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I was heading down to Wonthaggi to see a client yesterday. Wonthaggi is about 1.5 hours drive from me so I thought some new tunes might do the trick. For 3 hours in the car you need some good music!

So I plugged my iPhone in to my PC and the insufferable iTunes application opened up. I thought that I might be able to drag some music from my collection right onto the phone icon in iTunes and hey presto – new music. It was never going to happen.

It seems that the iPhone is so amazingly clever that you can’t do that. No, Apple insist that I wipe everything off the phone and fully synchronise with this PC. How long is that gonna take? I only had a few minutes.

I initially loaded the music onto the iPhone from my media centre PC (which seems logical right?) but today I was in the office using my office PC. I have 4 PCs that I might use for this task too. Just load some files on right? Nup.

You see because I have six  different PCs that I might use for this task (too many for Apple to deal with by a factor of five – oh but they will actually let you “authorise” five of them). I would have to have all six (actually five, the sixth one Apple won’t allow me to have) loaded up with exactly the same songs. That means converting my entire CD collection from wma format to Apple’s proprietary control system on six (five) different PCs. Yeah right…

But that is the only way Apple will allow me to add to my iPhone music. So now I have this useless thing that won’t allow me to add music without wiping everything off first and waiting an hour for the privilege of starting again. FFS Apple must hate me! Why do they insist on treating me with such disdain and contempt?

I say that because there is simply no valid technical reason that Apple should not allow you to drop mp3 and wma files straight onto the iPhone to play (even through iTunes). So there are only two choices left. Either:

1. Apple can’t develop decent software
2. Apple insist on complicating things to the point that consumers will lose all will power, give up and buy everything through iTunes.

I’m inclined to think that it’s number 2, and that’s exactly the reason that I bought an iRiver instead of an iPod for my car in the first place.

I avoid buying music from iTunes like the plague. Why would I when I can download DRM free mp3 files from Bigpond for less without having to navigate using that cesspool of a program called iTunes?

So buyer beware: Whilst iPhone was once the best thing since sliced bread, don’t expect that it is a phone and an mp3 player. It is not an mp3 player, just a portal to the Apple iTunes revenue farm. Put your credit card away and don’t give it to them.

The app store kept me interested for a little while, but I can seriously say that I don’t rely on any of them. In fact apart from the facebook app, I wouldn’t use any of the 150 apps that I have downloaded on a weekly basis. I’ve even been fully rehabilitated from the games.

I am seriously regretting the purchase of this iPhone. I had a play with the HTC Android phone and the HTC Sense with WinMo on it at my customers office yesterday. The HTC sense is a very nice piece of kit that runs fast and smooth. It’s about friggin time that a Windows Mobile device offered a decent experience, and the HTC sense delivers. Bring on WinMo7 too.

The Windows Mobile move to integrate social media with email and contact management is just awesome. Even the HTC sense makes the Apple iPhone app concept look like kindergarten.

Sorry Apple, I’m over it. I want to load my music on my phone! As soon as I can I’m outta here! I would take a HTC sense of this any day. Making the switch back to PC.

It appears that the hailed religious leader of Apple fanbois, Steve Jobs is stupid.

According to the wired report on the now famous “Town Hall” meeting (seems a bit religious doesn’t it – for freak’ sake they make computers), Steve says about Adobe,

They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5. – Wired Article

Apparently he’s never seen the smoking pile of garbage that is iTunes. In terms of designing to usability standards it is on a par with if not worse than Adobe’s lazy products like Acrobat Reader. It is slower than a snail, unbelievably irritating, and incredibly hard to use. Did they design this program to convey the complete disdain that they hold you in as a customer.

What about Quicktime? What a piece of rubbish! It does not conform to any Windows usability standards… and you have to wonder, was it designed with that in mind? – To make windows seem bad? I flat out refuse to install it, and thankfully more and more the format is irrelevant anyway. Kudos to flash!!! I can think of once or twice in the last 12 months that I’ve visited a site that needed their buggy piece of rubbish video player.

All I’m saying here is that while Steve’s flamboyant rant had the Apple underlings in rapture, it was a ruse.

Apple make money from iTunes and the App Store. If they gave it away for free by letting flash roam around on the iPhone and iPad unguarded there would be no profit and no business.

