Macintosh

Slow Death of an iPhone

June 2nd 2010, 09:06pm

This is my premature “coroner’s report” on my 3G (white 1Gb) iPhone.  I’m really posting this for anyone else who is having problems with their WiFi.  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.  Now an Apple Genius has confirmed the hardware is defective.  The unusual thing was there were no other problems with the phone, and there have been no error messages.  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.   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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Macintosh

The Enchanted Rodent

May 15th 2010, 10:05am

матрациToys! 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?  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.  And Windows 7 itself?  Meh, not exciting.  I’m sure there’s some good stuff in there, but I haven’t been motivated to look for it yet.  Mostly, so far it just works.

No, the star of this little ensemble is: the Magic Mouse.  This is an evolution from the extraordinarily elegant and beautiful but limited single button mouse.  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.  It’s a multi-touch mouse: the fiddly scroll ball has gone, and instead everything is controlled by gestures.  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.  This is so incredibly usable, you immediately forget you’re doing it.  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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