Geoff's Random Thoughts

All of my life I've loved maps, I remember drawing a map of Carr Clough (where I used to live) at Junior school, A - Zs which my Dad had, OS maps in Cubs and Scouts, route planners, road maps, all brilliant, all with different views of the world. It suddenly occurred to me the other day, kids born after 2000 are pretty much going to see the world the way that Google wants them to, yes there's Bing, but with Google Earth and maps being so accessible, they've started to become the defaults. A - Zs and Route planners are being rendered obsolete by Sat Navs and Mobile phones and for most other things people look on computers, not in books. The world belongs to geeks, but only how google want you to see it.

It's true, I've fallen into the bag gap. Yes, I've come over all Jeff from Coupling rather than Geoff from Manchester. It's one of my eternal quandaries, what size of work bag do I need? If I go large, I end up carry six metric tons of paper and cables about from place to place; if I go for a small bag, sooner or later I end of having to carry extra bags for bits and pieces, or have pockets full of 'stuff' It's probably more to do with me and my laziness to empty my bags rather than anything else, with my adoption of GTD of a working methodology, I can set a weekly task to empty my bag, but I'm in need of a new work bag and I don't know what to do.

As many people know, IOS 4.2 comes to iPad in a couple of months, maybe less. The second it is released, there will be a stampede to download and install it onto people's ipads. Of course, people in the App Development program have advanced beta versions to help them test and if necessary, recode their apps so they work on day one. But Fanboi's all over the world wait with baited breath to take their iPads and upgrade them to allow multitasking and various other features. It is however at this point that the moaning will start. "App A crashes with 4.2, and I can't live without it" and this is where people fail to do proper risk analysis and treat their phones and personal devices as the computers they are. It amazes me that so many people rush so quickly to update the phones they base their lives around without the slightest thought that something might actually go wrong, or that 3rd party developers may not have had time to test their mobile apps agains...

It's easy to buy an app from the Apple App store isn't it, go into the app store, find the app you want, click on the price and enter your password. Voila. Couldn't be easier. Could it? Well, as you can probably guess, I'm going to disagree. Yes, if you know exactly the app you want, it's really easy, You follow the instructions below. What if you only know your own requirements. e.g. I want an application to read RSS feeds. Well, you can go on the best selling lists, you can search the hot apps, if you've already bought a few apps you can use the Genius feature, but these avoid the actual problem of buying apps for a platform like IOS. For many years we've used Mice and Keyboard to activate things on a screen in front of us, but IOS invites us to get literally hands on. Some of the functionality is baked into the Operating System, but some of it is based around the way that the Application has been designed. You immerse yourself into these apps and ...

Well, I've had the iPad now for over a month and I thought it was time to post my thoughts after getting used to the device. Do I use it much? My iPad goes pretty much everywhere that's sensible with me. unlike the woman I observed flipping out her iPad while she waited for Inception to start at the IMAX, I don't carry it in plain sight, I don't take it to the pub and it doesn't go absolutely everywhere, but I take it to a lot of places. My MacBook pro is almost a desktop now, with iTunes syncing, mobile me and Evernote putting most things I need on the iPad, there's little need to move the MBP most of the time. From a point where I never envisaged buying anything but a laptop, My next Mac purchase will probably now be an iMac. What's the software keyboard like? I'm not a touch typist, but I can type at a fair lick. I've hardly noticed the keyboard, it hasn't got in my way although I do find the layout a little strange sometimes with the nu...

After my switch to twitterific a couple of weeks ago, I had a problem with an in app purchase. Which was detailed on this blog as a problem with the app store process here http://geoffsrandomthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/07/itunes-store-bug-and-in-app-purchase.html I fired off emails to Twitterific and Apple support and Twitterific came back with a far more timely and useful response that if I redid the purchase with the same iTunes account, I wouldn't be charged again. The action of re-purchasing the in app upgrade informed me that I'd already purchased it, so wouldn't be charged again. Unfortunately Apple came back with a very generic answer which didn't help me one bit. I can't fault apple for this for the simple reason that there are 200,000 apps in the store and they can't know each one intimately, but there should be a requirement on their part to have enough information about each an every app. One of the things that Apple Store support pointed out wa...

Well, the big announcement came and went, Evernote flipped it's lid. Unfortunately what Evernote unveiled was a formalization and expansion of the publication of the products which link into Evernote. There were already links to a lot of these products on the Evernote website and the only expansion was the publishing of notebooks to be downloaded into your own Evernote database. This sounds very negative, but please put this against the expectation built up by Evernote as a company to announcing what is almost an AppStore. This was like the expectation that builds up to Apple's WWDC or the difficult second album for a band which kicked off it's career with a million selling debut. I was expecting a shift in direction, or a mass expansion in functionality or the acquisition of a company like DropBox. Don't get me wrong, Evernote is an excellent product and the API allows developers to hook into the model easily which allows them to profit from Evernote's 3 ...

Over the last 6 months, applications like Evernote and Egretlist have become a larger and larger part of my life as I search for my ultimate GTD (Getting Things Done) setup. One of the issues I've had was that while I use a notebook at work, another at home and a phone the rest of the time, the iPhone doesn't have a large enough screen to use for looking at content regularly. When the iPad came out I was sceptical, I still don't like the app store lock in, but getting hands on with a colleague's for 5 minutes allowed me to 'Get' the iPad. Beyond GTD, I wanted to be able to read on the go, I have some dead time which could be used to catch up on articles. 1 week in. The iPad has barely left my side, I take it everywhere I can reasonably be expected to get value out of it. At Work, it's been especially useful for notes and reading. My Macbook Pro has been a little neglected although it still has tasks I can't do on the iPad and is the centre of...

I recently bought an iPad, which led to me downloading lots of iPad apps to find the best. The flip side of this was that due to the nature of iTunes, I ended up with those compatible for iPhone also being synced across onto my phone. This was an inconvenience, so I unticked the box on the apps tab of both my iPhone and ipad so that new apps weren't synced. Job done I thought. This week, I downloaded feedle and it didn't take long to set it up, but the following day feedler wasn't there when I went looking for it. I put it down to a glitch and re-synced it again, luckily setup was easy. It was only this morning that it twigged with me what was happening. Tweetdeck crashed on me once too often this morning, so I downloaded Twitterific which I love version 2 of on the iPhone and after confirming I liked it, I purchased the upgrade to premium which was an in app purchase. A little later, I synced with my Macbook Pro and after picking the iPad up again, I soon realize...

iOS was release last week and as soon as it was available, I upgraded my Trusty 3G. This is my Business phone, With being a 3G, I wasn't getting a lot of the 'Tentpole' features, but my phone is crucial for me to do my job and I have some key productivity apps on there, so why did I do it so soon after release? My iPhone had been a little problematic for a week or two. This began when its battery was draining in a couple of hours. A quick reinstall of Mail had curbed this a little, but I was feeling that a restore was in order. The GPS on the 3G wasn't working well and I was hoping the the upgrade might fix the issue. Multiple Email Accounts. I have a few different work email accounts for various tasks, some shared with others and up until now Webmail was the only real option to pick them up on the move. The upgrade took just over an hour, I had to upgrade to iTunes 9.2 initially, but it went smoothly, and a lot of time time was the initial backup before the u...