I think Lex Friedman echoes my thoughts perfectly in his article here.

This is still the most inspirational speech I’ve ever heard, and if you have a spare 15 minutes, it’s most definitely time well spent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Written on my iPad.

When Apple introduced the long awaited ‘cut, copy & paste’ feature to the iPhone, it seemed straight forward enough to use – tap the text area to activate the selection popup, choose your selection method, move the ‘grab points’ to select the text and use the relevant popup to select cut/copy/paste. Simple enough. I’ve never felt the need to know any more than that, so I’ve never bothered looking any further into how cut/copy/paste on the iPhone works. However, I just accidentally stumbled upon a shortcut. This isn’t even documented in the iPhone manual anyway – I checked.

Just double-tap where you want your selection to start, then without releasing your finger, drag to the end of your selection and you can cut out the first couple of steps. Handy.

First, a little background as to how I acquired the case. There has been a lot of publicity regarding the signal attenuation problems with Apple’s new iPhone 4 handset. In my humble opinion, it has been blown way out of proportion, mostly by people who don’t even own an iPhone 4. To be totally honest with you, I have experienced the so-called ‘death grip’. At my desk in the office where I work, I’ve always had a low signal. 3G is a distant dream, and a middling 2G signal is pretty much the best I can hope for. When I bought my iPhone 4, holding it in my left hand facing me (note: I only hold it like this when texting or emailing), the signal bars would indeed begin to decrease, and after a few seconds the signal would disappear completely leaving me with ‘No Service’. At home, however, where I have a strong 3G signal, I could never replicate the problem. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: Yes, it was a real problem, but not one demanding as much attention as it did. I suppose it comes with the territory for Apple. They have a tendency to generate huge amounts of hype around their product releases that even the slightest of problems will be met with huge amounts of negative feedback.

To address this negative feedback, Apple launched the iPhone 4 Case Program. This program provided those who experienced the signal attenuation problem with a free case. Either an Apple iPhone 4 Bumper, or a third-party case from a given selection. Evidently, I opted for the incase Snap Case Clear.

As nice as Apple’s bumpers are, the ‘naked’ iPhone 4 really is a beautiful piece of design work, and it seemed a shame to cover it up. The clear hardshell case allows all of the iPhone 4′s glass and stainless steel components to remain in full view, whilst providing a reasonable amount of protection. Precisely what I was looking for.

I’ll dive straight in with a few photos of the case attached to the iPhone. The case clips onto the iPhone without much fuss, and without any adhesives. Removing the case isn’t as easy as some of the clip-on cases I’ve seen, which I personally prefer as I’d rather the phone stayed in the case than inadvertently pop out.

The case comes packaged in a fairly nondescript, yet more than adequate box, but what did catch my eye is the ‘Stand included’ badge on the front. This wasn’t listed as a feature when I selected the case, but is actually a very nice addition. Its just a small piece of transparent plastic, which looks like a lop-sided W from a side profile.

All of the edges that touch the iPhone/case are rounded so it’s unlikely to cause any damage. You place the iPhone 4 into the stand on it’s side (landscape) and its nicely angled for watching videos. Turn the stand around, and the iPhone is tilted at a steeper angle. Particularly handy for me as I quite often travel by train watching videos on my iPhone. Note: This stand has clearly not been designed to hold the phone in portrait, and I wouldn’t advise it using it this way. It does work, but it is certainly not stable.

The box also lists a feature called a ‘Flash Ring’. Essentially, this is a black ring around the rear camera hole to stop the light from the flash from causing glare by reflecting on the case.

Pros:
Slim & lightweight
Transparent
Hardshell construction (doesnt ‘catch’ in your pocket)
Unobstructed accessory ports
Desktop landscape stand included

Cons:
Top & bottom of iPhone unprotected
Incompatible with official Apple Docks*
High-Gloss coating provides little grip
Perceived lack of drop protection – i.e. hard shell = low impact absorption

*It does fit in an Apple Universal Dock without any dock adapters, but this may potentially cause stress on the dock connector.

