Stories from the edge of sanity

This Blog has moved

2010-11-11T14:31:00.010Z

I've moved to Tumblr - find me at www.jasonified.com

Solution to Low volume on Macbook Pro running Bootcamp

2010-10-05T23:17:00.001+01:00

If like me you’ve been running Windows 7 under boot camp on a MacBook Pro you may have noticed a sound issue with the Cirrus chipset.

Basically, volume is significantly reduced from the speakers *unless* you switch on sound enhancements and “volume normalisation”. If you do this you get significantly louder sound coming from the speakers.

The issue with this fix is that audiodg.exe starts taking up CPU cycles

Cirrus have released updated drives that fix the issue and enable louder sound without having the enhancements enabled.

You can download them here

Using WEBDAV with Dropbox

2010-09-23T10:16:00.001+01:00

This is a neat trick to access your Dropbox account from any webdav supporting app.

All you do is ensure Webdav is installed and enabled on Windows Server, point IIS (if you’re using Windows) to a copy of your Dropbox folder and setup security so you have to login.

Now all you do is access the URL from your webdav app, login and you have read/write access to your dropbox files.

Ideal for accessing Dropbox from Pages, Numbers or other iWork for iPad apps!

Blank context menus with WindowBlinds – fixed

2010-09-22T23:09:00.001+01:00

If like me you like a lot of crappy eye candy in Windows and run WindowBlinds then you may have come across an issue where context menus (the ones that usually appear when you right click the mouse in the app) appear blank. Turn WB off and they are fine.

There’s a simple fix.

Open WindowBlinds, go to SETTINGS, then PER APPLICATION tab. Add in the EXE of the app you’re dealing with and under ADVANCED FEATURES click the “Enable if menus appear blank in the application” option

OK all the dialogs, apply the changes and re-launch the app.

Viola!

Titanium Developer hanging on SDK Loading….

2010-09-22T22:51:00.001+01:00

Just a quick post to help anyone that’s getting this. If you’re running Titanium Developer on OSX for iPhone development and you’re seeing a “Loading…” for the SDK dropdown that appears to hang forever, there’s a simple fix.

Delete the project, NOT the folder just the entry in Titanium then re-add it.

Worked for me

iPad Keyboard dock - first thoughts

2010-09-09T20:23:00.001+01:00

Bought an iPad keyboard dock today, here's a quick review.

The good

Makes typing easier, you make less mistakes and have more screen space available. It's great when remote controlling a "real" computer using Logmein etc.

It's very stable, the combination of dock and keyboard means you can sit it on the arm of the sofa without fear of it toppling off.

There are dedicated keys for brightness, volume, home and spotlight.

The bad

You realize instantly that the iPad should have come with two connectors, one on the bottom and one on the side. I don't care about this "hold it anyway you want" business - they should have included a landscape and portrait dock connector.

Lack of UI support for key controls/shortcuts within apps is immediately obvious. Yep it's great if you're in an e-mail and editing or using Pages etc but you can't tab/scroll through e-mail lists or Safari using the keyboard.

That's it so far....

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom

Twitter teaches us to be concise

2010-08-28T15:25:00.001+01:00

With it's 140 character limit Twitter is great at making us ~~more~~ concise. ~~Without resorting to using "SMS speak"~~I'm able to ~~review and~~ edit my post to make it ~~as short as possible in order to~~ fit the 140 ~~char~~ limit.

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom

How to upload iWorks files to Dropbox directly from the iPad

2010-07-29T17:20:00.004+01:00

The iPad is an extremely useful device but is flawed by the fact that every application you install seems to have it's own "sandbox" for storing files. Typically this means you have to copy files back from the device using iTunes and that's useless when you're on the road.

iWork is on example where the files are stored locally on the iPad but inaccessible by any other application on the iPad.

So here's a (relatively) quick and simple way to get iWork documents into Dropbox.

(You'll need Filer or ReaddleDocs for this and configured with your cloud storage e.g. Dropbox.)

1. Create your document in iWork (e.g. Pages)
2. E-mail the document to yourself (I know this is a little crazy but bear with me) as either a Pages doc or Word doc (whatever suits your needs)
3. Check your e-mail and you now have the document attached
4. Click it to view it within the mail viewer.
5. Click "Open with.." and select your file manager e.g. Filer

Your document is now transferred/opened in the file manager (e.g. Filer). Now all you need do is use the MOVE option in Filer OR the Upload (move doesn't work with Dropbox) in ReaddleDocs to upload the file.

Now you can go to Dropbox or another supported app and see your document, even put it back into Pages for editing.

It's a hack solution and not as elegant as I'd like but it works and is a pretty good solution at least until Apple all apps to share / access the same storage system.

Steve Jobs, what have you learned ?

2010-07-16T23:39:00.001+01:00

"One is how much we love our customers and how much we want to take care of them. We were stunned, upset, and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, but we didn't know enough to be able to address it.

If we'd done this event a week and a half ago, we wouldn't have had half the data we have today. We're engineers, and we want to solve real, hard problems. I don't think we could have done this faster...we've had cots in the labs, cars here all night.

We've been living here. But's human nature to tear down successful people. I see it happening to Google, a great company. Haven't we earned the credibility and trust that we'll take care of our customers?

The reaction has been overblown, and we could use your help with this."

Spot on. Now let's move on.

Cost vs Productivity vs Pacman and how attitudes have to change

2010-05-30T09:25:00.005+01:00

Recently Google replaced their logo with a fully working version of Pac-Man to celebrate the birthday of this classic game. This version used a Google logo map, featured Mr and Mrs Pac-Man and was written entirely in HTML - not a line of flash code in sight.

The new logo spread around the web like wildfire becoming a trending topic on Twitter within hours and it seems everyone was playing it.

Mashable later reported that over $120m of productivity was lost as a result Googles stunt and quoted information gathered from a report and blog post by Rescuetime, makers of time tracking software.

I have a real problem with that blog post and the confusion between productivity and cost but before I go on let's look at the definitions.

Productivity is described "The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). "

Cost is described as "The total money, time and resources associated with a purchase or activity."

and measurement as "productivity might be measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary."

So in short, productivity and cost are not the same. What one person outputs in 8 hours is not comparable to another. This could be down to training, skills or just character and determination.

On that basis it's impossible to determine what "productivity" was lost. You can determine what cost was lost (albeit by guessing an arbitrary and disputed hourly rate) and translate that to lost revenue in billable hours but even that can't be calculated properly.

Consider someone who played the game, then got back to work and still did all their tasks for the day - productivity was unaffected and the work that was supposed to get done was done.

What about a salesperson targeted with closing $10k of business a day, who got back on the phone, arranged two meetings and closed new business amounting to $17k. They hit their target and did so with hours of the day left - where was the productivity loss there?

This all reflects on the work culture of judging people on the time they spend at work rather than what they output at the end of the day. Productivity is measured on hours and the more time you spend in the office the more "productive" you are. We even see managers saying how certain individuals are "always here late" and "put in the most hours" and cite them as examples of model employees with the "right attitude".

I'd argue that if you're having to work more than your core hours per day you either are incredibly inefficient at your job, you're poor at delegating or you have way to much work assigned to you.

Studies have shown that working longer hours does not make you more productive and can lead to more mistakes and negatively affect your productivity. It also wrongly reports your time and makes people think you're getting your tasks done in core hours when you're not. This has the knock-on effect when quoting for future work, "oh we did that in 16 hours so the price is X" when in reality it took 16 hours PLUS another 12 you didn't know about.

Company owners shouldn't be looking at the people that put in the most hours as being the best workers. They are having to do more hours to complete their work so clearly they either aren't very good, don't have the right training/skills OR you're giving them way to much work to do.

(BTW the only reason company owners don't register or care about this is because it doesn't cost them for people that do this - if it did and people charged overtime it would be a very different story!)

What company owners should be doing is looking at the people that achieve their targets in goals in less time than was allocated, are getting a better work/life balance whilst maintaining personal profitability.

These are the people you should be modeling all your staff on.

Using eBoostr to boost Windows performance under Parallels on OSX

2010-05-13T02:50:00.001+01:00

eBoostr is a utility for Windows which was designed to bring the Readyboost feature of Vista to Windows XP and 2000. Readyboost is a technology that utilises the access speeds of USB flash memory to improve your system performance by caching data which can then be retrieved faster than a hard disk.

eBoostr has some significant advantages over Readyboost in that you can control more devices, you can specifically “tune” your cache by prioritising the applications and data to store and the cache is retained on reboot meaning that boot up times can be significantly improved.

This is all good but eBoostr comes with another benefit if you’re someone like me that uses Virtual Machine software like VMware and Parallels to run Windows under Mac OSX.

Typically USB drives running through Virtual Machine software like Parallels doesn’t pass through the full performance of the USB drive to the virtual machine which means whilst eBoostr can work with your USB devices you can gain a performance increase of around 10%, sometimes none and *sometimes* it’ll degrade performance. This is understandable since you’re access the device *through* a virtualised operating system.

One neat neat feature of eBoostr though is the ability to select system memory as a primary cache as well as a USB drive. This means that if you have enough memory allocated to your VM, you can partition off for example, 1gb to act as the eBoostr cache.

Once the cache is rebuilt you can run the control panel application above to see the performance and how much of the cache is being used at one time. A really useful feature is the ability to test the cache speed. In this mode, eBoostr switches off the caching, tests access speeds and then repeats the test with the cache enabled. In my case I was able to get disk read times of 3.8x the speed of the raw disk speed.

The nice thing about eBoostr is you can tell instantly that it works. Install and configure it, load in a couple of apps into the priority list, build the cache and then launch the application and instantly you can see a difference. This is no Placebo.

Obviously apps like eBoostr are RAM hungry and you need to be able to afford to give away a gigabyte of RAM in this case but if you have the capacity installed then I highly recommend eBoostr as a way to boost your virtual machine performance.

(On a final note, if you’re not running a VM and using Windows natively on your computer, eBoostr has one last feature that makes it worth the money especially if you’re running with a 32-bit operating system and have more than 3gb of RAM installed. Version 4.0 of eBoostr allows you to use the unused memory above the 3gb 32bit OS limit as a cache! This means you get the benefit of using that additional 1gb of RAM on a 4gb configuration without losing any of your existing 3gb RAM accessible by Windows. Neat.)

Why the iPad is, more than just a big iPod touch

2010-04-22T23:19:00.001+01:00

I've seen a few comments and tweets on the iPad where it's been dismissed as "just a big iPod Touch"

Well it kind of is as there's no phone and no camera but there's one difference. It's bigger and not just bigger with the same resolution, it's BIGGER.

More pixels, more space, easier to read web pages etc.

It's also faster and more capable and it runs OS 3.2 which has some key features around opening documents in other applications like spreadsheets in iWorks etc. Even if iWorks was available for the Touch it wouldn't be as easy to use as it is on this platform.

A big iPod touch is one thing, the iPad is something else.

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom

Why the iPad will change everything

2010-04-21T21:50:00.001+01:00

I'll admit I scoffed when the iPad was announced. I doubted it's target market, the cost and how it could compete with Netbooks.

The problem is that one you try one, use some apps you realise that this really is a game changer.

Apple have managed to do something that other manufacturers have struggled to do for years. A tablet that doesn't last 2 hours and has a ready made delivery platform for quite literally any app you could care to imagine.

Competitors take note. Apple have pretty much nailed it with version one with no camera and no flash.

You have been warned, get ready for V2

Written on my iPad

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom

Why the Tweetie acquisition is bad for developers

2010-04-10T06:39:00.001+01:00

Today Tweetie has been acquired by Twitter and it's author @atebits joins Twitters mobile division. Great news for @atebits but terrible for the Twitter developer community.

Why?

Twitter has always said they are developing a platform, a service on which 3rd party developers can develop applications.

Today, Twitter have begun developing apps.

The result of the deal is that Tweetie will be renamed "Twitter for iPhone" and become free in the next few weeks immediately squashing all other Twitter iPhone clients who can't possible compete on price.

The very developers who were encouraged to develop on-top of the Twitter service have in one short announcement, been wiped out.

Where does this leave authors of comparative apps? How can they compete with Twitters free alternative?

It feels like a great day for @atebits, terrible one for the developer community.

