I’m very pleased today to announce the release of Capsule, the developer’s code journal. Capsule replaces the scratch document you have…
How to best provide support for the software you create is an interesting point of deliberation. I’ve gone through various stages and…
I haven’t yet installed iOS7 on a test device, so these are henceforth disclaimed as knee-jerk reactions based on hearsay and screenshots. 8 months is a short time and lots has been done, more than I thought was possible. It’s a little too candy colored and simplistic for my taste, especially the icons. I expect…
About a week ago my iPhone 5 started acting strangely with my home network. It appears to have stopped joining the WiFi network (my network connectivity has dropped to 3G/LTE with the expected latency and my battery life has suffered as you’d expect). Oddly, while it doesn’t show the WiFi icon in the top bar…
I like iOS but even with the 10″ iPad it’s a 90+% consumption device for me. I don’t write code. I don’t work on my blog post drafts.1 I end up reading things and not replying – creating a backlog of stuff that needs to be done/written/filed/etc. When I’m out of stuff to read I…
Quite simply, Paper is the best app I’ve seen in a long time.1 It just turned my iPad from a device I leave at home for email, browsing and playing games to a business tool I want to have with me all the time. Over the last six months I’ve been using paper sketches more…
For the last few months just about every time I do anything on my iPhone that uses Location Services, I’ve had that icon come on and stay on. I couldn’t get it to go away unless I turned off Location Services entirely; and even then it would come right back as soon as I re-enabled…
While the iPad *can* live as a stand-alone machine with iCloud, I still plug mine in every so often to load up photos, etc. As a contrast, the Kindle Fire didn’t even come with a connection cable (just a charger). I guess Amazon is backing up/hosting media in the cloud for me, no idea about…
One of the things I love about Google Voice is the way I can receive and send text messages from my phone, iPad and laptop. To borrow from “the best camera is the one that’s with you”, the best device for messaging is the one you’re currently using. It’s blindingly obvious that this sort of…
Awesome to see Google using the Share Icon in the Android Market app.
Many people, myself included, blast Android for UI inconsistency; but it’s a problem in iOS too. Here we have two screenshots from the built-in iOS settings screens. In this one, you see a Back button and a Save button in the toolbar. Clicking Save will apply changes, while clicking Back will act as a Cancel…
Since getting my iPhone earlier this year, I’d kept all of of the photos I’d taken in the iPhone’s camera roll. I’d accumulated over 1200 of them. It was handy to have a bunch of photos with me, but there was a cost on several fronts: storage and speed. This past week I’ve completely revamped…
One of the things I’ve liked about Verizon with my Droid and iPhone is the ability to flip on the HotSpot feature via the My Verizon app. I click on Plan Features and turn it on/off. Easy. Last month I made some account changes and added some family members to my plan. I discovered that…
If you’re using Moderinzr to detect browser support for touch events, be aware that non-touch BlackBerry devices claim to support touch events. As you might expect, the touch events are pretty much impossible to trigger on a non-touch device. I worked around this by making the check for touch vs. non-touch browsers also test for…
I’ve been a mobile tech junkie for a while now, and watching HP recently kill their webOS devices (effectively, webOS itself) has given me an interesting feeling of deja vu. The situation here has some strong parallels to the plight of the Newton. Both the Newton and webOS were considered to be good technology, with…
If you’re looking for an iPhone app that gives you the ability to annotate and draw circles and arrows on screenshots the way the excellent Skitch app for the Mac does, I recommend trying Sketches 2. It’s not quite as good as Skitch, but definitely the best of the ones I’ve tried for iOS. Thanks…
The reasons that Android phones are either slow to get system updates, or fail to get them entirely are pretty clear. The process of getting an update ready to push to a handset is decidedly non-trivial: Google creates, tests and releases a system update. Handset manufacturers take the system update and apply their vendo-specific tweaks…