The BBC Suck at Technical Acronyms
Mar2
I keep track of the BBC dot.life blog, which purports to be about the technical side of life. So, first paragraph of the post today about Skype finally making it to the iPhone what do I find but a glaring error which actually made me go “aaargh”:
Is this the moment that Voip – to use the ugly jargon – finally makes the leap from the laptop to the mobile?
What on earth is “Voip”? Oh, he means VoIP. Yes, IP as in TCP/IP. “Voip” is not a business name or the name of a proprietary technology, it’s an acronym for “Voice over Internet Protocol”. I would have thought that the BBC technology guys could do better.
Anyway, Skype on the iPhone. Clever idea if I want to make outgoing Skype calls to people, as long as I’m in a WiFi hotspot. This would be convenient for travelling abroad and calling home but whilst I’m in the UK (or vice-versa calling people abroad without paying extortionate rates) it’s not really on par with the services from 3 and Nokia’s Skype integration, especially since other Skype users can’t call me unless I’m in the Skype app.
Still, I know for certain I’ll end up downloading it in case I mystically have my contract suspended and find myself abandoned in the middle of a hotspot needing to call home and not being able to find a payphone.
New Tag Goodness
Mar1
It is with joy that I announce that Microsoft have updated their tag reader application on the iPhone, doing something which nobody else has managed to do so far and feed the camera stream directly into the application so you don’t need to go through the annoying take-confirm-verify sequence that you have to put up with in the old version and every other 2D code reader I’ve seen on the platform.
Microsoft doing something right. In other news, temperatures in hell plummet with ice on the runway grounding several pigs.
Enrolled, Exchanged and Elderly
Sep0
Today I had to head up to the Sports Centre with my ID card and various bits of enrolment paperwork to go sign myself on for another year at Lincoln. This I approached with some trepidation, as last year’s enrolment was a 3 hour queueing marathon since nobody had bothered to test any of the systems.
This year was much faster, a 30 minute queue and a quick scanning of a couple of barcodes. I’m now officially a Level 2 Computing and Cybernetics student at the University of Lincoln. Hooray!
A MobileMe Mistake
Jul0
The MobileMe online login screen.
I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone – even my Windows installation – of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.
Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.
It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.
It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).
Guess it’s back to waiting.
It Really Just Works
Apr0
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?”