There is this free piece of software called the Prey Project. It’s completely open source, runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, and is basically magic. You install it right damn now, and it sits waiting.

So, you install this tiny lightweight piece of software. It hides down inside your computer, where a thief would never think to look. When your laptop gets stolen, you simply flick a switch on the Prey Project website, and then the next time your stolen laptop connects to the internet, BOOM, any number of rather awesome and CSIesque things begin to happen.

Detailed network information will get emailed to you, such as the laptop’s IP address. A complete Trace Route will be run. Both of these might help locate where the computer is at, if you hand them over to the authorities. But this isn’t really much, right? Prey packs quite a punch.

Screenshots are emailed to you. A list of modified files will be sent. The names of running programs and active connections will be thrown in too, for good measure. And here comes the good stuff – If your laptop has an attached webcam, it will begin snapping photos, and emailing them to you. Not only that, but it will attempt to locate the computer using any GPS equipment built into it, or by making use of the afore mentioned IP addresses and Trace Routes. It managed to pinpoint my house exactly. Scary, right? (Note that this software can also run on Android phones, most of which have a GPS built into them.)

Now that you know who the thief is, what he looks like and where he lives, Prey goes on the prowl. You can set an alarm off on your computer, that is immutable. You can alert the thief that you know who he is by sending messages and changing the screensaver. You can completely lock the computer down until a password is entered. And best off all, if you use your computer for a lot of internet banking and the like, you can hide all your emails and delete all your cookies. All remotely.

And the best thing about all this? It all happens at a time frequency that you set. Want photos every five minutes or every forty? Prey can set that up for you.

‘Sure’, you might say. ‘What’s the privacy in this? It’s all running through an external website that I have no control over!’

Well, I say, that’s a very valid concern. However, Prey can eliminate this if you so wish. If you run your own website, you can set up control through that, totally removing the Prey Project site from the equation. Now, is that cool, or is that COOL? I have it set up on my Macbook Pro as well as the desktop Mac.

One thing to note, if you are on a Windows desktop, is that the program won’t run unless you have a user logged in. It might be a good idea to set up a bogus account with no admin rights and no password, to lure the thief in. This, however, is not an issue with Mac or Linux.

Check out the Prey Project at http://www.PreyProject.com. It’s free, and it’s awesome for College students!

Thanks to The Big G, (or the G-spot, as he shall now be known) for pointing out an error in the linkage.

Tags: College, linux, Mac, snoop, thief, windows

Oxegen (one of the huge European music festivals) have released a free iPhone app. It’s currently number one in the Irish app charts, and seems to be instilled with the stuff of magic. Stuff that a few years ago, we were only dreaming would be possible.

Starting from the basics, this app provides a checklist of things to bring to the festival. You can tick things off as you pack them, which is a useful feature. moving to the slightly more complex, it incorporates artist twitter feeds and an RSS feed from the festival organizers. It also provides live traffic updates throughout the weekend, for those who aren’t camping. Then things become cool.

There is a fairly standard map built into the app. It can locate you using the phone’s GPS, and shows you where the stages, campsites, places to get your beers cooled and so on can be found, and direct you too them. You can turn your iPhone sideways, and see everything in Virtual Reality mode, for those you are useless at even iPhone assisted directions. You can also, in a blindingly simple yet stunningly obvious move, tag where your tent is, and your iPhone will show you the way, even late at night.

Another “Holy Shit It’s 2010″ feature is the Interactive Event Schedule. You tell it what bands you want to see, and it informs you of any overlapping performances. Sure, that’s ordinary enough. HOWEVER, just before the bands begin their set, it uses push notifications to inform you, and can then show you to the correct stage within the time needed to get there. That’s pretty awesome.

I have, however, saved the best for last.

Since Oxegen is such a huge place, it is very easy to loose your friends. The app can help out with that. Heading into the Settings area (strangely inside the app instead of in the iPhone settings area) you will notice an area to turn on “share my location”. If you do that, once the festival starts, it will show your friends (connected through facebook, at the moment, and you can choose only to show specific ones) exactly where you are on the festival site. Updated in real time. On the map. Now THAT’S magic. The one possible worry I have over this feature is that some smart thief somewhere might be able to work out where iPhone users have pitched their tent, and may have a night time visit. I’m not sure how well they protect the location data.

