Apple – Page 6 – Ian Dick

iPhone OS 3.0

Twas the night before Christmas and….wrong night. I’ll start again.

Twas the night before yet another Apple announcement and fanboy’s everywhere, especially those surgically attached to their iPhones, were kept awake by the sheer giddiness and excitement of the third software iteration of the Jesus phone. What will Apple announce? Are Apple really worried by the Pre? Are Apple listening to their customers? Where’s Steve?

It would be rude if I didn’t list out what I’d like to see in the next version of the software. Version 2.0 brought the Appstore plus a number of other improvements to the OS so 3.0 should bring quite a bit of new functionality. What would I like?

Background app’s. Over everything else I’d like the option to run an app or two in the background. Yes there would be memory issues but tell we what they would be and let me make the choice about how I want to run things. Chances of happening – Slim.

Cut and paste. Obvious and becoming more and more annoying as i use the iPhone more and more. I will be majorly pissed off though if Apple spend 10 minutes demoing this functionality tomorrow which should have been delivered in OS 1.0. Chances of happening – Strong.

App management get’s a bit crazy after five pages. Too much swishing to move around between app’s. Home button press helped but still not very good. No easy way to group app’s either. Chances of happening – Strong.

Flash. Chances of happening – Strong. I jest of course. It won’t happened and that suits me – I can’t think of anytime I’ve needed it to be honest.

Ability to remove default app’s. No more notes, stocks, weather etc which have all been replaced by better Appstore alternatives. Chances of happening – Slim.

Those four things (ignore flash) would make me very happy indeed. Add in MMS and video recording and I’d be very very happy. Especially as there will be plenty of other new things to ooh and ahh about. I hope.

Karma

I’ve spent today wrestling with dll issues and builds of Windows XP at work. It’s been frustrating and like looking for a needle in a haystack. By the time work was over I had the feeling the problem i solved but needs some testing. However I was cursing dll’s, the registry and Windows in general and looking forward to a night away form PC hassles.

So I plugged in my iPhone at home to get some podcast updates. After 10 minutes I realised the iPhone was still syncing. That’s not right! So I took a look at the iPhone in iTunes. Ohe feck – that’s definitely not right!

Why is iTunes uninstalling applications. Then the iPhone rebooted and the sync continued. When t finished I had no third party app’s on the iPhone. I checked the app’s tab in iTunes and all the app’s were deselected. I selected them and sync’d and sure enough they were installed on the iPhone. However they were all in different screens, some had lost their settings and some games had lost their saves.

Drat, drat, drat.

Feck, feck, feck.

This is the first issue I’ve had since the 2.1 update fixed all my previous application issues. I’m hoping it’s a one off. My app’s are all up and running but losing some games saves is a real kick in the nuts. Looking at the Apple discussions on applications it looks like there are a lot of people that still have issues with iTunes and/or applications running properly.

Still, I can’t help but feel this is karma. The revenge of Bill Gates. A reminder that no matter the platform you will get issues from time to time. I just hope that the last lesson for a while.

Photo Management

Since moving to the Mac managing most data has been fairly easy. My doc’s are all straightened out, music is in iTunes capable hands and photo’s are thrown into iPhoto and it’s easy to sync and publish from the one app. Lightroom has changed all that.

I started using Lightroom at Christmas and I love the finer control I get on my photo’s. However all my photo’s prior to Christmas are managed in iPhoto. The only way to get the photo’s from Lightroom into iPhoto would be to export from Lightroom into iPhoto and keep two separate sets of the same photo. Grrr. I hate duplication and I hate over complicating processes.

iPhoto’s most annoying feature is that it moves photo’s into it’s own library. I would love to have it create a library of images from across my drives but leave them in their location just like Picasa does. I tried Picasa when it came out for the Mac but iPhoto was by far the better tool for me.

So that leaves me with two photo libraries at the moment and none of my new photo’s on the iPhone as I didn’t want to create duplicates. There’s a couple of options in iPhoto for changing the editor which is a bit clunky in practice and for copying items into library but all that does is change the import from a move to a copy. I just hope iPhoto 10 has the options to manage files out with the library. That would be an update worth paying for. I guess there’s nothing for it but to export and duplicate the files I want to view on the iPhone into iPhoto. At least then I can take advantage of the new face tagging features as well. Or is there another option that I’m missing?

