Who cares?

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

Our four cars were lined up in the car park at the nursing home. Over the last week we had all driven hundreds of miles going back and forth to the death bed of a close relative. The cars were caked in filth: road and brake dust, bird crap and honey dew. The windscreens had more squashed bugs than a Windows service pack.

Coincidentally the cars were all silver in colour – apparently the most favoured for UK cars – with two having rear wash/wipers and two cars without. Yet the two without any automatic means to was the rear view had dusty but relatively clean rear screens, while the others had thick layers of muck with only the area covered by their wipers swept clean.

Why so? the cars without wash/wiper were a BMW coupe and most saloon cars don’t have or need wash wipers, and my Civic hatchback. The other two hatchbacks were a Nissan Note and an Astra. It’s pretty obvious that the design of the Nissan and Vauxhall meant that they picked up road dirt as wind whipped over the car at speed. Probably some weird vortex builds up behind them, swirling muck back at the windows. Whereas the other Honda and BMW are more streamlined and channel wind away from the rear of the vehicle.

When I bought the Honda I was aware it had no rear washer wiper system and accepted the car on those terms. Just like when I got my iPhone and now iPad2 which arrived a couple of days ago. Apple told me they were tracking the location of my gadgets and that I could look in and see where they were for myself. I accepted them on these terms and even think of it as a big bonus in case they get nicked.

I never once thought it was suspicious that Apple were keeping tabs on me. It was only a year or so that I willing drove around with a GPS receiver which logged all my journeys and speeds. That little box even came on holiday a few times and I have been grateful it did so because it was working out real average journey times for all mapping systems and satnavs using Navteq maps.

When the ‘discovery’ was announced about Apple tracking iPhones, under lurid headlines written by rabid hacks who had nothing better to do that day. Some more forward thinking journalists recognised a non-story when they read one and said “So what?”.

The guys found the little log file holding the dodgy data, hidden in full view here: /Users//Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ and even titled clearly in case you missed it . They even wrote an app for you to see what’s in it here: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

They warn the data isn’t accurate and indeed, when I view my phone’s info I have apparently been places I have never heard of. Which rather blows out the water the ideas the rabid hacks have of the data being used by private investigators to snoop on people. Apparently the location is determined by triangulating the nearest cell-phone towers and as this isn’t as accurate as GPS it often gets confused readings several miles from your location. In the case of my phone I can rest assured that I have never been in the middle of the English Channel or made a phone call from Reims even if I have the data to prove I did.

I just wish Apple could make my iPhone remember what it is I am trying to remember.

All abroad for iPad2 alternative

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Did we queue up at the local Apple Store for an iPad2? You must be joking! We lunched in Barfleur, on the Cotentin Peninsular, sitting alongside the harbour and enjoying the year’s first really hot sunny day to eat our assiette des fruits de mer washed down with a delicious bouteille de cider artesanal.

So what if it meant getting up at 5am to catch the fast cat ferry? Or the night before, French dockers decided to strike meaning instead of the day trip to Caen and Ouistreham, we were rerouted to Cherbourg. We didn’t even worry when the downstairs toilet suddenly started to gush water uncontrollably at 9pm the night before.

The following day, £350 unexpectedly appeared in my bank account and I was handed a ‘Birthday Voucher’ saying it was only to be used for an iPad. A quick ring around all the local Apple dealers showed we had chosen the best option. It had been either get up at 5am to join the queues at the Apple Store or snooze in comfort as we were whisked across the English Channel. The former with no guarantee of actually finding any iPads left to buy whilst the latter meant conspicuous consumption in the restaurant followed by Carrefours, to top up with all the goodies English shops don’t sell. Such as unsweetened squash drinks and fizzy water with a lemon taste. Can’t people in Britain drink anything without a ton of sugar or aspartemin?

Our trip was also the anniversary of a year ago less one day when the sudden closure of a door in a wood burning stove left my index finger broken in two places. The painful year has seen my guitar playing shrink to zero and computer mice become hurtful things. A trackpad was the obvious answer and very good it is too.

The Apple Trackpad is about half the size of an A5 Wacom graphics table, it is Bluetooth and runs off two long-lasting AA batteries. Set-up is simply turning it on, pairing in Bluetooth and that’s it. A tiny green indicator light shows when it is turned on or off, its location becoming indistinguishable from the aluminium trackpad when the lamp turns off. I bet the Apple guys had fun with that trick.