I will be at Oxegen from this Thursday, so if you are going and want to say hello, feel free to track me down. Send me an email/comment or something.

Anyway, this app got me thinking. What other “The Future Is Now” things can we take for granted right now? Every time I see a 32gb my jaw drops. These things are about the size of your thumbnail, and look at how much data can fit on them! The Microsoft Courier was another of these Future Tech products, but sadly never got past the R&D stage. It would have blown the iPad out of the water.

Can you think of any other pieces of tech that make you feel like we are living in Star Trek?

Tags: app, festival, iPhone, Music festival, Oxegen

So, if you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a large number of tweets in the past few days about a broken iPhone.

Recently, my iPhone has been giving an error at seemingly random times. It reads “This accessory was not made to work with iPhone”. It started off just popping up whenever I plugged it into the Apple Charger (but not EVERY time) and then progressed to just happening in normal every day situations. Once this error message came up, the iPhone shut off audio to headphones and the internal speaker, which made it impossible to take phone calls or use the alarm clock app. As you may imagine, this was rather annoying.

AppleCare Phone Call #1

So, I call the AppleCare people, and end up with a lovely Indian man, down in Cork. He assured me that I would be able to get my iPhone replaced, and that if I put up a deposit of €400, I would be able to get the replacement iPhone before I even gave them my old one! Awesome, right? I thought so. So I asked if I could ring them again later, with a credit card number. He affirms that I can, and says he will email me a number which I can use to jump right back to the replacement process without having to go through all the questions about the water sensors and such. I hang up, happy.

I never get the email.

AppleCare Phone Call #2

This time, I get a women called Ana, (whom it later transpires is convinced that my name is Ken McMan) who, because I don’t have that number I was promised, has to run through all the steps again to make sure that I’m not trying to rip them off. Which took a while. She had a fixation on the fact that I used a set of Logic3 Jivebox speakers with the iPhone (awesome, by the way) and it took me several attempts to pursuad her that they were not the issue. Then, after talking to several supervisors, she agreed to send me a replacement phone. It seemed that the cool get your iPhone in two days deal for a deposit had ended, instead, they wanted me to pay €29 for the service. Feck that! Went with the free service where they send me a box, I place the iPhone in the box which is taken back by the UPS guy, and I wait a few days (the weekend) and get a new one.

So this was going on, and at the same time I was organizing with Zagg to get a replacement InvisibleShield (as part of the warrenty you get a replacement one for free if it scratches or you have to replace the iPhone) which was a much smoother experience. Just went on their website, clicked a button, and posted the old shield.

Anyway, the iPhone arrived on the Monday, and it came in the most fecking awesome box ever. Seriously. Back in the day of the 3rd Generation iPod, you sent it for replacement and you just got it back in a plastic bag. For the iPhone, they bad designed a wonderful high quality box with protective foam and all. Take a look:

If you want to see yet more pictures of the iPhone replacement box, and the box that the box came in, head to My Flickr Account.

Anyway, I got the iPhone, and a few days later got the InvisibleShield. They have changed the application system! Comes with a really weird sponge, but was certainly easier to apply.

Tags: Apple, InvisibleShield, iPhone

So I watched about three live-blogs of the iPhone 4.0 reveal this week, all at once. You can watch it yourself if you so wish. Here are my thoughts on the new features offered by iPhone 4.0.

Multitasking – This isn’t really multitasking, now, is it? The apps themselves aren’t really running in the background, “services” are that the apps can use. This means that before an app can engage in “multitasking”, it has to be rewritten to take advantage of these services. And there are only seven types of things that apps can do in the background. One of which is NOT the ability to take part in Instant Message conversations, which means that I will have to stick to IM+’s push notification system. The seven services are:

1. Background Audio (allows applications play audio in the background and use the iPod controls)
2. VoIP which allows applications like Skype to accept calls in the background (now if only Skype would release their 3G version)
3. Location Services so that apps can use the GPS in the background
4. Fancier push notifications
5. Local notifications
6. Task completion (which allows apps complete tasks in the background, for instance, uploading a whole load of pictures to Flickr)
7. Fast App Switching (which allows applications open and close instantly)

UPDATE: Turns out that while I am technically correct in how this multitasking works, I am wrong about it being hugely limiting to devs, and was put right by the wonderful Steve Troughton-Smith, who knows a lot more about this kind of thing then I do. Basically, this is the same system that Android uses, and other then the IM dealio, offers all the benefits of multitasking except the ability to see two apps at once, which would be silly on an iPhone anyway. I could see that being useful on the iPad though. Think iTunes mini!