What do you think? Has Twitter screwed over 3rd party devs?

Tame rouge tasks eating up your CPU in Windows with Processtamer

2010-03-24T16:17:00.004Z

If you regularly see some applications eating up more CPU time than you'd like, here's a solution to keep your Windows install responsive.

Processtamer is an app that monitors the CPU activity of applications and can automatically reduce their priority if they are taking up to much CPU time.

It's free and downloadable from here

Outlook 2007 form error when opening/replying to e-mail

2010-03-08T09:25:00.001Z

Recently on a VM I have setup with XP and Outlook 2007 I was getting a popup form whenever I replied to or created a new e-mail. The error popping up was "could not install the custom actions, the object could not be found". I’d removed add-ins and cleared the forms cache (from within Outlook) and no joy.

I then stumbled upon this post which describes the problem and the solution which is to delete the form cache manually.

Did it and it worked so thought I’d share!

Outlook 2007 won't launch - fix

2010-02-17T09:33:00.003Z

If you are running Outlook and get into a situation where you're double clicking it to launch and it's not launching, there's a solution. Right click on the taskbar and click "Task Manager" and go to processes and sort by name.

Look for Outlook.exe and you'll likely see several (one for each time yout tried to launch). Right click all but one and click "end process"

Once you've closed all but one, the final process will continue and Outlook will appear

Annoying yes!

The iPad just got way more interesting

2010-02-09T20:46:00.000Z

Despite what you may think of the Apple Appstore and their closed policy, you have to love the fact that every day there's an new app or app update to download which could be a game changer.

Today it was Quickoffice 3 which up until now has been good but has relied on you copying files over via local wifi OR accessing email attachments via a seperate email address forwarded from your regular email. It sort of worked but wasn't seamless and totally practical.

Today however the game changes. Quickoffice 3 now supports MobileMe, Google Docs, Box and DropBox and suddenly the iPad is looking WAY more interesting.

The fact I can now access my work schedules, proposals, expenses etc via dropbox AND edit them on my iPhone is cool enough but imagine all using in a screen over four times larger.

Forget iWork, Quickoffice have just made the iPad way more attractive as an inbetween device which I could use to edit documents with greater comfort and clarity on the move.

My finger is ready, where do I sign?

Are the iPad missing features really showstoppers?

2010-02-09T11:14:00.003Z

Reading this article today prompted me to ask the question, Do the iPad shortcomings actually matter?

Let’s face it, the iPhone came out 3 years ago with no 3G, no MMS, no multi-tasking or flash support and yet it’s been revolutionary in the mobile market and has forced other manufacturers to re-evaluate and rework their phones and user interfaces. All the companies that scoffed at the time about it’s capabilities are now catching up with its stranglehold on the mobile market.

Looking at the netbook market, it’s been more of the same for years. Tablets have come and gone, Netbooks are popping up all the time but what’s innovative or different about them? They all run Windows or Linux and are all far too complicated for *most* people and battery life sucks despite them being solid state disk (SSD) based.

Does it matter that the iPad doesn’t have Flash as HTML5 takes hold? Will it force developers to support non-flash devices or question if they

need flash at all for particular web site features? Does multi-tasking really matter if you have a device that launches apps instantly and apps remember where they were when you left them? Is it a bad thing that you have 100,000+ apps at your disposal that are safe, trusted and won’t break your device?

I had a great conversation with someone the other day that nailed the case for the iPad. He was talking about buying his parents a notebook/netbook so they didn’t have to go upstairs to the office/den all the time to be able to emails/surf the web etc.

The problem is a netbook would be over the top for what they need. They just need to be able to email, surf, see photos etc so they don’t need anything over complicated.

The iPad is an ideal solution for them. They can sit on the sofa, email / surf using an interface that isn’t complicated and a device that’s easy to manage/backup etc.

This is where the iPad may well succeed - making netbooks/sub-notebook type devices easier to use for *most* people and maybe, just maybe we might start seeing some innovation and revolutionary products from competitors as a result.

TomTom Car kit for iPhone

2010-02-07T21:11:00.002Z

Bought one of these recently and used it today for the first time. Worked brilliantly although I expected the hands free to just work (it didn’t and requires Bluetooth sync which takes a few seconds). Excellent bit of kit, overpriced at 99.99 GBP but definitely the best mounting kit I’ve seen for the iPhone.

Best thing is that it works with a slim case STILL fitted on the iPhone.

Flash on the iPhone? I nailed it a year ago.

2010-02-06T23:35:00.000Z

In January 2009 I made this post this post in which I commented on why I thought we would never see Flash on the iPhone.

I didn't believe it was a performance or stability issue - I believed it was Apple ensuring that their Appstore was the ONLY appstore on the iPhone.

(jail broken phones excluded of course)

The fact is, allowing Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone is basically allowing them to run their own Appstore of Flash based applications and this represents a threat to Apple.

With the release of the iPad we're seeing discussion on this again but do Apple know something we don't - will HTML5 make Flash obsolete?

Comments welcome

Importance of making your application “power aware”

2010-02-06T12:59:00.003Z

In a world where mobile mobile usage is increasing, developers need to be more aware of mobile usage when developing their applications. Typically software developers make no allowance for when a notebook is running on battery power and keep their applications running (and processing) in the background.

Calling all developers and Microsoft too, please can you make your applications and services battery aware. I can’t stand seeing my CPU at 25% on battery power because searchindexer.exe is doing “something”

Snow will not beat us, not today, not ever.

2010-01-06T18:17:00.006Z

Today Basingstoke pretty much ground to a halt with snow and abandoned cars as far as the eye could see.

Our office was empty save a couple of local Escapees who braved the snow and walked in. The rest of us were at home and whilst we weren't snowboarding we could get on with our work, something that would have been impossible previously.

This time we were prepared. This time we used technology to beat the weather and it worked. Yes there were glitches but we managed to get 90% productivity today instead of what could have been about 20% in the past.

Oh and did I mention it cost us almost nothing?

The preparation was simple. Yesterday we made sure that:-

1. we all had each others mobile numbers.
2. we all installed Skype and shared each others login names
3. we setup Logmein on everyones Mac and PC (remote control)
4. we setup Logmein Hamachi on everyones Mac and PC (VPN)
5. we made sure everyone knew how to access web based e-mail etc.

The result? We could work from a warm home and easily access our computers and files as if we were sitting in the office. Skype enabled us to keep in touch as did e-mail and mobiles weren't even used (well mine didn't ring)

In the past we may have given up and stayed home and ending up behind on our work.

Today we beat the weather and tomorrow we'll be stronger for it.

Bring it!

1 way the iPhone is better than the Google Nexus one

2010-01-06T02:42:00.000Z

So Google have finally released the Nexus one "superphone" which apparently is going to challenge the iPhone.

Or is it?

What most people seem to be missing is a fundamental flaw with Android phones which is the limitation of App storage.

The G1 and Droid allow 256mb of App storage.

The Nexus one? 512mb

The iPhone? 32gb

Apple have had 3 billion App downloads, and tens of thousands of apps in the app store. There is no doubt that mobile app downloads are key moving forward.

We are told that the nexus (and possibly other Android phones) will allow storage to an SD card later with a firmware update but why has this not been addressed now?

It seems Google have made a massive mistake and are glossing over it. There will be a lot of disappointed Nexus users especially those that will switch from the iPhone.

www.google.com/fail

Don't underestimate the power of social media

2009-12-22T07:35:00.000Z

Christmas no. 1 this year is Rage Against the machine and all because of a Facebook campaign started in Essex, UK.

The aim was to beat X Factors stranglehold on the No. 1 spot each year and to many peoples surprise it worked.

One person decided it was enough and with the force of social media behind them they made a difference.

No government or organisation should underestimate the power of social media. It is without doubt a force to be reckoned with.

How to legally unlock your iPhone in the UK

2009-12-02T00:56:00.000Z

You may have heard recently that O2 have lost the exclusive agreement to sell the iPhone in the UK. As a result they are allowing users to unlock their iPhones for other carriers.

This unlock method differs from jailbreaking apps as it's a legal, authorised and a permanent unlock. This means if you update your firmware your unlock will remain in place.

It's really simple to carry out the unlock. Just visit http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/unlockmyiphone.html and click on the unlocking form link.

You'll need to enter some details including the IMEI no. of your phone (dial *#06# in the phone app to get your code) and within either minutes (or days in my case) you'll get a text message confirming your phone is unlocked. Next just put your new Sim card into your iPhone, plug into iTunes and you should be unlocked.

The only conditions are a) this is only available to contract users who have to pay £10 within contract and fulfill the rest of their contract or b) your are a pay as you go customer who has had the phone a year.

Having said that I know of people who have filled in the form with the code of a pay as you go phone and O2 have unlocked it!

Unlocking your iPhone in this way will make it possible to upgrade the firmware without having to wait for a patched version and can make your iPhone more attactive in the 2nd hand market.

For £10 it's well worth it.

Fasthosts support and the dangers of assumption

2009-11-15T13:35:00.004Z

I've just had a painful experience with Fasthosts Technical Support. I have a reseller account with them that I use to host a few sites. I'd setup a new domain and was given a temporary URL that I can use to test the site out before the real domain is attached/propagates.

So, I setup the site, hit the URL and saw an error from Google Toolbar telling me the DNS couldn't be resolved. The error was obvious and clear, the DNS entry hadn't filtered down to my ISP quickly enough and so it couldn't resolve the test URL. I got that bit so wanted to know *when* it would be likely to be available.

I raised a support ticket in the support control panel and asked the question.

What happened next was a series of e-mails between myself and someone I'll call "Nick" who made a fatal mistake of assuming to know what my problem *actually* was and then proceeded to answer it.

Firstly Nick claimed I didn't upload a default document. Nope that wasn't it because I would see a "Directory listing denied" message instead. I wasn't getting that - I was getting a DNS issue.

I explained what I'm asking (how long would it take for the site to be available) and the next response is that Nick assures me that he does understand me, there's no issue with the Fasthosts system and it's to do with the fact I've named my default document Index.htm and not index.htm.

Mmm, I never uploaded a default document......

I tried to clarify again saying it's nothing to do with the default document, the site simply isn't resolving and just wanted to know how long it would take. I even uploaded an index.htm file (empty) to show it made no difference.

(Ironically the system didn't let me upload index.htm and Index.htm at the same time so clearly it isn't case sensitive)

Anyway, now Nick responds with words to the effect of "great, glad the index.htm issue has been resolved, I'll consider that closed" and then finally clarified that the URL wouldn't appear due to DNS propagation and that *I* should read their support documents as I clearly don't understand how to use their system!

What's amazing here is that if you change a password in Fasthosts control panel, a nice little message tells you that "It could take up to 10 minutes for your password change to take effect"

Now WHY couldn't they have put that message next to the test domain URL?

More importantly, why couldn't Nick have saved both of us a totally unnecessary series of e-mails by just listening to me and understanding my problem and query?

VS2010 Beta 2 crashes due to raster fonts - solved!

2009-11-12T16:03:00.002Z

If like me you've have been installing Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and have been experiencing issues running the IDE and opening documents in source code code view then check your fonts as you'll most likely have a raster font selected.

Sounds stupid but it's true and documented in this post. Launching the IDE with a raster font set will cause all kinds of problems and "object not set to an instance of an object" and other issues.

Simple, stupid and apparently fixed in the RTM but didn't save me the multiple installs I had to do to eliminate any errors in setup.

Arrggg

Why Twitter Lists could make following obsolete

2009-10-30T00:06:00.006Z

Twitter is rolling out it's brand new "killer" function, Twitter Lists. Essentially it allows you to group the people you follow into multiple lists which you can keep private or share for public consumption. If you chose to share your lists then others can click a single button and follow everyone in that list.

Neat hey?

Maybe but what's really interesting about lists is that they don't just work with the people you follow but *anyone* whether you're following them or not.

This means you now have the ability to create multiple timelines that include people you are interested in whether it's work, play, family, friends, business, news etc.

This could effectively render your default timeline defunct and you just tune into your various "channels".

If you chose to make a list public, anyone you "follow" in this way can still see they are "listed" in a particular public list of yours, which is essentially just like being followed.

In Fact with sites like http://listorious.com/ featuring good lists to follow why not just bookmark peoples recommended lists instead of following them?

