Don’t drop the phone!

My first impression of the phone is it feels very very slippery. The smooth screen and the smooth plastic back make it feel like it is going to jump out of your hands. This is not just my opinion, everyone I have passed it to has handled it like it is made of crystal.

With this in mind my first purchase was a leather slip case from Ikonicedge. Without going into details, fantastic product!

Usability

I must say the new 3.0 features are really rather good. Push notification is coming to a lot of my day-to-day apps and it really is welcome. I can have IM+ active and will receive an alert when a new message arrives. I have seen a noticeable decrease in incoming SMS since that has been active, in favour of shooting over an IM instead.

The wifi works REALLY well! When I walk into the house it auto-connects to the wifi network, which is great for receiving calls on skype etc, and great if your house isn’t in a 3G area.

Features and Apps

Just like the adverts suggest, for most things you would need to do day to day there really is “an app for that”. Not all of them are free, but most of them are quite cheap and generally very good quality.

I like the way the app store auto checks for updates, and when I wake up in the morning I click update and several of my apps update to the latest version… slick!

One thing to beware of it I have found myself loading the phone with small cheap apps for 59p, then finding that 59p + 59p + 59p + 59p etc does add up! (yes, to £2.36!)

Addictive!

Oh… my… word… If you want your productivity levels to remain what they were before you bought the iPhone do NOT install games, specifically Flight Control. This is positively the most addictive game I have ever played and I just can’t put it down! You have been warned! BTW, if you buy it (just 59p at the moment) my high score is 74 on the default map.

Phone + email

As a phone it works great. The contacts list is slick, the interface is great and the call quality is fantastic. I can’t fault it one bit. If it had a blacklist feature (you can get this only by jailbreaking it) then it would be perfect.

Email works really well too. I don’t use push email so I have yet to experience that, but the standard 15 minute check works for me. If an email reply cant wait 15 mins then the sender really should have called me! The interface to mail is very nice. There are a few features I would like to have seen like the ability to “select all” or select a group of messages without having to click them individually, but for a mobile app it does the job and does it well.

SMS

The sms functionality is nice too. I used an N95 before which was nothing short of embarrassing… really!!! To have an SMS app that didn’t display the time the message was received, well, enough said about that!

The iPhone deals with SMS’s as conversation threads. When a message is received and you open it you also see the previous messages sent too and from the individual. I tend to send my SMS via JellySMS and clickatell (Internet SMS provider) as international SMS messages are much cheaper that way, consequently I only see half the conversation. For general use though, it works well.

Conclusion

I love the iPhone! Not in a physical way, that would be wrong(!), but as a phone/gadget it really is great. The camera in the 3GS is great (no flash, but you can’t have everything) and there are very few frustrations with it. Battery life would be one I suppose, but the N95 had the worst battery in the world, so even that seems good to me. With normal use it could last a couple of days.

I am still in the honeymoon period with this phone, where I am taking great care of it and making sure it does not get scratched/bashed etc. I imagine this will last a bit longer than it usually does with my phones, especially considering how much I paid for it.

I will no doubt post more updates as I go, but for now I am very happy with my purchase. As a phone is it value for money… hell no… not as a geek gadget does it make me smile when I use it, absofreakenlutely!

Recently I have noticed a sharp rise in twitter spam. Squarespace, a blog (amongst other things) hosting company in the states recently announced they were to give away 30 new iPhones to people who included #squarespace in their tweets. This took off like wikd fire and at one point they were generating 170 mentions PER MINUTE! Well worth it from their point of view.

Unfortunately this campaign resulted in innocent bystanders getting flooded with tweets by desperate, greedy twitterers trying to get a free iPhone at the expense of pissing off the people who are following them.

My guess is in the next month or two we will see the major players in the twitter game producing 3rd party products to filter the spam from twitter. Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck would be where my money goes. Twitter is manic enough once you get enough people in your follow list, without having half of them generating veritable white noise.

I guess this was inevitable really. Every service that comes about (mass mail, email, sms etc) gets abused, and someone always fights back against it. It is just a bit sad that a form of communication which started out so simple will soon require plugins just to filter the wheat from the chaff.