App Folders – This is something I called for in an earlier blog post. Basically, it allows you have folders of applications, with 9 apps in each folder. Great to clean up my games screen! The folder icon is made out of the icons for all the apps. I think that this is a feature that the iPhone was sorely lacking, and am glad that you can now keep something like 20,000 apps on an iPhone.

Fancier Mail – Hoohah. Single inbox. This is useful for me because I have about seven email accounts, and to check them all I need to go into each inbox separately. No longer! They have also included threaded messaging, which shall hopefully move over to Mac OS X soon, if they haven’t forgotten about the operating system.

iBooks – iBooks (the application for reading ebooks on the iPad) will make it’s way to the iPhone, and will sync with the iPad’s iBooks apps through iTunes so as you are always on the right page. Nice. If I had an iPad.

Enterprise – You probably don’t really care about this. Basically allows you distribute apps over a huge number of iPhones. Makes the lives of IT people easier.

Game Centre – This has been likened to Xbox Live. It is basically what the Plus+ network has been for a fair long time, just endorsed by Apple. I think this is the start of Apple moving into the social networking business.

So, those are the main features that Apple is toting. Pretty much all of them are things that have been on phones since the start of the smartphone craze, with only Game Centre being particularly innovative. However, there are another few little things that Apple have told us about. For instance, the iPhone now comes with inbuilt spellcheck, users can set their own wallpaper (like the iPad) and there is bluetooth keyboard support. For if you want to write your thesis in Notes, I would imagine.

So. What do you think about iPhone 4.0?

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 4.0

These days, a huge swodge of blog reading is done on iPhones and other smartphones, and we all know how hard it can be to navigate a blog on one of these devices, flicking around the place to view pictures and such. So, if you are reading this blog post on YOUR smartphone, chances are you have noticed something about now. The Scodio Blog has magical inbuilt ability to completely transform itself to best fit whatever device you are reading it on! The same of course goes for www.ViewFromTheQuad.com, my podcast’s website. On the VFTQ site, there is even a way for iPhone users to stream episodes without having Safari open! (Hint: play an episode of VFTQ, and use the home button to exit out of Safari, not closing the Quicktime window that pops up.) Who says the iPhone can’t multitask?

First thing is first. It is important to recognise that this is actually quite an easy feat to accomplish. Like, crazy easy. It basically comes down to what plugins you use, and if you have a podcast, how you encode your media files.

Optimise site for iPhone and other Smartphones

First thing is first. You are going to want to make your site work with pretty much every smartphone out there. If you use WordPress, this is easily accomplished by installing the WPtouch plugin, developed by Brave New Code. They say this on the matter of the plugin: “WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.” It does all sorts of cool things, like formatting the site to Apple’s App Store design specs, allowing you to integrate your tweets, add one of those cool iPhone home screen iPhones for when people want to add your blog to their homescreen, like an actual app and it rescales your photographs and such. It’s wonderful! It even allows you to run Google Adsense, Google Analytics code and other custom code, and it works with 99% of WordPress apps that would be useful on a mobile device.

Get your media ready for background play on iPhones

If you are a podcaster using any kind of blog system which links to it’s media files directly in the posts (such as the wonderful and powerful Powerpress plugin for WordPress) that magical background playing I mentioned is probably already already working. If you aren’t linking to media files directly in your posts, start doing it. Now.

Note that you must be encoding your media in a format that iTunes recognises. So basically MP3 or AAC. But I don’t know of many podcasters who don’t encode in MP3 anyway, so you should be fine in this regard.

“But what if I don’t use WordPress, Cian?”

Well, I can offer a few ideas. If you use RapidWeaver, some themes such as many of those developed by NimbleHost come with cool inbuilt iPhone themes that make the website look wonderful on an iPhone and an Android based phone. For CMSes like Drupal, I took a quick look around but couldn’t find anything. If you handbuild your own sites, you probably don’t need this article.

Tags: android, blog, iPhone, plugins, smartphones, WPtouch

You will remember that last week, I published a huge blog post on the topic of Online Backups, and mentioned here and there that I had a survey that I was conducting about how people backed up online. Well, It’s time to let that survey into the wild, with a grand total of 25 people taking it.

