Scott’s Spiel

I was, as always, excited at the prospect of another Apple keynote (even without Steve Jobs) yesterday. I was really hoping for some new iPhone hardware with some of those rumoured price cuts.

I was pretty pleased then when I heard the iPhone 3Gs announcement and even more pleased with the price drop of the current iPhone 3G down to $99.

This didn’t last long though when I found out how much of this price cut O2 will be passing on - a whole £2.

Not impressed, I want an iPhone but nothing has really changed following the keynote. Sigh.

Guardian Tech - which has been running an excellent WWDC coverage - has this wonderful reply from O2:

…you’re not going to find a better deal anywhere else.

Funny that, considering they are the only (real) carrier in the UK.

Geeky 02, apple, iphone, Rant

I recently upgraded my 02 contract to include unlimited internet browsing. While I wait to get a phone that can actually deal with this excellent bolt on I’m currently getting as much as I can out of it on my nokia 6500 classic.

Despite the problems with the phone it is quite capable of running a number of applications, including the Gmail mobile app. I downloaded it and for some strange reason the phone decides it belongs in the Games folder. Going to Menu -> Apps -> Options allows you to create a new folder (mine is “Web Apps”) and you can move the Gmail App in here (by going to Options when it’s selected from the Games folder).

After opening Gmail and logging in you’ll notice that it has a generally annoying habit of asking for network access time and time again (bascially whenever you want to do something). Thankfully there is a way around this. In the folder with the Gmail app selected, go again to the Options menu. Select Application access -> Communications -> Network access. This allows you to change how the program gains network access. For Gmail I’ve changed mine to Ask first time only which thankfully saves any of this trouble.

Other apps I’ve found so far which are worth downloading include Opera Mini and TinyTwitter. The above can also be applied to these and, especially for TinyTwitter, it helps a lot. I tried to get hold of jTwitter but kept getting 404s. Anyone able to help me here?

Geeky 6500, Geeky, mobile, phone, tips

I’ve been having a problem recently with my phone - a nokia 6500 classic. Bascially, when I bought the phone I quickly found out that the memory capacity is rather large. I quite enjoyed not having to empty my inbox out very often.

A good while later I have over 5000 text messages on my phone. This has really noticable complications, mainly trying to write a message when starting the phone. It took over 10 minutes for the messaging system to ready itself from a fresh switch on, which is quite annoying after a while!

When I tried to delete these messages using the Menu -> Messaging -> Delete Messages option my phone would do something rather weird and even more annoying. After a variable number of messages, usually around 30-40, it would freeze. Deleteing would not continue. If you cancel the deleting at this point the majority of the phone is fine however trying to access any messaging features doesn’t work.

Today I managed to find a solution. Instead of using the more obvious way of deleting messages I did this:

Menu -> Messaging -> Inbox -> Options -> Mark All. This returns to the inbox with a checkmark down the whole list. Now I go for Options -> Delete marked.

It did its usual on the first attempt although it stopped after about 130 messages. Plus, it returns to the inbox when if you cancel it at this point and doesn’t lock out messaging features. I tried again and within about 2 or 3 repeats I had completely cleared the inbox. The same process on the sent items box cleaned my whole phone of messages. It’s now much speedier to load.

I imagine someone will probabaly experience a similar problem (found someone with the slide version via google) so I hope this post will save a bit of stress.

Geeky Geeky, nokia, phone

I think we can all agree that it was a pretty average keynote? Certainly not one MacRumors will want to remember - I realised just how good their feed is when I had to go try and find something to replace it.

iPhoto looks great. I was using it earlier today and many of those new features would greatly improve how my library is managed. As for iMove and Garageband I can only really say “meh”.

iWork offers some needed improvements - EndNote integration in Pages is awesome and I’ll be looking into properly using it in the future.

My real surprise was in the Box Set which was almost aimed straight at me and offers quite a price reduction compared to the individual packages. I can’t exactly afford it right now but I’ll probably consider it in the next few months. My only concern is Snow Leopard may be out by that time, pushing the price higher or replacing it altogether.

I have a feeling everyone has a bit of a misconception about DRM free music. I understood it that it will be offered on iTunes Plus along side regular iTunes - no doubt at a hiked price. Certainly a step in the right direction though.

The lack of hardware upgrades, particularly for the Mini, is interesting. The next regular big Apple event would be the WWDC in June. Could we perhaps be seeing something between now and then that will give us something to get interested in? I hope so, but probably not.

Geeky apple, mac, macworld

At 4:30pm I arrive back home. My brother looks at his new game of Risk and subtly signals my participation.