Apple Updates

It’s Tuesday, there’s been loads of rumours so it makes sense that there are hardware updates from Apple. Nice bump’s across all the desktop range, especially on the iMac where extra RAM and HD size makes for a very nice product. Of most interest though was the Mac Mini. It’s been 18 months to 2 years since it’s last spec update and I’ve always toyed with the idea of using one as a media device attached to the TV. That’s despite the 360 (too noisy), the PS3 (great for Blu-ray but not fully codec compliant) and Sky HD (great for HD TV and Films but not great as a library). Apple TV doesn’t cut it for me and the Mac Mini looked to be best mixture of performance and flexibility that I wanted.

Two things have stopped me from buying one. It’s price and it’s spec which was starting to feel old. Today’s update has certainly sorted out the spec and it’s looking to be an excellent media device for under the TV. However I still have pricing issues.

Firstly, it’s price went up today in the UK. The cheapest Mac Mini before today was £391. Cheapest now is £499. Ouch. £499 feels expensive for what you get. I’ve always felt Apple overpriced in the UK when compared to dollar price so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the weak pound has lead to a price increase. Annoyingly the £499 priced Mini would be fine except it comes with only 1GB of ram. Surely that should have been 2GB by default?

Second is the comparison with Mac Mini and iMac prices. If I select the higher spec Mac Mini and bump up processor, memory and add I get the following spec:

# 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x2GB
# 320GB Serial ATA Drive
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# None
# Apple Wireless Keyboard & Wireless Mighty Mouse
# User’s Guide (English)

That cost’s £928.02.

A 20 inch iMac with the same hard drive and memory but faster processor only costs just over £100 more at £1043. A 24 inch iMac with double the hard disk and a faster processor costs £1,199. With a gorgeous 24 inch monitor. The pricing just doesn’t add up for me. Will this be the last Mac Mini update? I can’t see these selling well with the iMac so keenly priced in comparison.

So I’ll still not be buying a Mac Mini. Probably. As I think through it more I do have a Denon DVD player that cost me around £500 and the Mac Mini would do a lot more than the Denon ever could or would. The Denon at the time didn’t seem expensive. It does now!!!

On My iPhone

Because I liked this post on Gordon’s blog and I know of three people that have picked up iPhones this week I thought it was time to go through the app’s I use on my iPhone. The App Store is packed with app’s but with so much choice comes so much duplication, so many paid app’s where free app’s are just as good if not better. I’ve spent far too much on app’s so hopefully this will be a good pointer as to what’s worth buying…and not. In fact I’ve bought so many that I now have seven pages of app’s. Oops.

Doing this review has actually been useful for me. I’ve removed duplicate app’s and moved app’s around to more useful spots. I’ve also found some app’s that I really must try – Stanza, AllRecipies, WiFinder to name three. Oh, and pacman. Anyway, lets get cracking – this is a long one! If you want to jump to games then head down to Home Page 6. If you want a quick games recommendation without reading through the post then Fieldrunners, Warfare Inc, Wurdle, Virtual Pool and Rolando would top my list. Right – Home Page 1.

Continue reading “On My iPhone”

Macworld 2009

This is what I want, not expect.

New update to iPhone OS. Copy and Paste, MMS, more screen customisation options, ability to remove stock apps (Stocks, Notes, Weather etc), run background app’s if the user wants to at their own risk with reduced memory and reduced battery life but at least give me the option, wireless sync and the long lost push notifications that were due in Sept. Sept 08. Thanks.
Apple TV scrapped. Replaced with updated Mac Mini which is sold at a far reduced price. More capability, reduced price, new 10 foot interface. Boxee comes pre-installed.
Snow Leopard – free update in Summer 09.
One more thing – Mobile Me – it’s a great service and we’re really sorry about all the issues. Have it for free.

How great would Macworld without Steve Jobs be if those were some of the announcements tomorrow? I guess we’ll need to make do with some iLife news, some Snow Leopard news and predictable Macbook pro and Mac Mini updates. Oh well. Get well soon Steve.