There are two things I have learned from this. Firstly, that while this constant spamming is inevitable, where people get irritated there is usually a solution around the corner. Secondly, Squarespace will not be getting any of my money, ever.

Firstly I am ashamed to admit I was one of the first people the first person in line at the O2 store in Harrogate, waiting for the new iPhone. I got there at approximately 7:15am, hoping in the first instance to go to the Carphone Warehouse (who opened at 8), but only to be told by their manager they will not sell them on Pay & Go on launch day.

So, I trundled sprinted down to the O2 store, who opened at 9:02 (O2… gettit?!.. sad, I know!). I was so early that passing builders looked at me like I was some strange character with nowhere else to be. Little did they know I was a strange character who was WAITING FOR AN iPHONE!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got my iPhone then high-tailed it to work (another long story).

First impressions

My first impression of the phone is it feels very nice to hold, albeit a little on the smooth side which makes you feel as if you are always one slip away from dropping it. It does feel like it would not do to well in a phone vs pavement battle!

I have not owned an iPhone before, so some of the improvements were lost on me a little. 100% faster… err…ok, it feels quite fast, but I really don’t have a benchmark for that one. Copy and paste… did the previous model (or rather OS) REALLY not have that… Apple, you should hold your head in shame!

The activation process was pretty simple really, just plug it in and let iTunes do it’s thang! It sounds like it went a lot smoother over here than in the States, where people were waiting up to 48 hours for activation. One good thind about being ahead of the timezone race, I guess!

Killer Appz

The main reason I bought the iPhone is some of the apps that you can get for it, for free or for very little money. Surprisingly when I looked up most of the flagship apps that Apple features on their adverts the feedback was always very negative. The app that divvy’s up restaurant bills had one small bug… it couldn’t DIVIDE! Call me picky, but #AppFail on that one!

As my text usage is 99% international I wanted to find a way of sending texts via the Interweb. I found the solution, although it was a little tricky to setup. There is a better one which only runs on jailbroken phones, but as mine is not one of those, I settled for JellySMS.

It is a straight forward concept. You register an account with Clickatell, give it some credit, then hook up JellySMS to it. It works just as normal SMS would, it even pretends to be your number, so replies come to your phone. This could save a fortune on SMS bills. If you wanted to use your 100 free web texts from O2 (UK only) you can also register it to your O2 account!

There are a few TV guide apps that I like, the best so far is Tioti TX+. It is really easy to navigate and you can even record Sky+ on it. Damn… I was trying to find a reason to bin off my Sky+ and this has just given me a reason to keep it.

I haven’t had too much chance to pay games yet, but I had a quick go on copter (addictive) and Wolfenstein 3D (a blast fromthe past… literally!). Apparently the Tower Defense games are really good too, Field runners especially!

I won’t go into details about every app I have on there, but I will list them and you can feel free to ask questions:

• The BMW Z4 game (had to be done!)
• Tweetie (Twitter client)
• Tweetdeck (another Twitter client)
• AroundMe
• Facebook
• Google Earth
• Evernote
• Wimbledon (starts tomorrow)
• F1 2009 (live stats etc)
• iPint (really crap, but had to see it)
• JellySMS
• Remote (remote control your Mac itunes)
• Skype
• AIM
• Copter
• Dictionary
• Dog Whistler (piss off the neighbors dog!)
• ezShareLite
• Flashlight (turns screen white… mmm)
• Google App
• Ebay
• Handy Level
• iTranslate
• MultiConvert
• News24
• Sky News
• RSS Runner
• Paper toss (it’a a GAME!!)
• Nearpics
• Photobucket
• Speed Test
• Swine Flu Detector (dont ask!)
• Tioti TV+
• TVGuide
• Translator
• Whitenoise
• GPSLite
• POI Lite (speed cam alerts)
• Truphone
• Weather Maps
• Wiki How
• Wolfenstein
• Sudoku

Blimey, that was quite an extensive list, considering I have only just got the thing. Luckily most of these are really small, so they take up next to no room.

A great feature for me is it is compatible with my iPod kit in my car, as well as the bluetooth phone, meaning it is an all in solution whilst I am in the car… I can take podcasts with me and listen to them as I drive.

