graeme.blog

Tag: apple

  • Game Center for the iPhone is all very nice

    and looks lovely and everything, but what would be really good would be if they had launched with at least one game ready for people to play. Maybe that’s just me though.

    EDIT: Tell a lie, apparently Ms. Pac-Man works with it. Doesn’t point that out in Game Center itself though, which would have been nice.

  • Why I won’t buy an iPad yet

    Thought I’d ponder this a little while, give the product and the chatter a little chance to sink in. The iPad looks gorgeous. Pretty much a few weeks after I’d bought my iPhone, I knew I wanted the same thing, but somewhat bigger. I’m not a genius on this front, I know many people felt exactly the same. And now it exists, it looks right, and as one would expect from Apple, there are a few little twists that make it better than I imagined. Getting properly into the ebook reader market is one, an Amazon that works like the iPhone store is perfect. Price is another, if as it seems it comes in around the £400 mark, that’s a lot cheaper than I’d have guessed.

    So why not buy one? Well, for me, the iPad is going to be a device I’d use sat in front of the TV. I’ve got an iMac for doing my own work, and for serious surfing. I’ve got a proper laptop for work. For the sofa surfing, I’ve got my trusty Acer Aspire One netbook. Now, the netbook isn’t the iPad, isn’t as lovely. But it does fulfill the same task very adequately, and I just don’t think I can justify it to myself on the basis of loveliness. If it breaks, and can’t be fixed, then I’ll happily buy it as a replacement, but there isn’t any other reason to get it yet. It doesn’t doing anything else over and above a netbook to me, so I’ll happily wait. By the time I need an iPad, it may be in a second generation. It may be cheaper. Most importantly of all, I’ll have the need for it.

  • How to train your iPhone to spell the words you use

    Having had an iPhone 3G for a few months now, I had noticed that it seemed to learn words after you had typed them out a few times, adding them to the dictionary for that phone. I had even wondered if there was a way to get those words directly into the dictionary, but presumed it would probably be protected and tricky to do. Hackszine points out that there is a nice simple way to do it, simply type the words you want into notes a few times, until the word is learnt:

    Hackszine.com: Train your iPhone’s dictionary

  • How I Twitter

    I’ve been finding over the past few months I’ve been using Twitter more and more. I have used it for quite a while, but recently I’ve found both more friends and colleagues using Twitter, and have found more people I wanted to follow. There has definitely been a surge in interest over the last six months, and it’s being seen in more surprising places, such as a Twitter joke on the election night Colbert/Stewart show, or on one of the many mobile phones of Stephen Fry.

    So I thought I’d write about how I use it, seeing as I’ve been doing so for a while, and found myself a nice set of tools to help me.

    First thing in the morning

    I like to update both Twitter and Facebook first thing, so to kill two birds with one stone (actually a few other social networks too) I use Ping.fm . This allows me to subscribe to multiple social networks, and post my status to all of them from one place. They did also have a Facebook application I used for a while, however this has been broken since about the time the new version of Facebook launched, and they haven’t updated it to work yet.

    On the move

    Until recently I used a Nokia N95, and so I tended to use the mobile version of ping.fm from a browser. Now I’m on an iPhone, I’m using that for posting, and the Twitterrific application (link to UK iTunes store) for reading other people’s tweets.

    On the desktop

    I’ve used twhirl for a little while now, as it is an Adobe Air application, it runs nicely on all platforms including Linux. In an ideal world I’d like something that combined Twitter nicely with IM and other social networks, and although several applications have come close, nothing is quite there on the Mac yet. My only real gripe with twhirl is that I’d like to size the window a bit smaller, other than that, it has a lot of functionality, and displays incoming tweets rather nicely. I’ll post on twitter mostly from there in the day and evening.

    Sharing links on Twitter

    This may not be the most obvious route, but to post a link on Twitter I use the Mahalo Share Firefox extension. You’ll need an account on Mahalo, which if you haven’t come across it, is trying to be a human version of Google, with user-submitted links reviewed by their staff. Once a member, you can set up the extension properly, and have a single button in Firefox you can click whilst on a page to submit the link to Mahalo, and to many other sites in one go. I mainly use it as a quick way of saving links at Delicious, but I have it set up with several accounts, so I can also post the link on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere too. A series of checkboxes allows you to choose which service(s) each link is posted to.

    Adding tweets to my blog

    I had been doing this by a more tiresome method until recently, however I’ve just discovered the Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget. Don’t be put off by the fact it hasn’t been updated for a long time, it’s nice and simple, and works fine with my WordPress 2.6 installation.

    Sites I read about Twitter

    There are a couple of Twitter new sites that have started recently, Twitip and Twitterrati. I’m subscribed to the feeds for both, and have found them both useful. In fact this post was inspired by a recent article at Twitip. I’ve also used Twitterlocal and Twitter Grader to see who else is twittering near me, and how I compare to other Twitter users.

    So there you have it: a little insight into the various ways I interact with Twitter. How about you?

  • Microsoft launches Phone Data Manager

    Microsoft launches Phone Data Manager Beta – Download Squad

    This could be one to follow, Microsoft has released a beta of software to sync data with Windows. Interestingly, it isn’t just for Windows mobile devices, as the list of compatible phones includes several Symbian-based Nokia phones. I won’t be trying this myself, but it is good to see Microsoft offering support to non-Windows mobile devices, and I hope to see Apple following this lead too.

  • 0 Uses for a dead iPod

    I was looking at my old big fat iPod last night, and was mulling over just what to do with it. Under Ubuntu, I can actually charge it, and then get to listen to the disk drive failing loudly. So it is definitely gone. I was hoping against hope I could maybe use it as a large portable drive, but it is too flaky for even that.

    So what do I do with it? Should I bin it? Find a way to recycle it? Use it for a form of art? I’m lost for ideas, so any suggestions would be gratefully received.