iPad 2 and the smart cover

July 1, 2011 | Comment

So I have finally succumbed and swapped my iPad 1 for a sleek new iPad 2. The most noticeable change is the performance boost. My old iPad was beginning to get very sluggish and on apps that I use regularly, such as Pulse, it was becoming unusable. So it has become usable once again.

With it I also picked up a smart cover, the magnetised, folding cover come stand designed just for the iPad 2. And so far I just don’t know what I think about it. On the one hand it covers the screen offering protection, although only to … Read the rest

My iPhone 5 Wish List (it’s probably not what you think)

June 5, 2011 | Comment


I am coming to the end of my iPhone 3GS contract in a couple of weeks. Normally this end of contract would coincide with the launch of Apple’s latest and greatest device but this year it looks like I am going to have to wait until September at the earliest for my latest fix.

Of course the interweb has been wild with rumours of what the new device will and won’t have. Bigger this, smaller that, faster this, shinier that etc. But none has covered what I want for any new iPhone. my requests are few and simple – a … Read the rest

Evernote Web Clipper now a Rival for Instapaper?

May 24, 2011 | Comment

One of my favourite tools has got to be Evernote, the service that allows you to upload pretty much anything and have it indexed and available to search and view pretty much anywhere.

Evernote have today upgraded their Chrome Extension to extend it to offer “smart clipping”. Previously when you clipped a webpage to Evernote unless you highlighted the bit you wanted stored you simply got the weblink. Now it automagically seeks out the body of the web article and stores that. The only other app that I have seen do this is Instapaper the read-it-later service. While it is … Read the rest

Mac Folder Action Scripts and Evernote

May 15, 2011 | Comment

For reasons that I have yet been able to fathom the functionality levels between the Mac and Windows Evernote clients is subtly different. For example on Windows there is the very useful ability to be able to add a watched folder that when anything gets added to this it automatically gets added to Evernote. This is not an option on the Mac version. However, all is not lost using Applescript and Folder Actions Scripts it is easy to replicate this action.

I say that it is easy but that is only the case if you are au fait with the … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

imageLast year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Verizon iPhone, Who Cares?

January 7, 2011 | Comment

It seems that ever since Apple struck an exclusive deal with AT&T for the iPhone the whole of the US have been waiting for the holy grail in the form of the Verizon iPhone. And the blogsphere has been alive with it again this week. My question is this who cares and why?

Well in the US it seems that they care as the iPhone is not that great on AT&T and this gives them choice to what is perceived as a “better” network. This may or may not turn out to be the case.

But what about the rest … Read the rest

Now This is Getting Ridiculous

November 7, 2010 | Comment

iPad BackupI wrote a while back about the stupid amount of time my iPad backup was taking and moaned that it had taken a ridiculous three hours. My solution to this was to use BackOff to disable the automatic backups during sync. However, this means that if there is ever a problem you cannot do a restore so it is important to do the occasional backup, which is what I did yesterday afternoon and now, some, 16 hours later is still only 75% of the way through!

Let me repeat that…

My iPad backup is going to take a massive 21 … Read the rest

Teaching Teenagers to Program

October 31, 2010 | Comment


Had an interesting week teaching a couple of teenagers to program. In fact it wasn’t a week but only four days in which to impart some knowledge and get them to complete a small project so that they felt they had achieved something. For this I decided that they should create a form and then save the details entered on the form to a database. This meant teaching some HTML, SQL and PHP – in four days to two youngsters that had no prior experience of coding.

So the programme went something like this:

Day One: What is the internet … Read the rest

Small Scale Outsourcing

October 23, 2010 | 1 comment


Outsourcing is big business. I should know as I have been using it for over 10 years now to get access to some highly skilled and cost effective development and testing resources. But what happens if you don’t need a resource for a long term project or just want to get access to a skill that you don’t have in-house?

For example the business I work for often needs access to designers to do small scale work for our website. We can’t afford to retain the services of someone locally as we simply don’t have enough business to put their … Read the rest