November 2007 – Page 3

Northern Ireland Mac User Group meeting tomorrow in Belfast.

It was a long time ago that I started NiMUG and for the last three years it’s been somewhat dormant. But tomorrow brings us the first proper NiMUG meeting in a very long time. We have a room. Hired from Windsor Lawn Tennis Club in Belfast. We have a projector. Kindly donated by Mac-Sys Ltd … Continue reading “Northern Ireland Mac User Group meeting tomorrow in Belfast.”

It was a long time ago that I started NiMUG and for the last three years it’s been somewhat dormant. But tomorrow brings us the first proper NiMUG meeting in a very long time.

We have a room. Hired from Windsor Lawn Tennis Club in Belfast.
We have a projector. Kindly donated by Mac-Sys Ltd

We don’t have an agenda. Tomorrow is just the meet and greet. It’s designed to get things started, see what numbers we can generate and otherwise get the ball rolling. For future meetings I’ve had pledges of demos from quite a few people, and demo pledges are very welcome!!!

Maybe see you there?

(P.S. We have a NiMUG FaceBook group too)

Human Rights Day: 10th December

Human Rights Day is celebrated annually across the world on 10 December. The date was chosen to honour the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation, on 10 December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first global enunciation of human rights. The commemoration was established in 1950, when the General Assembly invited … Continue reading “Human Rights Day: 10th December”

Human Rights Day is celebrated annually across the world on 10 December.

The date was chosen to honour the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation, on 10 December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first global enunciation of human rights. The commemoration was established in 1950, when the General Assembly invited all states and interested organisations to celebrate the day as they saw fit.

iPhone: can be a pain in the butt

I don’t recommend this because it’s bound to cause all sorts of warranty issues. Sometimes your iPhone enters a mode where you can’t answer it unless you use your earbuds or bluetooth headset. Well, you CAN answer it, but you can’t hear anything. The handset speaker stops working. It appears that the iPhone still thinks … Continue reading “iPhone: can be a pain in the butt”

I don’t recommend this because it’s bound to cause all sorts of warranty issues.

Sometimes your iPhone enters a mode where you can’t answer it unless you use your earbuds or bluetooth headset. Well, you CAN answer it, but you can’t hear anything. The handset speaker stops working. It appears that the iPhone still thinks the earbuds are plugged in so it turns off the speaker. This is how to fix this problem without having to go to the Apple store.

Here’s the video demo in ITunes/AppleTV/iPhone format

The headphone socket on the iPhone turns out to be a dust trap.So, apart from requiring you to have an adapter to use any other headphones, they also put a magic dust magnet in there. And if it collects on a contact in there, you can’t receive calls without a bluetooth headset or your proper headphones because the iPhone thinks the dust is the headphones.

Apple’s recommendation is to stick the headphones in and out 7-8 times so it acts like a brush. I’ve found that a little compressed air will do the trick as well (and no, I don’t recommend blowing into it as your breath is warm, moist air).

Licensing Mac OS X…

There’s not a lot of sense coming out of Steven Berling’s Disruptive Technology blog. Yes, it’s ZDNet. Bear with me. The main points seem to be with the facts that Mac OS X has been “hacked” so it runs on vanilla PCs. And the iPhone has also been hacked months before the advent of the … Continue reading “Licensing Mac OS X…”

There’s not a lot of sense coming out of Steven Berling’s Disruptive Technology blog. Yes, it’s ZDNet. Bear with me.

The main points seem to be with the facts that Mac OS X has been “hacked” so it runs on vanilla PCs. And the iPhone has also been hacked months before the advent of the SDK.

Berlind thinks this is going to force Apple into licensing Mac OS X for third party hardware.

I had an animated gif of tumbleweed here but it was kinda annoying

Steven – what on earth are you talking about? I could understand it if Apple’s sales were flagging or if they needed to open up to a new marketplace, maybe to get some developer interest by supporting commodity bargain-basement hardware. But Apple isn’t flagging, it’s been ages since anyone described them as beleaguered (now they use that to describe Nortel, Microsoft, Dell, Gateway).

Apple is doing well in their current model and if they’re doing well why would they want to change? They have a hot selling phone product, they’re selling more Macs than they ever have and they have the attention of motivated hackers dedicated to making the platform better.

So this is going to force them to open the platform?

Berlind discusses this as a uniquely Apple problem and he’s half right. It’s uniquely Apple but it’s not really a problem. Apple is not dedicating hordes of engineers to combat this any more than there were hordes of engineers “hiding” the music on an iPod. If they were wasting significant resource then Berlind might have a point here but there’s no evidence that any of the Firmware updates for iPhone were designed to stop hacking. Plus they’ve not been vehement in trying to stop Mac OS X hacking either. It’s not as if we have Macintosh Genuine Advantage to worry about.