This question was designed to weed out the people who didn’t actually back up, so that I wouldn’t get a whole lot of useless data later. However, this useless data issue did come up, but not to the extent that it might have.

When somebody said if they backed up or not, I asked them to give a reason. The general reason that people gave was that they are too lazy, something that I don’t feel is an issue with backing up any more, what with Time Machine and the online services mentioned in my previous article. Just set them and forget them.

This data actually quite surprised me, as I never imagined that so many people would be using online backup services. While, predictably, the majority of people use a harddrive, there is a significant number of people who use the likes of Mozy and Backblaze. It should be noted that the people who marked “Other” were referring to the likes of Blu-Ray disks, DVDs and homebuilt servers. I should have thought of including them.

However, once we take a look at this data, things get starkly different. Out of the 11 people to said that they use Online Services for backup, only 4 of them said that this was their favorite method, and looking over the raw data, only two of these people were people who also selected the harddrive option. Not looking so great for the online services now! Other again referrers to homebrew servers and the like.

Not much commentary that can be done on this graph, to be honest, except that most people seem to have a LOT more external harddrive space then I do. I am impressed!

As we can see on this graph, Amazon S3 is the preferred method of online backup. (I’m discounting Dropbox, of course, as it is not technically a backup suite. However, I stuck it in there so everybody wouldn’t click “Other”. Interestingly, almost everybody who said that they used Dropbox also said that they used Amazon S3, further enforcing it’s popularity.

Amazon S3 wins again!

You may view the raw data for this survey at Google Docs.
Thanks to all those who took part!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online, Survey

This is part 1 of a larger article on Online Backup systems. In this part, I cover the different companies that I have tried out along with one or two that I have not. The second part of this series will be based around a survey that I am running about online backup systems. If you backup at all, online or offline, PLEASE fill this anonymous survey out so that I can get more data points. Thanks!

Recently, I have become more and more interested in the possibilities presented to me by online backup services. Places like Dropbox, Backblaze and Mozy offer huge (and often limitless) amounts of harddrive space in a building somewhere on the planet protected by armed forces and Minority Report-esque security features. However, for every advantage to using online backup, there is most likely a disadvantage. In Backblaze’s case, for instance, their datacenter, and thus, your datacenter, is located in San Fransisco, which means that tomorrow it’s probably going to be hit by an earthquake or something. Even though you can backup anywhere there is an internet connection, it’s gonna take a LONG time to get that first backup out of the way. (I’m 7 days into my first backup, and have uploaded about 42GB so far. Thankfully in the future Backblaze, the service that I am using, will only backup files that change. It should be noted, however, that these speed problems are likely not the fault of the backup provider, and more the fault of Vodafone and Comreg who are a bunch of incompetents when it comes to getting what speed broadband you are buying correct.)

“So”, you might say. “Why bother with this online backup rubbish? I have my harddrive sitting here next to me, which can do in minutes what might take days to do online.”

Let’s get something clear. Online backup should not be done, in my opinion, on it’s own. It should be supplementing a hard backup that you do every day at home, with a harddrive somewhere in your house. For Mac, this is redonkulously easy to set up, with the wonderful TimeMachine. Mac users simply have NO excuse not to go dig up an old external harddrive (or get a nice cheap one, places like Reads sell 1TB worth of delicious harddrive space for about €99) and just either leave it connected to your home computer 24/7, or just plug it into your laptop whenever you are at your desk. For Windows users, you will find a similer, perfectly capable backup system built into Windows 7. Online backup should be used for when you are out and about and accidentally delete a small number of files, or in case your house burns down in some horrendous oven accident, taking your harddrive backup with it. (Speaking of which, you did remember to turn the gas off, right? Better go check) However, the scope of this article does not include offline backup, and my good friend @SirJolt has written a pretty large article on this just today on the Komplett blog.