For me, the pros are definitely more important than the cons, given the alternative cases currently available. If you’re worried about the phone receiving significant damage from being dropped, then this style of case probably isn’t for you. You would be more suited to a more fully enclosed case. Incidentally, I also use my SENA Ultraslim iPhone leather pouch from my old iPhone 3G for additional protection. It fits perfectly fine with the Snap Case attached. You could, of course, opt to protect the screen from scratches by applying a screen protection film, but you’d then lose the oleophobic properties of the iPhone 4′s bare screen. I prefer mine without.

Rob's Rating: ★★★★☆ 

As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.

Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.

Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.

A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:

Notes:
The backup drive (or in this case, a target-disk-mode iMac) is referenced here as /Volumes/BACKUP. You will need to substitute this in the paths below with the location of your backup.
To make things as clear as possible, I’ve used blue to show source paths (where your backups are), and orange for destination paths (on your new Mac).
The commands as displayed below may span several lines, but they are all entered on one line in Terminal, followed by Enter/Return.

• Close iTunes if it is currently running, and ensure your iPhone/iPod is not connected to your Mac.
• Open the ‘Terminal’ application. The following commands all need to be performed at the command line in Terminal.
• Copy your iTunes folder from your backup to its new location (this could take a while, be patient!):

cp -R /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Music/iTunes /Users/rob/Music/

• Followed by your iPhone/iPod backups (the double quotes are important here):

cp -R “/Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/MobileSync” “/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/“

• Then your iTunes configuration files:

cp /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes* /Users/rob/Library/Preferences/

• Open iTunes on your new Mac, and verify that all looks as it once did. Your Applications and Ringtones should also be showing (if applicable).
• Connect your iPhone/iPod and synchronise.

Many thanks to Major at RackerHacker.com for the original article which this information is based on.

I’ve read several articles over the last few months relating to how Apple always seem to be ‘working’ with record labels and movie distributors to improve sales of albums and movies on the iTunes store. Most recently is the news that they may be looking to include better ‘digital booklets’, or some kind of ‘interactive digital booklet’. Now, dont get me wrong, I like iTunes. I regularly buy my music from iTunes, but mostly, it’s just singles, or the odd specially-priced EP. Sometimes even a music video. I’ve not bought a single movie or music album from the iTunes store. I also know that I’m not alone with this. There’s a very good reason I don’t buy movies or music albums for download, and one that Apple (and the record companies/movie studios) seem to be ignoring.

As an example, let’s look at the top 5 albums currently in the iTunes music store:

1. Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol 73 – Various Artists
iTunes Price: £16.99
CDWOW CD Price: £ 10.99

2. iTunes Price:Lungs – Florence & The Machine
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

3. Number Ones – Michael Jackson
iTunes Price: £5.99
CDWOW CD Price: £5.99

4. The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies) – Black Eyed Peas
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

5. La Roux – La Roux
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

iTunes albums have been getting cheaper, but the £6 difference between the prices of the ‘Now’ album is staggering. Out of the other 4 albums, there’s no difference between the Michael Jackson album versions, and the remaining 3 all cost £1 less for a physical CD. If you prefer the instant gratification from instant download, then the iTunes version may be preferable. Personally, I think that the short wait for a physical CD to be delivered is worth it for original-quality backup purposes alone.

Now, lets look at my biggest issue with the iTunes store – Movies. Again, going with the top 5 movies in the iTunes movie store:

1.Marley & Me (2009)
iTunes Price:  £10.99
CDWOW DVD Price: £10.99

2. Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
iTunes Price: £3.99
Amazon DVD Price: £4.98 (Double Pack)

3.  The Dark Knight (2008)
iTunes Price:  £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £5.98 (2 Disc)

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

5. Borat (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

I’m impressed with some of the lower priced movie offerings from iTunes, especially the Ice Age pricing. However, for less than £1 more, you can buy the Double DVD version, which includes the first Ice Age film! With the exception of Marley & Me (a new release), which is the same price for both download and DVD, all of these movies can be purchased cheaper in DVD format. Not only that, but some are even the 2 disc versions, offering much more than just the movie.

