Posts Tagged ‘ios’

AppSpotr is a cloud-based service that allows you to make your own apps for iOS and Android.

I had a very brief play around with it so I won’t pretend this is anything like an in-depth review. It allows you to create apps using a drag-and-drop editor. You can add a number of different pages to the app, the basic ones are free and then there is a monthly price for the rest of them.

So, for example, if you want to add a form to capture people’s details, that costs $5 per month. Or the enhanced content pages which you need to add videos costs $1 per month.

It seems like a useful service if you are, for example, a restaurant or hotel that needs a little app with a simple menu and some content pages. But, for anything more advanced, it probably will not provide you with what you need. There is no logical, for example, it is just a list of pages.

You also need a developer account with whatever platform you want to publish to.

Cook: “Here at Apple, we’re proud to announce our latest innovation. It’s called Bedtime, and it can improve your sleep quality by 160%.”
Ive: “Tim, I think bed time is already a thing.”
Cook: “NO, we invented it!”

I recently had to upgrade my iPad because a lot of the apps have stopped working on it. It has had a good four years, but that is all you get out of a tablet, so I felt like I was forced to upgrade something I didn’t really want to upgrade.

This was also my first experience of iOS 8 (until then everything was running iOS 6).

I do not think it is Apple’s finest release. Getting started on it was a pain. I was prompted for my iCloud password at start-up but it refused to accept it (even though I could log on to icloud.com with the same password repeatedly). Therefore I had to turn iCloud off at first and then re-enable it once I was up-and-running. Except it then prompted me for the password over and over again.

It then prompted me for the passwords to all my email accounts and worse, wouldn’t let me switch out to 1password to copy and paste it in. I had to open 1password on my phone and manually copy the passwords in, which is a massive pain when you use log and complicated ones.

After that the App Store kept insisting it had 11 updates even though I had updated everything, and most of the apps, including Apple’s own settings app rapidly crashed.

Apple are having a bad year. One bad release you could overlook, but Yosemite, the new version of OS X is preforming very poorly too. It took me 8 hours to complete the upgrade and since then I have found my Mac has crashed numerous times and there is a bug which causes file dialogues to continually grow so big they disappear off the screen that Apple does not seem to have any plans to fix.

The hardware on the iPad Air 2 is quite nice. It is a lot lighter than my old iPad 2 and I do really like the touch ID.

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

I’ve now installed iOS 6 on both my phone and my tablet. But, as of yet, I haven’t really noticed any difference.

I now have a clock on my iPad. Fine. Not used it. The maps look OK, but I was happy enough with Google Maps, so that isn’t really an upgrade because they have just replaced one thing with another, less accurate one.

The Siri improvements are very exciting, but then I haven’t used it yet. I use Siri for things like sending text messages and setting my alarms, which I can already do, and the Siri servers seem to be overloaded at the moment, as it’s practically too slow to use at the moment 🙁 .

Passbook, shared photo streams and Facebook integration I’m not really interested in, and I don’t like the cloud tabs or whatever they’re called. So, all in all, not really that impressed.

Having recently upgraded to iOS 5, I thought great! I’ll be able to use iCloud to send the photos from my iPhone straight to my laptop using Photo Stream and that will be the end of it.

No more will I have to connect my phone up using my cable, then open iPhoto, then import the photos into iPhone, then select the photos and click “Show in Finder.”

But of course, it isn’t actually as simple as that.

I opened up iPhone, the one that comes with my Mac and didn’t know anything about Photo Stream. Turns out you have to get the new version of iPhone, and that costs £10.49. I reluctantly did, and then found the Photo Stream option and turned it on.

But no photos appeared.

I waited a day or two in case it only synced once every twenty four hours. Still no photos appeared.

So in the end I plugged my iPhone into my Mac and imported the pictures into iPhoto manually. Then I went to right click on the photos to go to “Show in Finder” so I could get them. But that option seems to have disappeared.

In fact, the only way I seemed to be able to get them out was to connect my gMail account to iPhone and email them to myself.

Good work there Tim, I would like my £10.49 back.