Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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iOS comes of age: A True Smart Phone Arrives

Today iOS 5 is released, and with it the iPhone truly becomes a Smart Phone.

As a bit of a geek and working in IT, I have used PDA’s and Smart Phones since the Psion3.

Smart Phone’s and PDA’s have come and gone. The great Sony P series running Symbian OS and various Palm devices over the years.

These phones & PDA’s were punctuated by different Windows devices, these often had the most potential and the most ability, but were always handicapped by reliability and a frustrating OS that hindered rather then helped.

I always seemed to come back to Palm.

Then I saw Steve Job’s present the iPhone in 2007 and I thought this had great potential. A colleague of mine could be described as an Apple fan boy and within a matter of days of the original iPhone launch had one shipped over to the UK. This gave me the chance to try one out.

As a Smart Phone it was a joy to use, the terms delightful and magical, often used to describe the iPad is was came to mind.

As a Smart Phone it was ‘smart’ in a limited fashion. As a phone it was basic. No third party apps, no cut and paste, no multitasking (not quite true), no integration with Microsoft Exchange (essential for me).

But, and it’s a big but. What it did, it did better then any other mobile device.

  • Email – True HTML email
  • Web Browser – real web, not WAP, and do not even try and compare it with that sorry excused for a browser that was on Windows Mobile
  • The Best iPod Experience

    • Plus things like google maps, YouTube, stocks and shares app, notes, contacts etc.

    Still even with its limitations I left my frustrating Windows Mobile Phone in the car to act as my GPS SatNav and bought a iPhone one day one of there release in the UK.

    Gradually each new version of iOS has counted these points, added apps, more multitasking, Exchange Synchronisation and cut and paste.

    Now with iOS5 the iPhone becomes a true Smart Phone. Better alerts, over the syncing and upgrading.

    I have always been a bit slow to upgrade my hardware. I kept my iPhone1 until iPhone4, and now instead of getting the iPhone 4s (Siri May tempt me) I’ll just be upgrading my OS.

    Have to admit really enjoying iOS5. Little things like Landscape calendars, and finally a ToDo App, do not sound like much, but the geo fence features of the ToDo list are very cool. Having a reminder go off when I arrive or leave a destination is genuinely useful. Photo lovers will like the fact they can now create Photo Albums direct on the device.

    I had an issue with the ToDo’s at first, as I had Exchange sync switched on, it had my Exchange ToDo list, which of course does not understand GPS information, once I created a new ToDo list on my phone the GPS option appeared.

    My favourite is the notifications, finally we have caught up with the old Windows Mobile and with Android.

    A nice touch is being able to swipe between apps on the iPad, just like Alt-Tab (Command-Tab on OS X) in Windows.

    Also a four fingered swipe brings up your running apps, together with the five finger close, means you can use the iPad now just with gestures and not have to touch the home button.

    All together loving it. Simple, easy to use, whether your are a geek like me, or a Pensioner like my mother. And now a truly powerful iOS.

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    RIP – Steve Jobs

    A sad day today.

    One of the driving figures of modern computing has left us, but his influence will remain with us for a long time.

    The vision to take ideas and develop them, from Xerox’s initial ideas of a GUI which he developed into the modern Bit Mapped Screen driven by Mouse, to produce the Macintosh.

    Creating Next Computers, a computer that was instrumental in the development of the world wide web and the Next Operating system which became OS X.

    Taking Pixar to the pinnacle of modern animated film making.

    Making MP3 players simple to use and popular throughout the world.

    Creating a Smart Phone that could be used by Grandmothers as well as geeks.

    http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-has-passed-away/

    http://www.bluepoof.com/2011/10/herestothecrazyones/

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    Tablet Market – Sony gets interesting

    Sony have always been a company to admire, producing some interesting designs over the years.  I have a Sony TV, Sony PVR, and for a long time was interested in the Sony P Series mobile phones.

    Over the years they have produced a number great products and have now entered the Android Tablet Market with the Sony Tablet S and P models.

    I was hopeful that the HP Tablet running WebOS and RIMs new Playbook was going to give Apple some competition, now it looks like Sony are going to be taking up the challenge.

    From a photographers point of view unfortunately they don’t offer any real advantage over Apples iPad.  Maybe the next version.

    A quick review from a photographers point of view is here at Luminous Landscape.

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    Light It – iPad Magazine

    The new photography magazine Light It, has been released, from the Kelby Media Group, its a great magazine with light tips for all levels.  I downloaded it yesterday and really enjoyed it.

