That’s What I Wanted To Do… Sort of…

Whilst keeping track of one of many available liveblogs last night regarding the Apple keynote at the WWDC in San Francisco, something caught my attention. Actually almost everything I found interesting, but one thing in particular reminded me a lot of what I wanted to do for my fourth year university project.

One of the features touted when previewing iOS 6 was what I wanted to have done as an add on for my project. ‘Do Not Disturb’, a new feature for iOS 6 coming this autumn, basically mutes and sends calls straight to voicemail between certain user defined times of night. It will only let through those who you want to let through.

This is basically what I wanted to have done with an app as a companion to my project. I wanted it to basically turn on airplane mode after half an hour of being in the product and then it would turn airplane mode off when it was time to wake up. This was not possible with the API’s of the software developer kit so the idea was shelved.

However, this one would maybe be just as good as a companion. I know I’ll use it when the new operating system is ready to download.

One of the features of iOS 6 from http://www.apple.com/uk/ios/ios6/

Another Website Plug

Another plug for my website, but if you view it on a mobile device, the good news is that it shows up perfectly. It looks good in portrait or landscape, and if you save a bookmark of it to the home screen, it takes care of that too!

This website is looking and performing much much better than my old one. And it is much easier to update too.

Snapseed

Fourth months after Apple’s 2012 12 days of Christmas, I am starting to see the joys of one of their offerings. On the 7th day, iOS photo editing application, Snapseed, was free to download. At the time of download, it seemed like a fairly decent app, however, I didn’t really see the point in it as I did all my photo editing on my iMac or MacBook. The bigger screen, I find, is much more advantageous in those sort of situations compared to the smaller screen of an iOS device.

Lately, however, I have been finding that I am using Snapseed more and more often. And at times, in conjunction with other photo applications such as Instagram. Snapseed does offer a good selection of editing capabilities which can actually transform even the most average photograph into something that is worth sharing. I find that it is good for applying affects that I would normally shun on my computer in a non destructive environment. Yes they probably aren’t to everyones taste but it opens your eyes to different takes on photos.

I am aware that it does add to the argument that people have that computers narrow the gaps between professionals and amateurs, but that shouldn’t really make skills take a back seat. Anyways, here is an example from earlier of a photo edited in Snapseed.

Accidentally Becoming the Target Market

I woke up this morning to find that I had inadvertently become the stereotypical person that my fourth year project is aimed at. As you may already know, my project is to do with younger people (teens to mid twenties) who use their phone/computer too much in bed and cannot get a good nights sleep. So it was a surprise when I woke up to find that I had been sharing my bed with both my phone and my iPad.

I must point out that this was purely by chance and for some reason having a cold has meant that I haven’t been getting much sleep recently. I do not do this all the time and the product is not being designed for myself. I consider myself (without sounding too big headed) to have good technology discipline when it comes to things like this but if you cannot sleep and you are staring at the pitch black room for hours on end sneezing what else do you do?

Further user testing of my product will help see if it can stop horrifying scenes like this. I am going home at the end of this week and I should hopefully be able to get good feedback there along with some user testing that I managed to get last weekend. Of course I will not be testing it on myself as I am far too involved with it and it is already taking over every aspect of my waking life. But with only a matter of weeks left until the mark 2 hand in, it is only a matter of time until everything can return to a calm normality.

The Original Image

In the last post with the tribute to Steve Jobs, it was a photo of the image on my iMac screen slightly edited on Instagram. Here is the original I created last week.

#176 Hello GiffGaff

I finally managed to switch to Giffgaff today. A big change since I have been on O2 for the past 3 years. So far everything seems to be working well.

In the 3 years that I have been using an iPhone I have amassed a total of 11.2gb (upload and download) of mobile data. This works out at 0.01Gb a day or 10mb. That isn’t too much considering quite a lot of that will have been when out and about or when we couldn’t get Internet in the flat at university. It also is worth noting that some days would have had no mobile Internet usage at all.

