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I was trying the last few days to set up MMS for my iPhone 2G on Meteor's network in Ireland. I finally managed to do it a short while ago thanks to a post over at boards.ie.

I had previously downloaded the ActivateMMS2G package through Cydia on my iPhone but every time I entered in the details for MMS I noticed that the APN, Username and Password details were not being saved. I tried turning on and off the phone and entering in the details again. I tried uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling the ActivateMMS2G app again but nothing worked!

I had pretty much given up hope of having MMS working on my 2G iPhone until I took a look at that post on boards.ie. The process they mention was actually quite easy to do but due to message boards and people asking questions over each other I decided to put the steps involved in one place here to hopefully help others. As mentioned, I got this info from boards.ie, specifically user Popple3 in this post - I'm not claiming this info as mine and I certainly don't claim responsibility if you break your phone!The process looks long but it only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

With all that out of the way, here's what you need to do:

1. Download ActivateMMS2G from Cydia - if you don't have Cydia then your phone is not Jailbroken (for more info on how to JailBrake your iPhone check out my previous post). Open up Cydia on your phone and click on Search in the lower right of the screen. Enter in ActivateMMS and you should see the app in the list. Click on the app and then choose install which is located on the top right of the screen.
2. Restart your iPhone once you have installed the app.
3. Next up you need to find an app that will let you go through the iPhone folders and drag and drop files to it. As suggested on the forum I went with DiskAid. It's an app that has a 14-day demo which is perfect as you will only use it for about 5mins ;)
4. Download the MMS settings for Meteor here and unzip the 27203 folder to your desktop.
5. Make sure your iPhone is connected to your computer through USB.
6. Install DiskAid onto your computer and run it.
7. Once DiskAid opens change to the Root Folder on your iPhone by clicking on the lower left of the DiskAid window where it should currently say DiskAid Folder and selecting Root Folder. It will ask you are you sure you want to do this. Select yes to continue.
8. You should see a lot of folders appear on the left hand side in the DiskAid window. Click on the System folder and then click on Library folder.
9. Drag the 27203 folder from your desktop and put it onto the Carrier Bundles folder in DiskAid. When you do this DiskAid will take a moment to refresh. This is normal, it takes a long time because there are so many files and folders in this folder so just be patient - you're nearly there!
10. Once DiskAid has moved the folder with the MMS settings onto your iPhone you need to navigate to the User folder (not the Usr folder!) on the left hand side. If there are lots of files and folders try to collapse these to make it easier to find the User folder.
11. Next click on the Library folder from within the User folder. Then click on the Preferences folder.
12. You should see 2 folders - com.apple.carrier.plist and com.apple.operator.plist. Click on the com.apple.carrier.plist folder first and then click on the Delete from Device option in the DiskAid window. Do the same for the com.apple.operator.plist folder. You will be asked if you're sure you want to delete these folders so just click yes.
13. Close DiskAid and turn off your iPhone.
14. Start up your iPhone again and go to Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on Reset settings. After a few seconds the iPhone will display the default Meteor settings for you to use.

That's it! You can now send and receive MMS on your iPhone 2G!! Try to send yourself a test mms to make sure it works. Good luck!

We've had some updates in the past for our online store software but not like this! Following on from my recent post about how to make a great online store we have decided to focus this new release on improving the options available to the store admins to help make their lives easier. After all, the easier we make our tools to use the more offers they will give people like you and me!

Along with speed improvements, more options for ordering the appearance of items and updates to our text editor we have added a new tool that allows the site admins to update pricing for all products on the site in just one click! This means that if they want to offer customers a sale on certain items they can update the pricing in less time than it's taken you to read this line of text. We're very excited about this new tool as it makes offering discounts less of a chore for store owners.

We have also made some new tweaks to the styling of the admin tool to make it more IE 8 friendly. The new changes makes our store admin tools 100% compatible and tested with IE 6/7/8, FF2/3/3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 3/4 and Opera 10. It might interest you to know that over 75% of our clients run IE7 for their day to day web browsing. This number is falling all the time and Firefox would appear to be the rising favourite amongst our clients.

Perhaps the biggest news is that not only will all new stores come with these new features and enhancements but we have rolled out these changes to all our existing stores too! Now all of our store users can benefit from these new updates and refinements. We're sure the new updates will go down a treat :D

Building on the success of RentcarIreland.com a new sister site has been created especially for the UK market. This new site offers Hertz branded rental cars at a lower cost due to saving deals between Rentacar Ireland and Hertz. The new site also brings some new functionality in the form of dynamically updatable site headers, improved email marketing filters and new event guide for what's on in Ireland.

Check out the new site over at RentacarIreland.co.uk and let us know if you manage to drive away with any good deals! (man that's a terrible pun....)

