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Showing posts from January, 2010

An in-depth guide to iWork for the iPad

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The iWork team has been hard at work for over a year in order to make its iWork software available on the iPad tablet. Phil Schiller says that "they have done some amazingly remarkable work." Each one of the three applications costs $9.99 in the iPad App Store. Keynote has been designed specificially for the iPad. It runs in landscape orientation as that is the way that slides are designed on a computer and it allows you to take full advantage of the whole screen. When you open Keynote the first thing that appears in the slide library which shows is all the presentations that you have previously created in Keynote. Clicking 'New Presentation' on the top right hand corner allows you to create a new presentation and the screen changes so that a variety of templates are displayed. You start your presentation and the layout changes. You have the slide navigator on the left in a column and a big slide taking up most of the screen for you to work with using your

Canon Digital IXUS 120 IS Review

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The  Canon Digital IXUS 120 IS Digital Camera - Black (12.1 Megapixel, 4x Optical Zoom) 2.7 inch LCD  (Amazon link - best price) has an RRP of £299 but can be found for under £200 on Amazon. What a bargain this is! The camera itself is a mere 2cm deep and houses a 4x optical zoom lens. It also has a very wide angle shot at 28mm which is suitable for taking panoramic shoots and for getting everyone in the same group pic, making you can get the whole of the year group in one school pic without needing to take steps backwards. The mainly metal housing of the case means that the camera feels very robust and it is a great sized pocket camera for putting in your pocket. It has a power up time of just under 2 seconds which we felt was reasonable and has a "Smart Auto" feature which changes its settings to one of many different presets and analyses locations and faces to get the best image for you. Noise wasn't a big problem until we used the camera in very-low light conditio

Why you should expect another Apple announcement within 90 days

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After Apple's epically long 90 minute iPad keynote on Wednesday, it has become apparent that not all of the features of the Apple iPad have been announced. Textbooks are clearly missing from the device, running iPhone OS 3.2 according to its about screen, and we could see some newspapers and periodicals appearing around the time the 3G version of the iPad is launched. Flash was noticeably missing and it's the same story once again with the iPhone - no Flash. When and what? The announcement would likely be after WWDC, as Apple has stated it will not be appearing at the Conference and it would need to announce international prices and carriers. However, it is unlikely that this would be a keynote presentation but would most likely come in the form of an online announcement through a press release. Other devices: There are likely to be other product announcements at the same time, including iPhone OS 4.0  which may be the reason why there is a 2 month delay for the

Apple iPad UK Prices

Apple launched the iPad yesterday, 27th January 2010, and has once again managed to make another product that consumers now need, despite not having the need before. From the prices below it is clear that Apple will be making a lot of its money from the accessories for the iPad. The Apple iPad - $499 - this equates to around around £308 if we were to actually believe that Apple would keep the price equal for UK consumers, but we're gonna get ripped off realistically. The $599 Mac Mini equates to £510, which makes the exchange rate according to Apple being £1 = $1.17451 (hardly competitive considering the real exchange rate is $1.60+ now). If the same rule is applied the basic iPad would retail at about £425 . £399 seems like the magic price point for Apple though and £349 would be much better for consumers and would significantly boost sales. The Apple iPad Case - $39 for which is essentially a folder, will equate to around £35 UK price The iPad Dock - $29 for a fancy st

Explaining an iPhone to someone from 200 years ago...

There have been many technological advances over the last 200 years which make it almost impossible to even explain the concept of an iPhone to a time-traveller. Let's take an adult from exactly 200 years ago, in January 1810 and try to explain the concept of the iPhone (or any other modern smartphone for that matter) to them. In the early 1800s the idea of electricity was being trialled and unbeknown to these fantastic inventors, the simple circuits and batteries they were creating and testing have made our lives in the 21st century truly amazing. In fact, it was not until the early ninteen hundreds when electricity became common in households. Explaining the concept of this invisible power that could make things happen would be hard enough... explaining that it would power this device which you could put in your pocket and carry around for a whole day would seem incredible. Then of course there was the invention of the lightbulb and it's use in 1879 by Thomas Edison. O

