Jasonified.

IDEA: "Resume" for Apps and Games across devices

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:04:06 +0100

At home I have a fairly typical Apple media setup - iMac, external storage, Apple TVs dotted around the house + iPads etc.

When playing media across devices via iTunes, specifically films and TV Shows, you can “continue playing” or “start from the beginning” and iTunes will (sometimes) maintain the state across these devices for you.

It strikes me that with iCloud and the proliferation of “cloud services” for bookmarking and state management, this should be much easier, more reliable, and simply *better*.

I like the idea of playing a game on one device, moving to another (where I have the same app and iCloud state management selected) and picking up where I left off.

What about writing some markdown in Byword on the iPhone, switching to the iPad, opening Byword open and the cursor is where I left it (or even finding it open, ready an waiting when I slide to unlock).

Imagine writing a tweet in Tweetbot, opening the photo browser and realising the image you want to post is on your iPhone and hasn’t synced via photo stream. No problem, just unlock the iPad and there’s Tweetbot, not only open, but showing the photo browser with your tweet sitting, ready to post underneath.

We have “resume” for movies, tv shows and for books within apps like iBooks and Kindle.

Why not everything else?

Music from the Spotify for iPad Advert

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:32:00 +0100

Spotify for iPad is out with a great advert featuring the following tunes:-

Party on 5th Avenue - Mac Miller
It Girl - Jason Derulo
Some Nights - Fun
Foster the People - Houdini
Flo Rida - Wild Ones

As a spotify playlist (spotify was down at time of writing)

Visual Studio .Net 2003 Error: "Refreshing the project failed. Unable to retrieve folder information from the server."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:15:43 +0100

If you look up this error, some sites will tell you that it has to do with Visual Source Safe and/or a “.” prefixing a folder name.

I have visual source safe installed, but I was not using it on the particular project I was working on. I looked and I didn’t have any folders with a “.” prefix (i.e. “.foobar”) contained in the project that was causing the error.

Visual Studio creates a VSWebCache Folder under “C:\Documents and Settings\username”. Find this folder and delete it. Yes, the entire folder. It’s purpose is to cache folder structures (and some files) so that Visual Studio can load projects faster. It recreates itself on the next opening of a project and the error goes away. No harm done.

Make sure Visual Studio .NET is not open.
Navigate to Your Projects Folder (all of the places you keep projects). The two most likely places are “C:\Inetpub\wwwroot” and “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects“.
Enable the option to view Hidden Files and Folders. “Tools, Folder Options…, View (tab), Show hidden files and folders (click next to it), OK (click).“
This is the fun part, and likely to take some time. Look through all of your projects and rename any folders in projects that have names that start with “.“ (period).
Navigate to your “Documents and Settings“ folder (most likely C:\Documents and Settings) and open the folder for your username (i.e. Robz).
Find the Folder named “VSWebCache“ and delete it.
Reopen Visual Studio .NET and open a project.
Verify that the VSWebCache folder has been recreated in the same place it was deleted from.
Disable the option to view Hidden Files and Folders (if you wish). Follow the same steps as in 3, but click “Do not show hidden files and folders”.

Source : here

Fixing Visual Studio 2003 debugging with IE8

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:30:00 +0100

This is an oldie but a goodie. Having to setup a Virtual Machine based on XP, Visual Studio 2003 (and IE8 after SP3 and all the patches) I hit an issue where debugging wouldn’t work.

Solutions (found here) was:-

close your IE windows first.
Open RegEdit
Browse to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE -> Software -> Microsoft - > Internet Explorer - > Main
Add a DWord value called TabProcGrowth
Set the TabProcGrowth value to 0.

Relaunched, worked perfectly.

(Alternative is to uninstall IE8 and use 7 instead)

Looking at the “iPad 3” invite imagery, I realised...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:19:01 +0000

Looking at the “iPad 3” invite imagery, I realised it was possible to work out the orientation of the iPad by the background image.

Setting my iPad 2 to the same and removing an icon so it was only the default 5 icons in portrait mode I aligned the invite with a screen grab and worked out where the home button *should* appear.

Basically, the Keynote icon is the right most icon positioning the home button under the Maps Icon. This is based on aligning the icons and the background wallpaper so the bubbles match.

Forgive the roughness of this, it was knocked up quickly!

Adding multiple Gmail Calendars to iOS

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:27:28 +0000

Here’s a neat tip.

If you use Gmail or Google Apps and have multiple shared calendars in your account you can access them on iOS (and edit them) by following these simple steps.