How can these download prices be justified? Whilst I appreciate that there are hosting, admin and bandwidth costs to consider, these are inconsequential in comparison to the manufacturing and distribution costs of physical media. In my opinion, Apple need to stop worrying about bundling unnecessary ‘digital booklets’ and other such gimmicks, and just make these downloads cheaper. If they truly want to stop people from illegally downloading music and movies, stop making them so prohibitively expensive! I’m a big believer in the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Why keep trying to add all the superfluous nonsense in order to keep the price high? It’s the movie/song that people have come to your store to buy.

Rant over

Note: I’m not affiliated with Amazon or CDWOW, nor endorsing their services, I just mentioned them as they were the cheapest I could find at the time.

In Microsoft Windows, you can right-click and select ‘Open with’, choose the relevant application and check the box for ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’. This has pretty much always worked for me. Mac OS X has a similar right-click option, but this doesn’t always seem to work system-wide, as you might expect.

In order to make this change system-wide, you need to take a different approach. Right-click on the file you wish to always open in a particular program (the .png file in my case), and select ‘Get Info’. There is a section in the pane that opens for ‘Open with:’, and the ‘rogue’ application should be selected. Choose the required application (‘Preview’ in my case) from the pull-down list, and select the ‘Change All’ button. Confirm that you wish to make this change to all files.

Now when I double-click any .png file, it immediately springs open in Preview, and doesn’t try to launch Photoshop instead.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same procedure for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) too.

Updated 22/06/2009

As with most of the rest of the Worlds iPhone owners, I updated my iPhone 3G to the long-awaited OS 3.0 on Wednesday 17th June 2009. Surprisingly, it seemed to take far less time to complete than any of the other software updates I’ve applied to my iPhones. As to be expected from what we already knew though, most of the new features are subtle ones. The most obvious is the Messages app, which has replaced the old SMS app. Other than that, theres nothing remarkably obvious to differentiate it from 2.2.1. Not that thats a bad thing.

I’ve been reading about the 100+ new features, both known and hidden, but I wanted to note down the ones I’ve experienced which I particularly like or dislike. I’ll keep adding to this list as time goes on.

The Good

• SMS Previews can be turned off, regardless of whether you have a passcode lock set or not.
  
• Messages that fail to send get added to the conversation, but are marked with an exclamation, which you tap to resend.
• No more waiting for a message to finish sending before starting another
• You can turn off the multiple message alert sound (this would have been more useful in 2.2.1, as ive become used to it now!)
• MMS (needs no explanation!)
• Spotlight search
• Copy & Paste (Going to take some getting used to though. It pops up a lot when you dont want it)
• The call log has little icons to indicate outgoing or incoming calls
• ‘lol’ no longer autocorrects to ‘LOL’ (that was highly irritating)
• ‘fir’ will most often (but not always) autocorrect to ‘for’ (this was so annoying previously. I rarely want to type ‘fir’, but often type it by mistake when typing ‘for’)
• CalDAV support. I can now sync my Google calendar directly to my iPhone, and it updates in the background.

The Bad (IMHO)

• No Battery % meter on non 3G S phones. Why?
• Still cant watch Movies in portrait
• Still cant assign custom message alert tones
• After sending a message, the keyboard stays on screen (why doesnt it disappear if you tap in the conversation area?)

The Ugly (Things that work, but could be better)

• Messages speech bubbles are unnecessarily narrow(er) – I’ve discovered that this does not occur with iPhone 2G handsets.
• Messages icon doesnt look right with a blank speech bubble

So the printer arrived, I got my rebate, and it has served me brilliantly over the last few years. I really can’t fault it. However, I was really quite baffled when I originally set it up as to how I enable the bluetooth connectivity. I found out shortly afterwards, that there was no bluetooth connectivity…at least not built-in. To enable the bluetooth functions, you have to purchase the optional Epson USB Bluetooth Adapter! This was a small-print item on the original product brochure, that I’d annoyingly overlooked, but what a swizz!! Feeling slightly misled after spending £160 on the printer, I was in no hurry to be spending yet more money on a bluetooth adapter for it.

