iPod touch… A new rumour…

Well I was going through my feeds today and came across this on Mac Rumors. According to them, one of their users, DavidJearly, personally contacted Steve Jobs via email, and recieved a reply, which among other things, stipulated that the removal of the ability to Add/Edit calendar appointments was a ‘bug’, and would be fixed in a future software update. At last they have seen that this was such a stupid and pointless thing to do. It certainly stopped users such as myself going out and picking one up sooner – as I said in ‘At the Apple Store!‘, this was one of the main reasons I would even consider an iPhone over an iPod touch. And I reckon this was the reaction Apple was after, in that this would boost sales of the iPhone over a very minor software feature. Instead I think many who didn’t already have the iPhone came to the same conclusion I did: Where the iPhone available, (and even this doesn’t count in the US) I still wouldn’t buy one until the storage and 3G issues are addressed in the 2nd Gen iPhone. Instead of boosting iPhone sales, they may well have just harmed iPod touch sales.

Well now that this has been solved (or the solution is around the corner), I can again look seriously at the iPod touch to be the perfect companion to my mobile, allowing me to manage the finer details of contacts, after basic numbers, and to get full portable control of my calendar. Since getting the Mac I have become very dependant on iCal and while this syncs to the iPod I am using at the moment – a 30GB Black 5th Gen – the calendar is more limited than it is on the SLVR, and so really not worth using. Contacts is useful, but being able to edit the entries on the move is even more so.

Overall very welcome news, or at least relieving news that maybe Apple do go back on their decisions if they are clearly incorrect ones. Now then, where was the list of stupid decisions I want to quiz Steve on?…

The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up

Well as I said before, we went off to ExCel in London’s Docklands to the Future of Web Apps conference on Wednesday. It was simply amazing! We arrived at around 8:45am, and were greeted by the booths with passes. Of course this was too simple, as they didn’t have my pass there… That said, the organisers there were amazing about it, and simply gave me a blank pass which got me in. Whether they would have done more stringent identity checks had I asked for a pass above the £5 expo-only pass, because they didn’t even check my name, I am not sure.

Once the initial ‘drama’ was over, we explored the expo-floor. It was a ghost-town at this time in the morning, which it turned out was because a lot of people were already there, but in the ‘Showcase Stage’ where some of the paid talks were taking place. First things first, onto the free WiFi provided for attendees of FoWA. For this the ‘Microsoft Lounge’ provided the perfect seating arrangements – Microsoft Visual Studio, and Expression-branded beanbags. Much Xbox 360, and Halo 3 playing ensued, as obviously it would have been rude to not play when Microsoft had provided six networked Xboxs for our amusement…

Once the conference got going, we had a wander around the floor, and some of the exhibits were really good. Meecard looks very interesting, and may finally lead to an end of the many different new services cropping up which are effectively a clone of an existing service, but with one new special feature which means everybody must switch. Instead, I can set up a meecard (such as my own here) which can have as little or as much data on it as I like, and links to most of my social services. While something like Google Reader is a News Feed Aggregator, I see meecard as a Social Aggregator, bringing all of the social services I use to one easy to find and comprehend place.

Another of note was Wakoopa, who not only had hacked iPhones there to attract people (it worked!) but also were talking about their next big planned development – to log which Web Apps you use (should you choose to allow it to). This means that it will record how long you spend on, for example, the GMail webpage. I queried on the privacy implications this raises, and they assured me that instead of sending your web history to Wakoopa for analysis, the Wakoopa client will instead look for specific sites which they can log, and only send usage info for these, so it does remove some of the privacy issues, although I am not sure how comfortable I would be with something putting my specific web usage onto a public page, and what info they displayed would be of great importance. That said I will be looking at these new features with interest if, and when, they are released.

The Microsoft stand was also interesting. They were talking about ‘Expression’ – their competitor to Adobe’s Creative Suite. A friend of mine, who is an avid user of Photoshop, with some astounding results (see here), mentioned that from the looks of it Expression was more accessible to users who were unfamiliar with Photoshop. For someone like me, who has always been scared or beaten by Photoshop, this is good news. One thing I did find very amusing was that the main computers that Microsoft had for Expression were MacBook Pros. One was running Windows Vista through Boot Camp, and the other was running in OS X, but it was a surreal site, and the last place I thought I would see those!

The other main highlight was meeting Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht – the hosts of Diggnation. It was purely by coincidence, in that we were sat in the foyer of ExCel, and they walked in. After about 20 seconds of umming and ahhhing we decided that there was nothing to lose, and went to introduce ourselves. This was amazing, and they were great guys, although they couldn’t talk for long because they were running late in preparation for Kevin’s keynote speech, and for the later live filming of Diggnation.