A control panel lets you set all manner of ways to use the trackpad which includes, one, two, three and four finger inputs and swipes. It is exactly the same as using a MacBook multi-gesture trackpad but larger. There is even a click function as two little rubber feet operate a microswitch by gentle pressure on the trackpad. This guy here sums it all up:

It didn’t take more than a moment or two to adapt to the trackpad, anyone with experience of a modern Apple laptop, iPad or iPhone will use it instinctively and for web browsing it is the easiest way to navigate,. The Bluetooth range is longer than we could get across two rooms and a wall. This makes a trackpad ideal for controlling a Mac linked to a TV, for example, and at prices up to half that of Apple’s own, a trackpad can be bought from Amazon or eBay.

As for an iPad2, that has been ordered from Apple’s on-line store with the hope that anticipation of getting it in a week or so time, will not be sweeter than owning it.

iPad stolen… time for an iPad 2?

Friday, March 25th, 2011

Well what a start to the weekend – my iPad is stolen from my bag as I enjoy a well earned drink after work – and the day before the iPad 2 goes on sale! What a joke.

Somehow the sneaky so-and-so managed to get into may bag, which was never more than five metres away from me, open it, take the iPad (which I also referred to as my best friend) and then zip the rucksack up again.

So, so infuriating. To whoever took it – you are an awful person. Rethink your life. To myself – never let anything valuable out of your sight in central London and lose your faith in the inherent goodness of people – it’s a fallacy. To my parents who bought me the iPad, I’m sorry… it wasn’t my fault, blame society.

Thankfully, there wasn’t any important data or work on there, but it’s still massively upsetting. Losing it has proven to me how much I valued the iPad with all its wonderful apps and speedy browsing – I wouldn’t be that bothered if my Android phone went missing. It’s not worth that much for starters.

Anyway, as my ire simmers down, I’ve started to think about what to do now. First off, I’ll have to see if my insurance will cover it. If so, great – I might be able to afford a new iPad. If not, then I’ll have to start saving. Either way, I’m getting an iPad again.

I certainly won’t be looking at buying any other tablet – they all look fairly inferior. The only contender that looks like it could get close is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9-inch, but it still won’t have the delights of iOS 4.3.

Admittedly, I wouldn’t have paid for an iPad 2 if my original one hadn’t gone missing – now I’ll just have to. In the meantime, I’ll have to cope with real books and PC/console games. It’s a hard life.

iPad 2: An iPad 1 owner’s verdict

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

So I happen to own an iPad. In about three weeks or so it will be out of date thanks to the arrival of the iPad 2.

Should I be upset about this or should I support Apple and its continuing development of its hardware into ever more shiny, more powerful bundles of joy? Well, because of what Apple announced during its much-hyped event in San Francisco, I’m not too depressed. In fact, I’m a little non-plussed.

This is largely because I’ll be able to get what excited me most about Steve Jobs’ revelations from iOS 4.3. From the additional number of titles coming to iBooks via Random House, to the additional pieces of software like GarageBand and iMovie which I can use for work and play alike, iOS 4.3 looks pretty splendid.

OK, I’m a little jealous about the iPad 2’s enhanced graphics (nine times better) and the processor (twice as fast), and maybe a tad upset I won’t have cameras to make my face look even more ridiculous on Photo Booth, but outside of that there was nothing too mind-blowing to send me into fits of rage at my antiquated iPad.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d switch to an iPad 2 without a moment’s thought and it’s another beautiful piece of kit from Apple. I’m fairly certain it’ll be superior to any other tablet to come out this year. But, and this was probably expected, the iPad 2 announcement didn’t inspire the same reaction as the initial iPad introduction did.

Another slight disappointment was that Jobs didn’t really go in-depth to answer questions surrounding the iPad’s business capabilities – it would have been great to have had a fuller explanation about why the iPad is as good inside corporations as it is outside. I’ve used my iPad for work and it’s absolutely fine – almost as effective as my laptop and definitely less cumbersome.

Well, at least Marc Benioff joined in to give his backing to the device. The Salesforce boss congratulated Apple on the release of its latest baby via Twitter and was even included on one of the promotional videos saying iPads and tablets were the business devices of the future. To have the backing of an enterprise-focused man like Benioff is probably enough to prove the newest iPad is good enough for plenty of organisations.

For now, though, I’m happy enough with the iPad original and won’t be chucking it out of the office window like some new-age rockstar. Neither will I be running out and picking up an iPad 2 with froth pouring from my mouth – largely because it wouldn’t be worth spending half my monthly wages on.

Admittedly, if I were a rich man, it’d be in my hands not too long after release. But to me, a big iPad fan, this hints that anyone not convinced by the original will not be astounded by this latest iteration.

