Category Archives: Reviews

Mac OS X Lion Review

Posted by David Hurst on August 10, 2011 6 comments

Let me start by saying that I’ve just wiped my MacBook Air and I am now back in the comfortable surroundings of Snow Leopard. That’s the quick review.

I’m definitely what you would call a “power user”. As a professional web developer I demand much from my computer. It has to work well and not waste my time having to be fixed on a regular basis. This is the reason I left my PC and Windows well behind and moved to Mac in the first place. And, with each iteration of Mac OS X, the Mac has gotten a little better. Until recently, when Apple made the bemusing decision to bring the linear environment of the mobile OS to the Mac. This is not a step forward.

The App Store
It all started with the App Store – actually a great idea. I love the way I can log into App Store on my iMac and download all the applications I bought on my MacBook Air. It’s a great way to buy software, and it has resulted in a lot of software becoming much cheaper. The developers can afford to reduce prices because the App Store massively increases their market reach. What’s not to like?

Then, some bright spark at Apple decided that OS X Lion would be released as a download through the App Store, with no physical media edition available. This is a stupid idea. Apart from the obvious fact that a full OS could never be considered to be an “app”, in order to restore your machine, you will now have to restore a previous version of OS X first. On my MacBook Air (2010 edition) that means restoring Snow Leopard 10.6.4, and this doesn’t have the App Store. Therefore I then have to download the 10.6.8 upgrade which is best part of 1Gb in order to get the App Store. Once this has downloaded and installed, I would then have to re-download OS X Lion (several Gb) and install that. This is appalling. I’m glad I’m not a sysadmin supporting a network of Macs…

OS X Lion Visual Improvements
Once I had installed Lion, I was pleasantly surprised with the new visuals. It’s not a massive change – the login screen looks nicer and buttons are squarer. Overall, the appearance is better.

Launchpad
Launchpad brings iOS style app browsing to your Mac. Mastering the weird three finger plus thumb grasping gesture to open Launchpad can take a while. It doesn’t feel intuitive to me. But once in, it looks just like the screens on my iPad. I dove right in and started organising all my apps into neat little folders (a process that seems to take forever) and then never used it again. Why would I? I have all my most commonly used apps in my dock, I can rapidly hit Command+Shift+A in Finder to bring up the Applications folder, and I can search in Spotlight for an app – all of which can be done in significantly less time than it takes to open Launchpad and select an App.

Utterly pointless. It’s just eye candy. A home user or recent Windows migrator might be dazzled into thinking this is something “new” and “brilliant”, but for a professional user it has no point whatsoever.

Mission Control & Spaces
One of the best features of Linux is the way you can have multiple virtual desktops and switch between them. When Apple introduced this to OS X, I was over the moon. I have four virtual desktops arranged in a grid and I use Control+Arrow Keys to navigate between them. It makes my work easier, and makes a laptop with a lower screen resolution a viable main development machine. It allowed me to buy a 13″ MacBook Air to replace my enormous, more expensive and less mobile MacBook Pro 17″. For me Spaces is one of the key selling points of OS X. Trying to use Windows 7 without virtual desktops after Mac with Spaces is truly horrible.

So, why have Apple wrecked this functionality? In OS X Lion, you can no longer organise your Spaces in a grid – you have to have them all in a line. This is a real step backwards. What’s worse though, is that OS X Lion looks at how you use your spaces and then re-orders them on a whim. One minute your terminal windows are in the space next to your browser, then all of a sudden they’re two spaces away! Who’s in control here? It’s my computer and I know damn well how I work most efficiently. I don’t need an OS to make these decisions for me.

Another great feature of OS X is Expose and this used to combine really well with spaces, allowing you to rapidly move windows from one space to another. This functionality has also been removed.

Autosave & Versions
This seems like a neat feature, but it’s just confusing. I use Preview a lot for quickly cropping images, and saving a copy. Now I’m just confused – there’s no “Save As” option on the menu and it now seems to save the file the minute I change it.

The Autosave has been useful though, as when stuff inevitably crashes (which happens a lot in Lion), you don’t lose too much work. On reflection though, I’d rather have an OS that doesn’t crash and continue pressing Command+S on a regular basis as habit has taught me.

Mail
Mail now moves messages into conversations. This is annoying. If you have multiple new messages in a conversation, opening the conversation and scrolling through them immediately marks them as Read. Losing messages becomes much easier, since they end up somewhere in a conversation where you don’t expect them to be. Of course, in theory conversation threads are a great idea, but in the real world people don’t change the subject lines of emails when the subject changes. As a human being, I can determine a change of subject and organise my emails accordingly – the computer cannot.

Mail also has developed the annoying habit of crashing. A lot. Up to 10 times per day for me – always when I’m in the middle of typing a message. Autosave does mean that you don’t lose much, but I’d rather that it didn’t crash at all.

Auto Correct
The little auto correct spelling widget that pops up everywhere on iPad and iPhone to help counteract typos from the touch keyboard, has now made it on to the Mac and frankly it has no business being there. I don’t mind a bit of underlining of spelling mistakes, but having the system auto correct them is hugely frustrating. It would be annoying in a word processor, but when it starts doing them in my code editor and Terminal windows, I really lose it.