Kindle and an unlikely competitor

This article on Forbes asserts that Kindle already has competitors: The ability to grab free books online points to the deviceâ€™s real competition: not paper books but Internet-friendly laptops, tablet computers and smart phones. The amount of content available online is growing fast, and devices for accessing the Net are getting better and cheaper quickly. … Continue reading “Kindle and an unlikely competitor”

This article on Forbes asserts that Kindle already has competitors:

The ability to grab free books online points to the deviceâ€™s real competition: not paper books but Internet-friendly laptops, tablet computers and smart phones. The amount of content available online is growing fast, and devices for accessing the Net are getting better and cheaper quickly. One such device is already here. Itâ€™s called the iPhone.

Another post on Counter Notions claims that the big issue will be the DRM content:

iPod users have had an easy way to populate their devices, without having to repurchase most of what they have already paid for or illegally downloaded.

Kindle users, however, will have to purchase or repurchase all the content on their reader. Whereas it was possible to pay $399 for an iPod and enjoy all the music you wanted legally or illegally without any additional expense, not so with Kindle.

For my purposes, iPhone will likely serve me well. It’s already replacing my laptop for most of the things I use the laptop for (casual browsing, checking email) leaving the laptop to be used for document editing, instant messenger and detailed web searches. The screen is 40% smaller (which is a lot) but the device is only half the weight. Battery life may be an issue where the Kindle wins out.

Will Apple see the need to respond? Will Google assist them with their online content much like they gave them access to Maps?

iPlayer. For the love of god….

We’ve covered this before in september and October of this year. But it’s never been more plain than in this posting from Justin Masons blog at taint.org. The BBC has been sold Related posts: Take a couple of minutes to appreciate genius. OpenMoko FreeRunner: *sigh* iPlayer on my iPhone We got Youtube, Vimeo, CBS, iPlayer … Continue reading “iPlayer. For the love of god….”

We’ve covered this before in september and October of this year. But it’s never been more plain than in this posting from Justin Masons blog at taint.org.

The BBC has been sold

Unqualified Reservations talks Google Android.

From Five Problems with Google Android: The quality of the user experience on the iPhone makes a major difference to Apple’s bottom line. The quality of the Android experience has only a slight connection to Google’s. Sure, everyone on the project would like it to succeed. It’s not about the users. It’s about the advertising. … Continue reading “Unqualified Reservations talks Google Android.”

From Five Problems with Google Android:

The quality of the user experience on the iPhone makes a major difference to Apple’s bottom line. The quality of the Android experience has only a slight connection to Google’s. Sure, everyone on the project would like it to succeed.

It’s not about the users. It’s about the advertising.

The rest of the article describes some of the issues facing customers and developers of Android. The fact it’s a plain-jane implementation of an OS. That the development environments are Java and Javascript. That it breaks no new ground.

A very good read.

Casual Games

I’ve been thinking of applications which would suit the iPhone and iPod touch and mused about how the original iPod models had a click wheel and yet no-one managed to bring out a driving game 🙂 One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John … Continue reading “Casual Games”

I’ve been thinking of applications which would suit the iPhone and iPod touch and mused about how the original iPod models had a click wheel and yet no-one managed to bring out a driving game 🙂

One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John Carmack has criticised the iPhone already in this area despite not seeing the SDK and not knowing therefore what Apple’s strategy was for gaming on the iPhone.

Casual Games work because they can be picked up and dropped off. SIMCity and SIMTower (the less complex version and include SIMAnt here) were the olden days versions of Tamagotchis. They were games that you could spend an hour or ten minutes messing with and then wander off for a few hours. Come back and then see where it had got to. Tamagotchis had the same thing but with a little more tech and a little more demanding on the attention. Ignore the little device with the little animal and it died. So sad, too bad. Nothing was more fun than coming back to SIMtower and seeing that floors 9-13 had cockroach infestations and 24-30 had a fire about half an hour after you left it. So, you’d repair the problems and then wander off for dinner.

Attention is the resource we’re striving for. But we’re not looking to completely capture it.

Games like Strategy, racing games and FPS require absolute attention. We’re talking about games that will run on a phone so people might be just trying to kill time while waiting for someone to come out of a shop. So the games have to let you in quickly. There also has to be a SaveState or not much of a penalty for dumping a game. Games which require you to drop back to arbitrary save points are a pain – and why would you as a developer of entertainment want to cause your viewers pain? That would be like a TV programmer, after each commercial, show the last minute of what happened before the commercial. I’ve seen this done in the US….and I didn’t like it.