I will post more when I have had it for a week or so. I have ordered a leather case for it (a slim, non-offensive one) as it looks to be a bit fragile. I will let you know about that too.

If any of you have one of these iPhones (and you know I know some of you do!), feel free to add your comments about how you got on with it, killer apps you found etc. It seems like it is definitely going to be a fun phone to live with!

The Internet seems to be on fire with people either marketing themselves on twitter, trying to find out how to market themselves on twitter, or trying to find others to listen to their (usually expensive) method of marketing themselves on twitter.

Personally I am getting fed up of it. I see people day in day out trying to use twitter to get something for nothing. They rapidly get as many followers as possible and then start bleeting about their blog posts, their company, or their products. Enough already!

I liken it to some idiot standing in the town centre shouting at the top of his voice how fantastic his skills are in whatever field he works in. Do you think people would listen. Hell no, most people would cross the road to avoid such an imbecile.

So why do people keep doing it? Because the don’t understand. They see it as a captive audience who they can dish out their message to. The trouble with captive audiences is they put up defenses. When approached by someone in the street with a sign-up form, most people are armed with the “no” response even before they make contact. Sound familiar?

What most people miss is the opportunity to gain respect, take part, make friends and most importantly to help others. I say most importantly because firstly it gives you that warm feeling inside, knowing that you have helped another individual, and secondly because human nature dictates (for most of us) that if someone helps us, we want to help them in return. So, answer questions when you get chance (yes, even the daft ones!) and provide information when you have it. Before long your reputation will grow and then you will earn the right to be listened to.

This does not mean said person that you helped will be reaching for their wallet and looking for the “buy it now” button. What it does mean is that this person will listen to your message with an open mind, and have more propensity to see what you say in a positive light. From that basis you can open communication.

So, if you see emails/tweets/blog post offering “get rich quick” schemes, or “get 10k followers on 1 day” schemes, please do me a favour (and yourself) and block them/delete them/get as far away from them as possible. All they do is clutter up what is actually a very lively and friendly social network.

If you are looking for a moral to this blog post (should blog posts have morals… dunno?) then it would simply be “treat others as you would like them to treat you”. Twitter is great for that!

The problem is, Google has told us time and time again that you should do everything in your power to avoid duplicate content. We also know that if you have part of your site that must have duplicate content the easiest way to avoid it is to add a do not follow line to the robots.txt file.

This is great, and it works, but then how will Google know if you have a privacy policy or not, if you don’t allow it’s robots in there? Is there a guy employed on minimum wage to trawl through manually and make a note of it?

For now I have left it as it is, but I do wonder if Google will see it as duplicate content, along with half the Internet? Or is it clever enough to pick up on the keywords and turn a blind eye?

If you want to use this image on your site, simply add it to your page as follows:

<img src=”http://www.thinksynergy.co.uk/scripts/worldcupcountdown.jpg” alt=”World Cup Countdown”/>

Note: If you cut/paste the above, please make sure the “” are pasted correctly, and dont end up curly quotes!

Teleport is a method of controlling multiple Macs by sharing their desktop out. It does not work in the traditional remote desktop sense, in that you do not get the image of the remote machine on your desktop, but rather your keyboard and mouse *jump* over to the remote machine and you can control it.

This is obviously only useful if you can see the remote machine, if you can’t then there are other more suitable utilities to do the job. This is useful if you have another machine in the room, used for other tasks (video editing, mail, or even Twitter!).

The way it works is you run the utility on the target machine and share out the desktop. You then run it on the client machine and you will see the target machine in the menu. You can then drag it to the edge of your screen (any edge) and then when you move your mouse off the side of the screen it appears on the target machine. Cool!

There are a bunch of settings to prevent you accidentally moving from one machine to another, such as holding the command key while moving the mouse off the edge of the screen.

It really is a cool application and very useful for those of us with multiple macs. It does just what it intends to do and it does it well!

http://abyssoft.com/software/teleport/

I decided that ideally I would keep the XP functionality just in case, so I am currently dual-booting it with XP/OSX. It took a little messing with to get OSX working fully, but it now works nicely. It is possible to get the in-built wireless card working, but it is a very messy process and the general consensus is just to swap it out with a cheap airport-compatible card, which I did.

