Having just returned home from two weeks holiday I can now announce the death of the humble postcard. It has been killed off, like so many other things, by the internet. Now longer do family and friends have to make do with a quick “wish you were here” scrawled on the back of a card showing some generic views of your chosen holiday destination. Now they can be treated to regular updates via email and also personalised photos posted to online photo sharing services.

OK, all of this is only possible if you have a computer and broadband connection where … Read the rest

AppSwing currently have a student from the University of Reading working with us and as part of his course he has to do some research into the development environments that are in use throught the UK. In order to capture this information he has designed a short on-line questionnaire which will take 5-10 minutes to complete. If you could take the time to complete it that would be great. You can access the survey here: www.extra.rdg.ac.uk/devsurvey/survey/… Read the rest

By and large my job at AppSwing is one of management. Whether those that are “managed” (hello!) feel that it is a worthwhile exercise is open to debate and their own personal blogs. Anyway this week has been a strange one for me as I have spent 90% of it doing coding, something that I left behind some ten odd years ago. I have continued to dabble on and off over that period, my websites for example, with the exception of this one, have all pretty much been coded by hand in Perl and I have done bits and pieces … Read the rest

I’ve been an NTL customer for a number of years now and until six months ago it was a relatively painless experience. A good example of my NTL experience is when a contractor dig through the cable in our garden leading to our house. This caused a complete loss of telephone, TV and broadband and complete consternation from the boys who lost access to Runescape. However, one call to 150 and an engineer came out – once to put in a temporary fix and then to completely renew the wire a week later. No fuss, no quibbles and no charge.… Read the rest

I love the immediacy of email. To send off a message to a friend or colleague and get back something in minutes or hours rather than the days it would previously have taken to use snail mail. My kids know no other way. No longer do parents have to force their children to write their thank you letters, now they have to be forced to send their thank you emails. Even that is getting old fashioned now. My two can Skype their uncle to say a quick thank you and then get on with their lives.

Problem is too many … Read the rest

One of the great things about a Windows powered SmartPhone is the level of customisation and personalisation that is possible, particularly around the home screen.

As the buttons and screen are so small it makes sense to have as much available as early as possible, i.e. the home screen. Usually what is displayed is the carrier name, date, time, next appointment and message count details. However, Microsoft have provided a method to change and extend this information. So, using some third party plug-ins I have access to Windows media player, my task list and my alarm as well as all … Read the rest

For reasons that are too complicated to explain here I have gone back to using my SPV E200 in place of my trusty old Nokia 6310i. It has been six months or so since I last used the SPV and abandoned it due to it’s poor battery life. I have since discovered that ALL modern devices have poor battery life and so I’ll just have to put up with it. Actually that statement is not entirely true as my BlackBerry 7230 has phenomenal battery life but that is wandering dangerously off the plot.

In the intervening six months I have … Read the rest

If you have read any of my previous posts about spam comment entries you will have felt my fustration coming through that a) this happens and b) that there seemed to be little to do about it. However, thanks to a post from Steve Conlan, I seem to have found a simple way of blocking out the spammers.

As the spam comments are made by a machine and not a human the answer is to check for signs of human life. Normally this would be done via entering some sort of distorted word held in an image that cannot be … Read the rest

There was an article in this month’s PC Magazine that detailed a number of applications that you could run from a USB key. Some of these were fairly run of the mill but some were also pretty impressive and included: Firefox, Windows CE and, most amazingly of all, OpenOffice. I have tested all these out and can say that they do indeed work. What is most impressive is that these are fully functional applications and given the number of dlls and registry settings that most programs seem to need this is quite an achievement.

So this led me onto … Read the rest

You know when you think you have had a great idea and then you find that you were probably very wrong? Well after my last post Comments please? I am beginning to regret turning the bloody things on.

Since the comments page went live I have received three comments for each of the last two entries. I was really pleased when I saw the comment count and wondered what people could be finding to say about my words. In short the answer is nothing – it is a new (to me) form of on-line spam where on-line gambling services flood … Read the rest