Help

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

There were three of them, we were young and they looked oh-so sexy in their silvery grey jackets. We became intimate immediately, slept together every night and I devoted all my attention to them equally. It was exhausting and especially when my wife joined in and made it a ménage à trios.

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Hasta la Vista, or maybe not

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

A new member joined our retirement home for ageing laptops. We now have an Acer Aspire complete with Vista.

This is our first time using Vista with it being so badly received by Windows users who preferred to stay with XP. We can see why they didn’t bother to upgrade because on the surface there seems little changed from a user’s point of view.

Ours is Vista Home edition without the translucent layers copied from MacOS X of some years before. Also unseen in our initial poke-arounds, are the many security features and the new shell, moving many commands to the toolbar and so on. What we did note is the enormous amount of updates needed to bring the laptop on from mid-2007 to the present day.

This all had to be done over a wired network because Vista 2007 wouldn’t connect to our Virgin Netgear hub. Rather than placed on the coffee table as we sat watching telly, or more likely, snoozing through the dire new series Outcasts. For some reason 22 people voted it as 9.3 at IMDB and they all had similar names to members of the crew and cast (probably).

In total there were over 100 updates. An initial 89 took an evening to download and install over our 50MBps line. Followed the next day by further updates to updates, installing a new anti-virus and most important of all, new drivers for the wireless card. It all resulted in a reasonable laptop which is no slouch either, considering it is 4 years old.

However, our MacBook from the same year is just as fast and could run Vista as well as Mac OSX if we wanted it to. We checked to see how many updates it had undergone over the same time period and from the total of less than 20, a handful had been for iTunes adding new features and a few security updates but by far they were for Microsoft programs.

Compared with MacOSX Leopard, also released in 2007, is Vista any better? After all, it is now installed on just under 20% of Windows PCs, less than Windows 7 or both combined are less than Windows XP (Wikipedia 2010). Given the choice we wouldn’t run any version and not just because we are Mac fans.

The problem we have with every Microsoft operating system is they are a mess of multi-tabbed dialogue boxes, helpful wizards that just aren’t and leave you high and dry plus Microsoft’s arse-about-face ways to do things. It is like wearing boxing gloves and trying to use chopsticks, you feel you are kept away from the good stuff. For example: the Internet connection wizard could see the network but not get out onto the Internet. Its solution was to suggest keep rebooting the router, which every other Mac, Hackintosh and iPhone could use without a hitch.

Then there is the famed ’user choice’ Windows is supposed to give. In our experience this is just a way to make life more difficult and most of the time the average Windows users we work with haven’t got the faintest idea about changing anything. They still haven’t grasped the concepts of drag and drop or having multiple windows open and visible. If their PC is ‘broke’, IT, 100 miles away, has to fix it, even if it simply just a case of user error.

This article ‘User Choice, Customization and Confusion’ explores whether user customisation is a good thing or not. It might have been written by a Mac programmer.

The author, Mike Gunderloy, is a US-based lead developer and author of 20 or more books on the subject. He comes down firmly in the camp of the default choice which is to offer no choice within an application. Or maybe just a little, à la Apple. Enhancements and customisations can be done via special and often third-party applications. Apple has always maintained this stance, tweaks can be made via the Terminal or by little apps such as Tinkertool and Onyx.

As Mike Gunderloy says: ‘Many applications today expose dozens or even hundreds of customisation options in this way, Microsoft Office applications are prime offenders in this regard.’ We would add their operating systems, too.

Hate trains, love iPad

Monday, February 7th, 2011

I’ll start by saying that the concept of commuting itself is anathema to me. I experienced it for a year straight after leaving university and will never return to the stress-inducing miasma inside modern British train carriages on a regular basis ever again.

The heuristic lesson may have been learned, but sometimes I’m forced to get on a train for some reason or another and am reminded of a more melancholy time of my life.

This morning, however, my ire at British trains was somewhat tempered. Certainly not by the extra £50 I had to pay for a relatively short journey from Birmingham to London. Definitely not by the inane hunt for a seat. Nor was it the inevitable, yet still unbearably frustrating delays that cooled my proverbial beans.

No, no. It was my iPad that made the early morning hours considerably easier than they would have been. And I learnt something too: the iPad has a solid business case.

I hadn’t ventured to write an entire article on the device, acquired over a merry old Christmastime, until this very morn. And it proved surprisingly easy.

I just got Notes up and running, flicked back and forth between my sources, wrote the piece, emailed it to myself, and as soon as I was back in the office it was posted. Simple.