Mozy

The first of the lot I tried using was Mozy. I used it pretty much for two years solid, but never needed to use it to restore anything of great importance, as I was on the free account, and only used it to backup school essays and such. Nonetheless, I somehow have used 1.4 GB on it. Like all the online backup programs, you install a tiny little menubar application which just does it’s job in the background. However, it has a pretty low uptake among people who know lots about this subject, with a survey I carried out only showing 5% of respondents saying that they used it. Some complaints that can be found online are that the application (available both for Mac and PC) just sort of gunks up the system, makes everything run slow and tends to crash. I never suffered from any of these things, but I wasn’t backing up a huge amount of data, so I think that if you want some free backup space, go grab their 2gb offer for free, as it did the business for me. If you want to do a large amount of backing up, however, they may not be the best choice. Christopher Breen of PC world talks about some of the issues that he had in his PC World article. Another thing that I should mention is that Mozy won’t post your data to you on a harddrive, should you need it. They insist on sending you rather expensive DVDs or making you download everything. Which would take a while, I would imagine. However, as I said, Mozy are good, in my experience, for keeping an extra safe backup of those little important files. And remember that Mozy only ever backs up files that have been changed, meaning that after the first backup, everything SHOULD be nice and zippy, so long as you don’t fall foul of one of the weird bugs which will make your computer slow to a crawl. A year worth of unlimited Mozy backup runs you $54.45 per year.

Dropbox

Dropbox was the most picked online backup option, despite the fact that technically it doesn’t offer backups. Dropbox is basically a file synchronization service. You get a little folder in your Home directory (for Mac users, I suppose it is a network folder on Windows) called “Dropbox” and you just drop files in there. Instantly, all the other computers linked to your account download that file. It’s wonderful for what it does, again giving you 2GB for free. I use it a lot, again for school files. There is something just wonderful in knowing that no matter what computer in my house I write an essay on, it will instantly be on every single one of the other computers as well, as if by magic. It works stunningly fast, and has never once broken for me. It’s a real setup and go. However, can it be considered a backup solution? I don’t think so. Due to it’s synchronization backbone, once you delete a file on your computer (or it is deleted by a little kid who has run riot in your office) it deletes from the service as well. Not really a good backup solution, if you ask me. However, as I have stated in the past, Dropbox is basically what Apple’s MobileMe iDisk wants to be. iDisk constantly breaks, doesn’t sync and is generally clunky. Dropbox, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect in every way. If file synchronization is your deal, get a free Dropbox account, but I wouldn’t use it for any important files that you just HAVE to have backed up. While the first 2GB are free on Dropbox, a 50GB account will run you $99 per year, with a 100GB account costing $199, which means that per GB, you are paying $1 extra dollar for your second 50GB. Which is odd. But anyways.

Backblaze

Backblaze is the service that I am using at the moment. As far as I can see, it mixes the simplicity of Dropbox with the backup ability of Mozy. The entire client side of this system is contained in one insanely simple preference pane, which can get quite advanced if you want too. Unlike Mozy, Backblaze just automatically backs everything up (except for a few files, but we will get back to those) unless you tell it too, which includes any external harddrives you connect, as well as any flash drives connected. Which is kind of nice. You also get more control in how you throttle your upload speed, something which is important if you are uploading 50+GB. You don’t after all, want your network to grind to a halt for a week as you back up! Backblaze chooses not to backup some files, such as the system files (Not really needed, as you likely still have your OS disk for if something horrible happened) and Application files (which means that you will have to track down copies of all your programs, which should not be too difficult. However, it does keep the application settings files, so that once you redownload the programs, they will be working as they always had.) Personally, I have also set it up to not backup my downloads folder, as there are often huge files in there that are deleted within a couple of days. I imagine that I would tell the other options not to back these up as well. Another issue that somebody may have with Backblaze is that it doesn’t keep copies of any files bigger then 4GB. It does, however, keep all old copies of each file for 30 days, which turns it in to a sort of online timemachine. One interesting question I haven’t yet been able to get an answer to (due to my backup not yet being fully finished) is if Backblaze backs up all accounts. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but I have not yet gotten an answer from the company despite getting in contact with them several times. However, I don’t see why it wouldn’t, as I can see Backblaze running from all the accounts on my Mac. Again, like Mozy, once the HUGE first backup is complete, it only backs up files that have altered, meaning that everything is zippy. This includes your iPhoto library, which although it looks like one file, is actually a folder pretending to be a file. This means it will be just as zippy as everything else. Backblaze don’t offer any free account, but they have a 15 day trial account and it is cheaper then Mozy per year, coming out at a round $50 for an account.

Others

For users who are more willing to get their hands wet in the world of Online Backup, a service like JungleDisk may well end up much cheaper. It connects into an Amazon S3 account, which means that along with the $2-$3 you pay JungleDisk per month for the use of their backup software, you will be paying Amazon a certain amount per GB transfer, data stored and such. The pricing system is sort of complex, so I suggest that you check it out yourself. However, it comes with the happy note that it can also be used to sync your data with other computers, much like DropBox. It got a solid 10% of use in my survey, and people seem to be happy with the lower prices. However, it is not a simply set it and forget it service, and you have to deal with two companies instead of one.

Some of the other companies in the big bad world of Online Backup are Carbonite and iDrive, both chosen by about 5% of surveyed people, but I never have actually had the chance to try either of these services out, so I can’t really talk about them.

Winner

In the end, out of the services that I have tried out, Backblaze is the clear winner. Sure, it doesn’t back up system files, but those are so big that it would take you ages to download them anyways. May as well just reinstall the OS if it comes to that.

Many of the links here are referral links. However, none of the services above are paying me to write this article. Any extra backup space acquired by you signing up to these services using my link will be put to good use. Also, any mentions of the survey are correct as of the 10th of February 2010. Full details on the survey will be released in Part 2. Again, please fill out the anonymous survey to help me get more accurate data!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online

About three weeks ago, I stumbled upon an iPhone app called Sleep Cycle. This application promised to wake me at a time at which I was closest to a ‘waking state’, and thus leave me less sleepy and tired in the morning, something that I have a fair problem with which results in headaches and general grumpieness. It does this by measuring how much you are moving throughout the night, then waking you within a half hour time period that you set yourself, when it thinks you are sleeping lightest.

The Set-up

What you need to do while using this app sounds a bit dodgy at first. You run the app, choose your lovely sounding wakeup noise, set the latest time at which you would like to be woken, start the alarm and just put the iPhone face down on the mattress close to your head. Make sure not to power the phone down or put it on hold! The app powers down the screen, powering it back up if you pick it up to check the time. I rather like how it handles this, as it displays it in a nightime friendly way, that won’t burn out your retinas.

Next, you go to sleep.

Once you have done that successfully, the app sits on the side of your bed, dutifully recording all your movements, and compiling them into a chart what looks like this:

Sleepcycle - Stats

By use of this, you can try to work out at exactly what time you had that dream where you were swimming in a giant picklejar in the sky. The application also uses the data to work out at what time would be the best moment to wake you, so you feel least sleepy. Whether it works or not is in debate.

If we take a look at the App Store reviews, people are pretty damn sure that it works. We get the odd voice of descent, with Peter Dublin claiming that all it does is sound the alarm 10 minutes before you ask it too. I haven’t found this in my testing, but maybe there is some monkeywork going on behind the scenes.

In full, the app worked for me for three or so nights, but after that, it seemed to stop having an effect on how sleepy I was once I woke up. Maybe you will have different results, and if you have tried the app, let me know what you think in the comments! Some more screenshots are below, click them to view them bigger and get more information on each of the screens.

Tags: app, iPhone, ipod touch, sleep

UPDATE: Head to the bottom of this article to check out the CEO of McGraw-Hill totally outing Apple on their Tablet! It’s confirmed, people!

As we all know, tomorrow Apple is having a keynote. They are, as usual, keeping totally tight lipped as to what will be announced, but we are all pretty damn sure that it will be tablet hardware. However, hopefully they will do some software refreshes as well, and the following is what I want to see.

iPhone

Let’s be honest, here, people. The iPhone home screen is pretty difficult to get around. If you have lots of pages of apps, chances are you have to go flipping and flipping and flipping to find the one that you want. For instance, if I want to find one of my most used apps, “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application”, I need to flick to page 5 of my apps. And this takes time, time which might make my classy little joke a little late. And NOBODY want’s to make a joke late, right? This is what I’m thinking. You know Exposé on your Mac? I want to be able to do that for iPhone pages. If you are on any home screen, I want to be able to use three fingers to flip up or down, and then a 3 x 3 grid of homescreens will be displayed. I tap which one I want to head into, and boom. Easy access to “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application” along with all my other apps. Of course, if you had any more then 6 home screens, you could scroll down to see them. But if you have more then 6 home screens, you might need to get checked out. That’s 54 apps you have there.