    Unfortunately instead of getting praise for introducing another means of reaching photographers, all they seem to be getting is hate posts by iPad nay sayers.

    Kelby Media Group provide printed magazines, internet videos, pod and web casts, seminars (and not just in America), books and DVD’s and now an iPad magazine.  Lots of different ways to reach photographers, whether you have a computer or not, and plenty for none iPad owners.  Yet all it seems people can do is complain.  How dare they produce a magazine for the iPad.  How sad, why cannot trolls get a life.

    Now where did I put that CTO Gell, I want to try that sunshine camera flare technique!

    http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2011/archives/21059

     

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    Lightroom Performance Tweeks

    I have been doing a bit of reading recently, on optimising Adobe Lightroom to get the best from it.

    One thing you can do to help, if you have the disk space available, is to increase your Adobe Camera RAW Cache. This will make your Develop module that little bit quicker when you start to use Develop.

    The Lightroom previews used by the Library are different to those used in the Develop module. The Library previews can be generated on import, or when your first zoom into a 1 to 1 view.

    Develop uses a different cache and this cache by default is set to 1GB. Now most of use can spare more disk space then this and its well worth increasing. On a desktop machine the up to 200Gb is commonly used by many photographers. If your working on your laptop then space often at a premium so 5 – 15Gb is more common.

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    Stuck Alias on Side Bar

    I am a relatively new Mac User. My day job in IT means I deal with Windows in all its flavours, Linux – Redhat, and Solaris.

    At home I switched from Windows to Linux – Fedora, many years ago, but as I started to do more digital photography, I needed an OS that was supported by the main players in digital photography.

    So while my home server is still Linux, for my personal computer I switched to the Mac. If you want to know why, well its was just because I had never used one before, and I love learning new OS’s. This possibly explains why I have so many phones, running everything from Symbian, Windows Mobile, and iOS.

    I have now upgraded to Apple’s latest and greatest OS, Lion. Or OS X (10.7). After the upgrade I felt the need to have a bit of a tidy up. I had a few dead aliases (shortcuts ) on the side bar to old applications that I had gotten rid of during the upgrade.

    But one refused to go, the normal technique, to just drag it off the side bar and watching it disappear in a puff of smoke did not work.

    I checked Apple’s support forums and found several ways of getting rid of stuck Aliases.

    If its really stuck then open up the command line and delete the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from your user/Library/Preferences folder. Log out and back in.

    It should reset side bar to defaults.

    But I then found a far easier way, which I had to admit, did make me feel very stupid. To force it to go just hold down the command key and then just drag it off, this forces it to go.

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    Hotel Wireless – Free for some, paid for others

    Sorry for the lack of posts recently, after last weeks long weekend, it was followed by a hard week at work.

    At the start of this week I had to pop down to London for a couple of days.  I was travelling light, but still took the iPad.  I fully intended to write a few blog posts but came across a very iritating but common issue.

    Often during the day I came across free WiFi.  Even at the hotel there was free WiFi in the bar, but at the end of the day after I had retired to my room to write up my notes for the day and update my blog, the internet access in my room was paid only.

    I could walk in off the street, have a drink in the bar and use free WiFi, but as a paying customer who had booked a room for the night, who wanted to use the internet in his room, I had to pay extra for the privilege.

    Not fair.  So here instead of my usual update you get a quick rant instead.  Sorry guys!

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    SnapSeed for the iPad

    I love our iPad, and more and more Photography focused apps keep appearing.

    SnapSeed is a app recently updated with RAW support, which is what attracted me to it.  If your away with just your camera equipment and your iPad sometimes you want to play with your images and test out your ideas.

    I shoot RAW and until now there has been a lack of applications for the iPad that support the camera manufactures RAW formats.  Until now with the updated SnapSeed from Nik software.

    Nik are a big player in photography processing, products like Silver Efex Pro, produce the best black and white conversion I have found.

    This is not a review and not a recommendation, but it is a fun app.  The image above was initially processed in Lightroom then during my lunch break last week I had my first real play with the application and produced this.

    Have not had time to test the RAW support, according to their website RAW files are supported when Apple’s camera connection kit is used.

    To keep the weight down on our motorcycle road trip we took, once SLR, two lens and an iPad.

    The photo in the previous post was taken on my iPhone then processed on my iPad while I was on my road trip.