The machine itself is really nice. It is a little heavier than some, but that is mainly due to the 6-cell battery it has, over the 3-cell batteries most of its competitors have. This gives the machine around 5-6 hours battery life in XP and 4-5 hours in OSX (the power management in XP is slightly better).

The keyboard is a major selling-point. It is very big in terms of netbook keyboards, over 90% of a full-size keyboard. This means that while it is not easy to touch-type, you can at least type reasonably fast and are less susceptible to mis-keying.

Speed-wise this little machine is pretty good. Boot times are very quick indeed and navigating either operating system seems pretty slick. Obviously this is no gaming platform, and you would not want to render a video on it (the Intel Atom processor is designed for battery life, not performance) but for what it is intended for it is a great little machine.

The OSX functionality is not perfect. I used the instructions from Mysticus C to get it working. It is fairly straight forward actually, once you understand how it works.

Aside from needing to swap out the wireless card the sound drivers are not perfect. There are some hacked ones out there that enable sound, but the in-built microphone is still not fully supported. Hopefully in coming weeks there will be a driver available to support this. The webcam is already supported, so once the mic is working this will be a great little video conf machine. Bluetooth works well, as does the trackpad (complete with multi-touch!).

I intend to end up with a triple-boot system by putting Windows 7 on there too, but the bootloader is slightly different so I need to work out if it will be straight forward or not. My main partition is FAT32, so all the operating systems can access it. I may at some point replace this with NTFS (there is an OSX driver to support it) but I am not sure that will be necessary.

I have only been using the NC10 for a short while, so I will post again once I have got used to it. For now I am very happy with it!

I have a number that needs to be stored in a string format in PHP. However, I need to use this value at some point to run a calculation, for which I need the true value as opposed to the string. If I had just wanted a whole number the answer is very simple, use the PHP (int) method to convert it.

It is not that easy when you are working with decimals. Unless I am missing something (in which case feel free to embarass me in the comments below!) there is no easy way to do this. Here is what I came up with:

$string = "3.142";        // The source number, as a string
$a = explode(".",$string);            // Split the string, using the decimal point as separator
$int = $a[0];                        // The section before the decimal point
$dec = $a[1];                        // The section after the decimal point
$lengthofnum=strlen($dec);            // Get the num of characters after the decimal point
$divider="1";                        // This sets the divider at 1
$i=0;
while($i < ($lengthofnum)) {
$divider.="0";                    // Adds a zero to the divider for every char after the decimal point
$i++;
}
$divider=(int)$divider;                // Converts the divider (currently a string) to an integer
$total=$int+($dec/$divider);        // compiles the total back as a numeric value

If anyone knows of a quicker / cleaner / better / more funky way of doing this simple task please do let me know… if not then I hope this little snippet at least lets you avoid losing the half our of your life that I lost this evening!

UPDATE: Thanks to Xobman, who Twittered me this little gem:

Try $foo = “3.123″; $bar = (float) $foo;

LOL… low and behold, it works! That’ll teach me to post my (oh so clever!) code on the Interweb for all to see

Thanks Xobman!

Last week I noticed a spike in traffic to one of my sites. When I checked the stats I could see the traffic was coming from people searching for a particular domain name in Google. People often seem to type web URL’s into the Google search field, so it is worth making sure you rank high for your domain name too!

For some reason when people entered the URL of this supermarket into Google my site ranked number 1. I found this to be quite amusing.

What I found even funnier is once they clicked my link people seemed to think I WAS the supermarket. It turns out the supermarket had a prize draw and to enter you had to fill out a survey. People were registering on my site and emailing me their opinions thinking they were in the running for a prize.

This is most amusing, as my site looks nothing like the supermarkets branding, it isn’t even close.

I do find it odd that the proper site didn’t even rank in the top 10 on Google though. They must really be in the Google bad-books!

I pointed these people in the right direction, it seemed the right thing to do, but whoever the supermarket employ for their SEO probably needs a lesson in Googlisation!