The Diggnation filming began at 7:30pm, and lasted for an hour. This was fantastic to see, and a great experience. Kevin & Alex basically got rock-star treatment, arriving on stage to cheering, applause and blaring music. One thing I noticed was that Diggnation had actually filled the ‘Showcase Stage’ at FoWA more than Kevin’s Keynote speech about lessons learnt from setting up Digg and Pownce, which said something about the popularity of this particular podcast! The ‘episode’ was great, and they were very good, managing and entertaining the crowd, as well as doing what they were there to do.

Photos from the day can be found on my Flickr here, and on Alex Muller’s here

Future of Web Apps

Here at FOWA, on the free WiFi. The conference is amazing! I love it. Some classic moments such as seeing Microsoft demoing their Expression system on MacBook Pros (admittedly one was running Vista in Boot Camp but still…)

More to follow,  but in the mean time – Just found this on Flickr. Awesomeness!

iPod and iTunes fun…

Bit of a rant here (makes a change!). Just connected my iPod to the MBP, and iTunes seems to have forgotten who it is…

 

Bearing in mind that this is the same machine it synced to last night, and the same machine I ejected it from this morning, I wonder what could have happened in the intervening few hours to cause iTunes to forget all about this iPod, or for the iPod to forget that it was ever synced to this machine.

I don’t mind iTunes, but sometimes I wonder how there can be so many issues with what is effectively a closed system – Apple Software, running on an Apple laptop, syncing to an Apple iPod…

Thankfully the music etc is sync directly from this machine, so there isn’t a problem getting it back on there once I re-pair them and it syncs. This isn’t always the case though – see here for a perfect example.

FOWA & Thomas Vander Wal

Well we are off to FOWA tomorrow morning for what is looking like a fantastic day. Spending the day on the floor, and then going to the Diggnation Live filming. Plus I get to leave home later than usual which is always a bonus! We will however not be able to see any of the speeches, because we didn’t spend £250 on the passes which get you those.

However today, Thomas Vander Wal is coming to talk at school, thanks to him knowing our Director of ICT. The talk will be about Thomas’s speciality – Social Tagging and Folksonomy. Should be really interesting. Hopefully we will get a preview of what he will be saying when he talks on Thursday at FOWA.

New MacBooks

I saw some rumourings the other day on one of the 47 bazillion Mac rumour sites, that the next incarnation of Apple’s MacBook line will be available in Aluminium and Black finishes. In my opinion, this is the logical conclusion for Apple. Over the past few weeks and months, we have seen Apple slowly eliminating all of the majority-white finish products from their lines. First was the iMac which went to Aluminium and Black at the last refresh, then the new iPods came out, with the touch and phone being primarily black, and the classic going from the traditional white and black options, to the new Aluminium and Black options. Therefore if and when we see a new MacBook, I also expect to see this going over to the Aluminium finish. A sign of Apple shrugging off it’s ‘Apple Computer inc.’ past? Who knows. Maybe it is just that they like this finish more.

Regardless, as a user of a Aluminium-finish MacBook Pro, I am not sure how good an idea this is. I have found the the wireless range on this is terrible at times. It just won’t see networks which other laptops have no problem seeing. This is linked by some, and is a logical conclusion, to the all-metal casing interfering with the wireless signal. Whether this is the case or not we will have to see when the new MacBooks are released, but regardless of how nice that finish will look, they need to stop focussing on design over function, which seems to be a failing of Apple’s products at times.

Future of Web Apps

Next Wednesday a few of us are being let out of school for the day to go to FOWA – The Future of Web Apps Conference. This is at the ExCel centre in London’s Docklands, and looks like it is going to be amazing. We’ve only got the £5 floor passes so we won’t be going to any of the talks, but we have been told that the speakers etc. can be found on the floor when they are not presenting. Who would I want to speak to? I am not sure… I think it would be amazing to meet Kevin Rose and others like him. For someone like me, these are the ‘celebrities’ although I think that could turn out being more of an insult than a compliment!

On the same day, after the conference has finished, there is a live filming of Diggnation – Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht’s video podcast about some of the week’s stories from Digg, and we will also go to see this.

Personally I can’t wait, and neither can the others from what I have gathered. One Week!

At the Apple Store!