Terminal
For some reason Terminal now cannot handle using Nano (a Linux text editor) via an SSH connection, unless you change the terminal emulation from xterm-256color to xterm-color. If you don’t you’ll get random characters and garbage, and your text files will generally get screwed up. Apple don’t document this change, it’s up to us users to fiddle with the settings to get it to work again.

DigitalColor Meter
OS X has a brilliant utility called DigitalColor Meter. As a web developer this is hugely useful for quickly identifying hex values for colours on the screen. Only in OS X Lion you can’t do this any more, because Apple have removed the hex display option. Now you can only get RGB values. Why?

Scrolling
OS X Lion has reversed your scroll direction. Admittedly it makes more sense to push up when you want to scroll down – it’s the same action you would make in real life to push paper around – but I couldn’t get used to it. At least you can change it back.

Scrolling with a scrollbar is much more tricky though, since apps don’t have them any more. They appear briefly once you start scrolling (with mouse wheel or touchpad) and if you’re quick enough you can click and grab the scrollbar. I don’t like this. I want a scrollbar I can click and grab with my mouse.

Networking & Time Machine
In my office I have a CentOS Linux file server that runs Appletalk. Only, under OS X Lion, I couldn’t connect to any of my Appletalk shares. I had to recompile a new version on my Linux server to make them work again. Why does Lion not support all versions of Appletalk?

This is a much bigger problem if you use a network device for Time Machine backups, as many people do. There are loads of forum messages from users complaining that their network backup devices and NAS no longer work. Personally, I spent a great deal of time building my own network Time Machine backup service on my Linux fileserver. This works perfectly under Snow Leopard, but refuses to work under Lion. Presumably this is because almighty Apple only want you to use their own Time Capsule.

Stability & Speed
My MacBook Air has crashed more times with Lion in 2 weeks than every Mac I have ever owned in the past 8 years. On top of that, I now get to see the rainbow beachball of death with monotonous regularity. Lion has definitely slowed down my previous lightning fast MacBook Air.

Conclusion
Lion is nothing more than a dumbing down of OS X. A stripping of functionality and a funnelling of users into a rigid computing environment where Apple becomes the mighty overlord. Pro users like myself are cast aside as Apple try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They have turned their sophisticated, secure, stable and fast operating system into a shadow of its former self.

Limited functionality works on a smartphone and a tablet, but I don’t want it on my £1200 computer, thanks very much.

I have gone back to Snow Leopard and I will not consider re-installing Lion until these problems are fixed. Frankly, I think Apple should split OS X into two products like Windows: Home and Professional. The Home version becomes all “Fisher Price” like Lion is now, and the Pro version could be like a proper OS with proper features.

If it doesn’t get sorted out, my next development machine will be a PC and it will be running Linux.

Google Chromebook – Google launches its Chrome OS and own laptop

Posted by David Hurst on May 12, 2011 2 comments

Is this the dawn of a new era in computing? Is Google some sort of binary messiah leading us mere users to a new land of promise?

Probably not. Read more »

ZDNet loves Microsoft, hates privacy (and is not averse to providing misleading information to support their cause)

Posted by David Hurst on September 17, 2010 1 comments

I happened upon a ZDNet article about Internet Explorer 9 today. What drew me in to have a read was the post title: “Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser”. Wow, thought I. Have Microsoft done something groundbreaking with their new browser?

Simple answer: no. They just caught up with the other guys, optimised it a bit, added hardware acceleration and made it look like Google Chrome. Apparently, it even supports standards. Yep, you read that right – a Microsoft browser that properly supports standards. Web professionals around the world will probably need to hold off breaking out the Champagne though, because IE 6 – 8 will linger around like a bad smell for many years to come, and we’ll still be writing and re-writing CSS and doing silly Javascript hacks just to get our standards compliant code to look right on IE.

What struck me as odd is the way ZDNet positively orgasmed over the browser and made lots of unfavourable comparisons with other browsers. They particularly seemed keen to highlight the fact that Google Chrome has no hardware acceleration, as though rendering complex 3D scenes and animations through a web browser is a commonplace occurrence.

Then I clicked through the various screenshots on offer, and found these two:

ZDNet: Code required for IE9 rounded corners

ZDNet: "Code required for IE9 rounded corners"

Fair enough. That looks like straightforward CSS – the same code that can be used on Chrome / Safari to do the exact same thing.

And then…

ZDNet: Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6

ZDNet: "Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6"

Hang on a minute! That’s the exact same piece of code expressed in explicit notation. This is complete misrepresentation by ZDNet in some half-arsed effort to prove that IE9 is somehow better than Chrome. ZDNet need to wake up and join the 21st century, where web developers have been happily applying rounded corners in standards compliant browsers for ages. Perhaps they should consider hiring someone who actually knows a bit of CSS before they publish this kind of pure arse gravy.

Naturally, I felt the need to remonstrate and post a comment on the post – an action that (surprise, surprise) required registration. I duly therefore went through the registration process, taking care to de-select all email newsletters and junk mail options – I don’t want my inbox bombarded with articles from this lot, because I now don’t trust a word they say.