The only difference I can see with following is the rules that govern how @ replies are viewable to others and the ability to direct message someone.

Other than that it *seems* at first glance that Twitter lists could eventually make the traditional method of following/being followed obsolete and a new number will be chased, that of being "listed"

Thoughts?

10 real and practical ways to improve your battery life under Windows

2009-10-28T21:23:00.013Z

Do a quick search and you'll always find articles on how to improve battery life under Windows ranging from cutting down how many apps you're running to turning off Aero. Sadly most of these are a waste of time and add almost no improvement in battery life.

Being someone who tries to squeeze the maximum possible out of my batteries I thought I'd share some real, practical tips that have worked for me and extended my battery life from a couple of hours to *several* hours.

(Image courtesy of http://www.artistsvalley.com/)

First it's important to understand what affects battery life :-

1. Screen. Your LCD is one of the biggest draws on power you have and the larger it is and brighter it is, the more power it's taking up.

2. CPU. Your CPU is what's driving your machine and the more work it's doing, the higher the clock speed, the more voltage it's taking and the more battery it's eating up.

3. Hard drive. (Assuming you're running a traditional drive, not an SSD) your hard disk has moving parts and is spinning at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute. As you run apps, access files etc your drive is eating up juice as it spins to access data.

4. Peripherals. Wifi and Bluetooth on? Is that a portable hard disk plugged in to your USB port? Any internal and external device you're running is drawing power

5. Fans. The hotter your machine gets, the more the internal fan has to work to keep it cool. Fans have moving parts; motors which use battery juice. Keep your machine cool and your fan won't have to spin so hard which means less power is required.

Let's look at some ways you can reduce the power draw of your machine :-

1. Add RAM. The more memory you have the less your machine is going to swap out data to the hard disk and that means less moving parts are moving and less power is required. If you're machine can take more memory then invest in it as there is NO substitute.

2. Defrag your hard disk and free up at least 20% of space. The tighter your hard disk is for space the more thrashing it's going to do to find places to store data. Also the more defragmented it is the more it has to jump about to access that data. Run a tool like Diskeeper 2009 or similar and you'll align your data in a way that means your hard drive does less work to load your applications and files. Less work = less moving parts = lower power drain.

3. Replace your hard drive with an SSD. SSD drives are solid state (and expensive) but they have no moving parts and that means your access times are almost instantaneous and they draw less power. No movement means they run almost cool which means less heat, less cooling requirement and less power drain.

4. Update device drivers, run the latest OS. This is a really easy thing to miss. If you rely on Windows update you'll find that sometimes you'll miss out on upgrades to Wifi cards, Graphics cards etc. Updates can add new features but also fix any power draining issues and that means you can squeeze precious minutes from your battery. If you're running an Intel chipset then checkout the Intel site for updates. I've recently updated both Wifi and Graphics drivers that weren't offered on Windows Update. I also noticed significant improvements running Windows 7 (even in beta) over Vista.

5. Turn off everything you don't need, turn down your screen. Why have bluetooth or a 3G card on when you're not using it? Switch it off and use only what you need to. I haven't used my DVD drive in months so why have it powered at all? Disable it in your hardware manager or if you're using a machine with advanced power management, turn it off there. That noise your DVD drive makes no and again when you're opening my computer or coming out of standby is moving physical parts which means it's using precious juice, however small. Reduce the brightness of your screen when running on batteries.

6. Double check your device manager and power settings. Make sure you have settings enabled for devices that "allow windows to turn off X device to save power". Same goes for ensuring that Wifi cards on are on power saving modes and Graphics cards are configured correctly. Badly managed power profiles can eat up juice fast.

7. Watch your CPU. I have Task manager running almost all the time. Why? Because I can quickly see what's using up CPU time and deal with it. If I'm sitting on a site using Firefox that's using some Ajax updates then it could be killing my CPU as it refreshes. Or maybe I spot AVG kicking in with a scan and kill it quickly. When you're on batteries you need to be full aware what is running and eating up CPU power. Ensure that any power aware apps are configured to NOT run when you're on battery. Diskeeper is a good example of that.

8. Run your Notebook in Stamina mode. If you have dual graphics cards (Vaios) then run in the Intel chipset all the time unless your really need the faster chipset. Ok you might lose out on DVI output through a docking station but your battery life will significantly improve and your machine will run way cooler.

9. Make sure you battery is working properly and even replace it. Batteries don't last and will deteriorate over time. If you're seeing a massive drop in battery life then it could be your battery is worn out. Consider replacing it OR recalibrating it by running it down to nothing then doing a full recharge.

10. Hibernate don't Sleep. Tempting as it is to put your machine in sleep mode so it'll resume in an instant you're going to eat up juice if you do that. For the sake of waiting 30 seconds to resume you could gain another 10 minutes of battery life.

Over the past year I've made some improvements to my Vaio SZ7 that granted have cost me cool hard cash but have meant I can keep the same machine I'm happy with and improve on it. So far I've replaced the hard drive with an SSD, installed Windows 7 and recently fitted 8 gb of RAM (it came with 4gb).

The result has been a significant increase in battery life to the point now where I can use my machine without worrying to much about it running out of juice. OK so it' won't do an 8 hour day but I can come home in the evening and use it all evening without worrying about power. By the time I've putting it to sleep for the night it still has plenty of juice left.

Obviously anything else you can do to reduce the number of apps you're running, power drain on graphics cards etc is going to add to all this. I just wanted to give some practical, proven advice on how to get more from your battery.

If you have any tips of your own, please comment!

Don't wait for Windows Update for new Intel drivers,

2009-10-27T23:59:00.000Z

If you own a laptop that's based on an Intel motherboard then you should check out Intels web site before waiting for Windows update to tell you about new drivers.

I'm running a Vaio SZ7 which has an intel 965 chipset and recently updated my graphics driver and Wifi direct from Intels own site whilst Sony and Windows Update was showing no updates.

If you are running a laptop then it's especially important to ensure you are running the latest drivers ao you can maximise performance and battery life.

Windows 7 32-bit running 8gb RAM

2009-10-26T13:19:00.003Z

In an earlier post I talked about how to enable more than 3gb on 32bit Windows 7.

Why on earth would you want to do this? Why not upgrade to 64bit Windows? Well quite simply you can't upgrade. You can reinstall from scratch but there's no in place upgrade from 32bit to 64bit.

This means new install and all the pain and suffering that comes with that!

For those that have more memory installed and can't access it, this hack is simple, pain free and just works.

As you can see from the screenshot, I'm running 8gb of fully addressable RAM under 32bit and I have no issues with it. My system is fast, responsive and has had a new breath of life.

Oh and all my software and settings remain unchanged.

Winsnap fits nicely with the Windows 7 taskbar

2009-10-26T11:30:00.007Z

Winsnap is a great little utility for capturing areas of your screen to include in e-mails, documents etc.

I use screen grabbing a lot for proposals and e-mail troubleshooting.

Traditionally I've used Snag it which is pretty good although the interface (v8) is a bit dated.

Winsnap is a really cool alternative that integrates nicely into the Windows taskbar. Just click the right mouse (or left click and drag up) and you get a neat little menu to select what you want to do.

Once captured you can copy to the clipboard, save to a file or send to an image editor.

You can even add effects (like the reflection shown) automatically

Download Winsnap

eBoostr improves on Readyboost, works with XP and uses "hidden" memory.

2009-10-15T21:20:00.003+01:00

I've used eBoostr before I had an SSD drive and it's a great product that does work. It brings Readyboost functionality to XP users and improves on Readyboost by bring more configurable and supporting multiple cache drives.

The latest version (in beta) improves on this by accessing unused and hidden system memory. This means if you're running 32 bit Windows and you have 4gb installed eBoostr can use the 1gb that Windows can't normally access as a cache, improving overall performance.

I have to say when I used eBoostr it worked really well. My boot time was improved and launching applications was noticeably quicker. Once I moved to an SSD it was fairly redundant but now I've added more RAM to my laptop (6gb aiming for 8gb shortly) I can use some of this (up to 4gb) as an eBoostr cache.

Try it yourself for free (for now)

How to enable 4gb of memory on 32bit Windows 7 / Vista

2009-10-08T09:51:00.003+01:00

For the past couple of years I've been running a Vaio SZ71 notebook which when I got it came with Vista and 4gb memory installed. Unfortunately only 3gb was accessible as the Vista installed was the 32bit version which can only address up to 3gb of RAM.

To access the full 4gb I'd have to do a clean install of a 64bit version of the OS which would of course lose all my applications and settings as you can't upgrade from 32bit to 64bit.

Up to now there have been lots of supposid hacks that will enable 4gb on a 32 bit machine but these simply don't work leaving the only alternative as a clean install.

From what I understand a 64 bit version of Windows won't run that much better than 32bit unless applications are specifically written to take advantage of 64bit processor. In some cases 32bit applications running under a 64bit OS can run slower.

Despite upgrading my hard disk to an SSD and other improvements I've accepted that to use the full 4gb I'll have to reinstall until that is, I've discovered "Readyfor4gb", an application that *will* enable over 3gb on a 32 bit machine.

Readyfor4gb is an application that patches the Windows Kernel and updates the boot menu to give you a new option to boot Windows in normal mode OR a new mode that can address up to 128gb of RAM.

The patch takes a few seconds to run and creates a new boot menu option:-

"Windows 7 x86 [ 128GB with ntkr128g.exe ]"

Booting Windows with this new mode allows the full 4gb you have installed to be addressed under the 32bit with no major side affect on performance.

Note: This hack isn't sanctioned by Microsoft and there's no guarantee it'll work on your Vista/Windows 7 install. Google "readyfor4gb" and make sure you Virus scan/Spyware scan it before you use it. It's also worth taking an image of your hard disk before you do this just in case it goes wrong. Use at your own risk.

Solved: Poor battery life on iPhone 3GS using Push / Exchange

2009-08-27T10:18:00.004+01:00

Recently I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS and noticed almost immediately a significant drop in battery life. The first day of usage I was seeing the %age meter drop at an alarming rate ending up with about 5 hours of standby in the first day.

After some initial testing I realised that my usage time was increasing (albeit at a slower rate than the standby time) but even when the phone was idle.

To quickly explain "usage" and "standby", Usage is how long you've used the phone including background tasks like push, fetching e-mail, receiving SMS messages etc. Standby is how long the phone has been switched on and includes usage time. So, if you have 10 hours standby and 5 hours usage this doesn't mean you've had 15 hours in total. It means the phone has been switched on for 10 hours and of that, you've had 5 hours usage.

Anyway, what I noticed quite quickly was that when my usage time was say, 1 hour 30 minutes and the phone was left on standby for 10 minutes, it would end up showing 1 hour and 36 minutes of usage. This didn't add up.

The first thing was to turn off Push and immediately there was an improvement. This isolated the issue and so I tried removing the account, re-adding the account etc. I even tried switching to another test, Exchange server and running that with Push - nothing improved the situation unless I turned push OFF or used a different Exchange server and account.

Having determined that it was a combination of the 3GS, Push AND my Exchange server I went into Exchange, created a new folder and MOVED all my Inbox e-mail to a new folder "Old Inbox" leaving the default Inbox blank.

Problem solved.

The issue was *something* to do with e-mails in my Inbox which were causing the 3GS to almost continually be connected to the account. This was confirmed when I studied the log files on the Exchange server and could see in the days leading up to the 3GS switchover, file sizes of a few meg in size. Immediately after the switchover the file sizes quadrupled in size and once I applied the fix, returned to normal again.

What's interesting is I didn't get this on my 3G, only the 3GS.

Anyway I now have the battery life I'd expect on the 3GS and it's significantly better than that of the 3G even with Push e-mail and Push notifications switched on in OS 3.0

If you're using Exchange, the 3G/3GS and Push e-mail and experiencing battery life issues, I hope this helps!

Why I wouldn't recommend "Clapham Group" builders

2009-07-30T11:01:00.004+01:00

We recently decided we needed to get our Kitchen refitted and new appliances. Searching around I came up "The Clapham Group" (www.claphamgroup.co.uk and of 2 Corben Mews, Clyston Street, London, SW8 4TX ) who assured us they were qualified and right for the job.

