This is where it gets hard, either mobile phone manufactures have to define a standard then release it through all their phones during their refreshes and eventually years later it will be in common use. Or one company that has everyone already hammering to get the newest device and can spread millions of them in one go does it. The only company that has that kind of control over the market is Apple. No doubt their solution would be elegant, but what they can achieve that no other manufacturer can do is volume. The Olympics is the ideal testing ground for this and I would love to see it happen.

Android is suffering from fragmentation, where each handset maker has a variation of the OS; So when Google update you have to wait for the manufacture to modify it and then hope that your woefully under powered cheap handset will run it. Google are combating this with making the ‘Holo’ theme used in Ice Cream Sandwich mandatory, but they are not going all they way.

It looks like Microsoft has learnt from their previous experience in this market and by watching others namely Palm’s WebOS and Google’s Android go up against the iPhone. People want their phone to stay simple but be smart at the same time. They seem to have found a balance between Google’s open to everyone and Apple’s full control approaches to offer real an alternative. This combined with the eye watering aesthetic that Nokia have been using since the N8 it makes it a real pleasing offer.

The titled interface is a refreshing way of looking at a phone compared to Android and iOS’s very similar UI’s. Microsoft seem to have realised that the key to getting a phone OS to stick is to get apps, something WebOS failed at. I hope this could be another XBOX for Microsoft.

Now they are forcing people to upgrade to the latest version their computer can use. The only issue there being that some people still use XP! An OS that is nearly 10 years old and can only run IE8. Windows 7 is actually quite a respectable OS to use, and even has some features I would like to see on my Mac. Microsoft needs to get users used to the idea of updating.

I fear Firefox is likely to fall into the same trap Microsoft did with IE; people getting left behind on old outdated versions. This is a real issue with the web moving so fast and new standards being created daily. Only the Webkit browsers seem to be any good at staying up to date. Chrome Automatically updates and Safari updates are pushed by Apple through the OS regularly.

Aperture 3 is said to have 200 new features but really how many of those feature will one use and how many of them are even worth my time? Well I am going to try and help answer that question.

Brushes

This is a feature similar to what Lightroom has had for ages and one I have been waiting for. Apple handle the idea of affecting certain areas very well with out complicating it with layers. In fact all you have to do to affect a select area is click the settings of the adjustment you wish to paint on and click paint in or paint away. You can do paint in almost every adjustment you get plus there are some new adjustments like skin smoothing which is one of my favourites and has huge potential for real life usage.

The skin smoothing has been really effective in this picture in making him look a lot younger.

Here I use brushes to reduce the saturation of the background so she popped out more.

Faces

This is a feature we have already seen in iPhoto and is great to see it in Aperture. Using keywords to tag an image is great but really time consuming and slow however Apertures face recognition is rather good and makes it a load quicker to group photos of the same person. I have used the faces feature to help me when I was making a calendar. We didn’t have any photos of my brother, faces made it much easier and quicker to find them and add them in.

Places

Again we have already seen this in iPhoto. It is a great idea and I am sure will be really useful when more cameras have GPS built in, but very few do and this is a bit of a downside. GPS units cost around £100 at the moment and most people don’t have them and I feel this feature has no practical purpose unless you have shelled out for a GPS unit, which is unlikely.

Presets

Most presets tend to be alright but never actually come in handy. However when using Aperture 3 I have found it really useful to use them to help you get an idea of what you can do to an image. I use them as a base and then adjust to suit the image itself. They offer some great effects and are super easy to use with their little pop out preview. Have you ever shot a load of photos then realised that the white balance is off on all of them or they are all too dark and need lightening up, this is where the presets really come into their own. Upon import you can apply presets to all the images fixing them and saving you hours of going through and adjusting all of them.

Here I used the punch preset as a base and worked off it.

Curves

Curves are powerful stuff and have been missing from Aperture. (As a little side note we actually had a little lesson on curves in Physics recently which was quite funny as most people struggle with the way they work.) As you would expect they offer you great control over your image.

Web Publishing

The web publishing links to Flickr and Facebook are a great idea but I doubt most people buying Aperture are going to be uploading to Facebook. Flickr on the other hand I personally prefer to use Photonic for uploading my images as it makes it super easy to add the pictures to multiple groups, but not everyone has Photonic and so I guess it could a be a useful feature.

UI

There are a couple subtle tweaks to the UI, that make it just that much nicer to use. The grey is slightly lighter and the icons bigger and brighter, this gives Aperture a much more friendly feel.

The Problems

As much as I like Aperture 3 it has some faults, and some major ones at that. It is painfully slow, much slower than its predecessor. It is also a complete memory hog when you first use it. When you first open it and import all your photos it will spend hours looking for faces and processing all the thumbnails. This is painfully slow and means you can’t do anything on your machine. When I had the trial version installed it was prone to crashes, especially if my computer went to sleep while it was open, however I have found this to disappear after installing the boxed version. I mention this sleep thing because lots of people seem to be having the same problem and from what I can work out it is due to a feature in newer macs that basically hibernates your computer if there is a power loss and so saves what you were doing in the RAM on to the hard drive; for me this has resulted in almost 20GB sleep image files that fill up my hard drive. Don’t fret they disappear after you have been up and running for a bit. This problem has again disappeared for me once I installed the boxed copy of Aperture 3, but I can’t speak for others. Something worth noting if you have lots of Aperture plugins, if they have not been updated to work with 64 bit then you will have to relaunch Aperture 3 just to use them.

Conclusion

Aperture 3 has some great features that are well worth the upgrade and make a huge difference in how you edit your photos, but as with any release it is not without its faults. Most of the major problems I experienced simply resolved themselves after I installed the boxed copy I bought, it may have just been a problem with the trial version of Aperture Apple were offering. Loads of the new features are actually useable instead of being just there for show. I have attached a gallery with some of my favourite images from Tough Guy.

Copyright: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deep-resonance

Just before the release of Windows 7 Apple announced a couple updates to some of their products. They released what are basically widescreen versions of the iMac, which have to be said look extremely nice, they also gave them a bit of a speed bump. They released a slender new aluminium Apple remote, a server version of the Mac Mini and a new MacBook with better longer battery life and a plastic unibody shell.

But most importantly they released the Magic Mouse, that is unbelievably cool. One of most talked about announcements is a flipping mouse. It is so hard to find a good bluetooth mouse these days. Logitech are the only company that sell a good basic bluetooth mouse ever other mouse wants you to plugin some form of dongle. Is it so unreasonable to use a technology that could be built into every Laptop and is in nearly every phone. Anyway back to the Magic mouse, it has the most sleek and stream line design of any mouse I have ever seen. I don’t know if I would really uses all those fancy finger gestures, but as long as I don’t have to lift my right finger to click with my left I might actually have to buy it.

What I did buy was a copy of Windows 7, there are so many version it can get really confusing but after looking around people were suggesting to get the 64-bit version on a Mac as Apple have drivers for 64-bit Windows 7 unlike Vista where there are only drivers for the 32-bit versions. In the end I bought the 64-bit Home premium version. I decided to get Windows 7 after playing with the beta which has to be said was rock solid and great to use. I need it for some of my A level subjects such as Physics where we are given a CD which, surprise surprise is Windows only and for DT where we use a lot of Windows design software packages such as “Pro Desktop”. I think I might wait till I have the official word from Apple that it is supported under Bootcamp, which is said to be coming by the end of this year.

In my opinion when installing a new OS the only way to go is to clean install. This requires a wipe of the entire hard drive which is effort, but can save you countless GB’s of wasted space full of temporary system files that have built up. With this in mind you add the 7GB’s that Snow Leopard promises to save you, I managed to save 20GB’s of space!

Snow Leopard contains no headline new features, but instead offers refinements to existing features and some of these refinements are as small as animation in the spaces navigator; it now slides along with you as you move from space to space (shown right) an other example is the dark menus in the dock, this are just small Ui changes but make Snow Leopard just that bit nicer to use.

Other updates have been more widely publicised such as the new Exposé which not only works from the dock but puts the windows into a grid pattern to help organisation. The addition of a signal strength indicator for all the wifi hotspots around you has also been popularly discussed. One of my favourite new features is the upgraded services menu which is now contextual. I feel services has always been undervalued but with its new design it really makes it much easier for the user.

On the matter of compatibility the only things that I seem to have had any difficultly with are Dropbox and 1Password, everything els seems to be working fine. Everything I use on a day to day basis works fine, even CS3. http://snowleopard.wikidot.com offers a list of all the compatible software they have tested in Snow Leopard, so you can check anything you want. One other incompatibility thing I have come across is when I try to install the FLIQLO screensaver I get a popup saying it can’t be installed. Other software that seems to work fine but has a few quirks are things like Growl and other 32bit preferences which requires Preferences to restart in a 32bit mode before you can access it.

In my opinion Snow Leopard is stable enough and well worth the upgrade. Even from an end user point of view the speed, space and general fresh feel you get from the new OS is worth the £25.