P.S. Is anyone else, like me, expecting Phil Schillers keynote to be more entertaining than Steve Jobs?

BBC Radio on the iPhone

Following on from a tweet on Friday from @gav_richardson I found that you can install an app on the iPhone and stream some of the BBC radio stations. The app you need to grab is FStream. It doesn’t have the best interface but it does work well. Full setup instructions can be found here.

A full list of the BBC radio stations I’ve got to work are:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/wm_asx/aod/radio1.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/realmedia/1xtra_hi.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/wm_asx/aod/radio2.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/wm_asx/aod/radio3.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/wm_asx/aod/radio4.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/ram/6music_hi.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/realplayer/bbc7.asx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/asiannetwork/rams/asiannet.asx

Unfortunately Five Live doesn’t work which is allegedly due to broadcasting rights of sporting events outside the UK. Another solution is to try the Flycast app which again is free and search for BBC which should return radio station’s 1-4 which you can then select and listen to. At least there is a solution until iPlayer supports radio stations on the iPhone.

GrooveShield Form

The iPhone is a lovely device and I didn’t want to use it without some form of case. The day after purchasing the phone I picked up a Griffin Wave from the Apple store as there really wasn’t much else available on day one for the 3G iPhone. It did it’s job and protected the iPhone well but it was pretty ugly and also as the edge covered part of the screen it made cleaning the screen quite awkward. Shakeel was up last week and as soon as I saw his case I knew I had to change to it – the GrooveShield Form.

This clips over the back of the iPhone protecting the area which is prone to scratching and also gives slightly more grip than a naked iPhone. What I like the most is that it’s a hard case but also thin, so the iPhone doesn’t lose it’s looks which it did with the previous case. It’s also light and you hardly notice that a case is being used. The silver edging around the front of the phone is also still visible as is the whole front surface which makes cleaning the screen very easy. All the controls are easily accessible with the case on although the iPhone won’t fit in a dock unless the case is removed.

Best thing is that the case only cost £12 which is a real bargain. However it won’t protect the iPhone fully. One of my friends at work dropped his phone last week…onto a small stone. The result can be seen here – very nasty. He hopes to fix it himself – good luck! I don’t think it will be that straightforward.

Trailguru Fail

I tried out Runkeeper last week on my first boot try out. It worked really well but it’s not the only option on the iPhone. Trailguru promises similar features to Runkeeper. I went on another boot break in this morning so was eager to test Trailguru.

The results form Trailguru were disappointing and not copied above. This is a Google maps view of my walk using the walking features that Google now has. Trailguru ran for the full duration of my walk (1 hour 23 mins) but seemed to record only a couple of points and thought I had walked a grand total of 200 yards, not the five miles that I actually did. Even though the Trailguru site has more features than Runkeeper, the Runkeeper app has worked well both times I’ve used it in anger. Bye bye Trailguru.

While I’m talking iPhone app’s, Google Earth is superb, Virtual Pool is far better than I thought it would be and Trace is a very original, fun and free game that you should really try out.

iPhone 3 Months On

So how is the iPhone after a few months. The 2.1 addressed all my issues and since then it’s been great. Really enjoy using it. I know enjoy sounds a bit daft but I get so much more usage out of the iPhone compared to previous phones. It really does feel like a mobile extension to my Mac’s at home.

It’s missing obvious things like copy and paste, and sending sms to multiple addresses though. Browsing through Please Fix the iPhone also shows some of the niggles that could easily be addressed in a software update. Horizontal typing in e-mail, preferences on auto loading images in Mail, Safari crashes, the screen as a button for taking photo’s (at least make the button bigger!), changing backgrounds, adding custom text alert sounds etc etc etc. Instead the next software update is focussing on…public transit and street view additions to the Map app. While nice, it ain’t on my essential list. I guess the more obvious stuff plus things like bigger memory iPhone’s and a better quality camera will be kept back for next years new hardware upgrade.

Anyway, I was reading Gordon’s list of app’s so I thought I would do my own. Warning – it’s a long list as I do go through a lot of apps.