You can imagine my annoyance then when I got an email confirming my newsletter subscriptions with ZDNet. Yes, they completely ignored my wishes and privacy, and decided to send me their junk mail anyway!

Unbelievable. But, it gets worse…

I naturally logged straight back in to the site to change my subscription preferences, but found I was unable to do so, without giving ZDNet loads of personal information first!

This kind of contempt for user privacy is perhaps to be expected from an organisation the publishes complete falsehoods in order to support a product they favour. I guess Microsoft has them on the payroll.

Use ZDNet at your peril. They probably sell your data to the highest bidder… and the lowest… and every bidder in between.

HTC Desire – first impressions

Posted by David Hurst on July 15, 2010 2 comments

I’ve blogged before about my various irritations with the iPhone, which last year prompted me to ditch the shiny Apple handset and opt for a Palm Pre. I liked the idea of the Linux based OS, the multi-tasking and the real keyboard. In reality, the OS was a little limited, but the multi-tasking and real keyboard were good. Build quality, not so much.

When a saw a friend’s HTC desire, I was hugely impressed. The large, bright, high resolution screen, excellent app support and good build quality certainly appealed, but it was the impressive 1GHz processor that sealed the deal. I’m sick of sluggish phones, and the HTC Desire is certainly not sluggish.

There are certainly areas where the Palm WebOS is better, and it’s probably not as intuitive to use as an iPhone, but my first impressions are that as an overall package it beats the competition hands down.

I’ve only had mine for a few days, so I’ll do a more in-depth review when I’ve lived with it for a little longer.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used Palm Pre?

What exactly does the Apple iPad do better?

Posted by David Hurst on January 28, 2010 None comments

When Steve Jobs launched the iPad yesterday, he made a compelling case for a device to fill the gap between a smartphone and a PC/Mac. In his words, “If there’s gonna be a third category, it has to be better at these tasks — otherwise it has no reason for being.” Which tasks?

  • Browsing
  • Email
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Music
  • Games
  • eBooks

So, I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these things and see whether it is better at these key tasks than any of the alternatives.

Browsing
I think browsing the Internet on the iPad would be a nice experience. The screen size and touch interface combined with the portability of the device would seem to offer a better experience than a smartphone, netbook or PC/Mac. However, at the moment there is no Flash player on the iPad, and given that much of the video streaming done on the Internet now runs through Flash, I would see this as a huge fault.

Verdict: better than a smartphone, but simply cannot compete with a PC/Mac. Probably a better browsing experience with that screen than a netbook, but at least my netbook has the Flash player, not to mention a choice of browsers. I don’t believe anyone could say the iPad is better at browsing.

Email
Apple have vastly improved the iPhone email interface for the iPad, but the iPad is not a phone. Surely they should have used Mac Mail as the starting point? By virtue of the bigger screen, the iPad will be more pleasant to use than a smartphone, but given the superior portability of a phone and the cheaper cost of connectivity, it doesn’t really win out in the mobile email stakes. And of course, it can’t match a standard OS for email power and choice of email clients.

Verdict: what’s better? Nothing that I can see. Smartphones are better for mobile email, netbooks and PC/Macs are better at general email. Another defeat for iPad I’m afraid.

Photos
I’m just confused by this. I could see a use for the iPad as a way to share and enjoy photos with family and friends, but its lack of standard USB connectivity ruins this. You can’t just plug your digital camera into your iPad (not without the special adapter/connector, which will be a cost extra anyway), nor can you copy photos onto a memory stick or external hard disk. Presumably you will be reduced to copying all those 10MP photos in your collection via the incredibly slow Bluetooth, or by WiFi, assuming you have an access point nearby.

There’s no camera in the iPad, and it’s not like you would want to actually take photos with a device of this size anyway. Many smartphones on the other hand, do have cameras, and some of them are very good. My Palm Pre has an acceptable camera, with a flash, and is able to upload directly to Facebook, which is actually where I share photos with my friends and family.

Verdict: better than a smartphone or netbook for browsing photos, but much more difficult to get the photos on the device in the first place. Can’t match a PC/Mac for this at all.

Video
This I really don’t understand. The screen is 1024 x 768 resolution, or 4:3 in aspect ratio terms, so there’s no widescreen and given that most video produced now is widescreen, that means you will be chopping part of the video off to make it fit, or you will be forced to watch video in a strip across the middle of the screen. Most smartphones are widescreen, and so is pretty much every netbook or PC/Mac you can buy.

The lack of Flash player means that there’s no chance of watching online TV with BBC iPlayer or other services, and that’s just a huge flaw. And that lack of USB also means no DVD drive either.

Verdict: smartphones may be small but they are at least widescreen. Netbooks have the Flash player and can play DVDs with external drives. Your PC/Mac can do all of these things much better. So where does that leave iPad?

Music
Music? Really? Who is going to want a portable music player with a 9.7″ screen? It could be useful, plugged into an amp whilst streaming music from your main iTunes collection, but on its own the iPad does not look like a revolutionary music device, nor can it do anything better than any other devices.

