One of the new features in iPhoto ’09 was support for sharing photos on Facebook and Flickr. This tied in with the new Faces and Places features, with the former syncing both ways to Facebook and the latter syncing both ways to Flickr. It gave me an incentive to sign up to both these sites and for a while I was content. In fact, I’m still content with Facebook which, although sinister, works well. Perhaps because of the simplistic photo management. Flickr is more sophisticated and it’s causing me problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Macintosh
Flickr/iPhoto Disintegration
June 29th 2010, 08:06pmMacintosh
iPhone 4 Pay As You Go vs Contracts
June 17th 2010, 08:06pmObviously I need the new iPhone.  Need one, d’you hear? But where previously the pay as you go deal, though an upfront expense, has been great value for me (as someone who never uses the phone to call) things have changed.  Previously the upfront price from O2 included 12 months of unlimited data which could then be bought for £10 a month (and a £15 a month top up paid for that, £5 of calls, and snagged 100 minutes and 100 texts into the bargain).
This evening I’ve been doing some calculations which I will share in case any of you are in the same situation: namely, you hardly ever call or text (75 minutes and 100 texts would be more than ample). Â I’ve looked at 02, Orange and Vodaphone. (I wanted to include Orange PAYG prices, but I couldn’t find any info on data costs with this. And I’m assuming O2 have got their 18 month and 24 month handset costs back to front.) Â I’m also working on the basis I’ll keep the phone for 2 years, so it would be worth getting locked into a 24 month deal for cheaper monthly costs. Â All costs are calculated over 24 months.
O2 Pay and Go
£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £240 for 24 months of calls (£10 worth, 40 – 188 mins depending on call patterns), texts (300) and data (500Mb). No lock in. Total £839.
O2 Simplicity
£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £360 for 24 months of calls (300 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 12 month lock in. Total £959.
O2 Pay Monthly
£299 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (100 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 24 month lock in. Total £899.
Orange Pay Monthly
£269 for the handset, £720 for 24 months of calls (150 minutes), texts (250) and data (750Mb). Total £989.
Vodaphone Pay Monthly
£309 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (75 minutes), texts (250) and data (1Gb). 24 month lock in. Total £909.
Tesco Pay and Go
£569 for the handset, £240 for 24 months of calls and texts (for say 30 minutes and 40 texts), data (1Gb). Total £809.
Tesco Pay Monthly
£429 for the handset, £240 for the first 12 months of calls (250 minutes), texts (ulmited) and data (1Gb), then 12 months PAYG with any provider, say £120 for O2 as above. 12 month lock in. Total £789.
Tesco monthly would be a great deal if (a) they had any stock in and (b) I wasn’t getting a discount on my broadband with O2. So would their PAYG, if I really didn’t make many calls.
It looks like O2 Pay and Go may still suit me best so long as my calling requirements remain modest… But there’s not so much in it now.
Updated 18th June: corrected with official Vodafone pricing, which makes the handset £29 dearer.
Updated 20th August: Tesco pricing.
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More iPhone Death: Drowning
June 3rd 2010, 07:06pm
There could be lots of reasons why I didn’t blog my previous iPhone going in the sea. Â It could be that there’s not much to say about it (“don’t put your iPhone in the sea” is hardly new information), it could be that in the western wilderness of Pembrokeshire my only tool for blogging was waterlogged. Â Â But really it’s the pain. Â They say the pain fades: it still feels pretty raw to me. Â It feels cruel to be reminded.
For the record: we went to a beach where you can only get to the sand at low tide, and it wasn’t quite low tide. Â We had a 2 year old and a 5 year old with us, we decided to wade round and I volunteered to carry the latter (you can already guess what’s coming). Â I stepped into the water and discovered that the edge of the small wave concealed an extremely large rockpool. Â Which was very well hidden. Â Yes.
