haniblog

Here’s a quick and handy tip if you want up-to-date exchange rates on the iPhone. The Stocks app lets you do that for free. All you have to do is add a new stock with both currencies three-letter codes like so:

GBPUSD=X

That’s it! You should get the current rate as well as a historical graph underneath.

It’s simple. Aircraft appear in an airspace wanting to be led to two landing strips or a helipad. All you have to do is draw a line to the appropriate strip and the jet/biplane/chopper will follow the approach vector and land.

Simple, right? Nope! Not if you have three 777-class planes, 737’s all over the place, 3 crop dusters and slow-ass choppers all over the screen! And it’s so much fun! Go and get Flight Control and forget any free time you have. Addictive, fun, frustrating and beautifully designed.

The first time I heard the name Clay Shirky was through a post titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus on Daring Fireball. I watched his Web 2.0 presentation and was struck by his clarity of thought, the way his arguments made sense and the way I would go “Yeah!” at every salient point he would make.

Again, through Daring Fireball, I read Shirky’s latest essay on newspapers, journalism and the revolution we’re going through. This is a must read. It compares the state of online publishing to what happened around 1500 A.D., right after Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. Newspapers, advertising, walled-garden content, micropayments, subscriptions… it’s all there in this essay.

If you have some free time I would highly recommend reading this and then watching Clay Shirky’s videos on YouTube. Even the titles of the videos make you think! How about this one: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. You immediately have an “A-ha!” moment just reading that title!

I think his book Here Comes Everybody is one I’ll read on holiday.

I watched the iPhone 3.0 SDK presentation and kept on hoping for that Arabic will be integrated or displayed correctly at the least. Nothing was explicitly announced but I was intrigued when Scott Forstall mentioned enhanced Language features. Well it looks like the 3.0 OS will be fully Arabic aware!

Google finally switched on UK Street View in the Maps application on the iPhone and in Maps on the web. Here’s the view from outside our office.

Funny… everyone I show this does exactly the same thing: type in their postcode and go “That’s my house! That’s my car! Wow!”

The sun is shining, the sky is blue and Spring is Sprung! AND it’s Paddy’s Day! AND I’m getting Sky HD installed today! AND there’s the iPhone 3.0 announcement later on! AND we’re going on holiday in 19 days!

Me happy.

Today Apple sent out invites for a special iPhone event next Tuesday for a sneak peek of the iPhone 3.0 software. The Rumour Mill is going into meltdown with predictions, with Copy & Paste being the top wished-for feature.

It’s been an eventful month of Apple announcements so far: new iMacs, Mac Mini’s, Mac Pro’s and iPod Shuffle’s. Can they possibly (hopefully!) announce a new iPhone next week?

We bought a Mac Pro at work the other day and wanted a nice LED display to go with it. We naturally went for the Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display and found out that our Mac Pro came with a DVI-based graphics card. Obviously, it wouldn’t connect to the DisplayPort and there’s no adapter to make it work. Apple support told us that we had one option only: wait for the new Mac Pro’s to ship and buy one. But wait, there is another option! And it works!

Dave Bees, our CTO, found out that Apple sells the GeForce GT 120 graphics card which has a DisplayPort interface. Couldn’t this work with the display we bought? It does. It works perfectly. And there you go. Whichever Mac Pro you do have, buy this card if you want the latest (and quite stunning) display.

A little while ago Apple announced the new Shuffle. It’s t-i-n-y! Tiny! At £49 it’s perfectly priced as well.

Watching the guided tour made me roll around laughing at one point though. At around 75% of the way though the video when “Hannah” demos the VoiceOver functionality, she points out that the voice changes depending on whether you sync the Shuffle to a Mac or PC. The Mac synthetic voice is male and sounds good. The PC voice sounds, well, “special.”

Shite. It worked but I didn’t understand that jailbreaking and unlocking are different. For some reason Mobile Safari kept on crashing and the whole phone felt slower.

So I thought I’d restore it from my previous iTunes backup. Easy. Nope. iTunes refuses to see my phone. The only option is to do a complete Erase All Data on the iPhone and then hope that the automatic iTunes backup gets it back to where it was.

The moral of this story kids is: if you’re short on messing around time, don’t do it.

UPDATE: I thought I bricked the phone! I tried to do a complete Erase All Data and then do an iTunes install but all I got was the Apple logo with a spinning wheel and constant reboots. Scary. I managed to get it to recover mode and iTunes is happily copying everything back. Quick tip: if you think your iPhone is bricked, power it off then hold down the Home button and plug it back into the USB port. iTunes should see it and start the recovery process. Phew!