Perhaps Apple are referring to music production, but given they have supplied no apps for this, I think I’ll stick to Garageband and Logic on my more powerful and usable Macs.

Verdict: iPad does nothing better than anything else.

Games
Again, I don’t get it. Touchscreen games are all well and good on an iPhone or iPod touch, but on a larger device it is a nonsense interface. Plus, the graphics power is hardly going to be blowing anyone away. For the price of a decent iPad you can have a reasonable PC games rig, or you could have a netbook and a games console.

Verdict: smartphones are better for mobile games, and PC/Mac is better for proper games. The iPad probably beats a netbook here, although mine does run Quake3 at perfectly acceptable speeds. I remain entirely unconvinced.

eBooks
And here we get to the core of the issue. If Apple had launched the iPad as the iReader, I think everyone would be happy. Whether or not its screen works as well as the Kindle’s e-ink screen for reading books, remains to be seen. But given the closeness of the pricing on the various reader devices, the iPad makes a lot of sense: pay a little more, get a lot more. Personally, I’d rather sit and read a well thumbed paperback.

Verdict: the iPad’s true reason for being.

Should you buy an iPad?
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then the iPad has to be worthy of consideration. If not, then I don’t believe iPad will do anything for you other than giving you a short period of popularity whilst all your friends and colleagues come to stroke it and dribble on it. I guess if you have money to burn and you want to buy into Apple’s sexily packaged gadget du jour, then go for it.

If you do buy it, just remember that Apple will eventually address all the flaws, just as they did with iPhone, and then in short order they will bring out a better specced, more powerful and cheaper second version, leaving you with an obsolete but attractive door stop.

Apple has always treated its early adopters with an attitude bordering on contempt, yet the fanboys keep coming back for more, always failing to realise Apple couldn’t give a crap about them – they are, and always have been, a corporation interested only in the bottom line, and a bunch of early adopters buying what is essentially a beta version are simply helping to pay for the research and development of the final version, and that is very good for the bottom line.

Apple iPad – a bit of a disappointment?

Posted by David Hurst on January 27, 2010 1 comments

Well, the excitement of the launch of Apple’s worst kept secret is over but the hype is probably just going to get worse. It would seem opinion is divided, with some believing Apple’s collective genius has once again solved all our technology needs, whereas others feel the iPad is overrated and something of a disappointment. After having a few hours to reflect, I’m afraid I fall into the latter camp.

Firstly, I have to ask myself what gap in the market the iPad is filling? According to Steve Jobs’ launch keynote, it’s the space between a phone and a computer. Specifically, it needs to be able to browse the web, do email, video, music, games etc., and it must do all these things really well. He then said that netbooks currently fill this gap and they don’t do anything well. So, in Apple’s opinion, the iPad is to occupy the netbook sector and be a lot better than a netbook. Is it? What would I want from a device like that?

I’m typing this post on my netbook. It’s a Packard Bell ZA8. It has a 1.2GHz 64bit AMD processor, ATI graphics, 140Gb hard disk, 2Gb RAM, 3 USB ports, VGA, a card reader and a webcam. It’s running Ubuntu Linux and can therefore multi-task perfectly and run any Linux software I wish. I can completely customise the interface, access my hard disk, plug in a DVD drive or any other USB accessory I like. (It came with Windows Vista on it, which also offers all these things – it ran Vista OK too.) I can plug in my mobile broadband dongle, go online anywhere, video conference – it’s just a smaller more portable (and less powerful) version of my main laptop and desktop, and that’s what I want from a device in this market sector. It cost £300 and it has a better than average keyboard and screen resolution for a netbook. The only downside is the woeful battery life, but at least I can change the battery if I want, and I can upgrade the disk and memory too.

How many of these things can the iPad do?

The Screen
The resolution of the screen is 1024 x 768. When did you last see a new laptop or monitor with that as a native resolution? Consumers want widescreen, not 4:3. Can you imagine how dire widescreen movies will look on this thing? They will play in a tiny strip. This is a massive oversight.

Processor
It’s a custom Apple chip called an A4 and running at 1GHz. Of course without knowing the IPC rate or cache values, it’s impossible to gauge how powerful this chip will be. Apple are pretty good at matching processor power to equipment, so likely it’s fast enough to do everything the iPad does. No doubt it plays smooth video too. My netbook is fine with DVDs, and with video streaming, as long as the canvas size of the video is not too big. Full screen BBC iPlayer doesn’t work on my netbook, but I imagine the iPad could do that… if it had Flash… which it doesn’t.

Disk Space
The iPad is available with 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb solid state disks. 16Gb is peanuts these days, and most netbooks offer 100Gb or more. What’s more, the netbook, being basically a cut-down PC, gives full access to the data on your disk, whereas the iPad runs what is basically the iPhone OS and unless they have made changes, that does not currently have any sort of file navigation or management.

No doubt the iPad will be syncing all its data with your desktop and that puts iTunes or whatever software package in control of what you store on your device, and that seems too limiting for a netbook. Frankly it’s annoying on the iPhone and I can only imagine it will be worse on the iPad.

