For quite a while I have had a hankering for a GoPro without really having a reason for spending that sort of money. We are on a road trip soon and I like the idea of being able to take some video from the dashboard as we drive around and so a GoPro would be ideal. Even so I still don’t think I would get my money’s worth with a GoPro so when an offer came up for a EvoDX at only £20 I had to give it a go.
You get a lot of value for twenty quid. It’s … Read the rest
The more observant amongst you may have noticed that the site is now “secure”. Quite why a blog needs to be so I am not sure but Google is starting to insist on such things so I am in the process of converting all my sites to load via https.
To be honest it has been a bit of a trial, partly because this site runs on a WordPress multi-site installation and that has thrown up a few peculiarities. Anyway, the change from Google has forced me to look at all my sites and … Read the rest
While I might be a committed apple fan boy these days I have never actually queued up for a new product on launch day. That is until the AirPods were released. I’m not sure what attracted me to them most but I was certainly fed up of of tangled and snagging wires enough to make an early morning trip into town. I wasn’t the only one either but I was the first! Turns out it was just as well I did get there early as the Apple Store in Reading only had three for launch day.
Of course they were … Read the rest
As regular readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of the Pebble smart watch. So it was a great disappointment when the the company collapsed and the assets were bought by Fitbit. Pebble did at least return the money that had been pledged on Kickstarter for the next generation and, due to currency fluctuations, I actually received marginally more back than I put in. However, that’s not much consolation for not getting what was looking like a great watch.
For a few months I persisted with the Pebble Time but as time went on it … Read the rest
I’m always amazed at just how quickly app updates mount up (ok so I have 291 apps on my iPhone so that doesn’t help). Even taking that into account there are some that are updated very regularly (Facebook seems to be a serial offender) and the cost in data to keep up to date must be considerable.
Now Jon Darke has taken a closer look and calculated that cost:
… Read the restLet us assume LinkedIn is installed on 100 million devices (it states 50-100m on Android App Store alone), it updates every week with an average app update size of 261MB. Over
Google have a good track record of bringing to iOS unique apps that aren’t available on Android. They recently released a simple little app called Motion Stills which takes Apple live photos and turns them into forever looping gifs. And it works really well.
On opening the app you are shown your photostream with a looping preview of each image. Tapping on the image allows you to make some very small changes such as turning on/off the sound and, crucially, the image stabilisation. It is the latter option that is most impressive. Live Photos actually last longer than you might … Read the rest
I was persuaded by a mate to take a look again at Apple’s Siri, the personal assistant on iOS. I have to say that I have some deep seated psychological dislike of  shouting into my phone in order to get it to do stuff but I promised to take a look at it again as he felt I was missing out.
The first thing I struggled with once turning Siri back on again was just what would I say to here. I could ask the weather forecast but I have apps for that and I find looking out of the … Read the rest
Much of the banking system is still based on procedures and practices from the 20th century and so, like many other areas of life, is ripe for modernisation through technology. Â One company trying to bring some innovation in this space is Curve.
Curve is billed as the one card to replace all your cards and feels a little bit like Apple Pay in that you scan your existing cards into their (iOS only) app and then swap between them when making payments.
The Curve is currently in “beta” and only available to those working for small businesses. There is an … Read the rest
I wrote last week about the forthcoming iOS 10 release that finally will allow you to remove some of the stock apps including Mail. I speculated at the time as to what this would mean for third party mail apps and clicking mailto links:
… Read the restWhat is most interesting about this is that Mail is included in the list. There are many third-party mail apps on the app store at present but one issue has always been that when you click an email address in, say, a web browser the email opens up in the stock mail app. This change implies
By and large the Apple announcement last night was pretty dull. That so much time was devoted to emojis showed (to me at any rate) that there wasn’t anything ground breaking to offer. What was interesting was one thing that wasn’t discussed and that was the ability to remove (some) of the stock apps in iOS10.
iOS comes with an ever increasing number of preinstalled apps such as stocks, mail, weather, compass, calendar etc. and many, myself included, have long wanted to remove these from the device but that hasn’t been possible – until now. It now appears that on … Read the rest