haniblog

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.

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!”

I tried, I really did. Then I gave up and called Apple to take their underpowered, overprotected media box back. This is the first Apple product I absolutely and unreservedly hated. It made iTunes look bad, and that is one of my favorite applications.

Okay, so it’s hackable. But it turns absolutely buggy and crashes a lot. Plus, I don’t want to spend another night trying to coax it to do what it should do in the first place: play whatever media I throw at it, and iTunes syncing isn’t the way to do it.

Enter WD TV. It should arrive tomorrow along with a 320GB pocket drive. It costs £100 less than the 160GB Apple TV and it should play movies with popular codecs without complaining or transcoding. As a bonus, it plays 1080p instead of just 720p.

I really hope this is the answer otherwise it’s back to the Apple Store to buy another Mac Mini and install Plex.

CubeCheater helps you solve your Rubik’s Cube and it does this in a very clever way. You take photos of the six sides, it analyses them and then works out a step-by-step solution! You can manually enter the colours of course but by using the iPhone’s camera it moves this App from useful to “look what I can do with my iPhone” cool. At 59p it’s a bargain. Here’s a demo of how it works.

Boy was I wrong. I capitulated and bought the package and from the quick play with iPhoto and iMovie I’ve completely revised my opinion. iPhoto is fast fast fast now. Faces is just phenomenally fun and Places is just, well, cool. 

Okay, I’ll post a more in depth review later. I’m off to eat humble pie now.

For the past few years I’ve had a little Apple-related ritual. Whenever iLife is released I walk over to the Apple Store in Regent St and buy it. iLife ’06 and ’08 (they skipped ’07 I think) sit on a shelf in the study upstairs.

The one application from the suite that gets used much more than the others is iPhoto. iPhoto ’06 was a slow, clunky beast but I still faithfully used it to organise, tag and upload to Flickr (using Connected Flow’s FlickrExport) and even created and ordered one or two hardcover books. The ’08 version was much faster and the Events feature was fun to use.

iMovie ’06 was simple and straightforward. ’08 had me scratching my head a few times and came to the conclusion that I preferred the previous version. As for iDVD ’08, I don’t think I even launched it once. That’s no reflection on the software which I think is pretty good but times have changed. The ’06 version was used and used a lot. Garageband is great for recording scratch tracks for work and the ’08 release had a very handy Movie layer to sync voiceovers.

The one app I never used was iWeb. The fact that it doesn’t talk to TypePad, WordPress or Blogger was a great disadvantage and even though I know that it isn’t tethered to .Mac/MobileMe, it still feels constrained.

So, iLife ’09 is the one that’s going to break my little ritual. The one I have no interest in buying. Faces and Places? My D60 doesn’t have a GPS function (there is a third party shoe-mounted one apparently) and I can tag my photos with the person’s name. iMovie? No thanks, Final Cut Pro does the job a lot better. If iDVD had BluRay support it would be really interesting as opposed to being nearly useless now.

There isn’t a single feature that would compel me to buy this version, not one. Does anyone else have a different opinion?

Hell’s frozen over.

Microsoft is giving away a free iPhone app called Seadragon Mobile (App Store link). It lets you smoothly zoom into large images with no lag time. It comes with a few images and you can browse more using PhotoSynth.

The whole Seadragon initiative is actually very impressive.