USB
USB is an essential part of modern computing. The iPad doesn’t have it. That means no DVD drives, cameras, flash disks, backup drives etc., whereas my netbook can interface with all these things.

Webcam
Why is there no webcam? Surely a device like this is ideal for Skype and video conference? I can’t believe Apple thought about this and decided the iPad could do without a camera. It’s much more likely that they couldn’t get it in on this version.

Multi-tasking
I ditched my iPhone for a Palm Pre for the simple reason that the iPhone OS does not do multi-tasking. You might think this isn’t a problem, but I quite often spend an evening with my laptop or netbook out, browsing the Internet whilst chatting to friends on MSN or other IM networks. You won’t be able to do this with iPad, and I believe that’s a big let down on a device like this.

My Conclusions
Apple made a big thing about how cheap this device is, but the cheapest one has only a 16Gb drive, no 3G connectivity and still costs more than my more capable netbook. The 3G connectivity will be essential, because without it and without any USB ports, the only way you’ll be able to get online is via WiFi, and that means finding a hotspot. Plus, the 3G costs an extra $130, whereas mobile broadband dongles in the UK are now very cheap. The 64Gb version with 3G is a whopping $829. That’s an expensive netbook!

The iPad is not really a computer like your desktop, laptop or even netbook – it is a cobbled gadget. An iPad that runs OS X would have been an attractive proposition, but I don’t see any value in using a phone OS on a computer. Yeah, sure, it’s a great piece of design. It does what it does really well. Some of the apps look fab. But get past all of that, and it’s really just eye candy. Are you really going to want to scroll through loads of photos on your iPad? Bear in mind that you won’t just be able to hook up your camera to it, so you’ll have to first download all your images from your camera to your computer and then sync with the iPad. Sounds like more work to me rather than making things simpler.

What about music? Well, I already have an iPod, and I phone that can play MP3s. Heck, even my car stereo can play them. How many places do I need my iTunes, and do I really want a personal music player with a 9.7″ screen?

What was the real motivation for making this gadget?

Could it be that Apple sat and looked at its 75 million iPhone and iPod Touch users, and the 125 million app store accounts, and then thought… “how can we squeeze more cash out of these people”? They then looked at the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s reader and decided to make a book store and a larger iPod to put it all on. Then they dress it up as a tablet computer and tell us that it’s the thing we need to fill the gap in our computing life.

Apple fans and gadget fans everywhere will rush out to buy these things without really thinking about whether or not it will actually be worthwhile to have. Apple fans always do. And true to form, Apple will treat its early adopters with usual contempt by bringing out a version 2 with all the features version 1 should have had in short order, and probably with a lower price tag. The thing is not even ready to ship for another 60 – 90 days. What’s wrong with it? Is it not finished? Are there manufacturing issues? Are Apple waiting to see how many people pre-order before they really commit to production? It doesn’t make sense to me.

I love Apple computers and I love OS X, but I hate what Apple the company has become, and the iPad appears to me to be nothing more than a giant ruse to make money. It’s easy to get carried along on the tidal wave of hype and spin, or to be seduced by the touchy feely goodness of the thing, but I won’t be rushing out to buy an iPad I’m afraid. I know that as soon as I get chance to touch one in the Apple store, I will want it, but that’s all it’ll be: a want, not a need. I don’t need an iPad. It doesn’t neatly solve any computing gaps in my life, and is therefore nothing more than a toy. I’ll stick with my trusty Packard Bell netbook. The battery may be crap, but I can forgive it that and carry a spare in the comfortable knowledge that I can do almost everything I would ever want to do with a computer on a device that is small and portable.

O2 Home Broadband review

Posted by David Hurst on May 19, 2009 2 comments

When is ADSL not broadband? When it’s being provided by O2.

My experience with O2 has been exceptionally poor. I was originally given an install date of the 5th of March, but when this date came, and went, I called up to be told that my install date was actually the 3rd of May. Given that I ordered the service at the end of January, neither of these dates is what you might call “a quick turnaround”. I was given all sorts of excuses ranging from the snow disabling the engineers, to just outright blaming it on BT.

It was finally switched on mid-March. I plugged in the provided router and noticed with some dismay that the wireless only runs at 11Mbps, which would have been fine 5 years ago, but these days I would expect at least 56Mbps support. None of this mattered though because my Internet connection never ventured north of 200Kbps, and only then during the early hours of the morning. In the evening, it sank to speeds slower than a 56K modem.

A few complaints later revealed that O2 (or the providing company Be) was short on bandwidth and were upgrading the service, after which all would be fine. I decided to stick with for the three weeks they told me it would take to upgrade. This has now happened, and whilst speed has improved a bit (I can now get 2Mbps on a good day), it is still much slower than any broadband I have experienced and frequently runs at speeds below 100Kbps. Add to this the fact that O2′s DNS servers seem to fail or stall several times per day and you have a pretty useless connection. On top of this, it now disconnects repeatedly, and by that I mean every hour. And then the final straw to break the proverbial camel’s back: the wireless drops out every 30 minutes or so.

I can rarely watch video. I certainly cannot do any work. The connection is utterly useless and I am sick of it. No doubt I will now have a battle on my hands to get out of the contract, but battle I shall.

