Is this the world’s most expensive charger?

April 9, 2019 | Comment

One of the disappointments of the new iPad Pro was that all those lightning charge cables and accessories that I’d accumulated over the years immediately became useless. However, the move to USB-C meant that the iPad had a bit of a trick up its sleeve – charging. As you can see from the image above here it is charging my Apple Watch.

The iPad Pro can charge accessories such as your watch, iPhone etc. at a 7.5W charge rate – providing that you have the right cables. To do so requires a potentially expensive outlay in new USB-C to lightning … Read the rest

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

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

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

Connecting an iPad Pro over Ethernet

May 11, 2016 | Comment

So it has been a fun few first weeks with my iPad Pro and I am really loving the portability, the keyboard and pencil and the update to iOS to make it more suitable as a work tool. However, it was while I was on holiday that I came across a feature that I really could have done with – ether-networking. The wifi was poor where I was and it would have been good to connect over ethernet and upload more.

Turns out ethernet networking is possible with the iPad Pro and a few (costly) dongles. The major deal breaker … Read the rest

How did they manage to get that?

May 3, 2016 | Comment

So I received the above message to my phone last week. There were several things that were interesting about it:

it was supposedly from Apple (it isn’t)
whoever sent it had my full name
they also had my mobile number.

This was obviously a scam as Apple a) wouldn’t send notifications like this and b) definitely wouldn’t send you to a site called “applewarning.co.uk”.

I’m pretty careful about who has my mobile number although getting my name is pretty easy so I’m left wondering just who or what has been compromised to allow this information to become available to spammers. … Read the rest

Bringing Handwriting to the 21st Century

April 12, 2016 | Comment

Over the years I have had all manner of tablets and writing devices but I have never come across one that did the trick for me. Most styluses either have a big fat end which is fine for replicating your finger but no good for emulating handwriting. Or there are the more “active” styluses that only work with certain apps, or have calibration issues, or have terrible palm rejection. In most cases they suffered from all three issues.

And then along came the Apple Pencil…

I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical about how accurate the Pencil … Read the rest

The developer’s iOS 9 public beta conundrum

September 4, 2015 | Comment

[UPDATE – I’m being trolled by my bank! See the update at the end of the article]

The above is a conversation that I had with my bank about their iOS app and highlight, I think, an increasing issue that developers are going to have with more and more public involvement with beta testing.

I have been running iOS9 for a while now and on the whole it is pretty good but having beta software out in the wild does cause issues for developers of apps. It may not be possible to get fixes that are caused by the beta … Read the rest