Remove (Some) Stock Apps in iOS 10

June 14, 2016 | Comment

By and large the Apple announcement last night was pretty dull. That so much time was devoted to emojis showed (to me at any rate) that there wasn’t anything ground breaking to offer. What was interesting was one thing that wasn’t discussed and that was the ability to remove (some) of the stock apps in iOS10.

iOS comes with an ever increasing number of preinstalled apps such as stocks, mail, weather, compass, calendar etc. and many, myself included, have long wanted to remove these from the device but that hasn’t been possible – until now. It now appears that on … Read the rest

Connecting an iPad Pro over Ethernet

May 11, 2016 | Comment

So it has been a fun few first weeks with my iPad Pro and I am really loving the portability, the keyboard and pencil and the update to iOS to make it more suitable as a work tool. However, it was while I was on holiday that I came across a feature that I really could have done with – ether-networking. The wifi was poor where I was and it would have been good to connect over ethernet and upload more.

Turns out ethernet networking is possible with the iPad Pro and a few (costly) dongles. The major deal breaker … Read the rest

A (Very) Simple File Manager in PHP

July 20, 2015 | Comment

A while back I decided that I didn’t require my iPad any more so I sold it. On the whole I haven’t missed it until this week when I needed to do some testing for a project at work. Given that this was such a short term requirement buying an iPad just wasn’t sensible but I decided sitting in the local Apple store and spending half an hour doing the testing there was! However, part of what I needed to do was to save some screenshots and get them back to my work machine, something that the restrictions on the … Read the rest

Creating Good Looking Product Shots on Devices

July 4, 2014 | Comment

A while back I wrote about what I described as “One of the most amazing websites” I had seen and it was great. Placeit allows you to create screen mockups by uploading a screenshot that is then rendered into a chosen device. Unfortunately when I went back recently the prices had sky rocketed. To download even the most basic image now costs $8 a pop and a “casual” plan is $29 a month. For someone that uses the service about once a year that was prohibitively expensive.

I should state at this point that I have absolutely no issue with … Read the rest

Microsoft Office for iPad

March 30, 2014 | Comment

Now here’s a funny thing. I have deleted my iWork apps from my iPad and replaced then with their Microsoft Office equivalents. More than that I am also considering an Office 365 subscription just so that I can edit Office docs on the go. Why on earth would I do that?

Quite simply because Office is the defacto standard for work documents and while there is a real convenience to Google Docs (the real-time collaboration is unbeatable) nothing renders an Office document better than Office and that includes iWork.

While I have dabbled with iWork on my Mac I regularly … Read the rest

Forcing the Upgrade to iOS6

October 21, 2012 | Comment

I have Bento, the Apple produced database app, on both my iMac and my iPad and it is pretty good for what I need – it’s no SQL Server but then it’s not intended for such heavy duty querying. I decided that it would be useful if to also have Bento on my iPhone so that I could update date a database that I often need access to and when I tried to purchase it the message to the left is what I saw.

I haven’t upgrade to iOS 6 yet for a couple of reasons: my iPad is jailbroken… Read the rest

A Holiday with Only an iPad

July 25, 2012 | Comment

I’ve just returned from a five day break in Spain. On past holidays I have taken a whole array of kit with me including various laptops. This time I left it all behind bringing only my iPad with me. To supplement this I also brought along my keyboard case, camera connector kit and chargers.

While this was supposed to be a holiday there was a possibility that I might be needed for any support issues that might arise at work. I was fairly certain that the iPad would be able to cope but I couldn’t be certain until I put … Read the rest

Google Chrome on iOS

June 29, 2012 | 3 comments

So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.

I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.

There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest

The One Thing I Want From iOS 6

June 9, 2012 | 2 comments

So Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference begins on Monday and as ever the blogsphere is all aglow with just exactly what will be announced. So far this seems to include a refresh of every MacBook and iMac model, iOS 6 and, of course, the long awaited TV which just has to be called iTV. Most of that leaves me cold for now but given I have both an iPhone and an iPad any improvements that are made to the operating system are going to have a pretty direct impact on me.

Lots of other blogs have been drawing up long … Read the rest

Why Does my iPad Still Make Notification Sounds When the Volume is Down?

May 31, 2012 | Comment

One of the things that has really niggled me about my iPad is that it continues to be bloody noisy even if you have the volume turned right down. While any music is silenced notification noises, bleeps and bings continue to come through at full volume – not good when you are trying to sleep.

It seems that because, as daft as it seems, notification noises are not controlled by the volume control. Notifications are either off or on.

All is not lost though as there are two ways (at least) of turning off notification noises – the first is … Read the rest