I strongly recommend that you do not bother with O2 Home Broadband.

The Facebook facelift

Posted by David Hurst on March 26, 2009 1 comments

Facebook users have recently suffered their once coherent Facebook layout being bastardised beyond comprehension. If this is a “facelift”, then you can expect it to appear soon on “When Surgery Goes Wrong”.

Have you ever heard the time honoured maxim, “don’t fix what ain’t broke”? Here is a classic example. There was nothing wrong with the way Facebook was, having just been improved upon recently anyway. Sometimes, things are just right the way they are – no more engineering is required, just minor tweaks here and there as new technology becomes available. Examples of this might include: the car (4 wheels, an engine and seats – it works); the computer mouse (no, it will not be replaced by gestural systems and touch screens), and; that timeless classic – the wheel.

You can almost imagine the thumb twiddling and finger tapping going on in the Facebook design office as hapless designers and developers struggle to deal with the overwhelming possibility that they’ve already peaked. “Surely there must be something else we can do”, they say. Well, yes. You could bugger it all up completely. You could take all the nice functionality and then just roll it all up into one messy blob and call it the new home page. It’s like the plasticene that you used to play with at school. It came out of the packet in beautiful pristine coloured strips, then the fat kid with the snotty nose and the shorts that don’t quite fit properly, just mindlessly splodges it all together into a green/brown mush. Of course you don’t want to play with it after that, because everything you make will just look like a turd. And that’s how Facebook is now. A turd.

I have a mish mash of different types of information all appearing in one place. Status comments, photos, videos, wall posts, groups et al, all appear in the same confusing list, along with application posts from all manner of ridiculous apps, quizzes, games, virtual gifts and other completely useless crap. I can no longer hide other people’s application posts, I can only hide ALL updates from the person.

Everything has become much less private and much more in your face. In the past, I could see whether one friend had written on another friend’s wall, and if I so desired I could click to read the message. Now, the message is broadcast on my “news feed” which appears to have replaced everything else. However, messages sent to me are nowhere to be seen. I know that someone has written on my wall, because the notifications widget tells me so, but when I click the link, it just takes me to my feed and leaves me then to fend for myself, and I invariably cannot find the message.

In actual fact, if I click on my own name in the navigation, I get something more sensible with a Wall that I can actually navigate, but mysteriously, this feature rarely works properly. Most times, the page doesn’t load, or it just shows the news feed instead. Are Facebook still working on this? Have they forced an untested Beta onto everybody?

I imagine if the Facebook designers were actually tasked with improving the wheel, some bright spark would pipe up: “why not make it octagonal, that way it would be simpler?”, and all around the room wise designers would nod sagely and make it so.

Apple iPhone 3G Review

Posted by David Hurst on September 7, 2008 None comments

I resisted buying the first incarnation of the iPhone, due to the lack of 3G, which always seemed utterly bizarre in a “breakthrough communications device”. That, and the non-subsidised price ensured that my cash stayed firmly in my pocket. Both of these issues were resolved with the iPhone 3G, so I have relented and bought one, and after living with it for a few weeks, I think I’m in a position to write a review.

I think it’s important to remember that the iPhone is primarily a mobile phone, so I think it’s appropriate to judge it first of all on that basis. So, what do we need from a phone? Quick and easy dialling; an easy to use contacts list; portability; battery life; signal strength, and; call quality. Let’s see how it measures up on each of these points…

Quick and easy dialling
Most phones on the market have a series of number buttons, and making a call is no more complicated than pressing the buttons for the number you want and hitting the dial button. The iPhone has no buttons. To make a one-off call, we have to press the home button, slide the “button” to activate the screen, press the home button again if we’re not already at the home screen, tap the phone icon, tap the number pad icon if it’s not already selected and finally we can dial the number. It doesn’t take that long, but it’s not exactly quick and I can’t help but wonder how that might affect someone trying to call the emergency services when in dire need of emergency assistance.

I’m happy to trade off speed of dialling with all the additional features I get with iPhone, but not all users will feel the same.

Having said that, most calls will be to someone in your contact list, and the iPhone makes this nice and easy to do. You can also assign contacts as favourites, and these appear in their own shortcut list.

Easy to use contacts list
I can’t fault the contacts list at all. It’s easy to use, and allows you to store multiple numbers per contact, and all sorts of other useful information too. Adding and editing the data is easy on the iPhone, but as it syncs up with your computer, you can just add all your contacts there more quickly and then they will just appear on the iPhone. If you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service, they sync across all your computers and the iPhone.

You can add photos to contacts, much like you can with any modern handset, but I like the way these are also synced up and applied to emails as well as phone calls. I like the way you can also add custom fields of your own, and these are remembered so that you can use them across multiple contacts.

Grouping contacts and sending messages to groups is also possible, as is setting individual ring tones for each contact or groups of contacts.

Portability
The iPhone is lightweight, and surprisingly compact considering all the features it has, but there are certainly lighter and smaller handsets on the market. Given that most people will buy the iPhone partly because of the way it looks, I don’t think many prospective purchasers will spend too much time thinking about its portability.

