Tag Archive for 'Apple'

That Apple Presser in Full

Today Steve Jobs shocked the world by making some unexpected apologies at a press conference in Cupertino, CA.

He announced to a stunned press pack, “I am sorry. We lost our way.”

As reporters dropped their iPhones in shock, he continued, “We made too much money and became too complacent and arrogant. Too many of our employees behaved like Comic Shop Guy out of The Simpsons. Too many of our products contained design flaws which we denied until the bitter end. This will change.”

“For too long I pursued a petty feud against Adobe, forgetting that without Adobe, the Macintosh would never have been a success even in its niche design markets. Today we are allowing Flash on iOS. We are launching low-spec, low-cost versions of the MacMini and MacBook, and we are cutting the cost of the iPad. We’d like to apologise to everyone whose iTunes accounts were compromised. And we promise to answer the phone when you ring us up.”

“One more thing,” he added after a pause.

“We will allow any track on an iPhone to be used as a ring tone or SMS message alert.”

Ok, ok, I made this all up. That last one is utterly ridiculous.

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Best free iPhone apps

    Captain Haddock

The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

It’s no MagicSlate

iPad display

I have long dreamed of a neat, small computer which I called the MagicSlate and I was interested to read that this was one of the names Apple registered for their slate device. I even wrote a story about its developers. But that’s another, er, story.

But the iPad - it sounds like a sanitary towel for the late 20th Century, by the way - is no MagicSlate. It’s just a big iPhone. Without the phone. And not even a USB port as far as I can tell.

Steve Jobs has also dissed netbook users by saying they are “just cheap laptops”. Almost everyone I know has a netbook or has bought one for someone. And sometimes you need a cheap laptop and Apple laptops are not cheap. Apple could not make a netbook because there’s not enough profit in the hardware at those prices. According to BBC News his Steveness said:

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything - they’re slow and have low quality displays.”

Well my £245 netbook (running OS X, incidentally) has an LED-backlit display. Er, a bit like the iPad. And so much is on the web (and in ‘the cloud’) now that processing power just doesn’t count for that much any more.

One thing seems certain though - if the iPad is running on Apple’s own CPU, it won’t easily get hacked and ported to another make of device any time soon, if ever. But then why would you want to?

iPod Nano - 4th Generation

It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy - and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.

When The Old and the New the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.

I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.

All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…