Nick Jackson

My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.

Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.

iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.

Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it - would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”

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It is with joy I report that the BBC have started transcoding iPlayer content for the iPhone/iPod Touch. What this means is that whenever I am hooked up through a WiFi hotspot, I can get hold of any of the BBC’s programmes which are stored on the iPlayer.

There are also some other interesting points raised. Firstly, the ’security’ mechanism behind this is that the BBC does some user-agent checking. Basically, anything which can pretend it is an iPhone (Or Touch) can get the iPhone video stream. It was possible to rip the Flash video stream the BBC was using before, but it was fairly low quality. However, the H.264 stream given to the iPhone is higher quality, hence higher quality rips which are ready to go on an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.

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Who remembers the internet back when ‘Broadband’ was an amazing marketing opportunity at 512Kb/s? Now, who remembers 56Kb/s modems being all the rage?

Here at Brayford Quay, modern, plush student accommodation with en-suite sit-down showers, a desk and 6 complementary power sockets, over the wired network, I am pulling downloads at an amazing, awe inspiring, jaw dropping… 4KB/s (Or, for the technically minded people who spotted that one is bytes and one is bits, around 32Kb/s). That means (And I’ve checked this) it would be faster for me to write a letter back home (On real paper!) asking my parents to download the files I want, post it, wait for it to be delivered, wait for my parents to download the files, and wait for them to be mailed back to me on a DVD. That’s including the weekend.

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I’ve finally spent my birthday moneys, plus a bit of my ever-struggling student loan, and bought myself one of those iPhone things.So far, I’m impressed. It’s slick. It’s elegant. It’s easy to use. The screen is beautiful. It syncs with my music, videos, contact, calendars and email without so much as a “Do you really want to do this? It might change something!” warning.

As usual with Apple kit, there are hundreds of people on Flickr who assume you want to see every detail of the unboxing, so I’ll leave that part to them. Suffice to say it was refreshing to be able to have a new phone without spending 40 minutes negotiating every detail of the contract with someone behind a desk. Activation was a bit slow, mostly due to the incompetence of the network here at Brayford Quay. However, activation was simple, and didn’t need a mountain of information. Number porting is the inevitable 5 working day wait whilst the people at T-Mobile and O2 negotiate between themselves over who exactly is responsible for my 11 digits. If you know my phone number, don’t worry. It won’t be changing.

Obviously I’ve only just got my new toy, so I’ll post an update in a few days with how it’s working out. Right now, I’m off to play.

I’ve gone out today and bought myself (Amongst some bits of stationery) a new USB hub, and a new external hard disk (320GB for £49.99 - can’t complain).

The reasoning behind this is simple - I need a new USB hub to connect the mountain of devices I have to my laptop without running out of ports, power or both. I opted for a nice 4-port USB 2.0 hub (Powered) in order to be able to connect and juice up my various bits and pieces via a single port. Since I’ve still got a mini 1.0 hub, I reckon that 9 ports should be adequate for most purposes. If not then I’ll invest in a 7-way hub - but that’s getting silly.

On the hard disk front, I wanted it to use as a backup device - but no mere rsync backup device! No dodgy 3rd-party backup device! No, this was going to be a Time Machine backup device!

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I’ve picked up my copy of Leopard today, and got it installed after a couple of hours. It’s good, and OS X continues to beat Windows into the ground.

Leopard, for those who don’t know, is Apple’s latest version of OS X (10.5), the operating system which powers all modern Macs. It’s touted as having over 300 new features, but you’ll be hard pushed to find most of them. Let’s start with the headliners.

Time Machine is arguably the biggest feature, but I need an external disk to use it. I’ll be picking one up soon though as I need a better backup solution, so I’ll go over this in a few days. The Coverflow and Quick Look features are nice, as they allow you to see if you’ve got the right file without actually opening it. As I’ve already got a mountain of PDFs, lecture notes and reports hanging around in various folders, this has proven quite useful in not wasting bounces opening Pages only to discover I actually wanted OcTeX.

Visually it’s nice - the unified window appearance is a welcome improvement on Tiger’s mix of styles, although there are still a couple of different ones out there. Apple’s Pro Tools (Aperture, Final Cut, Pro Logic) spring to mind, as does GarageBand. I’m not sure the transparent title bar does much though, since I seldom sit looking at my desktop. My laptop is for doing things, so being able to always see the top 1cm of my desktop image isn’t the most amazing of features. The new Dock isn’t earth-shattering either. It’s a place for applications to live, and shouldn’t feel the need to reflect all my windows. There is a tweak you can use in the Terminal to change it to a more robust translucent black (Similar to when you move the dock to the left or right of the screen) which I’ve used. Far nicer, and icons are much more visible over applications.

Behind the scenes, a lot has changed. It’s 64-bit throughout (With noticeable performance boosts), there’s Core Animation (Which is very nice indeed, and may be used later in the year when I’m doing some application development work), apparently big pieces of Core APIs have been improved as well. The whole OS somehow feels more… bright and responsive. However, there seems to have been an increase of Marble of Doom occurrences in various apps, most noticeably Safari.

Other minor tweaks include the new Mail and iCal, some .Mac improvements, much better network options and user interfaces (Finally, search domain in the GUI!), screensavers and iTunes visualisers. There’s a full list on apple.com for the curious.

Recommended upgrade? Definately. Worth the money? On the outside, no, but developers will love working in Leopard, so expect a lot of Leopard only apps in the future.