They worked on fixed price and on the basis that if it takes longer, no charge and if it takes less, SAME charge. All fair enough.

We agreed a cost, agreed terms and we proceeded. Essentially they'd committed to fitting the kitchen and ALL appliances (Dishwasher, Washing machine, Gas Hob, Electric Cooker)

Now the two guys that have been doing the job, no complaints. Both good honest guys who are doing a good job done, my beef isn't with them.

My issue is with The Clapham Group Builders as despite them not sending a gas fitter out when they originally promised they now say we have to pay an extra 300 quid to get the hob connected.

So, despite their agreement saying they would do this, they won't and have essentially told us to find our own plumber.

What needs doing? not much, just drilling a hole and connecting a gas supply so why are we in this position?

Assumption it seems IS the mother of all cock-ups and in their case they assumed there was a gas supply leading right up to the hob and there wasn't. But even though there isn't it's not a big job to put this in so why wasn't this factored into the cost as a possible issue?

The Clapham Group Builders, re-enforcing the stereotype that builders are cowboys.

Well done guys!

UPDATE: 31/7: I've just spoken to Clapham Builders who are "disapponted" that I blogged about this before speaking to them. We did speak to them and got told to find our own plumber and it was our problem. Seems they are unwilling to accept it's their responsibility and would rather argue about it.

UPDATE: 27/8: Clapham Group or Clapham Builders have now invoiced us for 80 quid for installation of a Gas Hob. They claim that someone turned up at the end of July and installed it. Strange that as they didn't, no one was even in that day and we've already had to get it done by another company! Incredible!

Ultramon for Windows 7 beta released

2009-07-16T10:26:00.002+01:00

Ultramon is a utility that takes advantage of Multi-Monitor set-ups to extend your Windows task bar across multiple screens. You can quickly move applications or windows between screens and have the task bar on each monitor relevant to the windows being displayed on it.

Up to now it's not been possible to run Ultramon on Windows 7 but that's all changed with the new beta release. Check it out for free

Replacement iPhone 3GS

2009-07-16T10:11:00.004+01:00

I took my 3GS back yesterday to the O2 store in Basingstoke, UK. Over the last week I noticed some dust particles behind the screen so a call to O2 confirmed it was a fault, under warranty and they'd swap it out.

If you have any issues with dust behind the screen of your new iPhone, my advice is to take it back to be replaced - I've also heard Apple stores will do a straight swap too.

3GS first impressions

2009-06-19T12:28:00.005+01:00

My first thoughts on the new 3GS:-

It's fast. Everything is snappier, apps load faster and 3D games are massively improved. Calendar loads my Exchange, Caldav and several iCal calendars almost instantly.

It does close-ups. The camera is so much better with spot focus and incredible Macros.

It's less smudgy. The screen is much better, more slick and definitely retains less marks.

It's off colour. Compare a 3G to a 3GS and you'll notice the screen has a yellow hint on the 3GS. This is usually down to Apple messing with calibration and usually it's sw fixable.

It records video. Easy, simple and fast. Click, record, email or upload to YouTube.

It's loud. Not sure if it's me or my old phone is not right but the speaker seems MUCH louder playing music/sounds.

I can't say much for battery life at the moment as it was semi-charged and ideally needs to be completely run down and recharged. I usually find new iPhones take several cycles and a few days to get into the right mood.

WWDC aftermath, the iPhone 3GS

2009-06-09T11:12:00.005+01:00

The WWDC keynote was surprising in a number of ways, not only for the lack of support from AT&T in the US on MMS and Tethering but the lack of any significant upgrades to the 3G hardware.

So what did we get?

New camera. A 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus and better low light performance

Video recording/editing. Video at 30fps using the new camera and processor and editing/trimming with uploading to MobileMe and YourTube as well as sending via MMS.
Nike+ support. Built in, all you need is the transmitter.
Compass. A digital compass to assist turn by turn GPS.
Battery life. Improved battery life on Wifi, Video and Audio playing.
More memory. 32gb and 16gb models.

we also got some new features:-

HSPDA 7.2mb performance
Faster processor with 2x performance across the device
Improved rendering in Safari
Voice control (launching, finding, calling)
Accessibility features (contrast, voice activation/reading)
Buy/Rent movies, buy TV shows and download to the device
Improved Appstore/iPod interface
Turn by Turn support (Tom Tom navigation coming)

and what didn't appear?

New case. no cosmetic changes at all.
Headphone jack change. still in the same place
Front camera. we'll have to wait for 3G video conferencing and iChat.
Flash. no flash support for the camera, instead a better camera for low light
FM Radio. nothing mentioned
OLED Screen. no mention of an OLED screen.

We also didn't see any announcement of changes to mobile providers so in the UK we're still stuck with O2 which have handled the launch badly. Instead of offering people the chance to renew their contract for a specific period e.g. if you're on 12 months on a 3G, extend another 18 months to get the 3GS, you have to wait or pay a penalty AND renew.

Bad form O2, bad form.

Roll on the 19th

6 ways to improve your current notebook without buying a new one

2009-06-06T20:24:00.005+01:00

If you’re feeling the pinch or you just love your current notebook and don’t want to replace it, here’s a few tips I’ve learnt (and some I’ve done ) to improve the performance and in some cases the look of your computer and give it that new feeling.

1. Replace the hard drive. You need at least 20% free space on a hard disk to get the most out of it so buy a new drive (www.scan.co.uk is good) and use tools from www.acronis.com and a SATA USB interface to migrate your drive. In less than 4 hours (depending on the drive size) you’ll have a new, faster machine, more space and a complete image backup. If you’re feeling flush consider an SSD drive which will speed up your machine considerably, reduce noise/heat and improve battery life. A 256gb SSD will cost you around 500-600 GBP on eBay which is expensive but the difference is amazing.

2. Upgrade your OS. If you’re running Windows XP, consider upgrading to Vista SP2 or Windows 7 RC. XP is great but Vista SP2 and Windows 7 make much better use of hardware and resources even if it’s a couple of years old. Vista has a bad reputation but SP2 is where it comes good brings it much closer to the snappiness of Windows 7. Upgrade Vista to Windows 7 RC and you’ll notice boot times, resume and sleep times are reduced and the whole OS feels much snappier.

3. Install eBooster. Readyboost is a technology that swaps out frequently accessed data to a flash drive using the principle that it’s faster to load this from the flash memory than the hard drive. It does work and in conjunction with Superfetch (pre-loading frequently used applications) it improves performance but Readyboost rebuilds the cache on each reboot. eBooster works with XP, Vista and Windows 7 and takes Readyboost one step further by allowing you to determine what gets cached. Setup a flash disk or Express Card SSD and setup an eBooster cache and you’ll see faster boot times and instantly loading applications. You can also have multiple cache drives.

4. Upgrade your memory. Sounds obvious but it’s true. 32bit operating systems support up to 3gb of RAM (regardless of what’s installed) but 64bit can see much more. Max out your RAM to get the most of out of your system and consider 64bit OS if you really want to fly. Bear in mind that some applications don’t work properly or effectively on 64bit operating systems.

5. Replace your keyboard. Most notebook keyboards are removable and replaceable. Sony Vaios especially are simple to remove and replace and you can buy replacement keyboards from eBay for about 40 GBP. Replace your keyboard for a new one every 6 months and you’ll give your notebook a new lease of life plus you can sometimes end up with a much nicer keyboard with better movement and response. (Keep your old one for spare keys). I recently replaced my black Vaio keyboard for a silver one which looks more unique and doesn’t show key wear as much. For added effect I left the top row of keys in black (see below).

6. Skin your notebook. There’s lots of services that do this, LapJacks is one. Basically you buy Vinyl stickers that can be put on your notebook lid to cover it, updated it or Pimp it. It’s easy to install and remove them and there’s usually lots to choose from and you can sometimes upload your own images. One tip here is to buy TWO copies of the skin and use the 2nd to stick over your wrist pad, track pad and buttons. You end up with a unique notebook that is protected from scratches and smears. (the skin I’ve used is a worn skin which I applied to the lid, wrist pad and track pad and buttons. The usual response I end up with is “Jason, I know there’s a credit crunch but seriously, get a new machine”. The Irony is that this baby has a 256gb SSD and Windows 7 and packs a punch ;)

I put all this together over the past 6 months on my Vaio SZ7. Instead of buying a new model I pimped out my notebook as follows:-

a) Replaced the hard drive with a 256gb Samsung SSD

b) Installed a 32gb Express Card SSD to run Virtual machines

c) Replaced the black Vaio keyboard with a Silver version (which doesn’t show “shine” wear as much)

d) Skinned the laptop lid, wrist pad, track pad and buttons.

e) Upgraded from Vista SP2 Beta to Windows 7 Beta and finally RC

I’ve probably spent around 700 GBP doing this and yes for that money I could have bought a cheap laptop but I wouldn’t have got anywhere near the spec of the machine I no have. I get 4+ hours battery life on the standard battery, it boots Windows 7 in less than 30 seconds and I struggle to keep up with is sometimes!

If you’ve upgraded your notebook, are considering it or just have a something to say, please comment.

iPhone Video, OS 3.0 and on UK Vodafone?

2009-06-05T10:46:00.006+01:00

The Apple WWDC conference is looming and so is the announcement of the device (or devices) that will be running the 3.0 OS.

The latest beta 5 of the OS was released some weeks ago and Beta 6 has been expected but is weeks late. Rumors are that this is because Beta 6 would be adding functionality and applications that would reveal too much about the new device most notably video recording.

Next week the developer conference kicks off and we're expecting to see the announcement and presentation of the new device and the final release of OS 3.0.

So what can we expect?

Here's a run down of expectations:-

New case. the new case will do away with the chrome surround and change the backing of the device to improve grip.
Headphone jack change. this will be repositioned to the bottom of the device.
New camera. an improved 3+ megapixel camera is expected with video recording capability.
Front camera. A front facing camera will allow video calls and provide iChat support.
Flash. the Apple logo will double as a flash for taking pictures in low light.
Video recording/editing. the new device will be focusing on video allowing recording of clips which could be sent via MMS, e-Mail even uploaded to YouTube or Mobile Me. Basic video editing could also be included.
Nike+ support. Added to the latest iPod Touch there's no reason not to expect this.
Compass. A digital compass will enable turn by turn GPS.
FM Radio. ;no more streaming radio over GPRS/3G/Wifi.
OLED Screen. better screen and battery life.
Battery life. lots of improvements to optimise battery life and extend it by 1.5x

There's also a rumor going around that Vodafone UK are prepping for launch of the iPhone on their network. This means that in the UK O2 and Vodafone will be selling the iPhone and also opens up the possibliy of existing O2 customers migrating to the Vodafone network. No news on T-mobile UK joining in yet.

Can't wait to get my hands on one.

AppStore apps won't launch on iPhone 3.0 - fixed

2009-05-16T09:39:00.000+01:00

Came across a strange issue today. Yesterday my iPhone running 3.0 beta 5 was playing up. It was as if the clock and battery had been screen captured and were appearing under existing icons with the wrong time/level. Bizarro.

Anyway, I tried to reboot, it wouldn't start up giving me the apple logo. I hard reset and it came back saying "iPhone activated".

Once it was back none of my 3rd party apps would launch. They would just startup and quit immediately.

The fix is surprisingly simple. Log into Appstore and install ANY app. Launch it to test then launch the apps that were crashing, they should work.

HOWEVER you must do this in all iTunes accounts you have or any apps installed from other accounts / stores won't work. I did this in my UK and US account and all working fine now.

Mophie Air jacket initial thoughts

2009-05-04T21:46:00.001+01:00

I ordered a Mophie Air Jacket case earlier this year and finally last week it arrived.

The air jacket is a case for an iPhone 3G that not only protects the phone but acts a a battery charger to increase standby and usage times. Mophie claim it adds 270 hours of standby, around 5 hours of Internet use and up to 9 hours of talk time. Audio and video is boosted to 20 and 6 hours respectively. All of this is in addition to the built in battery.

The Air Jacket is fitted in two parts that come together to form a case around the phone. A switch turns the case on and off, there is a mini proprietory USB connector for charging and space for headphones, camera and phone buttons.

The first thing I noticed when opening up the packaging is how big this thing is. You don't fully appreciate the size from the Mophie web site but it is thick and turns the iPhone into a sizable device.

