Some months ago, the BBC decided they would update their weather website to look more ‘modern’. I must say, the design was slightly dated but a user could access ALL information required very easily. 24 hour forecast, with temperature, wind, humidity, pollen etc at a click of a button. Users could even get a nice five day at a click of a button.

Now, we are presented with this. (Click to view larger)

I really wish I had a screen shot of the old layout, because I thought it was a lot better. Now, I don’t know if I’m being stupid, but I find it really annoying and un-intuitive navigating this website. So much so I’ve been sent elsewhere, namely “weather.co.uk”, the Weather Channels UK website.

Now, I have this…

Look at that! Type in postcode (which BBC didn’t recognise even though the code change has been in place for at least a year or more!) and its away. Click “tomorrow” and oh yeah, we have tomorrows weather and a very nice organised breakdown.

Its exactly what I want from a weather report, instantly I can see its going to be warm again!

If you want to see for yourself, go to:

BBC Weather

The Weather Channel UK

Please comment if you feel the same way! I have emailed feedback to the BBC about this design change and got no reply!

I’ve been using iPhone OS 3.0 since about 18:00 GMT! I was on the check update button right form the launch time and was the first among people I knew to actually be able to download it via iTunes!

There are many blogs covering the various features, but I think MobileMe gets a bad wrap. I haven’t really seen “Find My iPhone” talked about much, and it’s a great little feature. I’m guessing they took the idea from a jail broken app which did kind of the same thing but failed. The GPS locate gets it to within about 30m, which isn’t at all bad! The message alert and tone is very useful! Its quite loud and can be heard a decent distance away.

Another interesting upgrade which wasn’t really talked about is the ability for MobileMe subscribers to upload images to their  galleries with great ease. Before the 3.0 update, pressing “Send to MobileMe” brought up the Mail app with your photo attached in it with an email address that would sent it to your account. This was an ok way around it, but for something which Apple control, a bit ad hoc. However, now its much more flash!

When you press the “Sent to MobileMe” button now, you are presented with the above window. Which lets you select the gallery you want to put it in (as you can see, I don’t really use mine to its full potential!) and lets you add a description and title. Within seconds (Wi-Fi) the photo was online, and you are presented with a link to preview it from Mobile Safari (which I am VERY impressed with! My new web development fly’s in it!)

Very promising application there, and I hope that the iDisk application that is in the pipeline (http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s/more-features.html, near the bottom) lives up to my expectations and blows the other apps out of the water. Apologies to them but I really don’t get on well with them.

In light of the changes to the Church of England proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which including praying for the CEO’s of Google and other popular figures, one friend came up with this as a suggestion!

“Our Google who art on servers, a verb be your name, your knowledge come, your googling be done, on earth as on the internet.

Give us today our daily searches.

Forgive us our typos, as we forgive those who typo against us.

Save us from the wrath of blogging

and deliver us from Microsoft.

For the internet, the knowledge, and the indexing are yours now and for ever.” Matthew Farmer, AKA Legend.

This is not what you want to see when you load up iTunes on both computers once the files have been synced.

Thank the lord for the plethora of backup files that WL Sync makes every time it syncs iTunes. I managed to load up the last one from earlier in the evening and it was all ok. But If I hadn’t have found that file, I would have to import every song I own again, manually.

So, as of this day, screw Windows Live Sync, hello Allway Sync. http://allwaysync.com/

It seems to work well, a traditional LAN based sync service. Very nice as I can plug in my work backup USB stick and it will auto sync to it. There is much more to it and will probably review it once I’ve got it set up.

I previously wrote about how Live Sync was very very good. I haven’t tried many applications for syncing, but the integration with Live ID and the background syncing worked well for my uses (backing up and copying files to and from laptop to pc).

All was good, until I got a message come up one day while editing a website. “The folder “blah” has more than 20,000 files in it, so we wont sync it anymore”. Now, the service allows 20 folders with 20,000 files to be synced. This sounds like a lot of files right?? Not to someone like me! Because the service looks at the amount of files, it doesn’t matter whether the file is 1kb or 1gb in size. As most html files don’t go above 15kb mark, this seems silly.

It sounds like they were thinking along the lines of most popular computer usage, storing music files and photos, which can be about 4-10mb in size (1000’s of times larger than my html/asp files). This is no use for more advanced computer users who want to backup their data as well as carry it around to where ever they want to go.

Adam’s solution: Use internal LAN while at home or on the same network as the computers which have the 20,000+ file folder to sync the files. This way the data doesn’t have to fly over the internet to get to the machine sitting by your feet. While at work or out of the LAN, queue up the files to sync when you get home.

Although, there may be 20,000 files to be synced over the internet, but each file isn’t changing at the exact same time! This means the bandwidth being used isn’t that great, its just a relatively small lookup table being queried every 10mins.