The keyboard is perfect for typing away on and the autocorrect function works like a charm if you do miss any keys. Perhaps some haptic feedback would help, just so you know you’ve hit a key, but it was simply a pleasure to use. Not to mention Notes is quite a pretty little free app anyway.

The iPad is less cumbersome than my laptop, takes about the same time to flick between apps and has a longer battery life. I’m not sure I’ll bother taking the old notebook outside with me again.

The whole experience this morning would have been even less of a bother if the train’s Wi-Fi hadn’t been the tech equivalent of a drunk slug on Valium.

If only the Government, train companies and the stations themselves were as dedicated to quality as Apple are, then things might run a little smoother. Anyone else excited by the iPad 2?

Note: this blog has not taken into account the white iPhone 4 delays, which would have been an apt analogy for British train punctuality.

Don’t throw tablet-sized rocks when you live in a glass greenhouse

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Toshiba is the latest computer manufacturer trying to muscle its way into the potentially huge tablet market. The Japanese giant has previewed an Android 3.0-based tablet with specifications very similar to those of the Motorola Xoom. Just as interesting as the actual product itself though, is the website promoting it, www.thetoshibatablet.com .

If you visit the site on a laptop or desktop computer with Adobe Flash Player installed, you get the usual specs, interactive graphics, photos and other information you’d expect from a product website. But what happens if you visit the site from a mobile device without Flash, such as an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch? You see the following page at thetoshibatablet.com/mobile/apple.html:

Slightly smug in tone, but nonetheless true for an iPhone or iPad visiting a Flash-dependent website. But not this particular Toshiba site if you remove the apple.html part of the address and reload. You then you get a mobile-optimised version of the site with almost all the information and photos from the full Flash site:

Although this mobile-optimised Flash-less site has now been taken down, it does undermine Toshiba’s smugly-made point about the lack of Flash on Apple’s iOS devices.

Although the iPad has its fair share of flaws, it’s still a pleasure to use and it has the advantage of actually being widely available. Unlike Toshiba’s as yet unreleased Android 3.0 tablet. Or the Libretto W100, Toshiba’s dual-screen Windows 7 tablet currently in very limited distribution. Or the Folio 100, Toshiba’s first attempt at an Android tablet which was hastily and mysteriously recalled shortly following its launch just before Christmas.

Plus, our own tests reveal that Flash video can drain your mobile device’s battery life more quickly than H.264 video. Its new tablet may turn out to be great, but Toshiba really shouldn’t count its eggs before they’re hatched or, as another old saying goes, throw rocks from a glass greenhouse…

Elgato’s Turbocharger

Friday, January 21st, 2011

On the day Apple’s new App store opened I had a quick look at the programs available, downloaded iPhoto 11 and then saw there was an update to Elgato’s Turbo264HD software. The full package includes a USB hardware accelerator as well as the software but the latter runs without the dongle. I asked politely and those nice people at Elgato sent me the serial number for the software. (more…)

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

Friday, January 21st, 2011

The most annoying thing about the recent iPhone alarm clock bug is that we have no guarantee that it won’t happen again. It happened last year when British Summer Time ended and again during the New Year transition. Even more annoyingly, the effect is different each time – the BST bug affected recurring alarms, while the New Year bug affected non-recurring alarms. What next? Chinese New Year comes round and suddenly alarms set for Wednesdays don’t go off? Apple should really sort out this embarrassment.

The iPhone has failed me for the last time. However, I’m not here to moan about the problem, I’m here to glorify the solution. The obvious thing to do is to download an alternative alarm clock app from the App Store, free or otherwise. That shows a distinct lack of imagination though.

Much more fun is the Star Wars Lego Alarm Clock – an alarm clock in the shape of a Lego Stormtrooper figurine.

Impractical you say? I find your lack of faith disturbing. Setting both the alarm and the time is easy enough using the push button controls on the little fella’s back. His non-removable helmet serves both as a five minute snooze button and illuminates the digital clock face. His legs and arms are fully articulated (for a big Lego man anyway).

Disappointingly, the alarm sound itself is a simple beep rather than a John Williams theme or sound effects from the film. There’s also no way to store multiple alarms, set different alarms for different days or alter the duration of the snooze. Although far smaller than an actual stormtrooper, the wee lad isn’t ideally suited for traveling along in your luggage. Although no bigger than a thermos, his slightly awkward shape and reliance on a pair of AAA batteries hidden behind a screw-on hatch are things most travelers wouldn’t want to deal with.

Still, the only thing better than a Lego Stormtrooper alarm clock is the upcoming Lego Darth Vader alarm clock. Both can be ordered from Firebox for just £20. Just don’t get clocky kid.