At 5pm I realise the time in SF will be 9am. I pause the game to load MacRumors Live (they can’t spell properly but still have the best live coverage) expecting to see a sea of pre-keynote chatter.

At 5:05pm I realise it’s Monday. As I exclaim “idiot” my brother agrees. Play continues…

Now that I’ve actually got the correct day it gives me a chance to look at what could be coming out of the Moscone Center this afternoon.

There seems to be the general assumption that Schiller won’t be unveiling any big new products. Now that we know Jobs isn’t taking part due to health reasons I think that assumption is a bit premature. And yet, I still believe it to be true. Apple just hasn’t got the room for another iPhone sized product at the moment. I don’t think we’ll be seeing the iPhone nano today, even if it does exist.

Enhancements will probably be key. Upgrades to iTunes and the App store are almost definite with probably a bit of talk about the desktop line. I’d love to see some cloud computing discussion, possibly related to Snow Leopard? Most of that will be waiting for the WWDC I’d guess.

I’d also appreciate some price drops, although it is Apple so that is unlikely. I’ve still not upgraded to Leopard and simply don’t have any motivation to at the current price.

Away from Apple any sign of Chrome for the Mac would be a real surprise. I don’t think we’ll be getting that today though and no doubt any Safari competitor would not be featuring in an Apple keynote, regardless of who delivers it.

While we’ll still have the WWDC and no doubt other Apple controlled events I’m going to miss the suspense and rumour that the Macworld keynote brings. I hope Phil Schiller ends Apple’s participation in style.

On a briefly related note:

Loved it!

Geeky apple, Geeky, keynote, mac

It’s here!

I’ve not been too involved in the development side for most of my term at Uni and it just so happens to be now my holidays happen to coincide with the release of version 2.7.

If you take a look back at my posts on 2.7 I feel justified by my disclaimer concerning the potential for changes before the final release. The entire back end has been overhauled with a much more modern and professional layout. Judging by the tweets I’ve been reading it looks like most people are fairly impressed by it. Take a look at the official screencast if you haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve also updated my theme again. I didn’t really feel the previous one worked too well on here so it’s been switched to this - slightly more minimal - theme.

Next term (I guess that means next year) I’ll hopefully keep this slightly more up to date. We’ll see!

Geeky 2.7, wordpress

About 3 weeks ago I wrote a post showing some new features for WordPress 2.7. Since then there has been a bit more developing going on and this post touches on a few more features.

As I mentioned back then, things can and very likely will change by the time this release is completed so don’t come back complaining to me when things don’t look the way the do here.

A excellent post on the Weblog Tools Collection has also appeared between these posts and this goes into some more detail about the major additional features. The comments on this post were an interesting read with many people split over yet another admin design change. Whilst I can understand where they’re coming from, 2.7 does make a few good changes that I know I’ll certainly find useful. My advice to critics therefore would be to give it a try and see what they think. If Subversion isn’t something you’re familiar with then feel free to ask for a bit of help.

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Featured, Geeky 2.7, wordpress

WordPress development, on a whole, is pretty simple. As someone who has come from a background working with IPB and a little bit of phpBB I was quite amazed at how unusual it is to edit the “core” WordPress files - those which are outside the wp-content folder and are distributed each release.

Instead WordPress relies on hooks that are either filters (which change something) or actions (which do something). These are quite simply littered throughout the code and any plugin can jump on these to do whatever is needed by the developer. However, the problem I’ve found is a lack of trying to find the right hook for the job. PHPXref, which is excellent for finding functions and variables doesn’t have the ability to find a hook which is usually in the format of:
do_action('name', $vars); or apply_filters('loginout', $output);

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Featured, Geeky development, hooks, wordpress

If anything sets the internet community buzzing it’s rumours about new programs and services, especially from the big players such as Apple, Google or (heh) Microsoft. With Apple we usually have a few months of leaked information to speculate about. However Google’s Chrome browser, expected out in the next hour, was only leaked around a day or so in advance.

That’s not really stopped the gossip though. Fueled by a 38 page web comic Twitter and the Blogosphere have been going all day long as the release of the browser aproaches.

Judging by the content of the comic this browser could stir the browser wars back into full assault. I particularly like the focus on performance that Google seems to have worked hard on. If I have any gripes about Firefox then speed is certainly it. Version 3 has certainly improved things slightly but it’s still no match to Opera or Safari in both starting the application and loading pages.

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Featured, Geeky applications, chrome, google, suspense, web 3.0

So I’ve been working on this for most of today and I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. I’ve considerably edited a free theme which was designed for a magazine site to something acceptable for personal use.

Comments welcome, I’m particularly interested in whether anyone feels it needs improvement. If anyone can find any bugs then let me know.

Featured, Geeky design, wordpress