I think the method of using the wired/wireless local area networks that most homes/businesses have these days would be a great improvement on the technology. Microsoft already own a application that is solely built around this. “SyncToy”, which I talked about below. Combining these services would be of great use to a lot of people, and would make backing up locally and syncing files while on your home network much better as you wouldn’t be using up your allotted ISP bandwidth for that month.

Quite a long ramble, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out, and I don’t have a degree in computer science! (Yet!)

I like Apple products, I think they are very well branded and from a business perspective, Apple is amazing. However, their protectiveness over what one can do with their iPhone out of the box is ludicrous.

I jail broke my iPhone a few months after getting it. My reason for
doing so was mainly to see what I could do that Apple says I can’t. Apparently there are some nice features that I can do now!

Most of the things I have found are cosmetic, like enabling an animated icon on the clock app and the weather app shows the current temperature of the local area. But there are some things which have real use for a device such as this.

An application installed via Cydia (the app store for jail broken iPhones) called SBSettings allows me to do things like one touch on/off of the wifi, 3G, Edge, Bluetooth devices and other things like see what processes that are running (kind of like task manager for iPhone).

To access the SBSettings panel, one horizontal finger swipe over the status bar (where 02-UK and the battery status are displayed) will do and a drop down appears. From here you can see things like apps that have been hidden in the ‘dock’, which means you can hide apps you dont use that much from the main view. You can also toggle the things detailed above on and off.

(Above image the panel that you see when you swipe the bar)

This has made my phone a lot easier to use, and it still manages to look cool like Apple wants. Also, an app called qTweeter allows a vertical finger swipe from the status bar to bring up a Twitter/Facebook status update area. This displays your profile image from either service, and allows you to update either service in turn or both at the same time with the same message. This makes updating your status very easy and much quicker than loading the rubbishy Facebook application.

(Image shows qTweeter)

After the jailbreak, I did notice that my phone became slightly slower, but tweaking a setting in SBSettings made things speed right up. Enable ‘permission fix’ I think it is in the settings and it will be fast once again.

From what I can tell, all Apple have done about the jailbroken iPhones is release some updates that means you need to wait for the iPhone Dev Team to re crack it. I also believe that they are adding some terms and conditions that disallow jailbreaking.

Not allowing users to do what ever they want with their phone is like saying you cant take your car to any garage you want (which I think is being looked at by some manufacturers!) or saying  that you cant add extra hard disks or RAM to your PC box.

With the iPhone OS 3.0 update, I hope that some of the apps I use now will become allowed in the Apple App Store, as the functionality of the device is greatly increased when you use some of the apps that Apple didn’t deem worthy for their own store. This would mean that Apple could capitalise on these functionality improvements via the store.

Recently, I decided I would try and use more of the Windows Live services that were available. As I like Windows Live Messenger, Writer is nice and useful for blogging without having to load up the browser, login in etc etc. So I thought I would try out Windows Live Sync.

Currently, I have a desktop PC and a Laptop. I work from both of these, and I like to keep the files on both the same. I have been using SyncToy for some time, and I really like how easy to set up and use it is. However, Windows Live Sync seemed ok, so I gave it a go. As I write it is performing a first sync on a 11Gb folder which previously was kept in sync using SyncToy. This is running in the background, and I can keep working! One thing I didn’t like about SyncToy was its need to sit on the taskbar, but apart from that I liked it.

Quick thought, I wonder if I can sync a folder on Live Sync to three locations, to maybe keep a periodic backup!

Installation of the service on both machine was nice and easy with Live Sync. I would say from download to starting off the first sync took no more than 10mins. Which for using a service I had never seen before, quite good.

Live Sync seems to use the external internet to process the syncing, and is all encrypted. This is much better than using the internal network we have set up, as I expect (haven’t actually tried this yet) that files that change will be queued up for syncing when the second machine is powered up. Automatic sync will be much better than having to schedule my SyncToy custom batch file to run!

Random little map, I like this application!! Operating systems hide the complexities of the machine from the user, now it seems applications for desktop use are being designed to hide the complexities of effective navigation of the internet from the user!! (I do A Level Computing, I’m bombarded with this thinking daily!). And making things like remembering what file you copied last, memory stick or computer version!! Just sync the damn machines directly, in the background!

Application has almost finished its file checking… Hopefully it will work right!

Seems the syncing speed when a file is deleted, changed is not overly fast, but not slow either. A minute (give or take 30 seconds) from saving a file or deleting one, it changes on the remote machine!

The online remote access is something which looks promising, I havnt tried it from a machine that isnt syncing via the application, but if it works like I hope that could be very interesting indeed.

Overall, Live Sync is better SyncToy at everything. SyncToy is good at its job, but Live Sync is better!