Me, nephew and phone all went in the water. Â Me cursed, nephew cried, and iPhone didn’t make any noise at all. Â Ever again. Â (After a couple of hours on the beach the tide had come back up to the point where we’d need to wade again: nephew declared that he wanted me to carry him. Â Slow learner…)
There are stories on the internet of iPhones that have gone into washing machines, toilets and worse and made it out.  I put mine in a box of rice (no silica for miles out there) for several days, and changed the rice very day.  Maybe it’s the salt?  When I got it home I took it to the Apple store where it was officially pronounced dead, and replaced for £120.  Which, incidentally, was just slightly less than what I would have paid in premiums if I had taken out an insurance policy.
TweetMacintosh
Slow Death of an iPhone
June 2nd 2010, 09:06pmThis is my premature “coroner’s report” on my 3G (white 1Gb) iPhone. Â I’m really posting this for anyone else who is having problems with their WiFi. Â For information, rather than hope, that is.
My unit, 10 months (but not under warranty because it was a replacement for one that went in the sea) gradually stopped connecting to WiFi networks and then even detecting them. Â Now an Apple Genius has confirmed the hardware is defective. Â The unusual thing was there were no other problems with the phone, and there have been no error messages. Â I’ve now just switched the WiFi off, although that means I won’t be able to use some apps (like remote) or surf fast at home and at work.
I now expect the rest of the phone’s functions to gradually deteriorate until it no longer rings or lets me dial numbers containing a 6. Â I should be furious, but secretly I’m pleased to have the perfect excuse to buy (with money I don’t have) the next generation phone, the one I always wanted, that is going to be announced next week.
You are going to announce it, aren’t you, Steve?
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The Enchanted Rodent
May 15th 2010, 10:05amматрациToys! Shiny new toys!  I’ve just taken delivery of a new iMac at work, with Fusion 3 and Windows 7.  (This is so I can use and trial software across both platforms, but I’ve also noticed my workflow speed up – though partly because I can now use iWork)  Which of these new toys to play with first? Well, obviously the iMac  - since evertyhing else runs on that – and it’s as lovely as expected.  I forget how long its memory is now, how many acres of hard drive space it has or exactly what capacity its throbbing  engine boasts, but with the little strain I place on it ticks along at a fair old speed running both operating systems with no lag.  (If I try running 3DS Max virtualised, we may start to find its limits…?)
So what about Fusion and Windows 7? Â I’m very pleased with Fusion: it’s elegant and intuitive with all the features of Parallels 3 (the last version I used) plus access to the start menu for multiple VMs in the menu bar. Â And Windows 7 itself? Â Meh, not exciting. Â I’m sure there’s some good stuff in there, but I haven’t been motivated to look for it yet. Â Mostly, so far it just works.
No, the star of this little ensemble is: the Magic Mouse. Â This is an evolution from the extraordinarily elegant and beautiful but limited single button mouse. Â The next incarnation, the Mighty Mouse, which used touch technology to allow you to right click with its single button and a scroll ball for whizzing around large documents, impressed me enough that I bought one, but not so much that it stopped me losing faith in the mouse altogether and relying instead on a graphics tablet.
The Magic Mouse is starting to win me back. Â It’s a multi-touch mouse: the fiddly scroll ball has gone, and instead everything is controlled by gestures. Â This means left and right swiping but it’s actually a single touch action that’s the winner: draw your finger up or down the surface of the mouse and you can scroll with momentum just like on the iPhone screen. Â This is so incredibly usable, you immediately forget you’re doing it. Â It’s going to be like two finger scrolling on the MacBook: I automatically try to scroll with two fingers on any other machine I use.
Every other mouse on any machine I borrow I am now going to draw my finger across and then wonder whey the computer’s frozen.
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Front Row TV Season Ordering Solution
February 28th 2010, 08:02pmNerdy post for users of Apple’s Front Row coming up.