[EDIT: Holy Crap, somebody pointed out that Steven Troughton-Smith, mentioned further down in the article, has developed THIS EXACT THING for Jailbroken iPhones! Apple! HIRE THIS MAN!]

While I’m on the subject of apps, I want some sort of auto-sort for apps I download. I want to say that homescreen 5 is my games screen, and have any games I download sent there automatically. Of course, this may get difficult when I fill up that screen, but it could then give me the option to dedicate another screen to games, which would be inserted, pushing screen 6 to screen 7 and creating a new blank screen 6, ready and waiting to receive my new game.
I want multitasking. Or if I don’t get multitasking, I want some sort of inbuilt push system. I want my RSS feeds to automatically update in Newsie, dammit! (More coming on Newsie in a later blog post.) While I’m at it, I want the Notes application to be able to sync over the air, like all the other MobileMe Push apps on the iPhone.

How about stacks? You know, those things that nobody I know uses that Mac OS X people can use on the dock? Basically, you click on it and a big drawer opens up, allowing you to place any application or document in it for easy access. Let’s have that on the iPhone! I want to be able to put a stack on the bottom bar of my iPhone, (a “cool games” one, for instance) and then just tap it so it springs open, allowing me open any app with ease. That would be nice. In fact, an Irish developer called Steven Troughton-Smith has developed a Stacks application for Jailbroken iPhones which is pretty much perfect. Apple! Buy it off him!

You know what would be really cool? I have my iPhone sitting here, next to my Macbook Pro. It’s on the same Wi-fi network, and has bluetooth. It can connect wirelessly in these two manors. How about I can send a text message from my Macbook Pro and have it routed through the iPhone to be sent? Hell, how about the laptop doesn’t even need to be on the same wifi network, but sends it over the internet to be sent, Push style, to the iPhone, which will then send it on. That would be spiffy.

iWork

There is one thing that pisses me off about iWork.com, Apple’s cloud document service. You can’t edit from the cloud. Take a look at the likes of Google Docs, and I imagine that Apple could bite a fairly huge chunk of this market from Google if they were to give cloud editing a shot. In fact, how about when you buy iWork and own MobileMe, we get iWork webapps? Online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that integrate into your offline version. Sure, they might not be able to pull all the fancy moves that the desktop applications can, but it would be pretty damn useful! Every time I save a document, I want iWork to, in the backround, update the cloud version of the file, and visa versa. You can even use my MobileMe space, if you want! There is a Documents folder in there for something, after all!

A big problem with iWork is that the documents are not easily viewable by people who are on Windows, or Mac users who haven’t bought iWork. Of course, you can always do a little jiggling about with the file and fish out a PDF (more on this rather cool process at TUAW.com) but I want something more. Apple, after all, like their stuff to “Just Work”. So how about, when the file is opened on a computer which doesn’t have iWork or is a Windows machine, a really barebones integrated PDF viewer is opened instead, and opens up this PDF file? Sure, there is no editing ability, but it allows me to send files to anybody, and have them viewed by anybody! Perfect cross-platform document sharing!

MobileMe

MobileMe doesn’t have a huge number of problems. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to sync Notes.app over the air.

HOWEVER, one huge problem that MobileMe has is iDisk. Let’s not mince our words. In comparison to services like Dropbox, it is utterly shite. It stalls all the time and it takes ages to update. It stops working for no given reason and, most suprisingly for a product that is supposed to be “embedded into the core of the operating system”, we can’t share files directly from the finder. Dropbox, on the other hand, is utter perfection. Seriously Apple. Buy Dropbox, or develop something that is even almost equal to it. If you do, iDisk will become perfect, and much more useful. Hell, what would also be nice is Apple giving us unlimited storage (with a MobileMe subscription, of course) and making some sort of cloud based Time Machine. The likes of Mozy would NOT be happy with that, but we are already paying more for MobileMe then for an unlimited Mozy account, so I suspect that Apple can afford it. Sure, limit the amount of non backups we can keep, but unlimited backups (for, say, a 30 day period) over iDisk would be lovely. And make it real easy to order a complete restore. Maybe send it out on a USB harddrive or something. In fact, just copy Backblaze for the restore process.

iLife

I have no idea what I would want in an iLife refresh. Much much faster iPhoto loading, maybe. Oh! Since I have already requested unlimited MobileMe space, how about all my iPhoto pictures automatically get sent to the MobileMe cloud? Build in some social network ability, and BOOM! Apple have just knocked Flickr out of the market, when it comes to Macs, anyway. The MobileMe iPhoto gallery is cute, but not really good for sharing with friends.