WWDC

With Apple pulling out of Macworld in the years to come WWCD is left as Apple only regular annual event. Even without Steve Jobs giving the keynote it was a riveting presentation to watch and there were many exciting announcements.

MacBook Pro’s

The new Macbook Pro line now includes a 13″, 15″ and 17″. The introduction of the new 13″ initially confused me as to where Apple are going with this, but after a bit of thought I believe Apple are moving their laptops in to the MacBook Pro label leaving the MacBook label free for something new.

As an avid photographer I have been waiting for the day that Apple would add some sort of a card reader into there laptops and finally they have. The addition of the SD card slot may seem insignificant but it is one of those little thing like the backlit keyboard that will help set Apple laptops apart from the rest.

Another feature Apple were emphasising was the improved 7 hour battery life. I have used my MBP for nearly two years now. As a heavy user of my laptop the battery is nearly dead (lasting just over 1 hour on a full charge). Apple are claiming that their battery will last 1000 recharges compared to a typical 300, if this translates into real life use then I am one step closer to an upgrade.

With all these great updates you would expect in the economic climate of today that the prices would rise but Apple lowered the prices.

Snow Leopard

As expected Apple went into some depth on the new OSX release. They focused on the refinement they had made, for example the reduction of the OS by 6GB and on a MBA that would be a significant help. There are also simple speed improvements throughout the OS due to many of the refinements. They spent some time discussing the new improved Quicktime 10 and the addition of exchange support.

Apple are billing this update as a no thrills update with a software speed bump, because of this again they came out with some radical pricing to entice existing uses to buy it. At $29 could anyone say no to updating?

iPhone 3.0

Before WWDC Apple held an event to talk about the 3.0 update. Some of the highlights were cut and paste, tethering and in app purchasing. Cut, copy and paste were finally announced and from playing around with it well implemented. Tethering has been a hot topic of discussion with a few free work around’s already been put out.

With the ability now to create turn by turn GPS apps, the in app purchasing is being used as a subscription method. Spotlight is another feature that in my experience has been very useful. The average person has page after page of apps on there iPhone and with spotlight it makes it easier to launch all those apps.

A feature that has been neglected is the ability for apps to now interact with add on hardware. This would be great in a word processing app where you could add a keyboard, but there is much more you could do, a barcode scanner for delicious library, or even if you want to buy something off amazon you could find it in a real store and scan the barcode then purchase it from amazon while standing in the store.

A feature that was only announced at WWDC was Find My Phone, it uses the MobileMe service to track down your iPhone and place its location on a map. We have already seen how it can save people from loosing there phones and might make MobileMe a worthwhile purchase.

iPhone 3GS

The climax of WWDC culminated in the announcement of the next version of the iPhone. The new phone offers an improved camera with 3 megapixels, auto focus and video. The new phone is reportedly much faster and has a built in compass which dramatically improves the GPS experience. There is no alteration to the case design which in my opinion was a mistake, the matt backing which we saw in many of the leaked photos would have been a good choice for the new 3GS model.

Palm Pre

Just before the announcement of the iPhone 3GS Palm released the Palm Pre. From what I can gather from reviews of the Palm Pre, physically the device is nicely designed but where it really excels is in the Web OS it uses. Its use of gestures makes it easy to navigate around the phone and the UI is very good. Palm are also taking a very active ad campaign against the iPhone as users come to an end of their two year contracts. The Palm Pre is by far the iPhone’s best competitor but personally I think the iPhone still offers more.

After a few days break to help me absorb the information Apple put forward, I thought I would share my opinions on iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and iTunes going DRM free.

iLife ’09

The first thing I should say is I am not going to buy iLife ’09. As usual Apple updated iLife suite, the major updates are in iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

iPhoto

In iLife ’08 Apple introduced Events a great way to organise your photos, now they have expanded on this with faces and places. Faces organises your photos by people, it uses face detection to find the peoples face, and face recognition to group photos of the same person. Faces is a feature I would love to have in Aperture as often I am asked to find photos of people, and tagging each photo is a lot of effort. Places does what it says on the tin, it organises your photos by their GPS coordinates or if they don’t have any you can place a pin on a map. This would be great if you go on holiday and want to see photos from a certain place, but I think it will become more effective when GPS becomes more common in cameras. There is also integration with Facebook and Flickr.

iMovie

iMovie now has precise editing allowing you to make cleaner cuts, it also gives you have much more control over audio manipulation. This precise editing is reason enough to get iLife ’09, it looks extremely slick to use. You can add video effects and change video speed; you can do green screen but this was not shown in the keynote. A great new feature is themes which allows you to add and change titles and lower thirds quickly and easily. The final new feature is maps you can create 2D or 3D rendered maps that fly from place to place. Maps has to be the most exciting thing in the Keynote for me; Earlier this year I shot lots of video of Iceland and this map tool would have been great to show where we went.

