So at 6pm this evening iOS 6 went live and no doubt plenty of people raced to upgrade. Not me though as I had already decided that there wasn’t anything in it for me. Flyover view in the new Maps app would be fine if I have a helicopter but I am at ground level and find street view useful so Google Maps is a must. Also I have Siri switched off so there is no need to upgrade for that. So all in all there’s not much there for me.
I went to update my apps this evening and … Read the rest
So yesterday was the big iPhone 5 launch day, somewhat of an anti-climax due to the fact that just about every aspect of the device and it’s accompanying accessories had been leaked in advance. What hadn’t been announced, however, were the prices.
As part of the “updates” to the iPhone Apple introduced a new connector to replace the existing 30-pin version that has been around nine years. While the rest of the industry has standardised on the microUSB connector Apple has introduced a new proprietary standard.  Recognising that there are millions of existing cables and accessories that have the existing … Read the rest
Steve Jobs announcing the Microsoft partnership at Macworld 1997Â and that Internet Explorer was going to be the default browser on Macs:
“Since we believe in choice we’re going to be shipping other internet browers on the macintosh and the user can, of course, change their default should they choose to.”
Wind forward to 2012 and in June, when iOS6 was announced I said that the one thing that I wanted to be able to do was to pick what I wanted as the default browser. It seems that it is no longer necessary to allow users to have such … Read the rest
As of June 2012 Gmail has 425 million active users. That’s seven times the population of the UK and one and a half times the population of the US, so it’s a pretty sizeable number of people. I am an active user, the rest of my household are users, as is my mother-in-law. This gives a good idea of the cross section of people using Gmail: young, old, male, female, tech-savvy and not so.
About a month ago my mother-in-law’s Gmail account was hacked but not only was the password changed but also all the reset data. This is … Read the rest
Despite being the uber geek that I am for some reason I have always shied away from jailbreaking my iDevices. Partly it is because that despite some frustrations I have been happy with the standard functionality delivered by iOS and hadn’t felt the need to jailbreak it. However, of late I have become increasingly frustrated with the speed of my iPad 2 particularly when it come to web browsing which has always been tardy on my browsers of choice: iCab Mobile and Google Chrome.
So it was of immediate interest to me when I read that a new tweak had … Read the rest
As a developer you might, on occasions, add statements to help you trace through your code so you can see how far it has got and where any issue might be lurking. Occasionally you might forget to take out these trace statements and they go live for all to see.
This one was on the T3 website yesterday as I went through and cast my votes for their reader awards.… Read the rest
I am addicted to Kickstarter. There I said it. They say that the first step in overcoming any addiction is admitting that you have a problem.
For those not in the know, Kickstarter is a crowd funding site where entrepreneurs post project ideas and the general public gets to back projects that they like. Projects are pretty diverse from technology to music to art through to design so there really is something to everyone. Backing levels usually start at $1 and projects have between one and three months to reach their funding target. Project offer a range of backing levels … Read the rest
I’ve just returned from a five day break in Spain. On past holidays I have taken a whole array of kit with me including various laptops. This time I left it all behind bringing only my iPad with me. To supplement this I also brought along my keyboard case, camera connector kit and chargers.
While this was supposed to be a holiday there was a possibility that I might be needed for any support issues that might arise at work. I was fairly certain that the iPad would be able to cope but I couldn’t be certain until I put … Read the rest
One of the great things about the move to music downloads is that music on the go has really become much more practical. iPods and other such devices (I can’t think of anything other than iPods but I’m sure that they must exist) mean that you can carry around with you so much more than when having a Walkman meant carrying tapes and swapping them around. However, my music collection is too large even for an iPod Classic so being able to stream my music from a hosted server with a large capacity hard drive is ideal. I could have … Read the rest
So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.
I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.
There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest