It took me a lot of deliberation, but finally I decided that the upgrade was definitely worth it. I now have, in my hands, a shiny new iPhone 3G.

But man, what a hassle. I was one of the lucky ones that managed to get one on launch day. I queued from about 7:45am with about 10 people in front of me and ate my McDonalds breakfast in line. There was the odd comment from miscellaneous chavs passing by, but I was totally happy to stand in line all day if necessary.

Unfortunately, O2′s service was quite disappointing in some respects:

• The server crashes slowed everything down so much it was ridiculous. I think it took about 90-120 minutes for me to get through in the end.
• The store staff wouldn’t tell us how many 16GB phones they had in stock. As it turns out, that number was about 4. Which is small, and irritatingly fewer than the number of people in front.

 
So all this being said, I had to settle for an 8GB, which isn’t really a big issue for me as there’s only about 5GB in use, and there’s plenty of songs to keep me happy on there. However, I think the larger storage would have been nice.

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Continue reading “iPhone 3G: A Review”…

10:43 pm | Posted in Apple | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

As you’ve all probably heard, a couple of weeks ago at the WWDC Conference, Apple has announced the iPhone 3G. Back when the first generation was released here in the UK, I got one for £269, unlocked it and have been running it ever since, principally because I was currently in-contract with Orange and didn’t want to buy-out of the remaining contract.

However, with all the subsidies now available and the much cheaper price of £159 on the £35/month contract, I took the leap of faith a couple days ago and listed my iPhone on eBay. Final price: £220. Not bad, considering it’s 9 months old and the back doesn’t quite fit on snugly due to the hardware unlock I used.

Anyway, this being the first thing of interest in quite some time, on opening day my intention is to liveblog the event as it happens on July 11th. So, depending on precisely where I go to buy the thing, I may see you there!

7:54 am | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Many of the readers of this blog will know that I am a giant, giant Apple fanboy. In fact, whenever I’m in Birmingham it’s an absolute necessity is to visit the Bullring Apple Store (as Sarah will no doubt painstakingly tell you). Unfortunately for me — or rather, my bank balance — a couple of weeks ago, I got a first-hand chance to play with the new iPod Touch. And, at this point, I think that you may see where this blog entry is going.

Rather surprisingly, however, I didn’t purchase the Touch. Since it’s quite large and my pockets are reasonably small, I decided that I’d wait a week and combine both the lovelyness of the Touch with my phone by getting the amazingly-hyped iPhone.

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Continue reading “New Toy!”…

7:37 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing | No Comments »

Thought I’d test out the latest Firefox 3 release (codenamed Gran Paradiso) to test out the apparent speed increases. Have to say that I’m bloody impressed – there is a very noticeable speed increase, especially with the JavaScript effects on the homepage. Apparently that’s all thanks to Gecko 1.9′s usage of Cairo as a new backend.

Funnily enough, I also downloaded and tried out Apple’s Safari for a few sites. I think it lasted about 20 seconds before it got closed and completely destroyed from my computer. Don’t know what it is about that browser, but I absolutely hate it.

Anyway, even though it’s currently at an alpha 7 release,  everything’s reasonably stable at this point so you might want to try it out.

9:32 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing, Web Development | No Comments »

Given the recent hype about WWDC and the supposed Top Secret features of the upcoming Leopard release of OS X, I was quite looking forward to the keynote speech today. Unfortunately, it was rather dull and overall, pretty much disappointing.

Whilst the Finder has been given a well-needed overhaul and the Dock has been prettified, personally I just don’t see the huge changes that had been promised. The problem is not so much that Leopard isn’t an improvement over Tiger, it’s that the hype built up expectations to a ridiculous degree.

But even so, as far as keynotes go and given Jobs’ amazing keynote in January introducing the iPhone at Macworld, this was quite a letdown. I was personally hoping for an update to the Mac Pro, and really wanted a killer feature for Leopard that didn’t really materialize.

One highlight at the end: Safari for Windows! I’m posting this from it now, and it really is quite nippy. I might even try it for a couple of days over Firefox. Either way, it’s going to make web developers’ lives a lot easier if they don’t own a Mac. 

12:39 am | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Well, although there wasn’t a live feed this year, I did watch the live updates from the various sites around the net. Boy, am I pleased when they announced that iPhone.

Yes, it’s stupidly expensive and is locked into a crappy carrier, and no, we won’t see it until the end of the year in the UK. No, there wasn’t any upgraded iPod. Nothing on Leopard, nor on the supposed Mac Pro. But just sit back and think about this for a second – this is just the beginning. Apple clearly has an awful lot of new stuff planned for 2007, and I’m quite a firm believer that, given time, we’re going to see some absolutely killer products.

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Continue reading “MacWorld Expo and the iPhone”…

10:06 pm | Posted in Apple | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

There has been a lot of discussion over at SFN recently about the relative advantages and disadvantages of Windows Vista, and whether we should all upgrade when it’s been released. A lot of the Microsoft fanboys are saying “yeah, this is a truly amazing release!” so I decided to install RC1 the other week to see precisely what all of the hype is about.

Truly, the entire experience annoyed me immensely. Everything, from the complete failure to design an interface as beautiful as OS X, to the annoying popup windows that say “Are you sure you want to move the cursor? You might get RSI!!!” got on my nerves in the most extreme fashion. To be charging am immense $300 for such utter, utter tripe is completely beyond me.

Personally, I’m holding out until the end of the academic year, when I should hopefully be able to afford to finally buy myself a Mac Pro. When I look at the enormous, seamless leap that Apple made 6 years ago from the transition from OS 9 to X, and the complete backwards step that Vista has made from XP, it’s amazing that Microsoft are even able to make any sort of software at all these days.

Anyway, on another note, I prepared some more photos for my photoblog earlier, but unfortunately left them on another machine which I’m not able to access for a few days. So, I intend to postdate them and keep up my one-a-day record!

7:24 pm | Posted in Apple, Ranting | No Comments »

With nothing to do I find myself spending yet more money on the so called “interweb”. Oh well, never mind – it’s quite good to be able to keep in touch, even when I’m 300 miles from home.

Not up to much today, as you can tell by the title. After the internet cafe trip, found the rest of the folks and came back to the hotel – just finished dinner, as a matter of fact. With the rest of the guys engrossed in Big Brother, I’m finding myself very bored indeed.

Not content with upgrading my aunt’s computer to the latest version of OS X, I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to try and get the classic PHP/MySQL setup working on there (since Apache is shipped with the thing anyway). As a matter of fact, it’s been a complete synch getting the stuff set up and nicely done.

The biggest problem that I’ve had so far is getting Smarty set up without beating it to death with a spoon. It doesn’t seem to like Darwin too much, but I’ve sure got a lot of time to sort it out and get the thing debugged. I realise now (which is rather too late) that I should have put the source code for this site, and worked on this for a bit. Oh well – benefit of hindsight, and all that. Perhaps if I get a chance, I’ll take my memory stick to the internet cafe down in Youghal.

My plans for this week are pretty minimal. Try and stay occupied as much as possible as to make time fly. It’s been pretty dismal down here so far, and I can’t see it getting all to much better. There’s nothing for me really to do, even with the plethora of equipment and other things that we’ve brought along for the trip. I think that more than anything (apart from Sarah, of course I’m missing not having the instant communication that I’m so used to with the Internet. Hard to think that we’d find ourselves so reliant on such trivialities, but there we go.

Anyway, I think that’s enough blogging for the time being at least. I’m going to go and get back to beating Smarty with a giant stick.

Hopefully get on here tomorrow. If not, then certainly Monday.

8:06 pm | Posted in Apple, Linux, Personal | No Comments »

Those of you that have visited in the past 12 hours might have noticed that the links that I had been using in my posts on the blogs didn’t work properly. The reason? The pure, unadulterated sheer joy of regular expressions.

Basically, instead of typing etc I have a safer alternative to including HTML in my posts. It involves the use of bbcode-style tags, and as a result, my link tags are written in a similar fashion. The simpler ones work great, but I decided that for the link tag, I’d make it a bit more complex.

Big mistake. One lesson that I’ve learnt from this is: never mess around with regular expressions if you actually value your life. It’s fixed now, thank god, but I need a sodding vacation after that. Now that I’ve said not to touch them, of course, I’m going to go off and try and implement a proper list code. Whoop-de-doo!

In other, vaguely related news, I decided that I’d go and play around with Tiger. I was up until 4am attempting (in vain) to get the damn thing working with PearPC. In fact, the best place I got to was:

JITC Warning: Invalid expression at 00800000 00000000
JITC Warning: Invalid expression at 00800000 00000000
JITC Warning: Invalid expression at 00800000 00000000
JITC Warning: Invalid expression at 00800000 00000000

Over, and over, and over again. Eventually, this morning, I eventually got the bastard to boot up, only to discover that the install process got about as far as a big, flashing “no” sign. After that, I decided to give up for a bit, so I have the joy of beating Apple software when I get back home.

Incidentally, I’m planning on visiting the Bull Ring Apple store, which promises to be good. However, I’m semi-dreading it, since I fear that much money may actually be spent buying an iBook. On the other hand, I don’t really want to buy one; Intel-powered stuff is coming out in less than a year, and I’d like to think that the price on this existing PPC stuff would be dropped to accommodate the changeover, and get the PowerPC stuff out of the door. Hell, the PowerMac G5 is still a stonking computer; if they were selling them off cheap, I’d probably buy one. Beats my PC any day of the week.

Right, I need to revise. I’m still in the Maths department, and I have yet to actually open my notes (which probably isn’t good). Have fun all, and I shall probably post something a bit later – presuming, of course, that I’m in a blogging kind of mood.

7:13 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing, Hardware, PHP/MySQL | No Comments »

Well, I have to say that when I woke up and watched the WWDC this morning, I didn’t expect Apple to announce they were going to be switching their core architecture over from the PowerPC to x86.

So, is this good, or bad? Personally, I think it’s a rather good choice for Apple. IBM has blatently not come up with the goods with respect to the 970 (aka G5); there’s been a lot of problems with it, and quite frankly, IBM seems to have its interests vested elsewhere. Apple did the right thing; IBM had become more of a hinderance than a help, so it makes good business sense to move.

On top of this, they have a good framework to build on. OS X is rather a revolutionary operating system. Not only is it built upon a very, very solid base (in the name of a FreeBSD offshoot), but it also enables for a lot of room for expansion. I wrote to someone not too long ago stating that something along the lines of what Apple are doing now was actually totally feasible. Realistically, the kernel that Apple have written needs to be re-modified so that it runs on x86, and the toolchain rebuilt to accommodate the new assembly, both of which they’ve obviously done quite nicely. Yes, there are other issues besides what I’m saying (it’s obviously not that simple), but that’s the general idea.

Also, because we have the Cocoa and Carbon frameworks to build upon, it makes life a heck of a lot simpler. Apps that are natively coded for X can be transported with only a few minor adjustments. I especially like the “universal binary” idea (both instructions for PowerPC and x86 are included in the binary, and the loader simply loads the correct set depending upon what type of system you’re on).

However, the technology that really stood out for me was the ease and simplicity of the Rosetta translator. That really was something. Basically, it converts the PowerPC instructions into x86 instructions, effectively allowing you to run any PowerPC binary on an x86 architecture. That really was something; it might not be fast enough for 3D/games/etc, but it’s certainly fast enough for Office, Photoshop and the like.

So I think the future looks good for Apple. They’re going to do well, methinks.

2:33 am | Posted in Apple, Computing, Hardware | No Comments »