iPhone: What’s Missing (2): Where’s The Keyboard ?

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Jul 122009
 

I’m very fussy about keyboards; perhaps ridiculously so. But I cannot understand the criticism of the virtual keyboard that comes with the iPhone. It takes some getting used to, and the auto correct feature whilst very useful can also be very irritating. Enough so that Apple should probably have a keyboard button marked “turn off auto correct for a while”. But it is perfectly adequate for what it is  – something to do a little text entry from time to time.

So why am I complaining about the lack of a decent keyboard ? Because quite simply if I’m doing any writing (and I don’t at present) on the iPhone, I would like to be able to type at full speed – which for me requires a decent clicky keyboard so I can get up to a reasonable speed (apparently about 120wpm!).

Adding bluetooth drivers to the iPhone should be pretty trivial for Apple after all there are already OSX bluetooth keyboard drivers available, and the iPhone operating system is OSX. So why does Apple not include one ? Sure there’s an excuse for the first release not to include one – Apple wanted to make sure that the phone was rock solid in a totally new market to them. But now?

Surely it cannot be because they feel that releasing such a driver would be an admission that the virtual keyboard is no good. After all, I’m not exactly an enemy of the virtual keyboard, but I want a real keyboard interface for those occasions when one would be useful.

iPhone: What Is Missing (1)

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Jul 122009
 

The iPhone is hardly perfect, although it is quite good for a smartphone. However now we are loading up our iPhones with dozens of added applications, the old swipe-able screen interface needs a bit of care.

The first improvement would be the ability to tag particular screens with names. This would be merely an aid to organisation, but in practice would be very handy. There is plenty of space in the status bar for the “name” of a screen, or Apple could do something funkier involving putting the name onto the background.

Secondly it would be handy to have icons that could “warp” to a particular screen – presumably by name. This would work as a simplistic form of ‘folders’ for the applications.

Finally it would be useful to be able to make certain application icons “sticky” so that they remain available no matter what screen is currently active.

The Apple iPhone App Store – A Year On

 Computing  No Responses »
Jul 112009
 

Apparently the Apple iPhone app store has been open for a year now. It has not been quite a year since I have been using it, but nearly so. It is not really anything new in itself as most smart phones allowed you to download new applications, but it does present the available applications in a very usable way.

The ease of use (which is something Apple are very good at) is sufficiently good that other smartphone vendors are effectively copying the concept. But that is something that is well known, so lets have a look at some of the warts.

The most obvious problem is that there are so many applications available that it is hard to find anything. Browsing for anything and you will find yourself in an endless list of possibilities. Searching is a little unsophisticated and has one very irritating feature – after searching for something, getting a list of applications, you will obviously touch an application to get a closer look at one of the applications. The search then changes what you searched for to the application name! This makes it very difficult to compare applications.

Some observers have criticised the number of applications by saying that they only select a small number – perhaps 4 or 5 that they use on a daily basis. They imply that all those “excess” applications are a waste of space because they do not use them. However they all overlook one thing – everybody’s list of 5 “daily” applications is likely to be different!

Besides which there are applications you load “just in case”. For instance I have “Vicinity” not because I need to know where the coffee shops are where I live or where I work. But because I am sometimes away from home and will need that information. Similarly I have an ssh-capable terminal client installed, because it may be useful in an emergency.

Apart from improving the search function, one other thing that would improve the app store is some method for allowing reviews of applications to be viewed. The easiest way to pick the best application out of a category of similar applications is to resort to what somebody else has discovered. Add a tab for reviews, and allow organisations to publish their reviews to the app store.

But more serious is Apple’s draconian policies on what applications get into the store. I am not talking about “adult content” here (although those who wish such, should be allowed it) but rather more ordinary applications. Applications seem to get rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons even though very similar ones get allowed through.

That gets more than a little irritating when Apple releases an update to the operating system that breaks certain applications, and then refuses to allow an update to that application to be released. For an example, see here.

Domestic Routers – Do They All Suck ?

 Computing  No Responses »
May 252009
 

Since upgrading my ADSL limk to the Internet, I have been hunting for a decent router to do the job. And have failed completely.

Personally I don’t think my requirements are that extreme :-

  • Dual WAN links – ADSL and Ethernet (not to be used simultaneously; just allowing users to switch between different providers).
  • 8 port gigabit switch
  • 802.11n wireless
  • Reasonably robust construction including an integrated power unit.
  • Reliability; capable of running 24×7
  • A decent command line interface connected to via ssh with the ability to upload an ssh key.
  • The ability to save and load the configuration over tftp so the configuration can be kept in a subversion repository.
  • A simple web interface.
  • A decent on/off switch on the front. Actually I don’t need this myself, but I can think of a few people who would very much like them.

Anyone know of something like this ?

Probably not.

Oh, and it should be open source to allow third-parties to “fix” the firmware along the lines of what DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato all do for certain routers. In fact the manufacturers could do a lot worse than to contract someone to add their routers to the list of routers these alternative firmwares support and ship their produce with that firmware.

Just as long as certain people in the alternative firmware world get over the weird notion that “routers” does not include anything that allows connection to an ADSL WAN link. Routers are not limited to just shuffling packets between different Ethernet segments. In fact if you look at a list of interface modules for a Cisco 7600 router (definitely not “domestic”), the Ethernet modules are outnumbered by other network interfaces.

Ubuntu – Installing MS Office 2007 with WINE

 Computing  No Responses »
Apr 162009
 

Unfortunately I have to run Microsoft Office 2007 for work purposes. No criticisms please! I have tried OpenOffice 3.x and it is just a little too disruptive to the documents in question (although part of the fault may be sub-optimal document templates). Personally I would much rather use LyX which is little feature light, but absolutely brilliant for pure writing.

Anyway, when I first tried running Microsoft Office with WINE, I couldn’t get past the installer and I had to come up with the following recipe for getting it installed.

First of all, remove all traces of wine from your system (I’ll be assuming Ubuntu 8.10 which is what I’m running) :-

sudo apt-get --purge remove wine wine-dev
rm -rf ~/.wine

Note that I am removing the old ~/.wine directory which you may choose to keep if you wish (you may have installed something else after all!). However this document assumes that you are only installing Office and may not work if other software is also installed.

The next step is to download the right version of wine from WineHQ. Unfortunately the latest version of wine isn’t compatible with the installer. The version I tried (after reading numerous problem reports) was 1.1.16. The archive page can be found here.

After downloading, install manually with :-

sudo dpkg -i wine_1.1.16\~winehq0\~ubuntu\~8.10-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

After this has been installed, you can mount the Office 2007 CD and start the installer. Incidentally it is well worth creating an image file from the real CD if you are going to be spending any time tinkering with this – which is why I’m using a CD image!

sudo mount -oloop,unhide /cdimages/office2007.iso /mnt
wine /mnt/setup.exe

The installation process should be fairly straight forward although you will need to ignore a few warnings about being unable to obtain some updates.

Once this has finished you can run Word with :-

wine ~/.wine/drive_c//Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE

Enjoy!?!

No guarantees that everything works properly of course, but it is a start.

At this point it may well be worth taking a backup copy of the wine directory with the installation of Office 2007. This can be done quite easily with :-

cd
tar cvf ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar .wine
bzip2 ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar

If you no longer need to run the installer, it may well be worth removing wine again to install a later version of Wine. This can be done by repeating the first step (but not removing the .wine directory) and downloading a different version of wine from the archive page as given.

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