Evernote – Free – Syncs with the online notes, image and PDF capturing service. Updates have brought proper note editing and the voice notes and quick image snaps sync to the website and hence Mac and PC clients really quickly. Would be nice to select certain notes for offline storage on the iPhone.
Twinkle – Free – One of the three Twitter clients I have installed. Usually the one I use most as it lets me see tweets local to where I am. Also supports Twitpics and comes with a built in browser so it doesn’t quit out to Safari when viewing a link.
Locly – Free – Finds shops and services in your area based on your location. Quick and pretty reliable when I’ve been working away from home.
Exposure – Free or £5.99. A much improved Flickr viewer. First version was pretty slow but it is now a lot quicker. I like it for browsing the popular pics on Flickr. Uploading of pics to Flickr is coming soon. Allegedly.
Klick – Free – Another Flickr viewer. Faster than Exposure and also has a nicer browsing method – flick your finger to move between photo’s. Download this instead of Exposure, at least until Exposure let’s you upload photo’s to Flickr.
Last.fm – Free – Excellent music player and artist finder. Based on your listening habits, radio station can be easily created and listened to over wi-fi and 3G. Using this far more than I thought I would. Lovely app.
Tuner – £3.49 – Browse and listen to hundreds (thousands?) of MP3/AAC streams. Works well although very little UK content.
Simplify – Free – Another audio streaming app. The difference is that your listening to your iTunes library and streaming it from home. Or your friends stream. To be honest I’d stopped using it due to buggy memory hogging Mac client but that is now fixed…and I’ve used it quite a bit over the last week. Who needs a large iPhone now.
Remote – Free – From Apple, control your iTunes playback from the iPhone. Does work very well but will only be useful if you have the Mac set up with speakers and you need to control from a distance. If it played back on the iPhone it would be far more useful.
Facebook – Free – Great client for Facebook, although I don’t use Facebook to often.
WordPress – Free – Allows you to post and edit your blog from the iPhone. It’s ok but could do with more easy roots into comments and admin of the blog. No real update since release.
IM+ – Free – Nice free IM client that connects to all the common protocols. Preferred to Palringo as it required a seperate login which IM+ doesn’t.
Bloomberg – Great business app. Allows you to track shares, show share price graphs dating back to a year and has currencies, commodities etc. Been a great bearer of bad news over the last few weeks.
1Password – Free – Syncs with 1Password desktop client for sharing passwords and notes securely. I find this pretty invaluable.
AirSharing – Was free, now £3.99 – Drag files to the Mac and view via this client. Works OK although struggles with some file formats that A.I. Disk works with.
Twitterriffic – Free or £5.99 – ANother Twitter client. Updated version is very nice although doesn’t have location features of Twinkle or Twittelator. Nicest interface though.
Vicinity – £1.79 – An early purchase that I no longer use. Finds shops and services in your area based on your location but Locly does it better and for free.
Super Monkey Ball – £5.99 – Great game, reminds me of console version and gets very tricky. Recommended.
MotionX Poker – £1.19 – Bargain game. Shake the iPhone and roll the dice. Still playing it today if I’ve a couple of mins to fill.
Texas Hold’em – £2.99 – From Apple – a really nice poker game. Recommended.
Real Football 2009 – £5.99 – A great demo of what games on the iPhone can do. A football game with a transparent d pad and buttons on the screen. Actually plays a pretty good game of football. Teams and presentation are superb.
Enigmo – £1.19 – Now reduced in price this is a nice physics based game. The concept and graphics are great although the controls can be fiddly.
Aki Mahjong – £2.99 – I love Mahjong and this looks and plays wonderfully. Highly recommended.
Solitaire Top 3 – £2.39 – Klondike, FreeCell and Spider solitaire. Plays well.
Cube Runner – Free – Guide your spaceship by tilting the iPhone. Simple game and graphics but nicely done.
Band – £2.39 – Play drums, base or piano. Nicely done but I never use it. First day purchase spree!
Tap Tap Revenge – Free – Think guitar hero but on the iPhone. Plays well and has online scoreboards.
Trism – £1.79 – A great little puzzle game with nice graphics and sounds. Quite addictive.
Wurdle – £1.19 – Nice word based puzzle game. Recommended.
Units – Free – Unit converter with lot’s of conversion options including currency. Not used often but very handy.