1. Go to http://m.google.com/sync on mobile safari

2. Login

3. Select your device

3. Select the Calendars you want access to

4. Save

5. Go back to your iOS calendar and give it a few seconds to refresh

6. Enjoy

jestone: (via - Tiefighters) Death Troopers - by Jeff Carlisle

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:14:18 +0000

jestone:

(via - Tiefighters) Death Troopers - by Jeff Carlisle

Tweet4me up and running

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:59:52 +0000

Quite pleased so far with the performance and reliability of the service and the take up by users.

Great comments and feedback and hundreds of scheduled tweets being loaded per day.

Looking at integrating with Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) and other services. Also looking at white label options for specific twitter clients and services.

Also planning to refactor the code and rewrite it in something else, possibly .net or ruby.

Tweet4me, Scheduled tweets from ANY twitter client http://tweet4.me

Tweet4.me - scheduled and delayed tweets from ANY Twitter client

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Tweet4.me - scheduled and delayed tweets from ANY Twitter client:

Procrastinated over it for 2 years, no-one else did it do wrote it myself and been using it for weeks to great effect. Post scheduled tweets from Twitter, Flipboard, Tweetbot, any Twitter client using special, Direct Messages to @Tweet4me!

GigaOM in what's next for the MacBook Air

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:09:46 +0000

GigaOM in what's next for the MacBook Air:

Eric’s Ogg on the next MacBook Air:-

“So it’s going to have to come with advances in software, in interfaces and new forms of input, like voice and touch”

Voice? Really?

Nonsense.

My work Halloween outfit

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:54:28 +0000

My work Halloween outfit

Jonathan Ive tribute to Steve Jobs. Wonderful stories about...

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:33:10 +0100

Jonathan Ive tribute to Steve Jobs. Wonderful stories about checking into hotels and Steve’s sense of humor.

I discovered by accident tonight a way to override Siri...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:06:02 +0100

I discovered by accident tonight a way to override Siri instructions:-

Press the home button to issue a command
The moment Siri thinks it’s interpreted the instruction, press the Mic button
(this has to be done *before* Siri acts on the command)
Press the instruction text
You can now edit, change it and hit done when finished
Siri will pick up where she/he left off with the new instruction

I don’t know yet if this helps/affects recognition, just thought I’d let you all know.

An Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:07:00 +0100

The tech sites are rife again with stories about Apple planning to release a branded television set within the next 18 months.

I say If they do, it’ll mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Why?

Any Apple TV set would have to work with external devices to be at all useful. Most likely this would mean multiple HDMI inputs, possibly a DVI, maybe a Component/Scart interface (although the latter are unlikely I admit).

Hell, it may even have a Thunderbolt port.

Also, being Apple they’ll probably add USB ports for connecting external media, charging devices, a variation of iOS like we’ve seen on the Apple TV 2 hardware and all this with ethernet and/or wireless connectivity built in.

They might even throw in a FaceTime camera - makes sense to have teleconferences through your “tele” right?

Finally, if they want to compete with regular TVs then they’ll probably have to consider a built in digital tuner with (most likely) recording capabilities. You could use an external tuner but built-in would tie in nicely with iTunes/iOS etc.

So what’s the problem?

Price.

If the price of a full-blown TV is too HIGH then they are too close to the cost of a full-blown iMac. We’ve already seen stories of people buying iMacs instead of Cinema displays and using the target display mode to use it as a monitor!

If the price is too LOW then why buy a 27” Cinema Display when the TV will most likely come in sizes upward of 27” AND will have connectivity to your computer?

Apple are unlikely to release a TV set without external connectivity that is designed NOT to allow you to connect your Mac to it. So here’s what they’d need to do :-

a) reduce the price of the Cinema display dramatically,

b) price the TV set between the Cinema display and a base iMac,

That’s a pretty big challenge.

My feeling is that if Apple release an Apple Television then it WILL replace the Cinema display and on that basis an Apple Television would mean the death of the Cinema Display.

Why OSX will be renamed iOS in the near future.

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:29:38 +0100

Lets face it OS “Ten” isn’t going to make much sense when the version number goes beyond 10.9.9.

Apple could of course forget the link ( as most of us have) and call it OSX 11 but there’s a very good reason why they will consider rebranding OSX to iOS.

Let’s review some numbers:-

Windows is used by approx 400m users worldwide.

OSX is approaching 60m users.

iOS is upward of 200m users.

Given Apples love for massaging figures (e.g. including iPhones, iPads, iTouch AND classic iPods for the purposes of “mobile” statistics) there’s a million good reasons to rebrand a future major upgrade of OSX as iOS.