Today in generally testing it all out, I have used less than 2mb and this has included some general Internet browsing. Giffgaff uses the O2 network so I shouldn’t really see any major difference anyway, if any at all.

Finally, I don’t know which tariff or goodybag I am best to use yet So I have plonked for the £10 one as it is most similar in terms of my O2 simplicity one to see how much of it I use by the end of the month. I am hoping that with the imminent arrival of iOS5, that I can save even more money thanks to iMessage since some of my most talked to people have an iPhone.

#168 Some Calculations

Last night I was thinking about something. How much it has cost me per day since I got my phone, almost exactly a year ago. The initial figure was quite shocking. £1.80(ish) per day since I got it.

How did I work this number out? Well for starters I ordered my phone directly from Apple (it is an iPhone 4) in time for launch day at a cost of £499 for the 16GB black version. At this time I also swapped pay as you go tariff on O2 from the one I had with my old iPhone 3G which cost between £10 and £20 a month to an O2 Simplicity Pay as you Go Tariff for £15 a month which gave me 100 minutes, 500MB internet, and unlimited texts. I tried to find out how much I had topped up over the year and couldn’t find an exact number so this first year was only an estimation of £15 a month multiplied by 12 months to give £180. That much in just topping up per year. Then to work out how much that was per day, the total cost (the cost of the phone plus the cost of the top ups) which came to £679 was divided by 365, and this comes to £1.80(ish).

That is a lot of money to be spending on a phone that, admittedly, I don’t use anywhere near my allowances per month so it is wasted. Hence the reason why I am on Pay as You Go rather than on a contract.

I continued working out costs for how much this phone would cost me over an estimated 10 year period, a little ambitious for a phone, and the cost per day still only worked out at about 63p a day. That is still quite expensive if I was using the same tariff, though not as expensive if I were to change phone every odd year, needing to buy it myself since I am on pay as you go. It would take 3 years for it to dip underneath the £1 mark per day.

What about change tariff I hear you say! The cheapest O2 tariff for PAYG from what I could see was a minimum of £7.50 a month to get unlimited texts, normal texts are 10p, I would have to spend a further £3 to get mobile internet on it which is quite essential since it is a smartphone. At £10.50 a day, it would still end up being 85p after 3 years and 50p per day after 10 years.

Still not good enough in my opinion. I have been with O2 for almost 3 years now and it could be better. Yes, by the looks of things I got a better deal with them than what I did with Vodafone before but they are still taking more money than they need to (in my opinion). I checked other network websites. Vodafone: I couldn’t figure out how much it would cost me so I gave up. Orange: our internet service provider at home, but the tariffs were still a bit much for what they gave you. Then I remembered a network that I had heard of before but not really considered; Giffgaff.

Giffgaff essentially is a crowd sourced network taking a piggyback ride on the O2 network. In otherwords, people have created the network and it uses the O2 masts and network to operate. Apparently, because of their lack of advertising, or phone support, they can make huge savings and pass them on to their customers. Their prices show it. It is a PAYG only network and texts cost about 4p and calls only 8p per minute with internet (from what I could establish) only a maximum of 20p per day. For £5 a month you get unlimited texts and for £10 you get 250 minutes, and unlimited texts and internet.

I shoved these numbers into my spreadsheet I had made up and, if I used an average of £5 per month, after 10 years total cost for this phone would only be 33p per day. It might not seem much less than the O2 one but it all adds up! In the screenshot below, you can see I was a bit liberal with the amount and put £7 per month, just in case and it still only came to 39p per day.

I had a look at some review sites and people seem quite happy with it, so I ordered a free sim card and I am going to try it out, and if it is good, I’m going to switch to them completely and get my number changed across too. All I have to do then is convince others to join too then there are free calls and texts between Giffgaff users…

#167 Time to move on?

