Iphone

Got an Iphone, want an iphone – not sure – everything about my experience is documented here.

Designed for mobile?

By in Computing, ipad, Iphone Tags: , , ,

Regular visitors to this blog (which posts less regularly than you deserve) will have noticed I change designs regularly.
Normally I choose a design that intrigues me, or that might allow me to experiment with something new. However this doesn’t always help you, the real “customer” of this blog.
After reviewing the visitor stats I have settled on this as the new look, and I don’t plan on changing it for a while.
The main advantage of this new look is mobile or rather smartphones and their related devices. It look pretty good on both a normal browser and a mobile sized screen, with easy to focus on areas for the good old (new) double tap to zoom.
Why not a truly mobile theme? These turn a site into rectangles that expand as you interact ( see wiki on your phone). Basically I hate them… Part of the point of a website is to show people things creatively, the standard ways of making a site suitable for smartphones seems to be to strip everything away.
Nowadays with relatively generous bandwidth limits and 4G networks around the corner the Internet should be used as it was intended.
Exceptions… Yes only one though – online payments – a nightmare on a normal site it’s extremely painful on a mobile device. If we want people to interact outside of an “app” store we really need to sort that, so far amazon seems to be the only online retailer where repeated purchases are a breeze. Luckily for me I don’t need to take payments , unless you think I deserve money for this sporadic essay writing.

Talking about mobiles and other devices, after a couple of weeks of using an iPad, many mobile sites think I need a washed out dull experience, however the iPad is not a phone, it has a better resolution than many laptops, and even high-end screens.
This means you really want an iPad to see your site as you originally wanted it to be seen – so don’t hide it…. the only thing that really does not work on the iPad are sliders, and that is now on a minority of sites – there are ways to get them to work and when they work – it works fine. The iPad is arguably what mobiles will end up being.

Small screens are only here for a short while, 5 years ago no one really thought larger screens than the maximum 320 * 240 arenas that used to be used would be improved to the resolution and size of a modern phone. With glasses like google’s Augmented Reality project possibly becoming available, the screen real-estate will expand to those devices. Flexible displays are also getting closer, so soon we will be able to expand displays larger than default sizes, already you can send your smart phone screen to a tv or other devices – this may become the default way of viewing data, an the smaller screen used only when truly mobile (which is not when most phones are now used!).

Anyway that’s my rant and opinion made public – read it and ignore at your peril.

Rush hour traffic made easy with waze

By in Iphone Tags: , , , ,

Yesterday I found myself in Manchester after a business meeting. The meeting ended on time (good for a Friday!) but there was still the problem of getting home.
I know manchester and have no problems after extracting myself from the one-way streets in going the right way. I do have a problem with the traffic, in Manchester it suddenly stops and it feels like driving through treacle and no matter how you twist and turn you just hit more traffic.
As well as traffic you get doubt, especially when you need to get to your daughters nursery to pick her up, get home, get her ready for swimming and get out all within an hour of the meeting…
Enter waze a nifty little gps app for the iPhone. It’s directions aren’t always spot-on (but it’s getting better) but it excels in one area. avoiding or informing you of delays. Waze uses crowd-sourcing, this means just by using it you send data about the roads you travel on.

 

The app has been around for a while now and has a decent user base – as a result it’s extremely good as knowing how the roads are doing.
In this case 25 minutes I didn’t have we’re at risk, a few seconds later the app re-routes me down roads other users (you can see Icons where they have been recently) have shown clear traffic. The end result five minutes of delays instead of 25! This is an app I cannot recommend more for people who find themselves travelling during peak times.

Goals for 2011

By in Computing, Iphone, Mysql

Well, a couple of weeks into the New Year, and it’s time for the usual Resolutions. So what are mine this year, well some I am keeping to myself, but a few techie ones remain.

