Category: Apple

iPod Touch Apps – Ones I’m using – Part 1

I got my iPod Touch back in late November last year. It has proved to be a very useful bit of kit. I don’t really use all of it’s functions, but I’ve been discovering new things most days/weeks.

There is a huge variety of apps available for the iPod Touch, some of them work ok, some not so ok because they are really intended for the iPhone which has a slightly different feature set.

So here’s what I’m using, most are free unless I indicate otherwise.

  • BBC News – Essential for keeping up to date with World and UK news and it’s free
  • Camera + – A much improved camera app compared to the standard one, this one lets you do some limited editing and adjustments to the pictures before you save them, share them by email, Twitter or Facebook. Sadly the resolution of the iPod Touch camera is a little limited, I don’t use it often compared to my small compact.  And for £0.59 this is a must have app.
  • Dropbox – I’ve been a Dropbox user now for well over a year, can’t be without it so it makes sense to have it on my Touch as well. It’s a great way to always have your files, photos etc available on all your devices and PC’s
  • Facetime – A great video conferencing tool, works great, better than Skype in most respects. It’s simple to use and great on the Touch because I can go walking around the house with it and show family and friends what is going on here. Free to download and free to use.
  • Facebook – Easy to use, although I would like to see them include some extra features in to this, such as managing friends.
  • Road Trip – I use this to record how much fuel we are using in the car and for our oil fired boiler!! Lots of apps available, after a lot of false starts I discovered the free Lite version of this which can cope with my requirements of entering things in litres, paying in Euros and still getting a Miles Per Gallon figure. Having satisfied myself that this app could handle my slightly unusual requirements I bought the paid version which can handle more vehicles including the boiler!! Which is just a bonus really.
  • Target Weight – Tracks my feeble attempts to loose weight, nice and simple to use, basic graphics and stats but it is free and works quite well.
  • Tumblr – I’ve only just started my Tumblr blog, but the app on the Touch makes it very easy to add posts on the move and adding pictures and quotes etc.
  • Twitter – Just the standard Twitter app, it works for me.
  • Week Cal – The standard calendar in iOS only has Day view or Month View, or a list view. Why they missed out the most obvious view… Week View I don’t know. This one is a paid for app, but it seems to do the job ok, although I still use my Filofax for everything calendar related!!!
  • Battery Master Free – a simple battery battery level indicator, the iPhone 4 has a simple indicator in the status bar showing the percentage, something that hasn’t been shared with the iPod Touch yet.

More in Part 2 of this article.

iOS Apps a flaw in their design

I have had an iPod Touch for a few months now. Great device and it does most things I want.

However, this morning I discovered a flaw in the way some of the apps interface with the basic settings. I was looking for a simple app to log my car fuel consumption, what could be more difficult than that? Plenty of apps to choose from in the app store. But so far I’ve not found one that does exactly what I want… and here’s why.

  1. I’m English, but I live in France. So I prefer my language settings on my iPod to be in English, but I also set my regional settings to UK, otherwise the calendar is in French….
  2. I buy fuel in litres, but I like to know what my car is doing in Miles per Gallon, but set some of the apps to MPG and they ask for the cost of fuel per gallon.
  3. Living in France I’m paying in Euros, but most of the apps, are using the regional setting to display my costs in GB pounds.

What I need is an app that has currency, quantity, cost, and units etc independent of the device settings. Anyone know of such an app?

In the mean time I will stick to my own spreadsheet, it copes with all these different units, language demands very easily!

iTunes Smart Play Lists

I’ve been using iTunes for several years and I think I got my first iPod in March 2004, a 20GB 3rd generation model. I have since got a bigger capacity one. But the topic of this post is how I have been using Smart Play Lists.

I have one play list which I use a lot, which I devised so that I don’t listen to the same song again once I have played it on my iPod or on iTunes. It uses the last played date which is recorded when ever you play a track either on the iPod or on iTunes. So this is what my Smart Play List looks like:

So if a track has not been played for more than 10 months and also if it is rated 5 stars it is included in the list.  So each time you listen to a track when you next sync with iTunes then that track will disappear off of the play list for at least 10 months in my case.

You can also restrict the size of the list depending on the capacity of your iPod, this adds a bit more variety to each sync.

I also normally turn on shuffle to further randomise the list otherwise you will quickly play all the artists at the beginning of the alphabet and never get to ZZ Top!!

You don’t have to set it to 10 months, you can vary the time span accordingly depending on how recent you want a repeat to be.

I have found this works for me quite well and I rarely get fed up with what iTunes feeds me.

Mac it is….

So after weeks of deliberation… well not quite. I’ve made a decision and ordered a new iMac. I had looked at Windows PC’s but by the time you added in the extra software I would need to purchase and a similar size monitor I would have exceeded the price of the iMac.

So I’ve ordered a new iMac quad core machine with a 27 inch monitor… yes it’s big! But in terms of screen resolution it’s only slightly bigger than what I’m using at present but by combining two monitors. Having it all on one screen will be a lot more useful, and I will spend less time glancing left and right all the time!

Delivery date is as yet to be confirmed but some time this month. I will still be retaining my netbook PC for XP and portable use, it works well and it’s very compact. My two existing monitors will find use on other PC’s and at last I think I will be getting rid of the last two CRT monitors we own.

I’m looking forward to the iMac it will be a new challenge although I’m familiar with the Apple OS, using it full time will be different.

Watch this space…..

PC or Mac…. Mac or PC

The PC I use is now over 5 years old. Today one of the graphics cards decided to play up, so I’ve had to revert to the internal card and go from two displays to one, which is a bit of a shame. I liked the dual 1280×1024 display set up a lot. Mail in one screen, browser in another etc.

So the obvious quick fix may be is a wide screen single display… but sadly the internal graphics card won’t support more than 1280 x 1024.

So do I just get another graphics card… my machine is quite old so it’s AGP only… although you can still get those cards.

So may be a new graphics card and a wide screen display.

I’ve been thinking about upgrading to a new machine anyway… but what… another PC, with Windows 7 may be… or may be a Mac Mini.

I need to sit down and look at my real requirements and compare the two to see what I actually need.

At first sight Windows machines look cheap and Mac’s expensive… but specifying them up to similar performance, there’s not much difference in them really.

Anyway my spare display can now be used on my notebook, or on my old G4 Mac over in France!