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When you like to control the information that is available to you through feedreaders the one that I have found most useful is google reader. It allows you to navigate using keyboard shortcut keys rather than the mouse. As a result you are able to navigate more effectively through the sometimes hundreds of posts. For a while now, about three years, I’ve been looking for an app that gives us the convenience of google reader whilst on mobile devices. For a while I had the N95 and ipod touch, the ipod touch and the miniS and now the Iphone and N97. The problem I kept having is with keeping everything up to date on all the devices. I didn’t want to read through twenty articles on a mobile device only to have to wade through the same articles a second time when I arrived back at the main computer I use for content processing. That’s where MobileRSS for the Iphone and ipod touch comes into it’s own. It is a simple, intuitive way to go through your google reader feeds whilst mobile. Select the view you want, whether using “show new” or “show all”. Show all will give you several thousand posts along with all the key words you’ve added, something that is not so easy to manage. The “Show new” tab however is great. When I pick up the phone and update all my feeds it gives me all of the new posts in an easy to process format. I have the option to view all feeds if I desire or to see each feed one at a time. As you know some information sources like to post dozens of posts a day whilst others like to post just one or two a day. Those that post once or twice a day are usually the first ones I’ll read. This is because they’re more specialised, more thought out posts. As a result they’re more relevant. There are two three ways to navigate through the content. The first is by selecting the list view. You see the headlines you want to read. In the second view you can read article by article and click the up or down icons to get to the previous or next posts. You can also drag the article from the one you’re reading to the next one. This speeds up the process by minimising the number of button presses. When I am reading each article I can add notes, keep unread, star, share or even send it to to a number of other places. As a result I can share the articles I find of interest according to the way I think other people prefer to share. The options for sharing are email/facebook/twitter/readitlater/instapaper and delicious. This means that I can share content within seconds, rather than minutes, anywhere I am, whether in a traffic jam or waiting to pay for the day’s shopping. Another advantage is that it’s always on. Whether I have wifi or 3g I have access to all of the latest articles. I’d recommend using it. See whether it makes information gathering and sharing easier for you too. More information

Last night I recovered my N97 after lending it to a friend for a few days and he told me it was too complicated to use, which I do agree with, after seeing how easy the 3gs is, but that’s not the point of this post. Turn by turn navigation is. For those of you who know me you’ll have heard that I’ve used the N95, N97 and Iphone for navigation and each has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Mainly the biggest weakness is having to wait until you’re stopped at a traffic light before checking whether you were going the right way or not. That has now changed. Nokia have recently come out with an excellent, yes, that’s my opinion, add on to the maps software that provides turn by turn navigation with a choice of hundreds of voices. That’s what makes the Nokia N97 such a great, although expensive GPS. You select the voice, in my case female Canadian french, and she will tell you which way to go. She will tell you when you’re at a roundabout, whether to go right or left and more. Best of all her voice will allow you to keep your eyes on the road. If you’re travelling with a fellow geek who can play with the phone whilst you’re driving then they will notice the counting down, telling you how far you are from the next change in direction, show a map of the route as a forerunner to the actual journey or even a map of the complete journey. From what I’ve described above you see that the N97 behaves just like a dedicated navigation GPS that’s constantly online. As a result you get traffic information telling you what to look out for. It’s a beautiful piece of software and I’d love to go on a road trip to test it. I’m in favour of this in car navigation. If you buy a GPS you’d pay 300-400CHF in some cases, several hundred CHF for the Iphone tom-tom app, or you could get it for free with your N97. The choice is yours. I’m very happy with how well it performed.

I tend to play a lot with my new phone as a result of which the battery depletse in a short lapse of time. If I’m by a power source then that doesn’t matter because recharging the phone is easy. There are other cases where recharging is a hassle.  That’s part of the excuse I used for getting a mophie air cover for the phone. Last night I was at a party and whilst talking to one person I found out that their phone battery was dead so I removed the cover from my phone and lent the external battery/charger/iphone cover to that person. As a result as the party progressed that person wasn’t tethered to a wall waiting for the phone to charge. She had full mobility. The cover does not recharge the phone fully. Instead it provides you with between seventy to eighty percent of the charge you would normally have. That’s enough to get you home comfortably. In other situations though the back can be used as an external battery. That is to say that rather than recharging your phone it behaves like a primary battery. The cover drains itself of power before the Iphone battery is depleted, therefore making sure that you can have around twice the normal autonomy of such a device. This could be interesting when the device is used on a hike for example. There are two weaknesses to the mophie that I would like to see rectified. The first is for when you’re using the mophie as a cover but haven’t used the cover’s battery. If you plug it in it will automatically start recharging the battery rather than going straight to recharge the battery. As a result I prefer to remove the cover when it is just the phone battery that needs recharging. The second problem is the amount of time it takes when you want to recharge the device both by itself and with the phone already in the case. It’s better when you’re recharging both at the same to do it over night.

