This is the first day at GDC, and in the press room, the interwebs connection was good, but in the middle of drafting another post, the thing went south on me.  Grr…  Worse yet, in the conference rooms (of which I’m in now learning about various coding techniques for graphics on mobile devices) does not have wifi!  Go figure!

{Update} Seems they do have WIFI for the conference rooms, but it was just down for a bit.  Still, I stand by my post. 🙂

Solution?  Tethering!  And what do I use?  Well, No.3 on my top ten list, PDANet.  Again, a life saver.  Now, for those who have been at Moscone Center in San Francisco, the 3G connection for AT&T is not great and spotty at best when underground.  So having numbers instead of bars for reception is critical. I have an article in iphone magazine where I talk about improving reception, but here is how to change bars to numbers.

I’ve written about PDANet before, on how I love it, but this post will have a slight bit of rant to it.

<rant>

I normally use the wifi to tether my laptop to the iphone and that works pretty well.  The only issue is others can jump on it to, causing issues.  I have been meaning to start using USB but never got around to it.  Well, clearly I cannot use WIFI here, so I finally downloaded the (Windows Only) USB client and clicked install …. what???  I need itunes??  FAIILLLL.  Ug.  I hate using itune.  I do not even like it installed on my machines if I can get away with it.

</rant>

Once I installed everything, PDANets client installed and worked smooth as silk. Its great!  So whats going to happen in 3.0?  I dont know.  The SDK shows we can have tethering, but AT&T has been mum on the subject. I’m betting they will have a charge for tethering. (You watch).   Till then, I’m loving PDANet. … yes, I know, I should go work for them and do promotions. 🙂