GarageBand

It has been a long time since there has been some real improvement here, but Apple have defiantly improved the app by adding lessons, it add a whole new experience and make GarageBand a very different app.

The only reason I am not buying iLife ’09 is because I don’t use any of the apps instead of iPhoto I use Aperture and i don’t do much video and iMovie ’08 is sufficient for my needs.

iWork

There are some great new updates to iWork that make it a well worth purchase. I am planning on upgrading to iWork ’09 simply because of the cool new animations you can do inside of Keynote.

Pages

As you might expect new themes, mail merge integration and a full screen mode. I can see the full screen mode coming in handy when in lessons, the mail merge would have been helpful when doing my IT GCSE because instead of having to use Office I would have been able to use my Mac.

Keynote

Some cool looking new animations such as magic move, chart animation and new themes. Some of these animation would come in handy when doing my English presentation, and I just love to play with animations. You can also buy the keynote remote app to remotely control your keynotes for £0.59, it requires iWork ’09.

Numbers

Additional formula’s have been added, new chart styles and table categories. These are all basic functions that will hopefully make Numbers a more appertising app for Excel addicts.

iWork.com

iWork.com allows users to share and download documents as well as comment and chat about their progress. If you are calibrating on a document it is a great way for the client to see it and add comments to what they think needs to be changed. I like the idea but don’t think I will use it and don’t think it is right they should charge for it, it would be a nice part of MobileMe.

iTunes DRM Free

After EMI went DRM Free we new DRM would fall, but it was just a matter of time and with the Amazon MP3 store being DRM free with all major labels Apple had to do something. There is now varied pricing through out the store but I personally have yet to see anything that is still not £0.79 in the UK. To start 80% of the library will be iTunes Plus but by the end of Q1 Apple hope to have a 100%.

Things

I have tried out many to-do apps, but after a few days I start to find flaws in the way they work. This time it was different, Things worked seamlessly and integrated better than any other to-do app into my life. I would love to write all my school notes on the computer and do my to-do list on it, but sadly I don’t carry my laptop to every lesson, this makes it difficult to maintain my to-do’s. Cultured Code the creators of Things have even solved this for me, with the creation of Things for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Desktop

Things on the Desktop is a well structured app that flows well, and makes it super easy to manage your to-do lists; by putting them into Projects, Areas or just what is next up. You can schedule to-do’s, add notes, ratings and add even keywords. You can add things to you Today list to keep you even more on target and focused. Things also has a very handy “Quick Entry panel” (shown below), you can call it up with what ever short cut you wish.

Things Touch

The addition of the mobile application makes it super easy to keep track of tasks by just simply entering them into the app and when you get home or even on the same Wi-Fi as your computer, and it syncs seamlessly over the Wi-Fi back to your computer. This means when I am at school I just write down my to-do’s on my iPod and and when I get back and they are all there ready for me to check off.

Conclusion

Both apps have an amazing user interface and work really well, but the only quarrel I have is that the sync is manual. You do have to have Things open on both the iPhone/iPod Touch and the computer for it to sync, this is because Apple will not let them run the process in the background. Things has dramatically improved my work flow and the efficiency of how I do tasks. It is an app I would highly recommend especially as for a few more days it is free on the Mac before they start to sell it.

My birthday was on the 4th October an so as you would expect I gained a trunk load of Geekery. As you would guess from the title I will be taking about Spore and Aperture.

Spore

Spore is an amazing game from the creator of the Sims Will Wright. In basic terms you are charged with bringing up a race of creature to your design, over a few thousand billion years. The game is great fun to play mixing the best bits of load of different game styles. There are a few problems with it, each level is very short and you can compete it easily in 4 days like me, but there are so many possibility so you can play it and every time come out with something different. Another problem I have found is the glitches, the game is divide into 4 stages and the final stage space I have yet to play as the game crashes every time I click buy on the interstellar drive to power your space ship from planet to planet. It is by far easiest to beat the game as a evil massacring savage civilization. I would highly recommend the game to anyone.

Aperture

I finally got 4GB of RAM for my birthday and so upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture at the same time. With the 4GB the performance is greatly improved. From what I have done in Aperture it is slick and works fast and well. The workflow is extremely easy to understand and uses. Apple also have loads of handy videos on their site. I have tried Lightroom but Aperture just seem to be more my cup of tea. It runs great for me and I can’t wait to try out some plugins.