The finish is smooth and glossy not matt or textured. Personally I think that's a mistake as it'll very quickly get scratched. A matt and textured finish would have been better.

The case isn't a battery extenders but essentially a charger. The idea is you use up your iPhone battery then turn on the case and it charges the phone. You can of course use it whilst it's charging.

Mophie make a big deal of the fact that it comes fully charged and so I was keen to see how this worked out.

Today I used it for the first time and switched it on when my phone powered down with zero battery left. The charge indicator kicked in and the phone started charging.

Disapointingly an hour later it was dead and the phone had about 25% charge which quickly ran out.

Overall not a good first test so I'm charging now and hope to try it again in the next few days.

First impressions have not been good but I hope to retest. What I would say though is that I'd happily have half the boosted power if it could slim down by 50%.

Will post another update once I can test again.

How in app purchase in iPhone 3.0 could make trial apps possible

2009-05-04T10:11:00.001+01:00

Up to now, the iPhone AppStore has not offered the ability to trial applications. This has meant that the only way to try out an app has been to buy it leading to some negative reviews in the case of apps that don't deliver on their claims.

Authors have got around the issue by developing "lite" versions of their apps. These are free versions that offer cut down features but enable users to try before they buy.

The downside to this approach is that there are lots of duplicate apps in the Appstore and you can't upgrade your lite version - you have to install again.

This could all change however with iPhone 3.0 and it's new "in app purchase" feature. Designed as a way to offer authors a way of charging for additonal modules, levels or features, this could actually solve the trial app issue.

Basically all an author has to do is build an app where certain features are locked away leaving the app itself as a free download. If the user wants to unlock these features they buy them in the app itself which unlocks the full features of the application.

Hey presto, a fully workable trial app model.

Congratulations @markpick, winner of a new iPod Nano!

2009-05-01T13:06:00.002+01:00

As promised I ran my Twiveaway campaign and today I hit the button to generate a Winner and the name that came up was Twitter user @markpick.

Mark, you're the winner of the competition and a new iPod Nano 8gb will be on it's way to you as soon as you let me know your delivery details AND your colour choice. I'll order it and let you know when it's on it's way.

How to add grouping, stacks in Tweetie and other Twitter clients

2009-04-11T13:39:00.010+01:00

This trick is something I came up with today after trying out the "Tweetstack" iPhone app. I couldn't get that working on 3.0 OS so got thinking on how I could achieve something similar using Twitter Search.

In order to do this you need a Twitter client that supports searching and saving searches so I'm using Tweetie. Next get familiar with http://search.twitter.com and understand how to use the advanced page and how to enter keywords/commands DIRECTLY into the search bar. You'll need to be able to use commands like "from:" plus operators like OR and AND so play with search to try out different queries.

Finally if you can't save searches under a separate name you ideally need to prefix them with something that won't get found by the search tool so you can quickly access them.

Using this simple technique you can have saved searches or "stacks" that could show:-

1. tweets from specific groups of users you follow
2. tweets from users you don't follow but want to see what they are up to
3. tweets from users you want to help who are asking questions
4. tweets from friends/family who may be feeling down/negative and you'd like to help

Here's a simple example:-

groupname1 OR FROM:user1 OR FROM:user2 AND ?

In this example, I'm looking for tweets ONLY from @user1 or @user2 that contain a question mark. I'm also prefixing with a name I KNOW will now appear on twitter. This is really so that your result has a prefix you can recognise to click on. (if you can save search results under a separate name then no need for this)

Want to know what I'm tweeting about and what responses I'm getting then use this:-

groupname2 OR FROM:jkneen OR TO:jkneen

and you can add more FROM and TO parameters along with OR, AND etc to add more people to the timeline. This means you can see whole conversations between groups of users!

All I do now is save that query in Tweetie and bingo, I have a "stack" of tweets from specific people asking a question.

Found your own custom queries for creating useful stacks? Post a comment!

Have fun!

Win a brand new 8gb iPod Nano through Twitter

2009-04-10T17:11:00.006+01:00

I'm giving away a brand new iPod Nano 8gb model (winner chooses the colour) and all you have to to take part is this:-

Step 1: retweet this EXACT message on Twitter. Simply copy and paste the text below and post it to your Twitter account. If you don‘t have a Twitter account, you‘ll need to get one at http://
www.twitter.com

RT @jkneen is giving an 8g iPod Nano to one lucky follower. Follow @jkneen and retweet this msg to take part! http://tinyurl.com/5jfpdd

Step 2: Follow me on Twitter. You can follow me by ensuring you are logged into your Twitter account, visit this link and click FOLLOW.

That‘s it! As soon as you complete both of these steps, you'll be taking part in the giveaway and will have a chance to win a brand new 8gb Ipod Nano!

Closing date is May 1st 2009. One winner will be selected who meets the criteria and will be able to choose their Nano colour!

Neat progress bar indicator inside IE icon on Windows 7 taskbar

2009-04-03T16:50:00.003+01:00

Noticed a neat little feature today whilst downloading an update to VMWare Workstation. I suddenly noticed the IE8 icon in the Task bar was partly filled in a green background. Turns out it's an indicator for the download window and gradually fills in as the download progresses. Nice touch.

Setup a second calendar on iPhone 3.0 using Caldav

2009-04-01T10:09:00.002+01:00

iPhone 3.0 brings Caldav support allowing you to run multiple calendars and view them individually or together in a single view.

This is ideal if you have your primary calendar for work (on Exchange for example) and your personal calendar with Google. Now you can see all entries across them at the same time whilst accessing each individually.

This article has a great description of how to setup Caldav for Google and it works great. Using this technique I can run two seperate Calendars on the same phone.

iPhone 3.0 Beta 2 released, fixes galore but no easy upgrade

2009-04-01T00:43:00.004+01:00

Just before April 1st Apple managed to squeeze in their 2nd beta release in March of the coveted iPhone 3.0 OS which is hoping to see public release in June/July this year.

Beta 1 was well received a few weeks ago with reports of Youtube failing for some, lag and incompatibility with a few existing apps like Facebook.

Since that early previews of copy and paste working, spotlight etc have had us eagerly awaiting an updated beta.

I've only played with Beta 2 for a short time tonight but already I've noticed it's speedier, bugs with Maps have been corrected and my blue tooth headset using A2DP now works without skipping.

The only real issue with these updates so far is that they don't like updating over existing installs. Even my Beta 2 update didn't work properly after trying to restore backup settings - YouTube failed again.

So, my advice? Fresh install each time will see you right.

Skype for iPhone is out and allows Voice over 3G, for some at least

2009-03-31T18:38:00.003+01:00

Skype for iPhone hit the Appstore today and is oncourse to be one of the most downloaded apps from the Appstore. The iPhone version is billed as allowing iPhone owners to make VOIP calls over Wifi but those of us running the 3.0 beta have found a hidden feature, VOIP over 3G.

Typically a carrier or phone manufacturer will control how their implementation of the OS will work and what features it will enable. The raw OS will have all kinds of neat features like tethering (where you can link your phone to your laptop to share Internet connection) or VOIP protocols such as VOIP over Wifi/3G. The carrier/phone configuration or carrier OS build usually activates or deactivates these features.

When it comes to Apple and Beta software, it's a little different. The iPhone 3.0 software allows tethering out of the box and many people have had this working already. It's also apparently possible to make Skype calls over 3G on OS 3.0, something pre 3.0 users are unable to do right now.

Clearly O2 (in the UK) and other iPhone operators around the world are going to have their say in the form of the Carrier configuration in the final release and this will determine what we'll be able to do with the iPhone with 3.0 software. Will they allow tethering? Will they allow you to make calls over the 3G network as part of your unlimited data plan?

Time will tell but for now, some of us can enjoy a typical Skype call over 3G that starts "Hello, Hello, Can you hear me? Hello? I can hear you, can you hear me?"

Windows 7 Build 7068 installed, just about.

2009-03-31T16:36:00.004+01:00

I updated my notebook today from 7000 to 7068 and things didn't go smoothly. What follows is a brief run down of what went wrong and how I fixed it.

BTW The trick in all of this is not to panic. As long as you can boot up and login to your machine you can fix most issues relating to user profiles.

During the upgrade it took a LONG time to migrate the user settings and on completion I realised that during one of the required reboots something off had happened with my user profile and it had been migrated to a temporary profile. This is a common problem which I've talked about before.

On logging in everything *seemed* ok but a few apps didn't launch properly, and needed registration data again. It was only when I noticed the file path to some downloaded apps I realised Windows 7 had moved my user profile root folder from c:\users\jkneen to c:\users\temp and not everything had come across.

Luckily this is easy to fix, just takes a bit of time and care. I used Beyond Compare to compare the two folders, eliminating anything that's identical and showing me JUST the differences. I then sync'd over any new files back to the jkneen side. I figured since TEMP had been copied from JKNEEN all my settings would still be there.

After ensuring all folders were back over, it was a case of transferring the NTUSER.dat file over and this was achieved using RegEdit and exporting the HKCU tree out to a new hive file, overwriting the original.

Finally I changed the profile root folder from c:\users\temp to c:\users\jkneen and logged off and back on. Once I'd made sure everything was ok I used Beyond Compare again to delete any identical folders from the temp profile folder and cleared out the old root folder completely.

All settings, files and application states were restored and I'm now back up and running

Phew!

Allowing multiple Twitter users to post to one Twitter account

2009-03-19T12:07:00.003Z

Here's neat trick which allows you to have several contributors posting into a single Twitter account without giving away the main accounts username and password.

I've managed to set this up on the BNILondon account at http://twitter.com/bnilondon

Here's how to do it:-

1. Setup your main account
2. Get the usernames of all Twitter users you wish to post
3. Think of a Hashtag to use, we chose #bnilondon
4. go to Twitter search and setup a search for your hash tag, plus specify each username in the "from user" box e.g. user1 OR user2 etc
5. Check the search results ( you may need to post a test message)
6. Grab the RSS feed from the link on the results page

Now

7. Go to www.twitterfeed.com and create an account
8. Create a new feed, enter your target account username and password
9. Specify the feed URL and turn links OFF
10. Set to 30 minute updates and save

Now all you do is post a tweet from an authorised account (one that was specified in the "from user" part of the search) and iwth the hastag you chose and voila, your posts are placed into the target account.

Tada!

First few weeks with the Samsung 256 SSD

2009-03-04T01:26:00.008Z

It's been a couple of weeks or so since I replaced the 250gb Sata drive in my Vaio SZ7 with a Samsung 256gb SSD and discovered the benefits of solid state storage.

Samsungs SSD has become popular over the last few weeks with Twitter buzzing about it especially the recent video showing 24 SSDs in a RAID array with over 2gb/s read speed!

Even with my meager single drive I've seen incredible benefits from switching to SSD

Speed - undoubtedly the biggest benefit. Access times are incredible with the computer booting 4-5 times quicker and most apps loading instantly or within a couple of seconds. Outlook 2007 flies with an SSD and boots instantly with fast searching and switching between folders in my 4gb offline storage file.
Power consumption - I've seen significant improvement in my battery life with the SSD. No moving parts means no motors spinning which means less power, less heat
Runs cooler - with no moving parts and less power draw, the wrist rest of my laptop (where the HD is located) runs cool, no heat whatsoever and that means the fans are running less so less noise, less heat, less battery drain.

There's still some confusion with regard to defragmentation and SSDs with some saying it's not required due to the zero seek times whilst others claim that SSD performance WILL degrade over time without optimisation. I'm currently running Diskeeper which is supposed to detect SSD drives ands uses an "optimisation" method over instead of traditional defragmentation to organise free space in a way that reduces degradation.

With Apple quietly introducing 256 gb SSDs into their Macbook and Pro line up it's going to be a very interesting few months. SSDs will come down in price and we'll see many more new notebooks with SSD as standard.

If you can afford to shell out on one now my advice is go for it - you'll be amazed at the difference and won't be disapointed despite having to live on bread and jam for a month or so ;)

Windows 7 performance tools offer troubleshooting tips

2009-03-02T18:38:00.003Z

Whilst playing around with some settings today in the Performance score screen of Windows 7 I clicked "Advanced" and was presented by the screen above which offers some tips and advice on performance issues. It's not showing any entries now BUT any performance slow downs are shown in the top section e.g. "Drivers caused Windows to resume slowly" and you get info on the particular driver in question.