In no particular order I intend to do/get the following:

  • Obtain a Macbook (Air / Pro).
  • Learn how to program the Iphone / Ipad
  • Get a tablet pc (Ipad possibly or windows 7 based one we shall see)
  • New Digital camera to replace the now aging Canon EOS350 – (my current one has suffered from being in -28 and + 40 in it’s working life)
  • Get this Blog back up and running doing the following:
  1. Reviewing Iphone Apps – on the Iphone 4 and Iphone 3g
  2. Document insights into MySQL from the servers I manage
  • Get to grips (finally) with OOP and PHP (come-on I know JAVA so I really should have cracked this already but the old C programming gets in the way).
  • Have a dabble in Cloud Computing – it seems to be here to stay and since 2010 had virtualisation 2011 is Cloud 🙂

That’s it for now – check back to see how I do 🙂

R-U-ON IPhone app – Server Monitoring

By in Iphone, Server Tags: , ,

Kick-starting an Iphone app review cycle, first up is one of the most useful app’s I have for server monitoring.

R-U-ON http://www.r-u-on.com/ is a great service, which has a free level and a paid.  Personally I used the free service for several years, now I use the paid service.

The Iphone app works with both absolutely fine.  Basically you create an account and then download a small program called an “agent”, this is set running or installed on your computer or server – these agents then connect to the r-u-on servers and send information.

You can get information about several things, most useful to myself is disk space, virtual memory usage, ram usage, cpu and load stats.  If any of these exceed limits set (you can customise them).  Critical failures can be notified by text message (theres a fee involved for this) which is absolutely essential.

The IPhone app simply connects to the r-u-on account and shows a summary, of your alarms (server’s which have exceeded a notification threshold – see the graphic below for this), or general server status – which hopefully is all green and show’s that all your servers are running well.  You can also view your trouble tickets, personally I’ve never done this and have no real idea what it is.

Screenshot of the alarm screen.
Screenshot of the alarm screen.

The only thing missing from the app is the ability for it to run in the background, though of course the Apple SDK does forbid this – bah! however it would be great if it could or some kind of background notification system used (which I believe may be available in OS 3.0 but not 100% sure).

Iphone 3.0 OS update – initial thoughts

By in Iphone Tags: ,

After waiting and hitting the Check for Updates button over and over again – at 7pm BST it finally arrived.. queue the 200+ MB download and the wait…

Once downloaded the update I had to wait for it to transfer the files – then it rebooted – great stuff… until the emergency call slider appeared – hmm – nothing happened – left for 20 mins – nothing happened.  Odd..

Undock, redock – restart – still the same how odd. Time for the old fav – Turn off….. wait 5 mins….and turn on… and hey presto it worked.. So not the most smooth of updates – but nothing I am not used to.

Right first impressions.

It’s fast… Wayyyy fast, my Iphone is overloaded with apps – I mean really overloaded – we are talking 9 pages or so full of apps… and now it’s fast.

Switching between native things such as SMS , phone and dock is great – the hidden page to the left (spotlight) for searching is great… though maybe not too useful for me – I don’t store documents on the phone afterall.

MMS works with O2 and is brill 🙂 about time – not got anyone to send me one yet – but me sending works – so that’s a big plus – suspect it costs me though, need to find out from O2.

Audio recording – brilliant, had an app to do it before – but this actually is higher quality – and the app tended to get confused if interrupted – this works in the background! so you can do things and it’s still recording – excellent!

Bluetooth pairing with headset – AT LAST – my old old phone could do this – and now my iphone can too – no more cables to listen to things I can wear my nice headphones and get the sound – the quality is good too – better than most pairings!

All in all brilliant – now all I need is the new apps (tom tom??) and video recording – which we know the phone can do if jailbroken – so come on – I don’t need high quality – I just need to be able to record my daughter playing sometimes!!

Oh and on itunes it looks like I can buy movies an series.. seems pretty good, what if my space is limited and the download time seems a bit excessive.. we will see.