blogitech from Chris Maddern

Hi Apple,

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

continue reading…

Seeing as I’m awful at actually posting large editorial pieces (which I really enjoy but rarely have the time for at the moment), in between them, I am going to try spattering in interesting media and thoughts.

Here is the first.

So you copied keynote then?

Congrats.

I realise that the 3.0 Beta was a development Beta; intended for use to test out the iPhone SDK 3.0 and aid in development. However, I am an Apple iPhone developper, I am also an iPhone user. I have one iPhone. This means that I test on my day-to-day phone so I would appreciate that it still remains usable in this capacity with the software I’m asked to install on it.

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes. continue reading…

Apparently Not :(

Rumour has it that iTunes 8.1 is going to be released in the next few hours. The new version of safari is actually a pretty slick Windows appliction; heck, it uses native UI elements which is a start!

So, while it’s not a new major version, do you think that there is any chance they may finally fix that buggy, slow mis-fit of a UI with something that may accidentally follow one Aero UI guideline?

Chris

Okay, this is a bit ‘niche’-ey. I have a US Macbook air with UK Keyboard layout and have spent a few months passively looking for the ‘hash’ key, whilst sort of admitting to myself that I’d probably bought a £1200 machine with no DVD drive, no changeable battery and NO HASH KEY.

But.. about that one, I was wrong… There is a hash key!

Anyone with a US Macbook Air on UK Layout : Ctrl-Alt-3

Finally!

Chris

Chris123NT has posted a wonderful guide that proves exactly what I thought would be the case but didn’t get round to trying for lack of an x64 install of Vista on any machine, oh, and time!

In order to install iTunes and the iPhone on x64 Windows 7 you need merely get source the Apple Mobile Device Center files from a Vista x64 install, copy them over and then run a registry script (i.e. the install that fails).

Head over here for the full guide; the files are now available in a rar file in one of the comments so just scroll down and save yourself an x64 Vista install.

That’s now all applications / hardware working fully on Windows 7 6801. Hang on for a production-system review soon!

Chris