 3D" ??

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My second game "Mespfi" published!

My second game "Mespfi" finally published, yeah! Some info about the 3-in-1 game listed below.

This was originally scheduled to be my first game in the beginning, but later was delayed due to some technical difficulties...

What does "Mespfi" mean, you might ask? Well, I made that up from the first 2 character of each of the 3 modes: "Memory, Speed and Find" - so technically it should be "me-sp-fi".... :-P

The screens on App shop copied as below to give you some idea about the game:

The description is as below:


Challenging 3-in-1 game suitable for the whole family. Test your memory skill, tapping speed plus your ability to find things not in pairs quickly. Can be played by single player or up to 8 players over the internet in real time.

The game can be easily adjusted to suit different age/level of players:

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For little ones who hasn't start learning numbers and alphabets, can start with "Find mode" with content type set to "Image", for them to enjoy finding one of the cute images that's not in pairs. There're over 80 different images, enough to provide them lots of fun for a long time.

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For parents with school age kids, this game is also suitable for helping kids with the learning and/or familiarising of numbers and alphabets.

For younger ones, recommend to set "Starts with 1 and A" to "Yes", and either "Disable count down" or increase the "Count down value (sec)" to a suitable value which they are comfortable with. You can later increase the difficulty by adjust the values accordingly.

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For those who enjoy challenges, the following settings are recommended for the highest level of difficulty, see how good you are in all 3 modes!

-Memory mode: 
--Starts with 1 and A: No
--Count down value (sec):1
--Content type: ABC+123

-Speed mode:
--Starts with 1 and A: No
--Disable Count Down: No
--Count down value (sec): 3
--Content type: ABC+123

-Find mode:
--Disable Count Down: No
--Count down value (sec): 3
--Content type: ABC+123

Includes over 80 different images and over 60 different backgrounds.

Personal "Top Score" recorded in each of the 3 different modes separately. Game also supports Game Centre for leaderboards and achievements.

Multiple languages supported: English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

For those interested in learning iPhone/iPad programming, a link to the full source of a simplified version is also available in the game.

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No! There's no malware on my blog! It's someone else!

I was updating my blog last night and suddenly Safari pops up this message, WTF, my blog has malware??

Tried Firefox from a Windows PC and it reports the same thing too, strange...

Clicked on the "Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page" and it reports as below, something about "nachbaur.com" and "176.9.179.0", how could my blog has those craps?

Start up HttpFox on the Windows PC, and as below, strangely it indeed tried to load things from those 2 URLs, how can that be?

Checked page source, Ah ha! Found it! It's not me, it's the "blog list" thing I added to the left hand side of my blog so that it automatically picks up latest posts from other blogs. And guess who owns "nachbaur.com" ("iOS web developer's life in beta" blog)?

The site "iOS web developer's life in beta" belongs to "Michael Nachbaur", one of the "famous" indie developers who's the co-creator, and recently sold their popular game "Casey's Contraptions" (Note: now re-branded as "Amazing Alex") to "Rovio", the company that owns Angry Bird.

I guess if you are famous, the bad guys would certainly love to target you due to your popularity.

As shown below, Google marked his site as malware infected too.

As a temporary work around, I have removed the blog list and until blogger.com released some sort of fix, won't put that back for a while. Hay, the only function should only copy the "text" content of the latest post from those other blogs, why is your silly code copying all the malware and other related scripts too??!!

I have requested Google to remove my site from their cache, so looks like you won't be able to find this blog from Google for a while until the cache been updated. As most of my traffic were referred by Google, it's going to hit my hit rate quite badly..... Don't think there's anything I can do other than wait for Google crawler to pick up my blog again...

Also tried to contact Michael by twitter, hope he gets the msg and quickly fix it. 

Have to wait and see how it goes then... Wish me good luck...

[Update 20/06/2012]

Michael responded with twitter: 

"Thanks for the heads-up! WordPress sucks... I've reinstalled and cleaned it up. Thanks for the warning!"

So looks it's fixed on his blog. Michael asked for a review, instead of like me - request for the page to be removed from the Google cache. May be his way is better, as I can't find my blog in Google for 2 days now :-(... How long is it going to take to be added back to Google again??

[Update 29/06/2012]
Thanks for comment from Peter below, yes it's fixed after I manually use the Webmaster tool to add my site back to Google. The other option is like what Michael did, simply ask Google to review, it seems to be quicker?

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Lots of fun with Unity 3D

While waiting for my 2nd game to be approved (submitted on 11/June) - which strangely takes longer than a week this time, I was wondering around looking for ideas and new stuffs. Then had a quick browse of this book "Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity" by Sue Blackman and I got hooked with Unity 3D!

Only spent about an hour or two, and I got a spinning sphere and cube running in 3D, amazing.

The most interesting part is it's ability to deploy to different platforms. I tried the Web one (shown above), Mac and also iOS. Except the iOS one needs some code change as the "OnMouseDown" function wasn't supported for iOS (haven't work out how to fix that yet :-P ), they all worked perfectly. I don't have an Android phone to test, otherwise would be perfect, all major platforms covered!

Still not quite used to the idea of coding everything in JavaScript, and the user interface is still quite tricky to manage (specially with moving the camera and objects around in different angles), but the vision that I can now lots of things in 3D and multiple platforms makes me really excited!

Although that would mean my previous knowledge with Cocoa, Objective-C and Cocos2D would not be of much use, still think that's something worth a try - let's see how it goes...

Remember - the 10000 hour rule!

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What? iOS 6 is coming!?

Finally got some break after 2nd game submitted and was just started learning some of the new iOS 5 stuffs - as I like to have all my games to still support "older" version such as iOS 4.3. Then noticed this email from Apple about iOS 6 Beta, and all these news about new features in iOS 6.... What the....Am I too slow or is Apple too fast, or both ??!!

Also saw a few posts complaining about iPad 1 and pre 3GS iPhones won't be able to get iOS 6. I guess it shouldn't be such a big problem when the economy is good, but under current situation I think probably not everyone would rush to get the latest devices as a few years ago.

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Graphic/image design is too hard for me...

Just submitted my 2nd game "Mespfi". Found most of the time in past 2 weeks mainly working on final testing, tweaking, and doing some graphic design stuffs. As before, this graphic/image thing is definitely not my type... Codes can be easily written, tested, but trying to draw/design something that looks "nice" or "attractive" is just too hard for me.

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