MrBen

iPhone App of the day – BBC News

Ben — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:15:04 +0000

After some delays due to some concerns from the BBC Trust, the BBC News app is now available on the App Store.

Like many people, the BBC News website has always been one of my most visited sites, but I didn’t feel it was very well suited to the iPhone and ended up looking elsewhere for news, so the availability of the app was good news for me.

The app has been well designed, it keeps the BBC Corporate look from the website, and is easy to navigate between stories, using iPhone conventions such as swiping between stories and the ‘back’ button in the usual place. The app also has the ability to send a photo or story direct to the BBC news team.

The only problem I have had with the app, is when switching back to it using the iOS4 multitasking functionality the app often crashes back the iPhone home page and then when I navigate to it again it starts from scratch, so perhaps there is some work to do on the multi tasking function, but this isn’t a huge issue.

Overall, this is already becoming one of my most regularly used apps, and could well soon be promoted to the first home page!

iOS4 – the review

Ben — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:39:16 +0000

iOS4 is now here, live, and being downloaded all over the globe by thousands of iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Having downloaded it, and started to use it, what can I say about the new version?

Well, first impressions were good, it installed easily and upon disconnecting and unlocking my iPhone, I was presented with a modified home page with my wallpaper in the background rather than the previous black screen. This additional level of customisation is a nice addition, making the iPhone feel more personal to the user.

Next, folders – this was just as easy as expected – just move one icon on top of another and the two will be put into a folder, which can then be named. Having spent many a minute searching for an app somewhere amongst pages of them, it’s nice to now be able to group them and find the one I’m after much easier.

Downloading iBooks was my next step. To use, iBooks appears to be a slightly prettier version of Stanza which I think is an excellent app. One area where I feel Apple could have gone a bit further is with the free books – they are virtually all old classics, which is nice to have, but surely Apple could have bought the rights to a few blockbusters to give new iBooks users something free to get their teeth into – would seem like a good way to convert people and then they would start buying books. Nothing really new here that I can see?

Multitasking is supposed to be the big thing here. The quick task switching via the double click of the home key is convenient, but I think it will take a little while for the full benefit of Multitasking to be felt as more apps will take advantage of this technology.

Mail is supposed to have been updated but I’ve yet to see the advantages as my only real teething problems with iOS4 have effected me here. I use Google Apps and have my mail, calendar and contacts synchronised with my iPhone. After the update, all of these were blank, and whilst mail and calendar were back inside an hour, it took over 12 hours for all of my contacts to reappear, which was a tad annoying. My inbox still seems to be struggling to stay synced. Hopefully this will resolve itself shortly, otherwise it may be time to delete settings and re-add my mailbox.

The spell check has started to pick up words in emails and texts, but I haven’t yet worked out how to add a word to the dictionary, i would have thought touching the red bar below the word would give me that option. I’m sure it’s there but I need to find it as I don’t want it trying to correct me everytime I use a slang word!

The camera now has a zoom, which brings in functionality previously available via other camera apps, such as Gorillacam. Nice to have it in the standard offering though.

So what do I think? Well, the level of excitement on twitter and the tech blogs yesterday may have led to a slight level of anticlimax! iOS4 adds some nice features, and it’s good that users of previous generation iPhones won’t feel so left behind when iPhone 4 is released in a couple of days, so I’ll give it a 9/10.

iOS4 UK release awaited – 6pm?

Ben — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:43:44 +0000

After the news last week that the latest iPhone software would be released June 21st, the tech world is awaiting the actual release time. As usual Apple has not given a specific time, but the US release is expected at 10am PST, and therefore if the UK release occurs at the same moment, that would be 6pm BST (not 5pm as is being reported in some quarters – we are on summer time people!).

Why so much excitement?

Well, this release is going to bring a number of new features which to date have required a jailbroken iPhone or even have been unavailable at all. I discussed some of the new features here.

Well, hopefully it’s only now a matter of hours until release and we can all find out if it’s as good as hoped – all presuming the download system doesn’t collapse under the strain of millions of users attempting to download!

Good luck everyone, we’re going in!!

If you have any news on this, please add a comment below!

UPDATE: If you are super keen to get the update, TMO suggests here how to force iTunes to look for the update (link found from here).

UPDATE 2: Well it’s gone 6 and iTunes still claims 3.1.3 is current. Anyone having any luck?

UPDATE 3: Bingo, 6:25 and now downloading… Supposed to take 45 mins but the minutes are counting down pretty slow…

UPDATE 4: and finally, all iOS4′d up! Still playing about but will review the new features in due course!

Hiding posts

Ben — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:55:29 +0000

For a while, I had an automated plugin on this site which created posts using my Google Reader shared items. I decided to kill it because it made the site look very spammy, but I didn’t want to just delete the posts.

I’ve added a new plugin, WP Hide Post, which enable each post to be hidden from various locations, it’s a really simple to use plugin, and has enabled me to hide the automated posts, but leave them in the archives. Perfect!

iOS 4 to land next week?

Ben — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:34:08 +0000

Just a couple of months after it’s announcement, it appears that the new iPhone software, iOS 4, will be available on iTunes from Monday 21st. Can’t wait!

What’s interested me posts – the end

Ben — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:01:44 +0000

A while back I decided it would be interesting to post items that interested me from my Google Reader onto this site. Whilst it put some content on here when I didn’t write anything, it ended up looking a bit spammy so I’ve switched it off. Now to see my shared items, I’ve installed a ‘Recommended Reading’ plugin which shows the latest items to the right hand side of this site.