Today, for the first time since “The far away tree” I lost myself in a book. I am not much of a reader at length. Most of my library is reference and I dip in and out as I need to learn but today I discovered something great. Roughly a month ago a colleague called me into his office to show me his new Amazon Kindle. Being one for gadgets and tech I was impressed, mainly considering the space I could save. I put it on the future purchases and thought nothing of it until the other day. I was browsing the Zagg website when I came across their App recommendation tool, I signed up and in my first list of recommendations was the Amazon Kindle iPhone App. Without hesitation I installed it, linked it to my amazon account and began searching for a book to test the App. After a short browse I discovered that you could send a sample of hue books to your Kindle to decide whether it’s the book for you. Very impressed I chose a couple and today on the train I spent the entire 40 minutes reading. Now this, for most is no major accomplishment bit one of the reasons I stopped prolonged reading was not by choice, I would get four pages into a book and wake up 2 hours later. The Amazon Kindle for iPhone has a function to switch the color to sepia. I found this a lot less hypnotic than the harsh black and white of a usual page. Maybe it was the time of day, maybe it was mind over matter as I was reading a book on a gadget but I know that I don’t have time to wait for my books to age to that sepia sort of color and will be reading a lot more on my iPhone.
By far my most used App of this month is Copilot Live and the recent improvements to iPod control within the Sat Nav makes it all the better. But this month I wanted to mention a couple of novelty Apps I have been playing with.
Timelapser is a nice litle time lapse / stop motion software that produces a nice little video. I liked it so much I bought a gorilla pod for my iPhone.
GS Lite, not played with it much but a nice to have for simple blue or green screen effects.
NB TotalFit, works with Mapmyrun and apparently is based on the iMapmyrun App, it has all the little extras like voice feedback that you meed to pay extra for on the premium version of iMapmyrun.
Natwest, I didn’t think it would be long before a bank jumped on the App badwagon and luckily my was first apart from the company that tried to produce an app for a bank that no-one has heard of. Natwest is a very handy and has taken anoter routine job of mine off the laptop and onto the phone.
Flixter, now I have a Ciniworld season ticket thanks to the PruHealth plan the flixter app is perfect for seeing what’s on, rating and trailers.
TV Guide, I don’t get much of time to watch TV but this app is very easy to use and allows you to glance over all the channels very efficiently, with one touch providing more details.
And of course WordPress 2 which without I would be writing these blog posts with on the train most mornings.
Apple, what are you doin to me? QuickTime.. the one program I thought I could trust in the world of video. The program that I thought I could make play most videos has slowly been getting worse as apple moves their programs more towards the consumer market than the professional but this takes the buiscuit.
Why have you removed the MPEG2 playback component? I have hundreds of videos produced by the company and external agencies which now apparently are not movie files and it really messes up the playback of .tod files which up until a couple of weeks ago I played fine with the JVC Everio plugin.
Their is a solution! Apple will sell the MPeg2 playback component back to you for a bargain $19.99 but why? Who made this ridiculous decision to reduce the power of Apple programs! Come on let’s not turn into windows media player! Come to think of it, Powerpoint supports mpeg2 and no other mpeg codec.
Please ReTweet until someone at apple reads this.
I am very much into my iPhone apps but a website I visited the other day made me stop and think. I always check the weather on Windguru but it not always accurate, so I went to the XC Weather site using safari to have a second look. XC advertised their new iPhone app on the homepage but with a web address rather than a link to the iTunes store.
I stopped to think and realised that soon at this rate I would have an app for nearly every website I visited on a regular basis and that would be ridiculous! The thing about XC Weathers development was that although just a webpage, it looked and behaved just like an app. From the vendors point of view, as other mobile phone catch up (lol) then the need for development in order to satisfy the entire Market will be high. With an efficient browser and bookmarking the tried and tested web application might not be such a bad idea.
An issue may arise with the software / website accessing key functions on the mobile phone such as the GPS which sets applications on the iPhone far apart from any website but i’m sure it’s very easily overcome.
I was never a fan of web design for specific devices and actually got frustrated when my iPhone reverted to a .mobi when I wanted to browse the original site. I thought .mobi was a minefield of errors but with the iPhone setting such a precedent and with with full screen browsing it might be a way to go!
I was going to remove my partitioned drive on my Mac that I had previously set up using Boot Camp but found another solution. Here’s how to do it anyway.
1. Close all programs
2. Go to the Utilities folder and select Boot Camp Assistant.
3. Select Restore the start up disc to a single volume.
Alternatively see my post on installing VM Fusion and booting from the Boot Camp partitioned drive.
The other night I finally grew tired of rebooting my Macbook to use windows programs, saving work to hard drives and rebooting back in Mac OS X.
I downloaded the latest trial version of VM Fusion fully prepared to delete the drive partition and re install all of my software (that would have taken hours) but VMWare luckily had thought of that.