Very neat and useful for troubleshooting.

256gb Samsung SSD installed and wow!

2009-02-23T17:25:00.005Z

UPDATE: Windows Experience Index rated my old drive 2.0, the SSD came in at 5.9

Today I upgraded my Vao SZ7s 250gb SATA drive (5400rpm, standard unit that came with it) to a 256gb Samsung SSD. I bought the drive off eBay new and it arrived from the US this morning after tracking it all week on the USPS web site (great service).

Anyway, I used Acronis Migrate Easy to do the job which took about 5 hours to clone the drive it's OS (Windows 7) and all my data, about 190gbs in all.

Replacing the drive is fairly easy on the Vaio SZ and involves removing the keyboard and trackpad area so you can get at the drive. Swapping over the units took minutes and I was quickly booting up again on the SSD without any problems.

Initial findings/thoughts:-

1. The drive is VERY light. So light in fact that when it arrived I was worried I'd been duped as there was no way the package weighed enough. It feels like it weighs half as much as the drive I took out which feels cumbersome in comparison.

2. Write times (copying folders) were averaging at 150mb/s instead of 24mb/s on the original drive.

3. Boot time into a usable Windows 7 desktop took less than 30 seconds compared to just over 2 minutes on the old drive. (NB. 2 minutes is from typing in my Bios password to having a *usable* system having had all boot up apps loaded)

4. I didn't compare Hibernation properly (my bad) but from experience it would normally take well over a minute to hibernate. On the SSD it was 33 seconds to hibernate 3gb RAM and 27 seconds to be back to a usable desktop.

5. Applications FLY with this drive. Outlook loads, presents outlook today and is usable in a few seconds (typically it could take up to 30 seconds to load and be usable) and Word/Excel load almost instantly from boot-up. Visual Studio loads in just a few seconds and the whole system feels snappy and responsive.

6. There is a bizarre sensation that you can "hear" the drive when you see the drive light flash. Of course you can't, it's just a fake memory but it's really odd to have a completely silent laptop. I can barely hear the fans.

Overall I am seriously impressed with this unit. I really couldn't have expected it to perform as well as this.

Currently running without Readyboost or eBoostr because frankly they can't compete with over 150mb per second read times! (Having said that I'll run eBoostr with a RAM cache as that can't hurt).

Amazing!

256gb SSD on it’s way

2009-02-17T18:05:00.001Z

Pleased at my purchase of a new Samsung 256gb SSD which is now on it’s way courtesy of USPS.

The Samsung is a new 256gb Drive that has read/write speeds of around 200 and 160 MBps which is pretty damn fast.

I’m planning to replace the 250gb HD I have in my Vaio with this monster hoping that’ll I’ll see some major improvements in boot up, general performance, hibernation and battery life.

I’ll post my findings.

Deploy single EXEs in .NET

2009-02-17T17:59:00.001Z

Whilst developing my "Readyboost Monitor” application I found a neat features of .NET Reactor in which it processes the executable taking any dependant DLLs etc and packaging them inside the exe. The result is a single exe that can be deployed on a machine with the .NET runtime installed which is pretty common these days.

ReadyBoost monitor tool

2009-02-17T17:45:00.002Z

UPDATE: download the Windows 7 version from http://www.drop.io/readyboostmonitor

I’m currently playing with a new app I’ve developed based on some existing code that monitors and reports on ReadyBoost usage.

The original app was beyond basic and didn’t work in Windows 7. I fixed that issue and reworked it to add balloon notifications, a tool tray icon, a moving graph and more useful information. It’s presented a bit like the Windows Task manager.

I’m in the process of putting the finishing touches to it and then will be posting it here.

Solved a problem using my own Blog!

2009-02-01T15:00:00.003Z

Weird. Having installed Windows 7 I was using Sage Line 50 to fire off some invoices and came across the dreaded Printer problem which can plague the Sage PDF Printer Driver. Quick search resulted in my own blog entry which I tried and hey presto, it worked!

Windows 7 , Readyboost and Low CPU usage

2009-01-27T19:55:00.007Z

After setting up a 15gb readyboost cache on a Memory Stick Duo I've noticed that my CPU usage in Windows 7 drops significantly. Windows 7 already has better resource management than Vista but it seems using a large Readyboost cache significantly reduces hard disk access and CPU usage.

Here's a screenshot of my Task manager and the CPU usage hit 3% (it was 2% at one point but I couldn't grab the screenshot)

This is the lowest I have ever seen in CPU usage on Windows and I'm frequently seeing the "System Idle Process" around 95%, a significant increase from Vista and XP.

This is a remarkable improvement on Vista. I'm noticing far less disk activity, Performance monitor is showing it and apps and files are loading fast - the system feels snappy and responsive.

Tomorrow I'm expecting delivery of a 32gb SSD Expresscard which I intend to test out as a) a replacement or additional readyboost device (giving 64gb uncompressed) OR moving my paging file to the SSD to see if that will improve performance.

I'll post my findings here.

Gadgets not working in Windows 7 Beta

2009-01-27T18:26:00.001Z

If you've suddenly found that Desktop Gadgets (the old Vista Sidebar) won't work in Windows 7 Beta it's probably because you've set UAC to not notify (read: pester) you!

Here's the fix

Readyboost improvements in Windows 7

2009-01-27T17:39:00.004Z

Just noticed that in Windows 7 it's possible to have multiple devices as Readyboost drives AND increase the size of Readyboost Cache files.

You can see here I'm using Memory Stick slot built in to the SZ71 with a 16gb card formatted with exFat.

Another new feature is the "Dedicate this device to Readyboost" which isn't explained but could offer improved performance by not assuming the card/drive would be used for other activity e.g. Photos/Media.

Windows 7: VS2005 webdev stops debugging on launch

2009-01-27T14:38:00.003Z

Just a quick one, if you're having this problem. Symptom is to launch a debug session in VS2005 in under Windows 7 running IE8 and the Webdev server halts leaving the browser up, unable to connect and debugging has stopped. Works fine if you set the web site to not launch a browser and navigate manually using say, Firefox.

The problem seemed to be down to multiple iExplore.exe instances running, not sure why. Stopped them all and relaunched and it works fine.

Improve Outlook performance by taking it Offline

2009-01-27T10:47:00.006Z

If you use Outlook with Exchange and find it slow and sluggish at times, you'll notice a performance improvement by switching to "Offline" mode. Just click in the bottom right of the Outlook Window and select "Offline".

This will break the connection between the Exchange server and Outlook and switch you to a mode that can check periodically for e-mail (much like a POP3/IMAP account).

To configure your send/receive settings select from the menu Tools/Send Receive/Send Receive Settings/Define Send Receive Groups and configure your offline connection settings.

Once you've done that you'll have e-mails checked regularly BUT you'll find that using the Outlook interface, switching messages etc will be much snappier.

Windows 7 installed, works!

2009-01-23T18:12:00.005Z

Yesterday I took caution, threw it firmly at the wind and upgraded my Vaio SZ71 from Vista SP2 Beta to Windows 7 Beta. Oh and I didn't image my drive first.

OK I'm not completely crazy. I did have a backup of my files courtesy of Carbonite and I figured if it went wrong then it would be a great excuse for a rebuild. I also didn't jump straight in but researched a lot of reports of upgrades, clean installs etc. The clear message I was getting back from Google and Twitter was that Windows 7 was faster, easier to install, run, manage than Vista.

So with my heart in my mouth I fired up the installer and went for it. The first thing I'll say is that if you're planning to upgrade from Vista, start EARLY. My upgrade took several hours, and around 3 reboots and the progress bars are useless sticking on 31% for an hour. At one point I left it running and went to bed, waking up in the early hours (we have a 3 week old baby) when I could complete the install.

Anyway, first Windows 7 runs a compatibility check. The good news for me was the only items it found was a couple of network drivers (linked to Windows Mobile, now redundant) and a warning that SQL Server 2000 may not work. Regardless it let me continue (and BTW SQL was and is working fine as it was on Vista which also warned about running it!)

Once the install started the first stage was copying files and gathering settings and files. What goes on next is a LONG time of gathering settings, then a reboot into a minimalist Windows 7 setup where more copying is done. There's very little configuration to do as the installer simply upgraded all my current features but this process takes a while and it rebooted about 3 times.

Fast forward several hours later and finally I was logging in for the first time to Windows 7 rebooted and seeing my files, documents, applications where I left them.

My first thought was that I'd made a mistake mainly because performance seemed sluggish but it turns out that was down to Windows Search which had deleted my index and was rebuilding it. I also had some issues with Stardock skinning apps (Windowblinds) and so removed them (apparently there is an update soon for Windows 7).

Once I'd removed some apps, run Windows Update and patched the system with some updates I was up and running in Windows 7. The first thing I did was check the device manager to find that ALL my devices were working fine - no driver issues, great news. My key applications also launched including Visual Studio, SQL Server Enterprise Manager and Sage Line 50, more plus points. So far so good.

It hasn't all been roses and there have been a few minor issues:-

1. Blank Icons. My taskbar and Start menu icons turned into white "paper" icons. Shortcuts could be manually fixed but exes were a no go. They all worked fine though. The solution? I tried deleting the icon cache file, didn't work. The solution was to use the culprit that caused it, Iconpackager from Stardock! I simply reinstalled it, selected default set, hit apply and presto, all fixed.

2. Locked profile. This is an old Vista problem I've blogged about this in Vista - the same solution worked fine in Windows 7.

3. AVG8 bluescreen. Trying to configure and uninstall AVG8 (which was using up 80% CPU) it crashed. I uninstalled and downloaded a Win7 safe version - all fine although I've turned off "Resident Shield" which should be called "take up all your CPU scanning files you haven't asked me to - Shield"

Other than that, I've had no major problems and Windows 7 is incredibly stable - it doesn't feel like a beta, more like a release candidate (RC).

Here's what I've noticed so far:-

1. Speed. It's faster, without a doubt and remember this is an upgrade not a clean install (which would always give a false sense of speed improvement). Menus are snappier, Aero is faster, the whole system feels slicker and more like (dare I say it) OSX.

2. Eye Candy. There's more of it, it's noticeable and it works! I thought the "superbar" would be a gimmick and was dubious but it works. Think of the OSX dock but without the growing/shrinking. It's more usable, showing recent files, allowing you to switch between instances and windows quickly and preview windows. I only wish you could do more theming other than changing colours and backgrounds!

3. Better notifications. The old tooltray has gone, replaced with a more useful and configurable notification area. YOU choose what to display and when. Very nice.

4. Friendler. Interestingly, despite the fact you can't upgrade from XP, only Vista (where "Programs and Features is the wording"), Windows 7 introduces both "Programs and Features" and "Add/Remove Programs" making it easier for XP users to find things. Quite a few hidden features have had their names changed, even "Task Manager" is now "Start Task Manager"

5. It's pretty complete. So far I haven't found anything that doesn't work other than Help which is usual with Betas. This OS feels more like a late Beta or at least RC1

6. Readyboost improvements. Whilst they haven't lifted the 4gb limit for readyboost, they *have* allowed you to plug in multiple USB drives/Memory sticks and use them at the same time. You also have an option to "Exclusively use" a card - I'm not sure what implication that has.

7. Wifi improvements. I'm on a half meg connection right now and Vista would struggle with video like Youtube, it would skip and stop all the time. After the upgrade I fired up Youtube and watched videos from start to finish. No skipping, no stalling - clearly something has changed re Wifi drivers/performance.

I'm still playing and will report back with any findings but the initial impression is that this is a release candidate masquerading as a Beta. If Microsoft had any sense at all they'd be prioritising the launch of Windows 7 ASAP and forget Vista SP2!

Why we won't see Flash on the iPhone anytime soon

2009-01-22T09:53:00.004Z

Since the iPhone launched with mobile Safari a lot of people have been asking about Flash support and with each subsequent firmware update it's discussed, wished for but doesn't materialise.

Rumors are that Adobe have it written but Apple won't allow claiming it would be a resource hog. So what's the big deal with flash and why won't Apple really allow it?

The answer is that it could cost Apple money.