Port of Nyon in Winter The picture above was done with an iphone and the autostitch application. To produce this type of photograph the process is simple. You take a series of pictures with the Iphone camera before going to the autostitch application. You select the photographs that you want stitched together and click the stitch button. The application will then find objects within the photograph before combining them into one panoramic shot. Once the image is processed you have the option of either saving the picture as it is or cropping it to remove the edges hence giving this type of result.

nerwin - 20th of Dec 2009

Well, I know a lot of people who has the iPhone and crashed a lot. It’s really with any phone, had problems with iphone, had problems with palm. Nothing you can do really. Sometimes you will never ever have a problem. All I have now is a crappy free phone from AT&T. Hey but it works, I rarely call anyone, nor anyone calls me.

This is an about face for me. As an appreciator of the latest technology I always want to have the latest technology but I can’t always justify the cost. As a result of this appreciation of technology so I have gone through a number of devices. As a child losing devices is a good excuse to buy a new one. As a grown up though desire is enough. I really like the n97 and what it could be but it didn’t live up to my expectations. I spend a lot of time participating in social media, whether blogging, commenting, seesmicing or tweeting. Data plans are cheaper. Apple has demonstrated that people want applications on their mobile device. This has led the mobile landscape to move away from simple telephony. As a result the devices have had to evolve. Bigger screens are needed, batteries with more capacity are needed too. As a result of this new market segment you have many operating systems and more and more choice. That choice does come at a cost. When using both the e51 and the n97 in paralel, one for work and the other for pleasure I found that I was using the e51, a mid range device rather than the n97 because it was easier to use, and more reliable. That changed my focus. Having the latest alternative was fun, but it wasn’t reliable. It’s only after a few weeks of not being able to stop the alarm and a few missed calls, because the device froze that I wanted to change to the next latest thing. I was thinking of the n900 that uses maemo as my next device. Two things stopped me. Firstly reliability, what’s the point of buying a device that costs a lot but may not perform as you want it to perform. The second is the maturity of the third party applications. If you get maemo how hard will it be to install new applications and more importantly how much choice is there? Is it worth waiting another three or four months to get that device only to find that it doesn’t work? That’s why I’ve gone to the Iphone 3G S. It’s the more mature phone. It is well settled into the market, most people find it easy to use an best of all it has a great diversity of applications. It is also reliable. In a year or two we’ll see which devices are out, as well as which are the most reliable. At that point I may switch to another OS. I’d rather wait for Maemo and S60v5 to become more reliable before spending yet more money.

kcarruthers - 7th of Dec, 2009

One benefit of a netbook you might not have discovered is that it fits really easily into a woman’s handbag - very convenient ;)

kcarruthers - 7th of Dec, 2009

One benefit of a netbook that you might not have discovered is that it fits neatly into a woman’s handbag - very convenient ;)

I like smaller and smaller machines. I’m now enjoying the use of an eeepc, the 1000hg. It has inbuilt 3g modem and a 4.5hr battery life. It’s a nice change to use a small laptop because it does the basic things. It allows me to tweet, read e-mail and fail at Nanowrimo. The keyboard is fast for typing. I was able to type over 20,000 words without finding the keyboard to be a hindrance. It’s not the smallest of keyboards, nor the biggest, but it does fit my fingers perfectly. The screen is fine most of the time. It is slightly too small for a few web apps and programs. A few times I’ve gone to a page or used a program which could not cope with the vertical resolution of such a screen. As a result I do need to think about which applications and websites I visit. I also tested seesmic for windows on this machine and that worked well. No crashes, no slowing down the system. I had it running for over 24hrs in between sleep modes and such without the hint of a problem. So far I like the small laptop. It hasn’t fallen into a corner like the 900. This one has actually been used. We’ll see when I feel the need for a larger machine once more. For now though this is fine.

I haven’t blogged in a few months but I have been tweeting, and working full time, and I’m attempting Nanowrimo once again this year. Last year the process was easier as I had a lot of free time. This year I need to make time. I did get to over 20,000 words but inspiration is slower to come. The meetups are still going on. We’ve had two in Lausanne already, one in Zurich, one in Bern and the next will be in Basel. I think I’ll skip Basel as I have some more urgent projects to finish first. Did I mention over 1.3 billion words have been logged for Nanowrimo? That’s after 18 days of writing.

No doubt you remember that my laptop motherboard died. The effects are still being felt today. When you have applications, and when you have several computers you authorise them in order to have access to the same applications and music on more than one machine. This works fine most of the time. You can easily authorise and de-authorise a machine depending on necessity. The problem is when you have hardware failure though. As hardware fails so the device number changes. Itunes thinks it’s on a new machine and all the permissions are gone. That’s the problem I’m having. Over 129 applications have just been removed from the ipod touch as a result of having five machines authorised with my itunes account. There’s not much I can do to change this situation. What I love about this situation is that it’s another reason not to use an iphone. Why would I buy a device which relies on another device in order to function. If the N97 crashes I don’t need to rely on this computer to sync things, if my n95 crashes same lack of concern. Same with the e51 and other devices. With anything apple though as soon as five machines are authorised if you have a hardware failure you’re stuck. Apple have to resolve this issue because everyone has access to more than five apple computers, either through friends or through machines of their own. If I need to use a wifi connection to sync my ipod then I might as well have any generic device. I am one step closer to going back to using Linux for personal computing, windows for work and apple for nothing but editing.