I installed the virtual desktop and fired it up. To my surprise the first option on the list of windows choices was to boot from Bootcamps partitioned drive. Without hesitating I went for it. It does some stuff at the beginning which takes a minute or so but then I was in. Fusion needed to install VM Tools in order to get full functionality and for some reason went through installing device drivers again.
I did get the blue screen of death at one point but I think this was down to installing too many drivers and updates at the same time, but this lead me to start it up again in the old fashioned Bootcamp way and fix it so that still works too.
Very pleased! Took a little time to get fully functional but saved me a lot of time and will save me a in the future!
This might solve the media streaming to the Xbox issue, watch this space.
Really quick post, yesterday I was looking for apps to generate a picture of whatever was on my iPhone screen and I came across a shortcut.
Hold down the Home Button,
Press the On / Off button on the top of the phone,
The screen will flash white for a moment as it takes the picture.
Check the Photos folder on you phone and your images will be there! Very handy for blog posts, presentations, demos etc.
I was amazed how many people with MacBooks did not make full use of the mouse pad fingertip shortcuts so here’s a few to get you started.
Firstly, quite obviously the entire pad is a button.
Two finger scrolling, by placing two fingers on the pad a stroking up and down you can scroll pages with ease.
Holding ctrl and placing two fingers on the trackpad allows you to zoom in on the macs screen.
Zoom in, similarly to the iPhone you can zoom in by placing your fingers together and pinching open.
Zoom out, pinching closed zooms out.
Rotate, place your thumb and index finger on the trackpad and rotate the two together. This is especially useful in programs such as Adobe Photoshop.
Four fingers up for expose, place all four fingers on the pad and then throw then up, this will throw all your windows away from the desktop and allow you to choose your next program.
Four fingers down for expose, place all fingers on the trackpad and drag them towards you, this will place all of your windows on your desktop for you to select your next navigation.
Four fingers left / right, reveals all your open programs, using one finger your can scroll through and select similarly to tabbing through programs in Windows.
Three fingers scroll to navigate, scroll through folders of images etc
For more detail click Apple > System Preferences > Trackpad
As if it wasn’t annoying enough that on the Apple Mac Keyboard sometimes the @ sign and ” are sometimes not as displayed on the keys (mine is right in the Mac OS and wrong in my Windows XP environment) but just wait until you write your next Tweet and need to emphasis a word with a hashtag, where is it? this was only brought to my attention in the past week and reminded me that there were a few other characters I have been meaning to find without having to google it and then paste it into my work. Here’s a few useful symbols and characters.
# = Alt + 3
€ = Alt + 2
© = Alt + G
• = Alt + 8
And one just for fun
= Alt + Shift + K
Thanks Nick Buckley for raising the #hashtag issue
Unfortunately, though I tried to avoid it, I do have a need for both Microsoft software as well a Mac based software, both at work and at home. I am fortunate enough to run two different set ups for running windows on an Apple Mac machine. At work I have a VMWare environment known as VM Fusion running Windows XP and on my home MacBook I have Windows vista running on a partitioned part of the drive, set up using Apples Bootcamp which comes pre installed on the Mac. For both situations you will need a working copy of windows.
VMWare Fusion Environment
The VMWare environment essentially loads a program and within this program loads the Windows operating system. All programs such as Microsoft Office work as usual within the environment. Fusion also has a handy little feature known as Unity which hides the VMWare surround displaying you windows programs in much the same way as you mac software. If, for example you minimise Word it slinks down to the Dock and not the Windows taskbar. If you take the time to set up VMWare Fusion you can also conveniently save down your files to convenient places within the Mac system so as to avoid the need to drag and drop files between the operating systems. We have VMWare fully integrated on the company network which means full support from the IT department.
Bootcamp
Bootcamp is relatively easy to install, it happens in two stages. First, you partition the drive, then you install your windows operating system on the partition. The benefit of running the Windows OS separate to Mac OS you would think would be less of a drain on resources but I have to say that when I boot up in Vista the Apple Mac hardware reacts in a completely different way. The fan kicks in pretty early and the system gets hot. Granted the speed seems to be good but if I’m honest with the processors and ram I am operating with I don’t think I’d notice a difference in speed between my windows programs running in Bootcamp and the windows programs running in VMFusion, the downside being running two operating systems at the same time. The main disadvantage is the fact that the two are separate, you can create a drop box to pass files between the two setups as you can see the partitioned drive from each system but it means rebooting.
In summary, if you are prepared to folk out a little extra for a VMWare licence it is well work it. It just means a more seamless work flow between applications. If you want to copy and paste from a window in outlook to Photoshop you can do, if you want to drag and drop from your windows desktop to an application you can do. As a time saver and for ease of use I’d say VMWare Fusion is the winner.
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