A while back I posted a brief note about the Cregle iPen, a result of my first foray into Kickstarter. At that point I hadn’t had much chance to try out the pen and said I would come back and do a proper review at a later date and this is it.

I was attracted to the idea of a pen for my iPad in order to be able to take notes in meetings and have a permanent electronic record, rather than to bring out any artistic side in me. So this review is very much biased to the the iPen in a business context but nevertheless the pros and cons outlined below will apply to any scenario, I believe.

Having pledged my money on Kickstarter I then had to wait firstly to see if they reached their funding goal and then for the device to reach manufacture and be delivered. In fact the hold up was even more protracted than that as Cregle had to wait what seemed an age for “Made for iPad” approval from Apple. It’s not just developers that have a nervous wait to see if their app is approved it seems – that wait applies to hardware developers too.

When the iPen finally arrived it was well packaged and contained not only the pen but also a slip case for it, spare batteries and nibs and a dongle that you have to plug into the dock port on the iPad. The latter is what makes the iPen different from a normal stylus and should give pin point accuracy that isn’t possible with a finger or stylus along.

The good

The pen itself is well constructed and feels very much like any other ball point pen in use – it is very comfortable to use. Currently it is only available in the obligatory Apple white but there have been suggestions that other colours (black and silver) would be available at a later date.

Compared to an ordinary stylus the accuracy can be very good – certainly good enough for handwriting without it looking like it has been done with a market pen by a two year old. However, that accuracy very much depends on the calibration which leads me on to…

The bad

At the time of writing this there were only two notepad type apps that were available with iPen support (it won’t just work with any application) – GoodNotes and Ghost Writer. This in itself is an issue as none of the note taking apps I use are supported so I had to invest in another just to try out the iPen.

Both the supported apps offer a way of calibrating the app with the iPen but in the case of Ghost Writer this is just too simplistic only capturing a single point on the “page” leading to huge variations in where you thought you were and where the iPen thought it was. GoodNotes captures at least five points making it’s accuracy much better but still not as accurate as shown on the Cregle videos on Kickstarter.

However, there are a number of issues with the calibration process. The accuracy is very much related to how you how hold the pen – changing the angle from when you calibrated makes a difference. Also sometimes no matter how much you calibrate it still can be a few pixels out which may not seem much but when you want to accurately write or draw a box for example it makes a huge difference.

The final issue with the calibration is that everytime that you open the app the iPen has to be recalibrated, even if you just nip off to another app to check something or look at an email or webpage, when you return you must recalibrate. This is a huge pain. Not only is it time consuming but it also disrupts the flow of working and quite often the calibration accuracy is different and you don’t get the results you expect.

All the above might be ok if the iPen’s manufacturers, Cregle, seemed intent on working with the community and app developers to improve the situation but from the experience I have of their support and the messages put out by them that sadly seems not to be the case. Any problems identified seem to be rectified in iPen 2 which, on the back of the experiences I have had, I won’t be investing in.

All in all it is a great shame as I was really looking to the iPen to be a way of ditching the pen and paper for a single iPad solution but the iPen is not going to be it.

Already the most funded project ever on Kickstarter the Pebble Watch for iPhone and Android has now passed the $10 million mark – 100 times the amount it was aiming to raise. Kickstarter is a great platform and I have backed a number of projects on it and will continue to look out for innovative things I can be an early part of.

Looking forward to receiving my watch too – glad I got my backing in early!

You may have noticed that the site was off line for a period of about a week early last month which was the result of an attack by hackers. I have no idea why they would be interested in my site in particular other than it was there and it represented a small challenge. The attack was ultimately pretty devastating as several MySQL databases were deleted. The hacker then contacted me to try and get me to pay to sort out the problems that he had caused. But as they didn’t have the files they had deleted they had nothing of value and I wasn’t interested in paying.

All of this has led me to take a long hard look at the security on my server and it was a humbling experience. I was able to find the holes in the setup that had allows the sites to be hacked in the first place. The issue was that I had set the wp-content folder to 777 in order to get media uploads to work on WordPress. I also knew that this was a bad thing and promised myself that I would go back to it quickly and sort it but, of course, I never did and paid the price of not doing so. This enabled a nasty program called C99 to be installed and from there the hackers could do pretty much anything they wanted.

I spent the best part of a week putting the server back together again and plugging the holes that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I have also strengthened my backup routine and put in place some jobs that will keep an eye on the server and alert me to anything suspicious. I will blog about what I have done at a later date.

However, the root of the issue was having the wp-content folder set with the wrong permissions. Don’t do it not ever! But a quick search on the web shows that this is not an uncommon issue – not being able to upload media to WordPress unless you do set the permissions to allow anyone access. Rather late in the day I have realised that the reason it wasn’t working for me was that the user that was trying to access the folder when I was uploading was different to the user that created the folder when WordPress was installed. Realising that and making the appropriate change has solved the issue and prevented me from setting it to 777.

I recommend that you take a look at your installation right now and don’t put it off. Not doing so could leave you with a nasty feeling when you realise that some low-life hacker has gone in and destroyed several years work. It’s not a good sensation.

So this week Google finally got round to releasing its cloud storage option, Google Drive. Within hours of them doing so the internet was ablaze with outrage over the terms and conditions and just exactly what they could or could not do with your files once they are uploaded. Many used this as the primary reason for not using the service and instead sticking with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive etc. I have, for me, a much more compelling reason not to use Google Drive – app support.

I have just over 20gb of storage with Dropbox, all of which I have been given for free for opening an account, referrals, beta testing etc. I find it a hugely convenient way to transport and share files across a number of different machines and platforms. And yet I have never been tempted to purchase additional space ensuring that my usage came in under the amount of space I had. That was a restrictive way of working and so when Google were rumoured to be entering the cloud drive space I was eagerly anticipating their arrival as I have already purchased additional space for Gmail and Picasa use and it has been a cheap way of backing up my photos – I currently pay $20 a year for 80gb. When Google Drive  launched I downloaded and was pleased to see that I immediately had 80gb of storage – which was a pleasant surprise as that figure didn’t seem to take into account the space I was already using.

But here’s the thing, if I was just using Dropbox to sync files between multiple machines then I could replace it but I’m not. Dropbox has a huge app infrastructure – particularly on iOS, my platform of choice, and the number of apps that have Dropbox seems to be expanding daily. Sure, Google has released an api and will encourage partners to support the platform but it is going to be sometime before the support is anywhere near the support that Dropbox has attained. In fact it has got to such a stage with Dropbox for me that I will make a positive decision on which app to download based on whether it has Dropbox support.

When Google can boast the same app ecosystem as Dropbox THEN I will be interested (providing they sort out those T&Cs).

Great review of the Raspberry Pi from PC Pro – can’t wait until I get mine!