It is worth thinking about how expensive the iPhone is, and how easily it could get damaged. It would be pretty easy for the iPhone to slip out of sweaty hands, hit the floor, and end up horribly scratched and disfigured. A case is essential! The one I have is a bit fiddly, and getting the iPhone extracted before the caller has hung up can be a bit of a challenge.

Battery life
This is a really important aspect of a mobile phone – after all, you can’t be very mobile if you have to plug it in all the time. Surely though, this won’t be a problem with an Apple product, not if their laptop battery performance is anything to go by anyway. So, how is the iPhone 3G battery life?

Crap.

There’s no other way to describe it. If you use the features of your iPhone regularly, you just won’t make it through the day without a charger and convenient power point. Mine is perpetually plugged in when I’m at home or in the office, and I’ve now taken to carrying a pay-as-you-go handset with me when I’m out and about, just in case the battery fails.

You can’t buy an extended battery. You can’t buy a second battery. You can’t even open the iPhone to get at the battery. When you consider that rechargeable batteries have a life span of around 500 full charges, I have to wonder if it will even last out my 18 month contract before it has to go to Apple to be replaced.

This is a very serious fault that needs addressing. I’m fed up with seeing the red battery icon.

Signal strength and call quality
I can’t fault either of these things. The phone is quite happy making reliable calls even on just 1 bar of service. Clarity of speech is excellent.
Now, it’s time to look at the iPhone’s additional features. Bearing in mind that Apple are trying to capture some of the corporate market, the iPhone 3G will be competing head to head with XDAs, Blackberrys and Smart Phones, so how does it hold up?

Connectivity
Pretty important for the internet and push email features of the iPhone 3G, and I have to say it is brilliant. It switches seamlessly between GPRS EDGE, 3G and WiFi, automically picking the fastest/cheapest connection within range. Internet browsing on 3G is perfectly acceptable, although you probably wouldn’t want to browse YouTube or any other high bandwidth sites.

National 3G coverage is pretty good and most major towns and cities have good 3G signals. There’s plenty of free WiFi around too, so getting online is never really a problem with the iPhone 3G.

Internet
The Safari browser on the iPhone is certainly the best browser I have ever used on a mobile device. You can open multiple windows, and easily zoom in on any part of the screen. The keyboard only appears when needed, and the iPhone neatly detects the orientation of the device in your hand and displays pages in portrait or landscape format accordingly.

That said, it does have limitations. You can only open 5 windows, and if you switch between the windows a lot, you will notice a rather odd bug where the window you switch to will load the content from the window you switched from, rather than showing the content you wanted to see. It’s bizarre and Apple need to sort it out.

There’s also no Flash support. Apple have been rapped by the ASA and forced to change their TV commercials as Flash is an important part of the Internet, and the iPhone 3G simply won’t display it.

Email and push functionality
The email client is excellent and supports all the major standards perfectly. When the iPhone first syncs with your computer, it will automatically import the email settings and set it all up for you – utterly painless. It makes most sense to use IMAP, Exchange or MobileMe with such a device so that your email syncs up. MobileMe is great, but there is an annual fee for the service, and it really warrants its own review. I think the big draw of the iPhone 3G, particularly for corporate users, will be the Exchange support.

For most users, the Exchange setup will be simple and painless, but for some, it will be difficult. I don’t think this is particularly a fault of the iPhone, it has more to do with Exchange and the plethora of different possible configurations. I couldn’t get my iPhone 3G to sync with my Exchange server as we use Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003, which doesn’t have the right service pack for Exchange as standard. Once upgraded, it worked perfectly and now my email is pushed directly to my iPhone. (I have written a guide elsewhere on my blog on how to get connected with SBS. Do a search in the box above if you need help.)

In fact, everything now syncs perfectly. My work email and calendar syncs with Exchange. My home calendar, email and contacts all sync with MobileMe. I have everything I need in the palm of my hand and then replicated across my iMac, MacBook Pro and Windows laptop. Perfect!

Camera
Many people are concerned with having a great camera in their phone. If that’s the case, then you will be disappointed with the iPhone camera. The resolution is poor and taking photos is fiddly, particularly self portraits. On the Mac, iPhoto opens every time I connect my iPhone and tries to import my iPhone photos. This is a pain in the butt. Frankly, I don’t want to take photos on my phone. I have a camera.

Horses and courses of course, but I’m sure Apple could do better here. Surely a forward facing camera would be sensible on a 3G device? Have Apple missed an opportunity with video calling?

iPod
More and more phone handsets now have MP3 players built in. Again, I have an iPod for my music, and using my phone for music is not my first preference, but if you’re going to have a music player and phone together, this is the one you want. The iPhone has all the same features as the iPod touch, with a beautiful coverflow system for browsing your music by album cover. It works well, and I must confess that I have loaded some tunes on to listen to at the gym.

In fact, you can also load full movies onto your iPhone, and in the USA you can actually rent movies on the iTunes store. For some reason, in the UK you cannot yet do this, which is pretty poor.

