Archive for January, 2009
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01.31.09
iphone 2.2.1 – update
The safari experience on the iPhone does seem to be a little more stable. I’ve been using it this last hour to hop around a bunch of different websites and it hasn’t crashed once. ‘Old safari’ would have crashed at least once during that time, so it does look like the experience has improved.
I was going to use safari to write this post but sadly I couldn’t click into the box where you type this text, one of those little nuances of using a mobile browser. Handily I have this splendid little iPhone app that I can use instead. Unfortunately it lacks spell checking and link management, so I’ll tidy up later. That at least isn’t Apple’s fault!
Let me reiterate – I love my iPhone, and I love Apple too!
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01.29.09
iphone 2.2.1 released
iPhone release 2.2.1 has arrived and with it promises of a more stable Safari experience. I for bloody one dearly hope that it’s true.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my iPhone for a million different reasons, and I’m happy to put up with all the shortcomings of no MMS, no 3rd party multi-task, no cut/paste etc, I just don’t care, but the way Safari has been recently has had me hopping mad (I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase before).
Sadly I’ve been too busy at work today to make any informed judgement on whether this update delivers what it promises, I had to settle for just letting the update happen whilst I chuntered on with my work. Perhaps later I can put it to the test and report back to my millions of faithful readers how it went.
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01.27.09
the way to complain
I cannot do any further justice to this, so just read and enjoy.
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01.26.09
comedy
Attending a student comedy gig tonight at my chum Adem’s place of work, the Thanet branch of Canterbury Christ Church University has reminded me of when I used to see a lot more comedy when I was younger. A local pub used to have gigs on and we would go to watch in the room upstairs and have a great time. It was there I first saw people like Ross Noble, Andrew Maxwell and many others, some of which have gone on to much better things.
I would also visit Jongleurs and other comedy clubs and have a really good time. I used to watch comedy videos all the time, stand up, TV series, sketch shows I loved it all. Actually I still do love it all and wish I got out to more live gigs and had the opportunity to watch more comedy on TV.
Perhaps I should finally bite the bullet and buy a new TV to put into my ‘attic room’ and hook a DVD player up to it so that I can watch funny stuff whilst Mrs Tom watches programmes about murders on obscure satellite TV channels.
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01.25.09
content management systems – jaws
I’ve been looking for a content management system to use for building my new venture, the channeltom.com website. I want to put a very basic site together about me, with links to all my stuff on it. Literally just a few pages.
I’ve looked at Joomla and a few others but they all seem very procedure driven and quite hard work to use. What I’m after is something snappy to put together and dynamic, sort of drag and drop, much like iGoogle or the new personalised versions of the BBC website.
I did some very brief searching yesterday and found Jaws, which at first appeared to do the job. Now I have it installed I’m not so sure. There certainly is drag and drop functionality and it is quite easy to use, but the way it manages content appears to be quite strange. There is an object (Jaws calls them Gadgets) embedded on the main page of your site which you cannot remove, and this is where any other requested gadgets load when you open links to them. This is messy.
Perhaps I am missing something, but I really don’t like that. I’ll have a further play today and see if I can find some sites which have been built with this tool to see how they did it. In fact I’ve just checked and the Jaws website itself is of course built with Jaws, and doesn’t appear to suffer this problem, so I guess I just need to work out how to use it properly.
If it turns out that I can’t do what I want with it, I guess I’ll keep looking.
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01.24.09
swoopo.co.uk – great, or a huge con?
I can’t work out swoopo.co.uk, a site I’ve just discovered. It’s an auction site where you pay to bid. When someone bids on something, it makes the cost of the item go up (by a penny or another pre-determined amount) and it adds time to the remaining time left on the auction.
As a result, on the surface it looks like a good site, as there are 40″ HD TVs for £90. However, because every bid adds time to the auction, sales with only a few seconds left actually last forever – people are of course perpetually bidding in the hope that they will win a huge TV for far less than retail price.
Each bid costs 40 UK pence, and you have to buy bids in bulk. This is where my understanding falls down, and I’m sure I could get it if I were interested enough to read through the site or Google it for some reviews, but I can’t be bothered, and I’ll get to that in a minute. Does this mean I’ll need to bid many many times to win my item, each at 40p a go? It would appear so, which although you still may win the thing for less than retail, adds a lot of risk – not everyone is going to win it, yet a lot of them will place multiple bids. This would appear to be a massive win for Swoopo, and according to the activity on the site, a stroke of genius by its creators.
I will probably steer clear – that stuff about something looking too good to be true probably being so is playing around my mind.
The reason why I can’t be bothered to delve in and read through all the FAQs or site reviews is because I feel I shouldn’t have to. A good website should be obvious and intuitive to use. Perhaps this is and perhaps I’m just a little dim, but I don’t think I am. Most of the workings of the site are obvious, but the rules don’t appear to be. Everyone gets eBay, it’s obvious, but I don’t think Swoopo is.
Anyone care to fill me in?
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01.24.09
new year, new blog
I thought as my previous two blogs had been such roaring successes that I would start a new one. Hmmmm…. What usually happens is I get a bit distracted and run out of things to write. Perhaps I’ll one day accept that I’m actually not very interesting and that no-one wants to read this sort of drivel.
Ok, let’s give it another go….