Movies – Free – Shows what’s on at the local cinema’s, again based on your location. Also shows trailers for movies and DVD’s but those are for American release dates. Again not used often but very handy.
iFooty – Free – Great little app that lets you track scores, live games and team news for all the English leagues and Scottish Premier. Same info as on BBC website but better presented and easier to use.
ShoZu – Free – I use it to upload to Flickr but it connects to a load of social netwrok for sharing photo’s, commenting etc.
Trailguru – Free – Captures walks, runs, biking etc via GPS and allows you to upload to their website. Trying this and Runkeeper to see what one works out the best.
RunKeeper – Free – Very similar feature set to Trailguru. First test was very accurate.
AeroWeather – Free – Downloads latest weather readings from any number of airports from around the world. I love little weather app’s – this tells you currently what is happening but does no forecasting. Still, lovely little app that’s very handy.
SleepOver – £1.79 – Sends a magic packet over Lan or internet to wake a PC…or Mac. My iMac is always asleep but the router is configured to pass on the magic packet from SleepOver and wake it – I can then use it for streaming from Simplify for example.
Mocha VNC Lite – Free – Let’s me VNC to my home Mac. Very handy and very powerful.
Twittelator Pro – £2.99 – Yes. Third Twitter client and the only one I’ve paid for. Shakeel recommended this and it does have some unique features. It supports adding little icons (dingbats) to tweets, you can see threaded conversations, easily see followers of other users and nicest feature is you can see trending topics from other twitter users. Lot’s of features but probably the worst interface. Also lets you see local tweets, but those are different to the local ones in Twinkle.
AroundMe – Free – Similar to Locly. Find local services based on location. Handy to have.
Fring – Free – Nice IM client that also supports VOIP to Skype. Don’t use IM too often on the iPhone but this is now the client of choice for me.
Trapster – Free – Shows and alerts you to speed camera’s in the area your driving. Content depends on other users updating data. From what I’ve seen it’s not populated with too much at the moment. One to keep in case.
Lux Touch – Free – Simple strategy game. Nice alternative to other puzzlers.
TV Plus – £2.99 – Fairly new and quickly become my favourite app. Essentially for Sky users it lets you browse a TV guide of all the channels for the next 7 days. The data loads quickly and you can set a local region so that the proper BBC and ITV channels are viewed. You can see information about each programme but the feature I love the most is it support Remote Record. Press the button from anywhere in the world and the record request will be sent to your Sky+ box. used the remote record 8 or 9 times now and it hasn’t failed me once. A fantastic app which every iPhone and Sky+ owner should have.
Brightkite – Free – Another social networking site. App is very nice but there are very few users on it. If anyone wants a Brightkite invite let me know – I have a few I can give away.
PhotoSwap – Free – Take a picture and send it to random stranger – you then receive a picture. Nice concept but seems to be full of guys looking for guys. One to delete.
Google Mobile App – Connects to Google search and other sites quicker than loading up Safari and then finding bookmark.
XBLFriends – Free – Add friends from Xbox Live and see if they are online/what they are playing. Handy.
A.I. Disk – £4.99 – New for me today – Connects to MobileMe, Box.net or any other webdav server. You can browse and view the file contents of these sites on the iPhone. You can also e-mail any of those files. I’ll probably get a lot more usage out of this than Air Sharing.
rRootage – Free – A game that reminds me of Everyday Shooter. Has some really nice concepts but no sound at the moment. Gets so busy on the screen that it slows down.

If I was recommending a top five it would be Evernote, TV Plus, Twinkle, Last.fm and Locly/AroundMe. There’s been quite a few more app’s downloaded, tried and binned. Too many to mention!

I also have home page links to iPlayer, Google, Flickr and Remember The Milk. I’d really like a Remember The Milk dedicated app rather than the Safari based solution at present. Rumour is that such a client is in development and isn’t too far way. iPlayer is used quite a bit as it works so well on the iPhone – I just wish BBC would hurry up and move away from Real streams for radio programs.

So that’s it from a happy iPhone user. I already have a waiting list for those that want to buy my current iPhone when the inevitable upgrade happens next year. How sad.