If you use a Snow Leopard (or possible Leopard) machine as your media centre and you rip your own TV stuff into iTunes, you may have puzzled over why TV shows seasons that sequence correctly show up in Front Row in a random order, particularly if you’ve not added stuff to your library in the order it was originally released.
Leopard’s Front Row annoyed a few users by changing the organisation scheme from…
TV Shows ->
The Avengers ->
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3 etc.
…to…
TV Shows ->
The Avengers
The Avengers
The Avengers
Which was fine with me while I knew that each entry corresponded to a season, and seasons were in ascending order. But in some cases the seasons seemed to come out in a random order, and I puzzled over it for ages (well, I like puzzles). Had I tagged badly, and it was sorting by release dates? Were the most recently added to iTunes showing up first? Actually it turns out it was none of this. You might have entered the season number in iTunes and have it all showing up correctly there, and when you check the tags you see the correct seasons too, but to get Front Row to read it you’ve got to force iTunes to write it to some other place (I’ve no idea where) by, for example, renaming the show temporarily and then naming it back to it’s correct name. It’s inconvenient (and a disappointingly mundane resolution to the puzzle) but at least it works until Apple release a proper fix. If they ever fix Front Row.
Incidentally if you’re finding some of your TV Shows are showing up as movies (as well as TV shows) in Front Row, despite being correctly categorised in iTunes, this similar workaround suggests changing the media kind to podcast and then back to TV show.
TweetMacintosh, The Internet
Add Geotagging to Your Non-GPS Camera
March 5th 2009, 08:03amOnce in a while something comes along that is so cool that you can’t believe it.  When Martin Varsavsky blogged about an SD card that included wi-fi I was impressed, but when I read that it can also add geotags to your pictures using wi-fi skyhooks (as the iPhone does, when not using GPS) I had to check the date.  It’s not April yet. How do they get all this functionality onto such a small card?  (It can also upload to photosharing sites via hotspots.  Oh yes, and it has up to 4gb of memory.  Currently pre-ordering at $99.) Â
There’s a rumour of an Apple iPhone service that will pass iPhoto your movements and sync those with your pictures to add geotags taken on cameras that don’t support them; iPhoto ’09 and its Places features makes whichever solution actually materialises first something of an essential upgrade for your kit.
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iPhone Airfoil Speakers
December 12th 2008, 07:12pmGood news from мебелиRogue Amoeba. When they sadly made it clear that an Airfoil for iPhone, sending your iPod other app’s audio to your hifi, is not possible due to Apple’s restrictions, I inferred they couldn’t get sound from the Mac onto the iPhone either. Not so, and Airfoil Speaker for the iPhone is under development.
Ideally, this will include a remote control for Airfoil too, so by combining with Apple’s remote (or perhaps even through a simple integrated iTunes controller) you would be able to start playing music on your Mac, decide where to send it (including, of course, right back to the iPhone) all from the iPhone itself.
So even if you don’t have an Airport Express in every room, if you’ve got your iPhone with you you’ll have access to your whole library of sound anywhere you can connect to your network.
An even nicer refinement, though one Apple may not like to implement, would allow the audio to be streamed to the iPhone wherever it is on the internet…
TweetEducation, Macintosh
Times Changing
October 16th 2008, 07:10amWhen I did my first degree, a few of my lecturers pushed their own textbooks; it makes sense, no doubt, since it would be a work whose authority (one hopes) they would have full confidence in – but it also makes them money.
Now I’m starting my masters (MAVE at Sussex) I find that it’s iPhone apps that are being pushed! Shamelessly, I might add. I like this.
TweetMacintosh, Wordpress
Blogging on Wooltack
September 27th 2008, 02:09pmI finally got an iPhone. The trauma of its aquisition is still too raw (and I’m still too poor a typist) to relate, so this is a test for the WordPress App, to see if I can post a picture from the phone…
Edit: practising editing and getting used to photo orientation (taking photos with the app isn’t as intuitive as it could be). I notice the iPhone keyboard doesn’t seem to have the thingies for doing HTML…