The real problem is…

Memory
The iPhone has no memory card slot. Presumably this would have detracted from the smooth lines of the gadget, but this just smacks of form over function to me. I have the 8Gb version, mainly because I refused to pay the outrageous additional cost for one with slightly more memory. Flash RAM is cheap. Why not allow users to expand their device as they wish?

GPS
A very welcome addition to the second generation iPhone is GPS. This hooks up seamlessly with the Google maps application to show you exactly where you are anywhere in the world. The iPhone can also triangulate your rough position from cell towers if it can’t see any satellites. The application does provide step-by-step directions, but it does not actually direct you through each step like a vehicle sat nav system. It seems to me that it wouldn’t take much to add this, and then with the help of a car cradle, you could make better use of the GPS. No doubt this would also dramatically boost iPhone sales.

Office documents
The iPhone has viewers for all the main Office document types, but you cannot edit the files. This is a huge disappointment as every other smart phone, XDA, or PDA I’ve tried has had this capability. Apple could easily resolve this, and I’m very surprised that they have not provided a mobile version of their brilliant iWork office suite.

Files
I am rather staggered by the complete lack of any sort of file storage or browsing functionality on the iPhone. OS X, upon which the iPhone interface is built, has Finder – the best file broswing and searching system of any modern OS, and yet the iPhone has nothing. I can’t copy files over to the device and organise them, and Apple has missed a serious trick here. I still need to carry my USB flash drive around with me. Very annoying.

Applications
One of the great features of the iPhone 3G is the downloadable applications. Be warned though that the quality of the apps is wide and varied. Some are fantastic (Apple’s HoldEm poker game for instance), but there are many utterly rubbish third party apps, some of which cost money, so you need to pay attention to the application rating and reviews before splashing the cash. The Apps feature does add serious capability to the iPhone, and the SDK that Apple provides for developers is excellent, so expect to see better things from the App store in the future.

The applications highlight another limitation with the iPhone: that of multi-tasking. It doesn’t have any. You can only run one application at a time, which makes things like mobile MSN, iChat or Skype completely impractical. This is something they may solve with a future software update – I certainly hope so.

Interface
The touch screen interface really needs to be seen (and touched) to be believed. It is truly stunning. The keyboard in particular is worthy of mention. With the “buttons” on screen for the keyboard being very small, it is very easy (and common) to make typos. However, the iPhone is extremely clever at working out what you wanted to type and automatically correcting this for you. Unlike T9 predictive text messaging systems, it is reliable, accurate and rarely gets in the way, which allows you to type quickly and with confidence.

The iPhone also boasts two accelerometers (is that spelled right?) which detect movement, and this means you can play games like Super Monkey Ball by actually moving the iPhone around in your hands. I hope to see some more innovative use of these features in future Applications.

Summary
The iPhone is not perfect, and it is not far enough ahead of the competition to warrant their being excluded from consideration. It’s not for everybody. I can live with the niggles because the overall package is so good, but the battery life really riles me. I can’t understand why it is so poor. I would rather have a slightly thicker iPhone and a much longer battery life if such an option existed.

As an everyday work tool, the iPhone works well. Invariably, the average worker will have it plugged into their computer or car regularly through the day, and therefore the battery won’t be too much of a problem. In a purely social setting though, the iPhone doesn’t make as much sense. There are other handsets with Internet, better cameras and better battery life. Whether or not their better features will be enough to overcome the draw of the iPhone’s sheer beauty and desirability is another question.

If the battery was good, I would score the iPhone 9 out of 10, with the dropped point for the lack of Office software and file browsing. With the shoddy battery, I can only give it a 7 out of 10, and I think I might have been better waiting for the 3rd generation.

Tape Deck for Mac OS X 10.5 – audio recording tool

Posted by David Hurst on June 2, 2008 None comments

I was in need of a tool for recording audio, both from the internal microphone on my MacBook (i.e. recording meetings), and also from the line in port (I recently had to import some audio from Mini Disc). Tape Deck does the job in a very visually appealing and intuitive way – it looks just like an old fashioned tape deck. The spools rotate as you record and play back and the button sound effects are great. A really neat application.

Each time you press record, Tape Deck creates a new “tape” which can be labeled. All the tapes are stored in a virtual drawer on screen and are searchable. Set your recording input in your system preferences, then choose mono or stereo in Tape Deck, and low, medium or high quality. Press record to start the recording, press stop to finish it. Simple.

Finished tapes can be exported to iTunes straight from Tape Deck, complete with cassette coverflow artwork. All the files are stored in .m4a format and the compression is excellent.

It could do with a full quality (320Kbps) option as the high quality compresses at 128Kbps. It’s good, but Tape Deck could be used for a wider array of things with this option. It would also be nice to be able to wipe portions of a tape, or even trim a tape. I got sidetracked on the phone whilst recording from a Mini Disc and forgot to press stop, so I have a file with 15 minutes of blank space on it. You can set a stop marker in iTunes, but that doesn’t help with the wasted diskspace. The application is only at version 1.0.1, so I’m sure the developer will look at these extra features in due course.

Priced at $25, I think this is an excellent tool at a very reasonable price.

Check it out at www.tapedeckapp.com.