It has nothing to do with how rubbish Adobe products are, and Macs crash more frequently than windows because they are Macs… don’t go blaming flash (which is actually one of the more reliable Adobe products, probably thanks to its Macromedia roots).

So cut the bullshit Steve! Stop throwing stones because that Apple store you got is one freakin’ huge glass house!

I got a chance to get up close with the Kindle 2 over the holidays… Until recently, that’s been pretty hard to do here in Australia.

My verdict: Super impressed!

The eInk screen is very comfortable to read, although I didn’t get a chance to use it in the sun (as it rained in QLD pretty much the whole time).

What I like about the Kindle 2:

• Super thin
• Very light – easy to hold for long periods of time
• Easy to read
• Long battery life…

What I don’t like about the Kindle 2:

• Still very limited selection of titles in Australia. It’s getting better, but still not good enough
• Scrolling control / jog dial – could take a lesson from the old HP TC1100 jog dial
• Lack of touch input
• Device is locked in Apple style…

Pros outweigh the cons as far as I’m concerned. The Kindle 2 will do much to attract people to e-reading.

What I’m really excited about is the prospect of using a Tablet PC or UMPC that fills this form factor. No, I don’t want it to run some dumbed down mobile phone OS like Google Chrome or Windows Mobile either… I want full Windows on it. I want it to replace my desktop like my Motion J3400 does… Can’t wait for that – It’s only a matter of time.

Every article I read about Tablet PCs in mainstream IT press seems to want label the Tablet PC as a failed concept. As I watch significant numbers of Tablet PCs walk out the door every month in our business, I chuckle every time I hear about it… Of course, even I’m old enough to know that it’s all happened before…

Into Personal Computing History…

In its current form, the PC mouse is now 42 years old, but it is really only 25 years since it went mainstream with the Apple Macintosh – 1984… Here’s what a respected PC journalist had to say about that:

"The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation – as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices."

John C. Dvorak – Commenting on the mouse that came with the Apple Macintosh, San Francisco Examiner, 19 February 1984

That pretty much sums up the way the tech journos  write about Tablets and UMPCs today…

Like the switch from keyboard to the mouse, most people will initially resist the change… I still know people who hate the mouse so much that they continue to operate completely without one.

That said, even I was still using PCs without a mouse well into the 90’s (we had PCs at home, not Macs). Nowadays, it would be practically impossible to work without a mouse (barring touch and pen input of course!).

I believe that the adoption of Touch and tablet technology is similar. Digital pen technology has been around in a commercial form for 20 years now, but it really hit the mainstream in 2001 (2006 for UMPC). So it’s been 9 years and things are getting exciting for a couple of reasons:

1. Better hardware – outdoor / indoor screens, capacitive touch, low power processors, mobile broadband access.
2. Better software – Windows 7, multi-touch, Android, better handwriting recognition and ink enabled apps like Microsoft Office.

So the Tablet will continue to gain ground as  an accepted mainstream form of computing.

However, it won’t play out exactly the same. That’s because tablets are most useful in mobile scenarios, whereas the mouse could be used practically on a desktop. Practical Tablet PC use also has much higher software and processing requirements – like handwriting recognition and virtual keyboard input.

That means that unlike the mouse which is now attached to practically every PC, tablets will probably never gain that sort of presence. Additionally, they will take longer to gain mainstream acceptance.

Apple will have a good crack at it this year… like they did with the mouse, with the release of some sort of Tablet. But like the much like the mouse, they probably won’t be able to change the market overnight.

Also, if Apple do adopt touch input on a PC – as the mouse has taught us – it does not mean that Apple will ultimately own the market.

I recently found that I couldn’t open WAV file attachments in Outlook 2007 on Windows 7. It was harder than it should be to find the answer to this problem, so I thought I’d publish the answer…

Outlook keeps a temporary folder for opening attachments and it is hidden in Windows 7. If a file in that folder becomes locked or corrupt, you can end up as I did… unable to listen to your voicemail messages.

The solution is simple, jump into the temporary folder and clean it out. But…

Even though I had switched off all of the “hide protected operating system files” options in windows, I still couldn’t find the temporary internet folder called outlook.content. 

