When we purchase a piece of Apple hardware or software, we must accept a EULA before we use it.  It’s pretty standard in the proprietary world to put measures in place to restrict a user’s use of the product.
I am pretty confident that hundreds of users click “accept” every day without reading such a license , let alone understanding it.

I have fallen in to this trap too, what “freedoms” am I signing away to Apple?  Over the next few weeks I’m going to sit down and read the EULA for Mac OS X Lion, iTunes, and iOS 5.  Am I really happy with signing these “freedoms” away?

Yesterday the world lost a great man, Steve Jobs.

I know that this will be plastered all over the Internet, I know that newspapers already have obituaries written, but I wanted to pay my respects to this great man.

Steve’s keynote speeches were always brilliant, it was these speeches that made me so enthusiastic about Apple products.  I love reading about what he had done in the early days of Apple, watching old videos, etc. I love how the company grew and how he drove it forward.

I will miss that we will no longer have the chance of seeing him at Apple events, on stage or in the crowd.  There will be no more reports of his one word responses to the pleads of customers/developers.

My thoughts go to his family, both at home and at Apple.  Goodbye, steve.

Written by Everett Kaser many moons ago, I first played this classic game on DOS and taught how to play it by my Dad.  At the time it felt fairly hard, and it still catches me out from time to time now!

This is my current “I’ve got five minutes to fill”, or indeed “I’ve got half an hour to fill” game.  I play it on the way home from work, knowing I’ll get about six games out of it.

It’s not visually stunning, but the graphics do give that nostalgic feeling of being back in DOS, it even has some DOS style animations and sounds!

The game can be a bit fiddly, having been originally designed to tap squares with a mouse, but once you’ve got the hang of it it’s fairly easy to do by finger.

I would recommend this game to anyone who likes a quick logic puzzle.  Especially as it’s on the App Store for FREE!

First up is Wager by Tom Diggle.  This app is handy for calculating the return and profit of many betting types.

It sports a succinct UI which is both fast and effective and allows for multiple bets to be stored for later reference.

Find it on the App Store for just 69p!

Next we have Doodle Sub by Oliver Foggin.  A simple game, yet so frustrating and highly addictive!

Dive your sub to the depths of the ocean, is there ever an end!?  If there is, I’ve not found it yet!

Once again, this can be found on the App Store for just 69p!

I’m impressed with the device, I’ve played with them in the Apple Shop, but having one at home is nice.  Faye has an old G4 iBook, this new device has somewhat elevated the iBook’s duties.
The iPad gets used for games, web browsing, email (both through Mail.app for GMail and through Safari for the uni web mail), and for watching 4OD/ITV/BBC iPlayer.

This picture really captures what I think the iPad, or any other tablet, is really good for:

It is, in fact, really easy.  Go to the page you want to search on, then click on the search box in the top right.  Type in your query and wait for the text “On This Page” to appear:

Click on matched text and you’re given this view:

Simply click the “Next” button until you find the text you’re after!

I’ve bought a fair amount from the Store, inclusing:

• Aperture
• Pixelmator
• MarsEdit
• XCode
• Broken Sword

The two Broken Sword games were an excellent find, I recall playing these two games around ten years ago and it’s been great replaying these games, virtually unchanged.

One thing I love and hate about the App Store is the centralised updating system.  I love it because I can update all outdated apps at once.  I hate it because rather than looking for the updated parts of the app, it just replaces the whole app with a new copy, this is fine until you update XCode, and suddenly you’ve got to download 4GB again!

There have been musings about Apple using the App Store to update OS X.  Buy the new OS on the store and have it update your system.  For me, this has two drawbacks:
Firstly, I don’t really want to download a whole OS to update my system, but currently the Store doesn’t do “only update the out of date bits”.
Secondly, I like to backup my data and start from scratch, this means I don’t get any previous OS bits lying around…

Overall, I do like the App Store, it’s a great and convenient way of finding apps and keeping them up to date.

Just over two years ago I bought myself the ThinkPad X32.  I initially installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 on it, and it got upgraded to the latest dev builds, which turned into 2009.06 stable builds.  However, when I got it out on Monday, it failed to upgrade to OpenIndiana and was running horribly slow.

The reason I grabbed it out was that my trusty MacBook (of five years now) has a problem…The fan that cools the CPU has died.  I noticed this on Monday afternoon, but I’m fairly certain that it had been dead all day – just a testament to how good these machines are, even though they do get quite toasty, they still plod on!

MacBook out of the picture, I take my ThinkPad to work with me.  I struggle with OpenSolaris a bit more, then give up and put Ubuntu 10.10 on.  It’s a very nice system.  I’m not one to advocate Linux and it’s alien commands, but so far, as a general user, I am happy with it.  Software installation doesn’t seem quite as straightforward as Apple’s App Store, but it is all very usable.

I especially like the fact that I can use Dropbox with Ubuntu.  I rely on Dropbox to keep all of my work document in sync across my two Macs (sometimes my MacBook doesn’t get out of my bag in the evening to do a profile sync).

So, I’d like to raise my glass and say: Well done Canonical and the Ubuntu community, you have impressed me beyond what I thought I’d be.

When the iPad was announced just over a year ago.  It sported Apple’s very own A4 processor (An ARM based System-On-a-Chip CPU) running at 1GHz, had a 9.7″ 1024×768 display, and was around 13.4mm thick.

The iPhone 4 was announced last summer.  It also sports the very same A4 processor, it’s display is obviously smaller (3.5″ with an impressive 960×640 resolution), and it was a slender 9.3mm thick.

The iPad 2 will sport a dual-core Apple A5 chip (the same clock speed as the A4, but with two cores and improved graphic performance).  It’s a skinny 8.8mm thick too!

Hardware in the first generation iPad and the iPhone 4 were pretty similar, so what can we expect from the iPhone 5?
I think it’s safe to say that the next iPhone will have the same A5 processor as the iPad 2 does, giving a bump to performance (especially helping multi-tasking for iOS) both in processing power and in graphical abilities, and we will also see a few millimetres shaved off.

Rémi Denis-Courmont, one of the original contributors to the VLC project, objected to a GPL’d project being available on the Apple App Store and what restrictions Apple forced upon it.
On 9th January Rémi posted on his blog “On January 7th, I was told by an Apple attorney that VLC media player had been removed from the App Store. That is how I was able to break the news first. However as can be expected from an attoryney, there was not really any explanation.”
Applidium, the iOS VLC developers, received a letter from Apple stating that they were sorry the dispute couldn’t be resolved, see Rémi for details…

So there we have it, the VLC has gone from the App Store…It has yet to be deleted from my iPhone, but I can be sure there will be no updates in the future.

Another triumph for the consumer friendly GPL!