After a mass changing of passwords earlier this week, I have come to a big decision, which was to remove my twitter client from my both my computer and my phone. The reason being? I can’t really be bothered with it anymore, and the time spent constantly sifting through peoples updates for something that I might find interesting have shrunk drastically since I started using it two years ago. I will still use it, but I don’t see any point in having something open on my desktop all the time, distracting me from something else I would rather be doing. I’ll check it when I am checking everything else I go on to at the start of the day, and if I feel like it, at the end of the day.

The only exception to this will be my iPad, which will keep Twitteriffic on it since I use that, not so much for doing productive things, but when I am watching tv or the likes. Another site that has fallen foul of this decision is facebook, I don’t exactly use it and the tidy up earlier in the week cemented its fate. Like twitter, I will go on occasionally when I check everything else, but not any other time. I also have to add, that I never had (apart from only a week or so) the fb application on my phone and it has never been on my iPad, because I rarely use it.

As you can see in the screenshot below, no twitter client is present on my iMac.

#162 Dropbox: The Dissertation Saviour

This post is by no means me just finding out about Dropbox, it is just having found an even more useful application for it in context with everything else I have been doing. At the moment I am writing my dissertation. No big problem you might point out. I have one of my external hard drives plugged into my iMac all of the time to do do Time Machine backups so if I lose it or make a mistake with it and want to go back I can. Again not a problem. The problem is that I have 2 computers, my iMac is the one I use most of the time if I am doing work, because the screen is bigger and I can immerse myself in what I am doing easier, and my other computer is my ageing, 4 year old MacBook which is still just as capable of doing high intensity Photoshop work etc but I tend to avoid using it for anything major apart from work in University in the studio or light browsing.

If I need to exchange files between my two computers, I would either use a USB drive or external hard drive and manually move the files between them (dubbed Sneakernet by Phil Schiller) or I will hook them up together with my Ethernet cable for larger files I want to copy, such as merging Aperture libraries so it takes seconds instead of hours. You might ask now why I don’t just use that instead of going to the hassle of downloading and installing dropbox. The reason is simple.

I still have my computer back up every hour, again that isn’t a problem. I still have my dissertation and file of other things in a folder on my computer, another non-problem. I want my dissertation on 2 computers without the need of ‘Sneakernet’. Problem. When Dropbox is installed, it puts a folder on your computer which is uploaded to the ‘cloud’ and subsequent changes are then uploaded too. I installed Dropbox on both of my computers, put the dissertation folder into the folder that is uploaded and hey presto, it does the job as advertised on the tin. I go to my dissertation folder, open the Pages document as normal, and as soon as I press the save button it is uploaded. I want to go somewhere else and work on my dissertation, I take my laptop, and away I go, the dissertation is downloaded and I can work on it. I am not too bothered with incremental backups not being saved on my laptop with Time Machine or similar because I know the majority of the work will be done on my iMac. Simple as that.

#154 iPhone Tracker

I know I am a little late to the party with this, but when this first came into the public eye, my MacBook was unable to run this application.

What I am talking about is the iPhone Tracking (dare I say it, scandal?) where some researchers had been rummaging around in the iPhone backups located on the computer it is synced with and found a file which has locations from where the phone had been used. They had then created an application which visualised on a map where the user had been.

I tried to run this application on my MacBook 3 weeks ago, just when it emerged, but it was unable to run. I do not know why this is, and I am just going to guess that it was that it was on Leopard and it needed Snow Leopard to run. Now, 3 weeks later, and back home and reunited with my iMac, which is running Snow Leopard, I have been able to run this application. This is what the results were:

It clearly shows the main areas where I have used my phone. The centre of Scotland is where it has been used most and is where the points are most accurate. Towards to top left of the map, things start to go a little bit wrong. This is where, from what I gather from the people who created this application, the locations are out because of something to do with the phone mast (I might be wrong with this though), I haven’t been to where all the little dots are but I have been to some of them. The cluster of blobs around Inverness seem to be about right though, and there is a small cluster about Oban which again is true.

It isn’t the most interesting of applications but it appeals majorly to the geeky side of me.