While I’m on a “Move Everything to the Cloud” rant, how about putting our iTunes libraries up there? You just bought Lala, a serious contender in music streaming, so you have the tools in front of you. Why not allow me listen to my iTunes Library wherever I am?

So, in general, I want Apple to cloudify everything. Of course, this would make most of the Mac population totally kill their bandwidth (I only get 100gb up/down each month) so that would have to be sorted out.

What do YOU want to see announced tomorrow?

UPDATE Some silly CEO has outed Apple on their tablet. Oh-Oh…

Tags: Apple, apps, dropbox, iLife, iPhone, iWork, MobileMe, mozy, Software, stacks

This is a piece that I wrote for school, but I thought that it was relevant too this blog as well. You will understand, therefor, it’s slightly different register then normal. No snark here!

Today’s technology is moving along at a blisteringly fast pace, speedier then anything even Science Fiction writers of yesteryear could predict. Except for the flying cars. I still hold out for the day I have to swat for my flying car driving license.

I remember receiving my first ever computer. I was 11, and it was a brute of a device, built by a company called Gateway who used to reside here in Ireland. It had a huge 4.6 GB harddrive (enough to hold an amazing 1,150 songs) two hundred and fifty six times the amount of RAM that the space shuttle uses every time it goes into space, and more importantly, a stuttering connection to the internet! The internet (or “The Web”, as we called it back then, in our late 90s and early millennium coolness) was an elusive place, to be both respected and feared. It could be used to send pages and pages of text in minutes around the entire globe, it could be used to listen to strange music, and we could even create our very own websites! I still look back at that dusty relic of my own first website, and realise that it was actually quite ahead of it’s time, using technologies that were just being developed. And who could forget the dialtone? I remember my first ever iPod, a chunky yet attractive 20GB machine, capable of holding 20GB of music, only a third of what our second computer could hold. Those were the good days! I still have it lounging around in one of my desk drawers, and some day, I hope to take it apart and restore it to it’s former glory. For some reason, I have always liked it’s clunkyness when compared to the new anorexic models that Apple release every year. And who could ever forget their first spontaneous, breathtaking encounter with an online message board or chatroom? It’s like we were thrown through a window of information, trailing colourful glass as we went.

Nowdays, however, things are totally different. My thin, light laptop has more speed, memory and storage capability that could have ever been built into that hulking Gateway. My phone is immeasurably more powerful then that machine, with the ability to access a wealth of information in a blink of an eye, and no longer am I confined to only checking the latest blogs and sites once a day, but these blogs and news sites come to me, every single minute of the day! The phone measures my sleeping habits, and wakes me up every morning within a 30 minute alarm period, based on when I am in my lightest phase of sleep. It can even listen to local radio stations from the other side of the world, and all this in a device smaller then a paperback book! I can shout at it, and it will play exactly the song that I ask it too, I can shake it to interact with it’s menus and, if I feel the need, I can play games on it that rival their console counterparts. This is the biggest change that I have seen happening around me, the change in communication. Sure, I missed the progression from pony to telegraph, from telegraph to phonecall, but I have witnessed the rise of the ability to send high quality videos around the world in seconds. I am watching the landscape of the social norm be torn asunder, the very meaning of “communication” changing day by day and most importantly, the ability for free information to propagate throughout the world within seconds. Less then five minutes after the Hudson plane crash, I was looking at pictures of the event, even watching short videos generated by people who were near the river that day. Somebody even leaked the audio conversation that the plane was having with the Air Traffic controllers, a shocking listen, if only for how calm everybody remained. Earthquakes in far off regions of the world were reported second by second by an army of anonymous fingers, dancing over phone keypads and laptop keyboards, and I didn’t even have to go looking for this goldmine of intelligence. It came to me. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations are going bust every single day. The biggest uprooting of information sharing ever is happening before our very eyes, and it is not happening quietly.

So what do you think? Am I right in suggesting that this is the biggest change to happen over the last 18 years? What is the biggest change that you have noticed in your lifetime?

Tags: growth, hudson, internet, personal writing, school