It should be somewhere like this:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\F2OLM1OC\

But this last part “F2OLM1OC” is system generated. i.e. it won’t be the same on your computer. And, the folder \Content.Outlook\ is not shown if you simply go to your temporary internet folder.

So the easiest way to get to the folder and to navigate straight here… remember to replace “%USERNAME%” with your computer user name (the name you logon with).

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook

You’ll find the folder in question inside that one. Or, you can go into your registry to find the location of that folder directly. You’ll find the entry here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Fixed!

Since i’m a touch / tablet geek I have an iPhone, several UMPCs and several tablet pcs.

I’m fairly proficient at typing so there is nothing faster than typing. But the reason that I have tablets is that it’s often not convenient to pop out a keyboard to type. You can’t always have a flat surface handy to rest your laptop on (although I’ve seen plenty of people try).

So with all touch and tablet devices input is the question.

The combination of the capacitive touch screen, virtual keyboards and predictive correction is great. I use it all the time for quick emails. SMS is so easy with this too.

When writing something like a blog post on long emails, the virtual keyboard on the iPhone is way to slow.

On the other hand, my tablet pcs are excellent for that job. They are a lot bigger than the iPhone so not as discreet. However handwriting recognition quickly becomes a very fast method of input. The good news is that with windows 7 it is even faster! In fact with my experience at pen input, handwriting is fast catching up to typing as a method if input.

So the tablet pcs fill that space. Very mobile, great for longer more detailed input.

So whar about the UMPC? Well they are not as good as either the tablet or the iPhone for input. But what they do have going for them is windows! There are so many things that you just can’t do easily with an iPhone… For me that’s things like access files on the network, play windows media content, access certain websites, backgrohnd instant messaging etc etc. UMPCs can do all of that well…

Wrote this on the iPhone… Very hard work!

This is a test post from wordpess for iPhone

The windows photo gallery program on my PC recently started to exhibit a strange and quite annoying yellow tinge recently. Thankfully, someone published a solution to the problem which is caused by a faulty driver update for some LCD displays.

The drivers don’t appear to be faulty as such, but they muck with the windows colour management settings for the screen.

Oddly, the yellow tinge only shows up in this application. All of the other photo viewers I tried did not have the yellow.

Anyway, the solution is here and it worked on my LG LCD monitors: My Digital Life

BSOD = Blue Sign of Death

Vista Media Center

When I was in Brisbane last year, my friend Luke showed me a Windows XP Media Center. I thought it was pretty cool and I’ll tell you why.

For those who don’t know what the fuss is all about, a media center is like a hard disc recorder (PVR), Foxtel IQ or a Tivo. That’s one of those devices that allows you to record TV shows, pause live TV and play it all back later.

They are usually made up of:

1. Hard Disk to record shows onto
2. A TV Scheduler program
3. Connections to your TV and Stereo

They might also have a DVD burner inbuilt.

I had played with a Windows XP Media Center a few years ago, but digital TV was pretty new then and the digital TV recievers that I had were not compatible with the Windows Media Center software.

Digital TV has come a long way since then and so has the Windows Media Center platform. The hardware to make it all work is now much cheaper and easily avaialble.

So why does Windows Vista Media Center rock?

Well, Media Center is so much more than a Tivo, a Foxtel IQ or a PVR. Those things are purely oriented around TV. But whilst the media center might be connected straight up to your plasma TV or projector, it can also be another PC on your network. So with Media Center you can:

1. Easily network with your other computers
2. Share files, photos and videos around the network (think digital cameras and mobile phones that are already connected to your PC)
3. Connect to and browse the Internet easily in a familiar environment
4. Download and access online media (Think torrents – nothing illegal of course , youtube, Bigpond movies).

What I found is that there is so much to watch on free to air TV but it’s never on when you’re there to watch it. Vista Media Center fixed that for me, so I cancelled my Foxtel subscription.

So when I have a moment, I can sit in my lounge, browse through some old photos while listening to some cool tunes. When I’m done, I’ll browse through the TV shows that I’ve recorded and find something worth watching!

Now if only we could get the free to air networks to buy some up to date and decent TV shows like The IT Crowd and The US Office… 

I’ll tell you a little bit about how to put your own Media Center together later…