I ticked the wrong box

Apple released this update a day or two ago. I installed it yesterday morning.

Unhappy customer.

Since then, I’ve had worse performance on transition to the SMS and contacts screen. I’ve also had issues when listening to music and receiving email/sms at the same time. Sometimes the music fades out and then stops, and I need to tap the round button at the bottom to make it go again, sometimes the music just halts (no fade), I head the new email sound, then music starts up again.

I’ve noticed nothing good about this update.

I ordered an invisibleSHIELD from zagg.com for my iPhone 3G today - and they gave me 2x discount codes for 20% off in their online store.  I don’t need them, so I’m posting them below.  If they don’t work (they are one use only) let me know and I’ll post a comment saying they’re gone.

4w5vfh

m5uemw

Oh, and with the 20% discount, free shipping to the UK and Europe, and the strength of the pound, I got it for around 50% of the purchase price at easyishop.

This morning I saw on the iTunes store that Automattic had their wordpress iPhone application released. I promptly downloaded and installed it onto my new phone. I’m writing this entry on it now and it seems pretty good. You can upload photos but I think writing HTML will be a bit of a pain, but for a quick blog post it seems to do the job. I say if you have an iPhone and a wordpress based blog then this is a good application to have, and the price can’t be beat.

Update: uploading a photo causes my iPhone to crash. I’ll try again :-S Hmmm, it worked that time.

Update 2: now it tells me I have an invalid image, and it won’t upload it. I hope they get that sorted soon. No images for you this post sorry.

Arrrrgggg!

When I ordered my MacBook Air the only options I had for keyboard were UK English, and French. No US English when ordering from the UK store you see. So, I was trying to hack around with rcov today, and needed to alter some source. I wanted to copy and edit a line of code, preserving the original. To do this, I was just going to hash out the line, and put my altered line below. That’s where I encountered my issue.

THE UK KEYBOARD LAYOUT HAS NO # SYMBOL PRINTED ON IT!!!!

Luckily I found this page - Hat tip to QuiteTall.

ALT-3 for people who can’t be bothered clicking thru.

I mean come on - the keyboard has symbols such as § and ±, but no #?!?!?!? What’s going on with that?

Today I had my first experience creating a VERY simple workflow with Automator.

I was editing word documents, excels and powerpoints on my mac and then sending them back to my work PC so that I could embed visio diagrams in them, as well as image files I have on that machine.

I was emailing lots and lots of files, and doing it over and over again, so I thought there must be a better way to do this. Even Windows has a “Send To” option in Explorer, so the mighty OSX 10.4 should be able to do that too.

So, to cut a long story short I clicked on Finder in the applications pane, then selected “Get Selected Finder Items” as the action. That was dragged over to the workflow area.

Then, I checked out the actions in Mail. This was a bit confusing, because initially I tried to run “New Mail Message”, and then “Add Attachments to Front Message”. This second step is unnecessary. First of all “New Mail Message” returns “Mail Messages” and can’t be used as input for “Add Attachments to Front Message”, and secondly files/folders are input to “New Mail Message” and they are attached automagically. I then selected my details by clicking on the Address Book icon, and set a subject “Files from home”.

Third step was to send the message. The action is called “Send Outgoing Messages”. This was dragged over, and then I saved the action as “Send Files to Work”.

Now I have a shiny new menu item under automator. Basically any file(s) or folders I want to email to work, I now just right click, go to automator, and click on Send Files to Work. And off they go!

I will have to play with Automator a little more I think. I’ve had my mac over 2 years now, and this is the first I’ve used it.

Look what I just pre-ordered…

I already have a 13″ PowerBook that is a little over 2 years old. The battery now has a 45 minute life, it’s scratched a bit, and I think it needs a rebuild. With my new job (!) I’m going to become a bit of a power commuter, and want a machine that is ultra-portable. The original reason I opted for the 13″ PB was because of the portability, but the MacBook Air is just that bit more portable. I know the battery can’t be replaced by mortal men, and that it only has a mono speaker, and that it has no internal optical drive, but the portability and battery life for me is the key.

Oh, and it’s as sexy as hell.

This is a device I was excited about, but now, meh. iTV becomes Apple TV

No 1080 High Def???

Only 40Gb HD???

I like that you can connect computers to it to pull the media, but why a restriction of 5? Seems arbitrary to me (similar to the restriction within the Airport Express). A big question I have is does it stream media out, or does it support file based access over the wireless? I’d rather it just acted as a big hard drive for your computers, and streamed out (played) to the TV. But 40Gb? I can’t get over that. That’s nothing.

— EDIT —

Reading the keynote, it appears that the 5 computers are used as a source for Apple TV. And it appears you can sync data to it like an iPod (supporting smart playlists and everything). $299 USD, shipping in Feb.

How about that. The rumours were right. At MacWorld today: The Apple iPhone

It looks like it will be supporting Wifi, EDGE, camera, GSM, iTunes and has a camera (if you look at the screen shots carefully). It DOESN’T mention any 3G service, so it looks like video calling will be out, and I assume the camera is on the back (which means it’d be not so cool for video - it’s good to have picture in picture so you can ensure you’re actually in frame).

I do like the screen size, and the fact that it’s touch screen. Well, I’m actually torn on that - touch screens have a habit of getting very messy, and I’d be concerned about the scratchability. But all in all it looks like a very sexy device.

Any word on availability???