It's important to remember that Flash is much more than just wizzy gimmicks on web sites. Flash is a development platform and has been for some time. With the release of Adobe Air we've seen it mature into an even stronger contender as a solid, cross platform development framework.

Regardless of Air though the basic Flash engine can be used to develop some sophisticated application solutions that are graphically gorgeous, and easy to install.

If Flash support is added to the iPhone it would have to be limited in some way to prevent Application developers doing the obvious - using basic web pages to act as a holding page to a more sophisticated Flash application. Even worse for Apple, allowing Flash from the Home page *could* allow apps to be bookmarked and run almost naively.

Imagine if Flash as the ability to run basic API calls like Safari web apps are able to, we could see a range of flash applications appearing that could be downloaded directly to the iPhone into a special "Flash player" app where they could be launched from and could be designed to look and feel like a native application.

Take this further and Adobe could have their *own* Appstore which allows them to sell Flash based applications through a native app which could also store and run the applications presenting the user with a Home screen like replacement.

The possibilities are endless.

Nope, I don't think we'll be seeing Flash support anytime soon and if we do it's going to be severely limited to running in a browser and with basic animation support.

I can't see Apple openly letting Adobe stick a competitive development environment on their little baby.

Comments welcome.

Autoresponders, good or bad?

2009-01-20T11:52:00.002Z

I've been reading about certain faux pas when it comes to using Twitter and one was specifically about the use of Auto responders.

Anyone using e-mail clients like Outlook and services like Exchange will be familiar with setting up out of office replies and other responders. Social networks like Ecademy allow you to send an auto response when someone hits your profile but are auto responders a useful tool or annoyance and could they work on Twitter?

Specifically an auto responder could automatically e-mail someone that follows you OR even someone that unfollows you but how it works is quite key.

The obvious approach is to either:-

1. Snapshot a users friends list and cache into a DB regularly, compare subsequent snapshots to see who has been added, left etc and respond accordingly to the differences.

2. Write a robot that responds to mail notifications, pick up twitter follow emails, parse them and post a response. This doesn't solve the unfollows however.

If you needed both then option 1 is the best one, otherwise option 2 is a quick win for follow responders. Oh and a service like this would need your Twitter credentials to be able to work properly so that could be a problem.

The challenge with this service however is making the auto responders look personalised.

One way around this is to produce something that will group followers and unfollowers together so that instead of:-

"@another, thanks for following"

"@whatsisface, thanks for following"

"@lastbutnotleast, thanks for following"

etc we end up with:-

"@another, thanks for following"

"Welcome @whatsisface, @someoneelse and @lastbutnotleast, thanks for following."

You could also vary the surrounding text for both single and multiple follows making the look more natural AND time delay the responses so they don't happen immediately but at an interval between say immediate and 24 hours. All of this will help it look more like you are responding and mix in these responses with your normal tweets.

It's just a thought for now, any comments welcome.

First impressions of Encamp for iPhone

2009-01-14T10:47:00.001Z

Check out this post on Apresiphone for first impressions of Encamp, a new Basecamp native app for the iPhone. Very cool!

Twitter, generating revenue and APIs

2009-01-13T13:59:00.005Z

There's no doubt that Twitter is a huge web success story - a simple question of "What are you doing?" has got people and organisations talking to each other and has shown how news can travel faster through a social network than it can through the standard news channels.

The big question though is how will Twitter monetize their service in 2009?

The obvious choice is keyword based advertising much like Google adwords. By simply indexing Tweets advertisers could place targetted ads into someones Twitter timeline which would work on a pay-per-click model. Advertisers could sign-up, bid for clicks and create campaigns based on keywords.

It's relatively easy to implement this now within the current web interface but therein lies the problem. Alongside the Twitter web interface there's an API that developers use to interact with Twitter and there's a bunch of Twitter clients already available on multiple platforms so how do you monetize a service like Twitter AND support a developer API?

Charge developers.

Allow developers to use the API based on a one-off or regular, fixed price development cost. Charging based on usage wouldn't work as developers wouldn't be able to pass on these costs to the users. The problem here is that a fee is not going to make up for the lost ad revenue.

Integrate advertising INTO the API.

This could work integrating ads into the feed so they are picked up by the Twitter clients just like normal Tweet feeds. This could be done either through an API change and therefore client updates OR a hidden follower could be added to all users allowing it to be fed seamless into existing feeds without any API / client changes. Each tweet would have a link to the relevant advert URL and the position would be inserted by the API based on keywords of tweets in the feed timeline.

Whatever happens it's going to be very interesting to see how Twitter can generate revenue from the service without upsetting the userbase.

I don't expect Twitter to disappear anytime soon but the next Social web site is just around the corner and I have no doubt that if Twitter get this wrong then another service will soon popup that goes back to the basics of what we have now and that could attract users away, at least until it decides to build it's own revenue model eventually...

Mobrise for iPhone gets worse

2008-12-24T14:52:00.002Z

Mobrise, the Highrise interface for the iPhone gets worse with it's latest update - crashes galore http://is.gd/diZ3

Copy and Paste on iPhone - Pastebud almost solves it

2008-12-13T17:52:00.004Z

New post on Pastebud for iPhone

http://www.apresiphone.com/2008/12/copy-and-paste-on-iphone-pastebud.html

Improve system performance in Vista

2008-12-07T23:37:00.006Z

Periodically Vista takes on a mind of it's own. My hard disk light starts flashing away and my system slows down. Firing up Task Manager doesn't reveal the specific culprit but clicking on "Resource Monitor" in Task Managers Performance page and opening up the disk section reveals the culprit has to do with "System Volume information" which it turns out is the result of Vista System Restore. It's basically creating a checkpoint and apparently it runs on a scheduled task both daily at midnight OR when you start up.

The quickest solution to this is simply to turn off System Restore and your machine is suddenly usable again but this wasn't good enough for me - I like having System Restore checkpoints just in case.

I decided to do a quick check of the scheduled tasks (Control Panel / Administration) and this revealed the two triggers, one on system start up and one at midnight every night.

All I did was edit the daily task and turn off the enabled option. Now every time I boot up a snapshot will be taken OR I can take one manually. What I'll probably do however is configure the daily task to run say every 3 days at midnight AND ensure it doesn't run later if it didn't have time to run. This will ensure it doesn't interrupt me.

Hope it helps.

Vista SP2 Beta installed

2008-12-04T22:11:00.004Z

Decided to throw caution to the wind today and install a beta of SP2. Why? Well it didn't hurt installing the beta of SP1, in fact it actually *improved* my system and so far I've had a painless experience with SP2.

Installation was straight-forward, I used a registry hack to turn on the Windows Update installation and after a few minutes it was listed as an available update. In < 20 minutes the upgrade was done. I could have downloaded the standalone version from MSDN but decided that Windows Update would be easier and it was. So far no noticeable changes other than the version number. Performance *seems* better with things being snappier but I could be wrong. Since this is my primary machine I'll be posting any issues or benefits I find.

Update: Resuming from Suspend is very fast now with Vista instantly usable

"Ghoster" helps you concentrate?

2008-12-01T00:47:00.002Z

I remembered an application today for the Mac that was really cool and would dim any background windows so as to help you focus on the foreground.

Looking around for something for Windows I came across "Ghoster" which does just that. Launch it (no setup) and any foreground Window appears normally and everything else is dimmed.

Download it from here

AppleTV 2.3 update finally makes remote Volume buttons work

2008-11-23T23:52:00.001Z

It's been a long time coming but the new AppleTV 2.3 finally allows you to control the volume of your Apple TV (for Music initially). I've always been puzzelled why we had useless volume buttons on the Apple remote and it's refreshing that Apple have finally looked to make use of these.

Other updates are Video playlists (a godsend when you have 500+ movies on your device) and the ability to output Music via remote speakers from one Apple TV device.

With this update and the Remote application software for Touch and iPhone we're getting ever closer to having full Sonos capability at a fraction of the price.

Updated to iPhone 2.2, not bad

2008-11-23T23:19:00.001Z

iPhone firmware 2.2 brings a few new features, easier update and leaves us wanting for more

Read initial thoughts here

Latest Appstore reviews

2008-11-22T14:22:00.000Z

Check out the latest reviews of iPhone apps at http://www.apresiphone.com

Carbonite - superb backup software

2008-11-16T22:12:00.003Z

Up to now I've been using Connected, a product from Iron Mountain to backup my laptop during "idle" time, it's a great product and allows remote access to files through a web browser. The only issue is with Connected is it's space related and that means my 30gb space costs $75 per month.

Enter "Carbonite", a product that offers remote backup features but there's NO limit on space and the cost is around $50 per YEAR. Amazing. I installed the free trial a couple of days ago and it's superb.

Firstly it takes up way less CPU cycles than Connected and Mozy so your computer is still usable during the backup. Better still though every icon in your system gets a little indicator that tells you the backup status e.g. green is backed up so you can see quickly what files are backed up.

Another nifty feature is that you can open a backup drive icon from your desktop and browse your backup files, select one and then right click and click "restore" to recover it. Superb.

So far this product is great and whilst there is some concern in putting your faith in the "cloud" but at LEAST there's a backup somewhere!

Power Support Air Jacket - great case for iPhone

2008-11-11T14:47:00.001Z

I bought the black and clear case Air jacket cases an they are superb. Snug fit on the iPhone and protects it nicely from scrapes whilst adding almost no weight or appearing obvious oh and it comes with two screen protectors, one anti-reflective and one normal.

http://www.powersupportusa.com/products/iphone3G_airjack.php

Update your Facebook status from Twitter

2008-10-21T00:36:00.002+01:00

I tend to use Twitter for all my status updates because it's easy to access from my computer and phone and so to keep Facebook friends updated I sync my status from Twitter.

Firstly, you need a Twitter account so go to www.twitter.com and sign-up.

Next, add the http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/ app to your Facebook profile and set it up with your twitter account details.

That's it! Anytime you update twitter you update Facebook. Why? Well Twitter adds a whole host of services you can use like www.tweetlater.com (scheduled status updates). There's also other services like Jaiku and Pownce.

VMWare converter, best on external media

2008-10-21T00:03:00.002+01:00

VMWare Converter is a free application from VMWare that will "convert" a physical computer into a virtual one. Basically you can take a power hungry space eating box and transfer it with all software and settings to say, a USB hard disk and then carry it around with you. All you need then is a VMWare player on the hard drive and you can plug it in to almost any computer and boot up your virtual computer as if it was sitting there with blowing away with it's big old fan.

Very handy.

What I've found playing with the free converter app is it works best if you use an external drive so plug in a 100gb USB drive, fire up the converter and specify the drive as the output. You end up with a faster and more reliable "conversion" and you've instantly miniaturised your hardware and made it ultra portable.

I'm using it to backup/archive some old dev computers and make one particularly more portable so I can update certain projects etc on the move. The original computer is safe and sound and can be used to fall back on (or generate another VM if mine goes south) which is great.

The future is definitely virtualisation. Our laptops and computers will have hardware "layers" between them and the software and device drivers. You won't need to worry about upgrading, reinstalling etc. You'll just "transfer" your desktop VM to your new Laptop and hey presto! All your apps, settings, etc will be there.

Got to be the way forward.

Low on updates I know

2008-10-21T00:02:00.000+01:00

Follow me on Twitter for up to date stuff. Sorry that Blog posts have been lapse but have been very busy. I will do better, I will do better!

55 chinese lanterns launched tonight

2008-10-14T00:16:00.001+01:00

It was a nice night tonight so we decided to launch a load of lanterns
from spencer park in wandsworth. .

We'd bought 200 or the buggers two years ago for our wedding but
weren't allowed to launch them.

So now and again we launch a few and tonight it ended up being five
and a half boxes! Got quite a few people came over from a mile or so
away to see what was going on and a few thought it was ufos.

So if you saw 50 or so lights over London tonight it was us!

(only 150 left to launch)

Impressed with Streetvan

2008-10-01T23:49:00.003+01:00

I signed up for "Streetvan" today, the younger sibling to "Streetcar", a pay as you go car rental service in the UK. I have to say that the web site is superb. The interface and design is clean and easy to use, the booking process is slick and intuitive oh and it's not written in Ruby or some other funky language - it's good old .NET ;)

Dexter

2008-09-22T20:20:00.000+01:00

If you fancy a slightly different type of US TV Show then try "Dexter". Season 1 was superb and season 2 is living up to the same standard. Season 3 starts next week in the US.

