Apple AirPods

August 4, 2017 | Comment

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

Pebble Time vs Apple Watch

July 7, 2017 | Comment

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

The Hidden Cost of App Downloads 

June 25, 2017 | Comment

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: 

Let 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

… Read the rest

Google’s Motion Stills

July 26, 2016 | Comment

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

Siri Idiot

July 5, 2016 | Comment

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

A Bit of a Curve Ball

June 28, 2016 | 4 comments

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.  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

You might want to think twice before removing the mail app in iOS 10

June 21, 2016 | Comment

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:

What 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

… Read the rest

Remove (Some) Stock Apps in iOS 10

June 14, 2016 | Comment

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

Google Cardboard. VR – the Future or Passing Novelty?

June 7, 2016 | Comment

A friend of mine turned up recently with a Google Cardboard a, well, cardboard phone holder that allows you to watch virtual reality content. I was interested to have a go but skeptical as to the longer term possibilities of the technology.

As you can see from the picture above the box has a place to put your phone which is held a few inches in front of a couple of lenses. You need specific apps in order to see the content which create a sort of stereoscopic effect. Although this is made of cardboard it is pretty robust although … Read the rest

Font Awesome and Glyphicons not Working on iOS Safari

May 31, 2016 | 5 comments

I have been working on a new side project (called WriteTrack since you ask!) which is based on the bootstrap framework and makes use of both Font Awesome and Glyphicons. I had got far enough along the path to want to check out the look on a mobile device which is when I came across the issue that you can see on the left hand side of the header image above. They weren’t rendering as expected at all – the desired look is what you can see on the right hand side of the header image above.

A search of … Read the rest