I’ve recently had more and more need to be able to print to my printer whilst my iMac has been turned off. It’s such a pain having to wait for it to boot up, just to print a document from my laptop. So I decided to look into purchasing (begrudgingly) the Epson USB Bluetooth Adapter. I found that the price of this adapter varies wildly, but can be found for around £30. Well, I say ‘found’…..I couldn’t actually find one in stock anywhere. I even tried the trusty boot-sale in the sky – eBay. Trying to be as vague as possible, I searched for ‘Epson Bluetooth’, but there were very few results, mostly from overseas.

After searching a bit more though, one of the results was for a generic mini USB bluetooth adapter, but it was being being described as an alternative to the Epson USB adapter. Many eBay sellers stock them, and some call it a ‘nano’ bluetooth adapter. They can generally be found for less than £3 including delivery charges. It just so happened that I was bought one of these very same adapters as a gift about a year ago. I’d been using it to make my old laptop bluetooth enabled. As that laptop has now been replaced with one that has built-in bluetooth, the adapter was just sitting in my drawer doing nothing. I had nothing to lose by plugging it into the printer and giving it a try.

I plugged it into the ‘EXT I/F’ port on the front of the printer, and the little green LED inside the adapter started to flicker. I checked through the ‘setup’ function directly on the printer to see if the bluetooth options were configurable, and they were. It had a valid MAC address, and I was able to set a pairing code. I set the printer to discoverable, and scooted over to my laptop. I scanned for bluetooth printers in the area, and it found the Epson! I continued through the setup of the printer on my laptop, and sent a test page. It printed perfectly. It wont print from the lounge, as it’s too far away, but as I only intend on using it wirelessly with my laptops, this isn’t much of a problem.

Wireless printing for £3? Bargain!

But what’s this got to do with UK Broadband, I hear you – imaginary guy that I’ve borrowed from Wil Wheaton – asking? Shh…I’m getting there…

As I have a lot of personal files on my iMac, I wasnt going to trust it as-is in the hands of my local Apple reseller, so I backed it up with SuperDuper!, formatted it and installed a fresh copy of OS X 10.4 Tiger (via a USB DVD drive). The iMac went off for repair, came back fixed, and then came the time for installing OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Still not seeing what this has to do with UK Broadband… Shhhhh!! I’m getting there!…

After installing Leopard, I went straight for the software update to get the latest patches. The Mac OS X 10.5.6 update alone weighed in at a monstrous 675MB. This was without the Airport, Java and other updates, which took the total way over 1GB. At this point, I havent even installed the iLife suite, or Microsoft Office, which will also require some hefty updates.

I also wanted to upgrade my laptop running Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. The amount needed to be downloaded for this upgrade came in at a hefty 607MB.

Anyway, the point of all this, is that I have recently had a new phone line fitted, with O2′s home broadband service. I was considering going with Sky for their ‘free’ broadband, but with a monthly download limit of 2GB, I would have punched through that in one evening alone. God forbid I even consider watching something on the BBC iPlayer service! HD? Don’t be silly! Luckily, the O2 package that I have (which is their lowest package), comes with ‘unlimited’ downloads. Fair use policy aside, this is how all broadband providers should be offering their services.

A quick look at the moneysupermarket.com comparison site, shows that there are still lots of broadband suppliers offering monthly download limits. They’re not even decent limits either. Going back to the ‘free’ Sky broadband. You get a 2Mbps line, with a 2GB download limit. This immediately takes you out of the running if you want to watch BBC iPlayer HD. Even if your 2Mbps line could stream the video to you (which it cant), you’d almost hit your monthly limit from watching one hour-long programme.

I suppose the purpose of this post rant, is just to highlight my frustration at how progress of digital services in the UK, is being desperately hindered by the greed of our lacklustre communications companies. Get it sorted!

After adding my Hotmail account to my iPhone, I dug into the settings to find out what the server details are. These should then be able to be used with any POP client:

Incoming Server

Server: pop3.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 995

If the option is available, ensure ‘delete messages from server’ is disabled.

Outgoing Server

Server: smtp.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 587