Great idea and the characters are brilliant especially Dexters sister. Superb.

How not to use powerpoint

2008-09-16T20:09:00.001+01:00

This sketch is great and is so accurate on the way people use or misuse powerpoint

http://www.5min.com/Video/How-NOT-To-Use-PowerPoint-14562160

The brits just love a freebie, the latest the £20,000 fuel giveaway

2008-09-05T16:55:00.002+01:00

In a story reported here Electronic Arts are giving away up to £20,000 in free fuel to promote a new console game that uses fuel as a currency. The result? A hell of a lot of motorists hit a petrol station in North London to claim it causing traffic jams and havoc galore. Superb example of good marketing.

Personally I find it brilliant that people would drive all that way in their car and burn fuel, wait for what could be hours to get a chance to fill up, then fill up (or not) with their £40 of fuel (or less if they didn't use enough up getting there) and THEN drive their free fuel home!

Brilliant!

Google Chrome - first impressions

2008-09-02T20:03:00.008+01:00

Googles new browser, Google Chrome is now available here.

The download and installation is quick and simple and it automatically offers to import all Firefox bookmarks, passwords, toolbar links etc. Nice.

The design is clean and the use of tabs above the main window is fairly unique. It also feels fast to launch and use.

Initial problems are to be expected (it's another Google Beta after all), here's a few things I noticed:-

Doesn't like Skins. If you're using WindowBlinds or a skinning application you may have a problem with it. Exclude it or turn off skinning to get it looking correct.
Some WYSIWYG editors don't work. FCK for example doesn't although the blogger rich editor works.
Scrolling very jumpy compared to Firefox and IE (when using Trackpad scrolling)
No plug-ins / extensions. This will be the killer. The strength of Firefox is the add-ons and themes and the developer network behind it.
Icognito mode. Great if you want to surf porn or hide what you're doing, not good for hiding you from servers so be careful!
Create application shortcuts. This is a nice feature. Go to gmail (or any site for that matter), select this option and it'll create a shortcut on your desktop, start menu etc and launches gmail likes it's an app.
Rendering engine like Firefox/Mozilla. Outlook web access and other rich apps look like Firefox.
Logmein is crap in Chrome - slow and unusable. GotoMyPC is fine (launches a seperate window and is not embedded)

Overall Chrome looks promising is it too little to late and what's in it for Google? where are the annoying ads?

Domains for sale

2008-09-02T01:34:00.005+01:00

Following on from the sale of pocketlife.com earlier in the year I've been going through my other pocket domains and though I'd list them here in case anyone is interested ;)

1. "Pocket" domains

pocketdatabase.com
pocketdatabases.com
pocket-database.com
pocket-database.net
pocket-databases.com
pocket-databases.net

pocket-domains.com
pocket-domains.net
pocketdomains.co.uk
pocketdomains.com
pocketdomains.net

pocketapplications.com
pocketcontacts.com

pocketfreeware.co.uk
pocketgames.net
pockethardware.com

pocketlife.co.uk
pocketlife.net

pocketmessages.com
pocketmessages.net
pocketmessaging.com
pocketmessaging.net
pocketorganisers.net

pocketsalesman.co.uk
pocketsalesman.com
pocketsalesman.net

pocketsql.co.uk
pocketsql.com

pocketstickies.com

pocketwapsite.co.uk
pocketwapsites.co.uk

pocketwebsite.co.uk
pocketwebsite.com
pocketwebsites.co.uk
pocketwebsites.com

pocketword.com
pocketwords.com

2. "Work" domains

workfaster.com
workbetter.com
workharder.com
workeasier.com

3. "Anywhere" domains

edit-anywhere.co.uk
edit-anywhere.com
edit-anywhere.net
editanywhere.co.uk
editanywhere.net

ftp-anywhere.co.uk
ftp-anywhere.com
ftp-anywhere.net
ftpanywhere.co.uk
ftpanywhere.com
ftpanywhere.net

update-anywhere.co.uk
update-anywhere.com
update-anywhere.net
updateanywhere.co.uk
updateanywhere.net

Playing with CodeSmith and .netTiers

2008-08-31T01:34:00.003+01:00

Not that much to say other than if you're sick of working developing data layers yourself then check out CodeSmith 5 and the .netTiers templates. It doesn't take long to get to grips with and generates workable data layers you can implement into your project AND regenerate whenever you want which is great for Agile projects.

The article I started on is here and introduces you to the concept.

My only issue is with codesmiths "savings calc" which I think is flawed OR you should be earning way more on software development. Basically codesmith can generate the layers, the VS solution etc and as a result has a cute little function to show you how much time and money you've saved.

The problem is the initial DB I was working with had one table with one primary key/identity field and then username and password. I generated the data-layer and once complete checked the calculator and was told I'd saved over £40,000 worth of time.

So either the calculator is flawed and they are generating WAY too much code or I'm seriously missing something. Show me a client that would pay £40,000 for a DAL that accesses one table and inserts/edits/deletes and I'll show you one let down customer!

Anyway, Codecharge and .netTiers makes a great combination and the best thing is you can alter the DB and simply regenerate the datalayer into your existing project. This means you can be really agile, tweaking the DB as you go.

Apple, you can do better

2008-08-19T21:24:00.002+01:00

I posted an item over on ApresiPhone.com about problems with the latest 2.02 firmware update and it's clear Apple are in uncharted waters and don't know how to navigate when it comes to the iPhone and 3rd party applications.

Currently restoring my iPhone to factory settings and 2.02 and will reinstall and set-up everything from scratch.

Custom errors in classic ASP on IIS7 and Vista

2008-08-13T13:55:00.002+01:00

Spent a few hours the other day trying to solve an issue I had with Vista and IIS7 using Classic ASP. Basically I couldn't get the 404 error to redirect to a custom page. I tried various methods but all failed. IIS6 was simple IIS7 just didn't work.

The reason for doing this was to allow "friendly URLS" on IIS6. This is basically where you can have www.mysite.com/aboutus and it'll redirect to a dynamic URL. It's done using a meta tag that creates a friendly redirect AND using a custom 404 page.

In IIS6 this is easy to setup, just specify your 404.asp page, and any requests that aren't found are redirected to:-

404.asp?404;http://{HTTP_HOST}:{SERVER_PORT}{HTTP_URL}

with the {} values replaced obviously.

Your page then picks out the relevant URL and redirects accordingly.

Now in IIS7 I couldn't get this to work so eventually I found a work around.

1. Go to this page and download the URL Rewrite module
2. Install it and then against the site you want to edit go into the module and create a rule with the following settings:-

a. Requested URL "does not match the pattern"
b. "*.*" as the pattern (this assumes you are doing /aboutus and not /aboutus.htm)
c. Action = "redirect"
d. redirect URL = 404.asp?404;http://{HTTP_HOST}:{SERVER_PORT}{HTTP_URL}

(replace 404.asp with your asp page handling the redirect)

Leave everything else as default.

Once done you end up with a redirect that works just like the 404.asp custom page and you can now use the same code you might use on the live 2000/2003 server running IIS6 and it should work perfectly!

Hope it helps

Wall-E in Duplo in 2 minutes

2008-08-11T12:00:00.002+01:00

OK so it's not that great but I only had 2 minutes to do it and limited bricks - Could do much better with Lego :)

HDR-TG3E First impressions

2008-08-06T20:32:00.005+01:00

I picked up one of the new Sony Solid State Handycams this week and it's pretty damn good despite a few reviews I've read. It's bigger than I thought it would be from press shots etc but still smaller than my previous MicroDV based Sony camera which broke last year.

The TG3E is a completely solid state device using the Memory Stick Duo Pro format and thankfully comes with a 4gb stick which is enough for an hour of HD filming or a few hours of standard quality (SD) filming.

Battery life is difficult to judge right now as it usually takes a few charge cycles to get the battery to full capacity but on average a full charge is showing around 100 minutes or more of possible recording time.

The unit itself is covered about 90% in a Titanium case (the rest plastic) which makes it solid in the hand and feel like it's high quality. There's a sticker on it which states "Pure Titanium x Premium hard coating" which supposedly makes out it's impervious to every day knocks and scratches. Ironically within 2 hours of handling I managed to get a tiny scratch right next to this sticker so not that protected!

The TG3E is a HD device that can record in multiple resolutions from standard (non-HD quality) to full HD at 1920 x 1080i resolution which is pretty impressive. I bought a 16gb Duo stick for around 100 GBP that allows me to get 115 minutes of recording at full HD resolution and 234 minutes if I take it down a notch (still HD but not the full 1920 x 1080i resolution).

It has a quick start up and standby mode so it's very quick to open up and start recording (you just lift the screen and it fires up) and it's very easy to navigate and use the menu options.

Alongside the video camera there is a 4mp camera with flash that can take stills (and which uses the full zoom capabilities of the camera) and if you're recording video you can take a 2mp photo whilst recording).

Zooming is great and it's really easy to use because of the nicely placed buttons. There's even an EASY mode which takes care of everything for you and the face detection will work out contrast and exposure settings based on an individuals face. Once nice feature is the review mode will work by showing the faces of people in the videos making it easier to pick out footage for a certain person etc.

I've read a few reviews complaining about image quality but I haven't seen this yet. If you're in any doubt then just try it out in a shop to see what you think yourself.

I would have liked it a little smaller and compact (considering it's solid state) but when you consider the technology in this thing it's a pretty impressive piece of kit and at around 550 GBP it's a pretty good price too.

In the box you get the camera, a soft cloth case, AV cables (no HDMI cable) and USB cables to linking up to PCs and Mac. You also get a dock, power charger, the 4gb stick and software for uploading and transferring video and photos to your computer. The actual camera has a mini-HDMI socket for connecting up to an HD display and via it's standard AV can also provide a component connection.

Overal a solid, well built unit that performs well and hopefully I'll get to play with it over the next few weeks/months and post an update.

Hasbro shut down Scrabulous - miss the point completely

2008-07-29T18:12:00.002+01:00

So it seems Hasbro have had the Facebook application "Scrabulous" shut down in the US and Canada. Scrabulous is an application, written by developers based in India that lets you play Scrabble on-line against Facebook friends. It's a brilliant implementation of the game, easy to use and an opportunity Hasbro should have spotted a LONG time ago.

You would have thought someone at Hasbro would have thought "mmm, these guys have over 500 thousand daily active users, let's just buy them out, rebrand it as an official Scrabble application and hit the ground running with over half a million users"

Nope, some bright spark decided that it would be better to file a lawsuit to have it shut down in the US and Candada and then launch their own branded version that currently has 9,374 active daily users.

Scrabulous is still active in the UK for now, not sure how long it will last.

iPhones, O2 contracts and PAYG and iPhones are on us!

2008-07-18T00:18:00.005+01:00

Because of all the hassle trying to upgrade my old O2 account I ended up getting a new contract for my iPhone 3G. I was told at the time I could switch my old number over to it and finally this has now happened.

It isn't an easy process. Firstly you can't transfer one O2 contract to another so here's what I had to do:-

1. Bought the iPhone with a new no.
2. Contacted O2 re my old contract, asked it to be transferred to Pay as you go (PAYG)
3. About 24 hours later I have a PAYG SIM that works with my old contract no.
4. Now call O2 PAYG and ask for that number to be moved to my new contract
5. 24 hours later, a little problem with texts during the transition and it's now over

So I now have my OLD contract number on my new one, PAYG closed and credits attributed to the new contract account. yeah!

A few things that helped during all this:-

1. Call forwarding. Does what it says on the tin and forwards my call from my T-mob account

2. "Mobile Secretary" for Windows mobile. Free app that allows you to forward (and delete) SMS messages automatically. if they are in the address book of the target phone you can reply easily using the new phone

3. Patience of friends and family who put up with me telling them to use 3 different numbers!

These two things have made the transition very easy.

I'm now looking into options to add additional handsets for the rest of the team so we can all be mobile and connected.

Submit/Vote on iPhone features you want

2008-07-16T21:30:00.001+01:00

Head over to Apresiphone or directly here to submit feature requests and vote on ones posting by others.