It’s a bit like Splash screens in games. Man – how annoying are the splash screens in Battlefield 2142? Yes, we know it’s EA. Yes, we know some company called DICE had something to do with it. After the first time, we don’t care who made it. At least on most Mac versions of games you can delve into the bundle and ditch the movies which make up the splash screens and the game just continues on. Saved us from the overly long sequences in the Mac version of Halo I can tell ya. These are only slightly less annoying than companies which insist on showing you splash screens after the game is finished. You quit out only to be hit by an advert. Thanks but no thanks.

We’re looking to grab the attention, hold the attention and be able to release attention quickly. So our game must load fast, not be in your face too long, and get you into gameplay as soon as possible. And when done – it should allow you to exit quickly.

4/100 A Community I Love

While there are communities around everything, there are some that I love. I made some good friends and met my fiancee on an online community but I don’t go there any more. Some communities have a way of tiring. They’re best when you take breaks from them. I’ve never really fitted in with some communities. … Continue reading “4/100 A Community I Love”

While there are communities around everything, there are some that I love.

I made some good friends and met my fiancee on an online community but I don’t go there any more. Some communities have a way of tiring. They’re best when you take breaks from them.

I’ve never really fitted in with some communities. The RPG community for example always seemed a little strange and alien and, as a result, I preferred to just blog on my lonesome rather than try to fit in with their arcane rules and preferences.`RPG.net, for example, is extremely bound by their little groups of mini-Hitlers. Anything you say that contains sarcasm or opinion is going to be vetted and you quickly find yourself labelled as “passive aggressive”. It’s a crapshoot however – like a mexican standoff where one or other person will get labelled first. As a result, I pretty much hate it there.

The Mac community is different however. Again I have some ownership over the area I spend my time in and that’s comfortable. What’s better is that there’s a very vibrant community in this little corner of the world and we do our best to moderate it in terms of keeping us legal (ie, no selling software illegally). To extend that, the friends I’ve made through owning Mac-Sys have created a community there. I’ve met, because of Mac-Sys, some savvy yet amiable businesspersons and been lucky enough to keep their friendship. I’ve also met some complete goits and I’m maintaining a list.

OSX-Nutters is a community I enjoy a lot when the Yanks aren’t whining about their own politics (which of course is the best thing to do rather than using their Constitutional rights to bear arms in the event of a corrupt government). The group started when a group of people from OmniGroup’s Mac OS X Talk mailing list needed somewhere to vent off-topic as well as keeping on-topic. Some of the humour and one-liners are just inspired.

The community I love, however, is my group of family and friends. You can see most of my friends on my FaceBook page and my family fill out the rest of it. That’s my community.

Magic 8-ball says: Outlook not so good

That’s a pretty brief review of Outlook 2003 when connected to an Exchange Server. When my IMAP server isn’t responding, I still have my local data. And it works. And when things change, they sync up nicely. Yesterday I spent the morning restarting Outlook as it kept crashing every time the network connection went down. … Continue reading “Magic 8-ball says: Outlook not so good”

That’s a pretty brief review of Outlook 2003 when connected to an Exchange Server.

When my IMAP server isn’t responding, I still have my local data. And it works. And when things change, they sync up nicely. Yesterday I spent the morning restarting Outlook as it kept crashing every time the network connection went down. Today I have this:

The little exclamation mark shows that I can’t get access to my Exchange Server. This means that at intervals the application freezes up. Considering that my calendar is part of this application as is my mail and most of my to-do list, I find myself pretty much unable to be 100% effective.

On the other hand, using a more decoupled service like IMAP with subscribed ICS feeds (a la Google Calendar) I’d still be able to work. At the moment I can just sit and look at the wait cursor and the little exclamation mark. Most of my work is, to be honest, in message passing and making sure people are doing things. As such, my reminders lists, calendars, follow-ups and email are crucial. When I can’t access the server I can’t even search my email. (and yes, I know I could change some of this, if I had access in my profile/policy to change things).

This is why I’m keen on decentralised outsourced services. If you’re not an IT company then why have a server on site. Why tie yourself down like that. Use decentralised services so if your broadband goes down you can pop down to any WiFi hotspot and use theirs. If your hosted email service goes down, you’ve still got access to other services and plenty of opportunity to change to a provider that won’t go down. This is why I use Pair Networks – pretty unrivalled in terms of reliability.

I loathe Windows and Outlook.