Well, 260m+ reasons actually.

A conversation with Leo aged 2 1/2 re his sister, Poppy who is almost 1

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 16:53:18 +0100

Me: you need to look after Poppy, she’s only tiny.

Leo: when I get big and strong?

Me: yep but also now, remember you’re her big brother, she’s only little.

Leo: Yes, I am.

Leo: and when I’m big and strong I can throw Poppy in the air?

Me: mmm, let’s go just over that looking after Poppy thing again….

Hey! Really love your blog, I was having some issues with Hamachi and my main internet network connection, and that fixed it right up. :) I use it to host a minecraft server. Thanks!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:09:27 +0100

Thanks, glad to help!

Kernel panic installing Snow Leopard? Try Lion

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:00:31 +0100

I’m not sure when it happened, what firmware or hardware upgrade changed things but inexplicably and without warning I was unable to re-install OSX Snow Leopard on my 2010 Unibody Macbook Pro.

No matter what I tried, a standard retail Snow Leopard disk, the original disks that came with the Macbook Pro, the same result - a kernel error on startup.

I looked on-line, I tweeted and found more and more people with exactly the same problem. I even put the original hard drive back in (which I’d replaced with an SSD) and the original RAM. I reset PRAM etc and still a kernel panic.

I couldn’t re-install OSX and the result was an abomination; a Macbook Pro running only a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 running natively. Worse still, I could only run OSX in a VMware installation within Windows 7.

I was definitely going to hell.

But suddenly it has all changed. OSX Lion has been released (well the GM in my case) and after burning it to a disk and trying it, it installed successfully.

So if you have an iMac or Macbook that won’t install OSX Snow Leopard, try downloading to spare/friends machine and burning a disk - you may be pleasantly surprised.

Using a remote server to sync/transfer data faster

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:46:04 +0100

In the process of upgrading my mailbox to an Exchange 2010 I’ve found a neat way to do it without affecting my local network speed.

Using a remote server that’s connected to a very fast Internet connection I’ve installed Outlook 2010 and setup both exchange accounts. All I need to do now is drag emails between both accounts and the changes will be synced up to the new box.

The advantage of doing it using the remote server is a) I don’t have to my notebook syncing at home and eating up bandwidth and b) the remote server can transfer gigabytes in seconds which means it’ll be quicker.

Obviously this could also help with remote data transfers of any kind.

Useful tip of you manage/use remote servers.

IDEA: "Responsive content"

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:50:31 +0100

I’ve talked about this concept in sales pitches with prospects, with clients and privately and thought It was time to “put it out there”.

This idea was inspired when Heath Ledger died and I’d visited an HMV to see copies of his film, Knights Tale next to the tills.

So here’s how it works (in the example above):-

1. You run a site that sells DVDs, Music etc.

2. You ensure your web content, e-commerce products are well described with keywords, actors names, locations etc, all properly indexed/tagged.

3. You choose a selection of news/feed “sources” that will be used to trigger content and having a weighting system in place to rank the data received. (ideally you’d want news sites, twitter, but could have as many as you like).

4. You build a “bot” which has the job of taking these feeds in, filtering by relevant content keywords and then matching these against your own index finding relevant content and promoting/displaying it.

So for example, an actor is reported dead by the BBC, Twitter, Reuters etc. Your bot picks these feeds up and is filtering for specific phrases/keywords/names. It matches this against similar words in your site/database and the result?

The actors DVDs are “featured” on your front page of your site and automatically.

The best bit you don’t have to be specific - you don’t have to say they’ve died, you don’t even care if they have - you’re just reacting automatically to the fact that *this* person is being discussed by multiple feeds/sites and multiple times.

You’re reacting to the trend and promoting your products/articles/content accordingly.

Another example - you run a site that sells home safety products e.g. smoke alarms, fire extinguishers etc. One day news reports come in of a house fire where a smoker detector wasn’t installed or working or testing. The bot kicks in, collates the stories, filters the common words and matches/cross-checks to your product database and FAQ/Knowledge-base.

Next minute, articles and videos you produced about checking smoke detectors are promoted to the front page with smoke detectors as featured products. You Twitter feed is showing links to smoke detector test articles and tutorials and this can happen in almost real-time and automatically.

I called it “Responsive content” - no doubt someone else has called it or will call it someone else and Apple will call it iContent. Oh well.

If it exists, I didn’t know, didn’t check and blew it.

If it doesn’t exist, you implement it and you get rich, throw me a bone or at least a bit of credit.