Well I am here in the Regents Street store. I love this place if I am honest. The reason I came this afternoon was to play with the new iPod touch, and my God was it worth it! They are fantastic. Everything I knew and loved about multi-touch technology is true, and I think that everyone should play with it. I found some things a little difficult to get used to, and found typing worked best if you used your index finger, as thumbs tend to obscure the keyboard and you end up hitting the wrong key…

Another thing I couldn’t figure out, although that may just have been me, was how to click links when you have zoomed in on a webpage. It seemed no matter how much I tapped the link it wouldn’t open… This may just have been a glitch on that particular touch, because I tried another and it seemed to work. I was slightly disappointed by being unable to click the links, as I wanted to try posting to the blog on the iPhone, but sadly couldn’t get to the log in screen on WordPress!

The queue to even get to the iPod touchs was amazing, and I happily stood in awe for 20 minutes to get my hands on one (which I subsequently did a second time, because there were a few things I didn’t try the first time!). One thing I did notice, was that many people were coming up to the guy selling them straight from the display stand, and asking him if it was the iPhone. He was then having to explain that it wasn’t. That said people didn’t seem to be dissuaded, and they were flying out the store – from the looks of the amounts left in the case, they were selling in roughly equal quantities.

Will I be getting a touch? Probably yes – I was (and still am) tempted by the iPhone, but the smaller capacity, combined with the lack of 3G (and EDGE depending on coverage!) makes it a bit pointless. The only thing (and I know this sounds stupid) that is making me want an iPhone more than a touch is the ability to edit and add calendar events on the iPhone, which has been taken out of the touch. This is something I can already do on my SLVR in a very limited capacity, and I was looking forward to managing my calendar on the new iPod… One thing I wonder, is if once people are able to write successfully to the iPod touch’s drive (through hacks etc.) whether they will be able to copy the iPhone’s calendar app over to it, considering they are basically the same device running the same software. We will see!

P.S. See pics from our trip here, and here.

‘Mum is no longer the word’ – A follow-up

Firstly my thanks to Thomas Ricker, and Engadget for their live-blog of the event, which I followed this morning. Really good, as ever.

Well, as expected, we saw the announcement of the UK iPhone, running on the O2 network. My prediction of them launching immediately was (sadly) off, and they will be available from November 9th. This begs the question what the curtains, and the store closure until 4pm, is about. I am off to Regents Street this afternoon with some friends anyway, so we will see what (if anything!) is different.

The UK iPhone is the same as the current US model, and so we did not a see any form of hardware upgrade. Steve hinted that by this time next year we will have a 3G iPhone, in saying that they expect the battery life issues to be resolved by then. It is therefore running EDGE, which is bad news frankly. The EDGE coverage on O2 in the UK is shocking – indeed the demo model that Journalists saw this morning wasn’t even detecting EDGE in the Apple Store Regents Street, in Central London! While EDGE may be the major coverage service in the US, here and in much of the rest of Europe 3G is the way the networks have gone. It is a shame that this hasn’t been taken into account, as it will mean that the iPhone will probably get bad press from day one when it goes on sale officially here, with the features like Internet Browsing and Song Download needing WiFi connection to be remotely useful. Note that O2 has said that they have partnered with ‘Cloud’ to provide free WiFi in over 7,000 locations. Whether this makes up for it I am not sure…

While the announcement was good, I can’t say that I was wowed by any of the announcements related to Apple. Indeed one of the only ‘at last!’ moments was O2’s announcement that as of October 1st they will make all of their contract plans unlimited data.

Regardless this was a great morning, and I am hoping that by the time I get there at 4pm today, they will have put out the iPod touchs in the store for general consumption. I get to play with a multi-touch display at last!

UK iPhone tomorrow?

Well the plot thickens! From what I have seen it looks like Apple have closed the Regents Street Store and put up large black curtains over all of the windows. An announcement outside says that it is closed until 4pm tomorrow for a private function. We know that this is an invite-only special press event. From all of this I will happily speculate that Apple are setting up the iPhone displays, possibly as I type, and they will launch tomorrow morning immediately. Whether this will be a ‘Gen. 2′ with 3G and larger capacity we will have to wait and see.

The other question on my mind is who will give the announcement. It could be Steve Jobs himself, or it may be someone else, such as the ‘head’ of Apple Europe. Either way I can’t wait if I am honest – I have been wanting to play with an iPhone for a long time and this looks like it may be my first chance.

I am also wondering whether they will launch the iPod touchs in the UK, as not having them out until the 28th once the iPhone is out seems a little counter-intuitive, to me at least.

Regardless, I finish early tomorrow and so will be heading off straight to the Regents Street store to be in line to play with Apple’s latest shiny new toy!