Posts tagged ‘iphone’
Old problem, new trick
January 26th, 2012 at 10:49 pm by Dr. Drang
I went on a business trip to upstate New York this week and tried out a new system for keeping track of my expenses. It’s simple enough that I might actually stick with it. There are a bunch of expense tracking apps for the iPhone. Most of them either require you to open some sort…
The mute switch and the missing feature
January 14th, 2012 at 5:33 pm by Dr. Drang
In the “what does mute mean” disagreement between John Gruber and Andy Ihnatko I’m generally in agreement with Gruber: having “mute” on a phone mean something other than “no sound under any circumstances” is so valuable it shouldn’t be abandoned. But I’m sympathetic to people in Andy’s camp, mainly because the mute switch on the…
Killing iOS apps
January 8th, 2012 at 8:35 am by Dr. Drang
Now that all the successful and punctual bloggers have had their say about Fraser Speirs’s nicely written “Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking” post, it’s time for me to weigh in. Being timely has never been my strong suit. The gist of Fraser’s post is that people—including people who should know better, like Apple Geniuses—seem to think…
Type2Phone
December 16th, 2011 at 10:00 pm by Dr. Drang
I’d seen mentions of Type2Phone by Clark Goble and Stephen Hackett, but I didn’t get around to looking at it until Justin Blanton linked to it earlier this week. Well, now I have it installed on both of my computers, and even though it was hard to get working and has a weird display, it…
Slippery when Apple
November 27th, 2011 at 9:36 pm by Dr. Drang
When I got my first iPhone, I bought a case for it within a week or so. The aluminum back of the original iPhone felt cool and slippery to me, and I was sure it’d fall out of my hand someday. The case was less to protect the phone if I dropped it than to…
The return of TaskPaper
November 14th, 2011 at 8:05 am by Dr. Drang
Several months ago, I got so sick of TaskPaper asking me for my password so it could sync that I stopped using it entirely and went back to keeping my to-do lists in Markdown files synced via Dropbox. On Halloween, a new version of TaskPaper came out that—finally!—drops the homemade syncing system and uses Dropbox…
Savior of the Universe
November 9th, 2011 at 9:13 pm by Dr. Drang
Following a link from Michael Tsai (who’s been my go-to blogger recently on the OS X sandboxing controversy), I read this post by Jeff LaMarche on Adobe’s announcement of the end of mobile Flash. The key passage is this: I missed a huge factor in the demise of Flash. I assumed the performance issues they…
Dash it all
October 23rd, 2011 at 7:45 pm by Dr. Drang
I wanted to type a dash in a text message today and saw something I thought was new—two types of long dash in the hyphen popup. I know iOS 4 had a popup on the hyphen key, but I would swear it had only one long dash on it—the em dash, I think. It’s hard…
Eliminating doubled iPhone calendar entries
October 19th, 2011 at 8:23 am by Dr. Drang
I upgraded to iOS 5 last Thursday, and it went pretty smoothly. The only exception was that most of my calendar events showed up doubled on the iPhone. After a weekend of hoping it was a temporary iClould glitch that would resolve itself, I decided on Monday I needed to do something to fix it.…
iMessage
October 15th, 2011 at 10:12 pm by Dr. Drang
Maybe someone can tell me different, but I see the new iMessage feature as completely useless for me. Apple’s description touts it this way: If you’re a texter, you’ll love Messages on iPhone. Now it comes with iMessage, a new service that’s even better than texting. Because it’s between you and anyone using an iPhone,…