How to make a successful forum

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Having run several forums in the past and being a member of several large and niche forums, I have gained some experience in the way to make your forum successful. I've picked up many tips over the years - here are some of them: Offer something different  - There are tens of millions of forums on the Internet so your forum needs to be different. Don't make it too general as no one will want to join a forum about everything, but make it too niche either or you'll limit your potential audience. Be sure to specialise in one topic, some of the best examples of these include: techguy.org - it's not a computer games forum, it's not a technology forum, it's specific enough; thedibb.co.uk is another - it's a forum about Disney theme park vacation planning, not about Disney and not about one theme park. Give your users cool features - like blogs or have a podcast for them to download. Make it different by making it interactive ! Don't plaster it with

iPhone OS 4.0 rumours become stronger...and the iphone 4g?

There are more rumours bubbling around than ever, and the Apple rumour-mill will have some explaining to do if there is in fact no Apple event on January 26th/27th. Invitations are expected to be given out by Wednesday next week and we'll know by then whether anything at all will be coming in January. There are now rumours that a new OS will be coming out and possibly even an iPhone 4g, as its being dubbed.The new iPhone needs to be refreshed and it needs to have a better screen, a 5MP camera and there are rumours of a touch-sensitive back panel (which I find useless and will say straight away that it will not happen). As far as the OS being released, this is necessary and patents have been filed which say that you will be able to add a contact to your home screen. It is also expected to announce a new way of managing apps, the enabling of the FM tuner which apparently the chip is capable of doing, multi-tasking (this needs to come...come on Apple!) and Flash! What would yo

How to take screen shots in Mac OS X

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Everyone knows that the print screen button in Windows does exactly what it says on the tin...except it doesn't print. It takes a snapshot of your screen and copies it to the windows clipboard, you then have to open up Microsoft Paint and paste the image, then save it to where you want. On Mac's however there is no Print screen button and there is no obvious user-friendly way to do this if you a first time user of OS X. However, Apple has made their Print Screen utility much more advanced than Microsoft's. Press CMD + SHIFT + 3 and a screenshot of your whole screen will appear on your Desktop as an image file. Press CMD + SHIFT + 4 and your arrow will change and allow you to select a portion of the screen to print screen, drag a box over the area and release your mouse. It will appear as an image file on your Desktop.

Apple's tablet comes closer and closer

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Whether you think it's called the iSlate or the Apple Tablet, it's an almost certainty that by the end of the month we will have a Tablet to be drooling. Whether we actually need it, is a different story but we're sure Steve Jobs will be able to persuade us that it's the best thing since the iPhone. What might be coming that is not a tablet? An iPhone announcement will surely come - either OS 4.0 or a new iPhone with an improved camera and screen. An Apple TV update - with the 40GB model removed a few months back and an OS update late last year Apple hasn't forgot about it's "enthusiast" product. Maybe a new box? We could do with some PVR functions... Back to the tablet then... I have just found the image to the left of someone's concept for what the device could be. I have got to say that this would be the perfect kind of device as a tablet probably isn't going to be enough. It needs to come with a stand and be able to essentially act

UK phone networks take the strain as 2010 rolls in

An estimated 500million texts are expected to be sent today (January 1st 2010) in the UK alone, at an average of 13 texts per adult. In order to conduct some research, I did the same as many and in fact sent 18 texts at 00:00 exactly from my iPhone on O2s network. It was clear that the networks were feeling the strain as it took 46 minutes to send out eighteen texts and I was still receiving texts from other people that they sent at midnight, at 1.30am. Perhaps on an unrelated note, signal strength dropped dramatically in my local area and my 5-bar GPRS service fell to just 2 bars. Based on the estimate of 500million texts and the fact that about 99.99% would be sent within the first hour of the new decade, this equates to 139,000 texts per second and it becomes clear why mobile phone networks were jammed even if there are five major different phone networks in the UK. I would like to wish all my readers a very successful and happy new year!