Facts at your fingertips – Trivopaedia – a plug!
Woohoo! Excuse my excitement, but as a non-C-programmer, it’s exciting to see All About iPhone’s first application hit the iPhone AppStore. I’ve been maintaining and fiddling with Trivopaedia, my ‘encyclopaedia of all things trivial’ for years and Stefan Wolfrum has done a sterling job in producing a basic iPhone conversion.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
It’s free, of course, as all versions have been since 1997, so there’s no reason not to have it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Stefan’s planning all sorts of enhancements, I’m looking forward to seeing a search box in the interface, for example.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
Still, it’s a great start, you can download it here, or of course, in AppStore on the iPhone itself.
Comments welcome, back to me on the content at [email protected] or to Stefan on the interface at [email protected].
Not so hot in ‘Bed’ mode…? [updated]
The iPhone is, as we know, without match in the web browsing world. Safari on that big 4″ screen is very intuitive and the fact that Flash objects are ignored (for better or for worse) means that pages load much faster than on S60 Web, for example.
However.
There’s one scenario in which the iPhone (and iPod Touch) fall short. Bedtime. (more…)
More Applications Than You Could Shake a Stick At – But Where to Put Them?
Matt has written (or is going to write – ha! my crystal ball!) elsewhere on All About iPhone about the average number of application that users download from the iPhone AppStore. 15, apparently. Maybe I’m unusual then. Because I’ve grabbed over 60. (Out of interest about a dozen of these were commercial and the rest free)
But, and this won’t be news to existing iPhone owners, with all the built-in applications (around 18, depending on model), this makes a total of around 80 applications to organise in some meaningful way.
Pages and pages of apps
Is there a fundamental problem with the iPhone application launcher? What’s the best way to keep things organised? And how could Apple improve things? Could they learn something from traditional phones after all?
The Great Mystery Battery Drain and the Modern OS
I woke up this morning to a dead device. Hmm…. I pressed the ‘Sleep’ button, to see the Apple logo and a boot up sequence, followed by a quick battery warning pop-up message. And then, a few minutes later it was off again. The strange thing is that I had charged it fully yesterday evening. And this isn’t the first time this has happened in six months of ownership.
Low battery
Looking round the forums online, it seems that is phenomenon has been seen by others. No definitive explanation has been given, but with 15 years of mobile computing in my blood I’m going to offer a few thoughts anyway…
Who cares about Copy/Paste? You’ve got YouTube and the AppStore!
Another gratuitous link of interest over to All About Symbian, one of my other stomping grounds, in which (I love advocacy and comparison pieces) I’ve been seeing if S60 phones can match some of the Apple iPhone’s ‘party tricks’.
Hopefully you’ll find it an interesting little read, although the main thing to take out of it from the iPhone’s point of view is that in several cases I found it necessary to have third party software on the Nokia N95 in order to get close to the iPhone. And, in the case, of the AppStore bit at the end, S60 phones simply had no answer.
An even more interesting list would be ‘What’s needed to bring the iPhone up to S60 phone-like specifications?’. Apple’s got a great set of built-in apps and a superb UI, but I’d argue that, to achieve real mainstream must-have status, top priorities should be:
- A decent camera. 2 megapixels with no flash just doesn’t cut it when Nokia has been making 5 megapixel, auto-focus camera phones for over two years, some with Xenon flash, and with most phone makers having also now introduced 8 megapixel cameras. Yes, people don’t really need 8mp, but 5mp is a definite ‘sweet spot’.
- Doing a deal to get real time navigation on the iPhone. Google Maps is great, but it doesn’t go the extra mile when you’re using it to navigate while driving.
- As previously mentioned, add Copy/Paste and a common file store to the iPhone’s OS. This is an utter show stopper for many professionals.
Copy and Paste and the iPhone
Right from the very start (July 2007), the voices clamouring for Copy and Paste functionality on the Apple iPhone have been growing stronger and stronger. Is this really big deal? Why have Apple not already implemented this in the operating system? How could they include it without complicating the UI too much? What other implications might this have? And is it likely to happen? What about workarounds in the meantime?
Yes, Copy and Paste IS a big deal. Ask anyone who’s tried doing actual work on an iPhone and they’ll tell you. Better still, try it yourself. Admittedly, the lack of a basic Office suite restricts the scope of Copy and Paste slightly, but the flexibility of being able to selectively lift bits out of an email or text for inclusion in another communication is significant. And I’m one of several million iPhone users who are rather keen to see it in place.
AroundMe in the Vicinity of Google Maps
The sheer usefulness of finding ‘stuff around you’ has meant the emergence of several pretenders, despite the ubiquitous presence of Google Maps itself. AroundMe (at first commercial, but now free) and Vicinity (always free) are also well established now, but in the interests of keeping things simple (and reducing the clutter slightly on your application screens), the question remains ‘Is it worth looking things up in these ‘extra’ solutions?’
With this in mind, I put all three to the same tests. Read on.
X-Plane’s mere existence validates iPhone
I have a confession to make.
I’m quite old. Mid-40s, at least. Old enough to remember the earliest days of home computing. Dragon, PET, Sinclair ZX81, then Amiga and the earliest IBM PCs and the RM 380z, in my case. Then on through the PC’s AT and then Pentium series and through to the Celerons and Centrinos of today. And, on the Mac front, similar progress through to today’s iMacs and MacBook Pros.
And throughout it all, there was one application which validated the platform as a serious computer. And, you know what, the Apple iPhone shares this application. (more…)
Vista and iTunes 8.0.1 can play OK
If you’re a Windows Vista user like me [/FX: sound of a thousand Mac fans gasping] and have upgraded to the latest iTunes version, 8.0.1, you may be stuck looking at the following error message:
iTunes error
Apart from the relative inanity of an error for which the software knows the number but can’t translate into helpful English, there’s the question of how to fix it. It seems that the latest iTunes doesn’t like Vista ‘vanilla’ – I’m guessing that Apple have been testing it on fully patched Vista machines. In any case, the cure seems to be to install Vista Service Pack 1, released a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it takes an eternity to install, but at the end of an hour you’ll have Vista and iTunes cosy buddies once more.
Review: Brando Solar Charger Sheath
My Apple iPhone doesn’t need charging anymore! Well, at least that’s what I’d like to say.
My intention, while testing the Brando Solar Charger Sheath (called the ‘Solar powered leather case‘ on their site), was to not have to plug my iPhone into the wall or into a PC or Mac – I wanted to run completely green. And the weather’s been playing ball too, with back to back sunshine for 3 days in the UK Autumn.
Brando solar charging case
In terms of design, the case itself is as converged as the iPhone, although I have to report that there are a few serious caveats and flaws that should be noted. Read on…