haniblog

So long Steve and thanks for the knowledge, experiences and all the fun.

Those clever creatives at Dentsu London have launched a range of covetable and collectable toys with a twist. Switch on your smartphone camera and you’ll see the character lives in an environment which pulses, moves and interacts. Watch the Suwappu video and you’ll understand.

Introducing Suwappu! | Dentsu London.

I’m half torn about this! Should I order it?!

THE OCD CHEF CUTTING BOARD via BoingBoing.

Jarrett Heather’s amazing, fun, creative, brilliant kinetic typogaphy animation. Love that term.

I haven’t listened to music on Spotify or iTunes since discovering mixcloud. I’ve been using it for a number of weeks and am hooked. After stumbling on one of the mixes from somewhere else I found that I can find more of the music I like to listen to so much easier than the other two services. Every mix, track and artist are all tagged so clicking on a track I like displays other mixes which contain the same song. And there are no annoying audio ads to interrupt the music. Simples!

Now if there was only a mixcloud iPhone app.

I found it a bit annoying not to use my current printer with my iPhone or iPad after the new 4.2 software update. Apparently the feature will only work with HP ePrint printers and I didn’t want to buy a new one since I had an Epson multifunction printer connected to my iMac. A google search for a workaround turned up a tip on Steven Troughton-Smith’s blog but that required hunting around and finding a pre-release version of 10.6.5, finding and replacing the files.

However I found a better solution with a bit more searching… AirPrint Hacktivator! Launch the app, click the On button, delete and re-add the printer and that’s it! As you can see from the screengrab above it works perfectly!

We spent a few days in France last week to celebrate my Father-in-Law’s 70th birthday. I fell head over heals in love with the Dordogne. We stayed in a lovely and spacious gite called Le Peyrat in Saint Martin de Guscon about an hour away from Bergerac. We even had a French chef cook two nights for us and the food was just… so amazingly delicious

More photos here. I took the photo above on the Grand Etang de la Jamaye lake.

Twitter released their free app for both the iPhone and iPad and it’s my favourite client by a long shot. As a matter of fact I haven’t had so much fun going through my Twitter feed since Tweetie on my Mac.

Well no wonder! They’ve both been written by Loren Birtcher, formerly of apebits the company which he formed to write Tweetie, amongst other software. Twitter bought Tweetie from apebits in April and Loren has been working with the team on an official app since then.

There have been lots of grumbles about the fact that it doesn’t have a unified timeline but that’s one of the reasons I prefer it over Twitteriffic. I like having my follows, mentions and DMs as separate timelines and the app keeps my position within those different views whenever I switch. The UI itself is fluid and very responsive. Tapping on a tweet with a link slides the web viewer over from the right and stacks it over the feed like so.

If a tweet contains a link to a video the app doesn’t lock the timeline and you can still scroll up and down the feed as it loads. The app has some other nifty gestures as well. Pinching any tweet will show the author’s profile and dragging an entry down will display the conversation associated with it.

Twitter for iPad and iPhone is free in the App Store.

We had a fantastic time in Portugal. The highlight was going to see wild dolphins and we were very lucky to see over 40 of these graceful creatures hunting. More in my Flickr stream.