We've had such a great success lately with our online store software. Our decision to build our own software from the ground up instead of just buying off the shelf has proved to work hugely in our favour. What's interesting is the angle we took when developing our software. We focused not only on the store customer's user experience but also the our client's experience for managing their store.

One of the best things about our software has to be the ease of use of the admin tools. These are the tools that let the store owner manage products, manage orders, manage email marketing, etc. When we were researching the current online stores out there we noticed that the admin tools were one of the main weak spots for many packages out there. Those tools are either very easy to use but don't give enough options to fully manage your store or the opposite, too many options all hidden away in obscure locations and very difficult to work with. This baffled us. Why would a web company spend so much time developing a nice store front end only to have it impossible to use without training by the store owner?

Our interface for our online store software uses common sense. All tools for dealing with products are stored under the heading 'Products' in our system. Product info is not scattered all over the place under 'Reports' or 'Export Details'. It's all located under one heading because this is what the client expects.

Buttons should also say what it is they are going to do! I'm always shocked when I see buttons with the word 'submit' on them. A button should say what the action is it going to perform is - 'Save Product', 'Update Product', 'Delete Product', etc.

Simple things like asking for confirmation before deleting a product can give our clients the confidence that they can't break their new store or give visual feedback after an update so that they know their details were saved. If your client is going to delete a department then be sure to make it clear that any products that depend on that department would also be removed and ask for confirmation if they would like to continue or not. If they choose not to continue then give them a message to let them know their action was cancelled. If they actually did delete the department and all the products within that department then once the action is complete tell the end user that everything was successful.

We actually pride ourselves on having online store software that is so easy to use that no training should be required. When delivering the new store to our client we given them a run through all the site features, explaining in detail how everything works, answer any questions they have and leave them with a nice and simple 'How To' guide so they can get stuck in. We also keep our contact details in plain view for the client when they use our system. If they should ever have a question they can easily send an email or phone us for instant assistance. We don't hide our contact information because we're not afraid of giving support when it's needed.

So how do you make a great online store? You focus on the end user experience! Just don't forget that you have two end users. Your client who will be managing the store in the admin area of the site and the customers to the site who will be using the front end. If you cut corners on the admin tools your client will not be confident in using the site and will be contacting you all the time for assistance. If you cut corners on the front end of the site then you will never help drive sales through the stores! It sounds so simple but it's amazing the number of products out there that get this wrong!

Of course this is only one side in making a great online store. Marketing plays a huge role in getting your store out there and driving sales to your site but this is a topic for another day!

I'd love to hear your stories about your experience with online stores below. If you know of any good stores let me know and if you know really bad ones then it's time to name and shame!!

Oh man, this guy takes special place in my 'Nut Job Hall Of Fame' (no pun intended). Still funny though :)

Just like I did previously, I have managed to update my iPhone with the new OS 3.0 software and remain unlocked. Currently you can unlock all iPhones except the new iPhone 3GS (but this should be available in the next few weeks, click here to keep up to date on this on the Dev-Team Blog). Because I am using an old first gen iPhone model it was a really straight forward to update.

I hit up iClarified as before and followed their instructions to download the jailbreak/unlock tool - http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=4302 - install was simple and quick to do. I think the whole process took me just under 30mins from start to finish but you will need to allow for some time when downloading the files required for this.

Just make sure you sync your iPhone before you run the update so you can do a restore once you're finished and restore all your contacts and data. My iPhone 2G is now running on Meteor without any problems. Enjoy!

I have updated my blog with a simple feed showing the latest entries on my Twitter feed. There's also a simple 'Follow Me' link so feel free to add me to get all the latest....er....random thoughts from my head! I would like to update the design used on my site but I haven't the time lately and the current BlogEngine ones are so boring (apart from this one obviously!). If anyone knows where to get new Blog Engine designs please let me know.

I've been busy in work the last week working on the new Ballygarvan Stone Craft online store that will be launching very soon. This store builds on our tech from our previous store releases and adds in some nice new features that we're all looking forward to playing with once done.

I am putting the finishing touches to two brand new servers that we ordered for a huge project we are working on for the next few months. These servers are running Microsoft's 64bit versions of Windows Server 08 and SQL Server 08 software so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this and messing around with all the new IIS 7 features. Currently this new project is under wraps but when it launches it is going to be plugged into one of Ireland's largest websites so we expect huge traffic from day one. Sorry for being such a tease about this but NDA's are signed so can't say much else at this point.

I have also been messing around with Linq To XML for this new project. I have found a lot of sites explaining Linq To XML but when it came to actually writing the code to create some real world XML it was difficult to find good examples so I will post up some tutorials over the next few weeks on how to read and write XML for real world projects using Linq.

So all in all it's been an exciting few weeks in work with new projects and looks like things are going to get even better in the coming weeks!