CogBlogged Tagged ‘iphone’

My new unlocked 4s is in action here in Canada. I went to a Virgin Mobile kiosk in a mall here in Welland and got a pay as you go plan set up, the sim card installed, and unlike my experience with Yes Optus in Australia, it worked right away. So now in Canada, I have a new phone number, can SMS, and most key, have 3G data wherever I go (and where it is). The other gain here is that I can swap in my AT&T sim when I go south of the .ca border and be back on their network– and I don’t have to renew my contract with them when I got the new iPhone (though it cost much more; it ought to make me more careful with it!)

One of the largest PITA flavored hurdles of using an iPhone or iPad for more than just lookin’ at stuff is the end arounds one does to move documents on and off the thing. This means either having to sync through iTunes, or more often than not, the 2000s version of sneaker net is emailing attachments to yourself. I have have seen (and installed) the Golden Light, the Grail (for now) — Phone Disk – it mounts your iThing as a drive! And what is crazy is you can download a fully licensed version for free until December 1st. If you have an iThing, stop reading my stuff, and download a copy now! Do it! What it does is mount your phone (it can be automatic or you can set it in motion) when you connect it with the USB cable. There is a menu tool that you can control [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate. So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity. It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure… The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an [...]

Harrumph to people who gave up on RSS readers and really are deluded that they can get all their news via twitter; its now my secret weapon of discovery. It was there I found in my techie feeds a story that my bank (Chase) has added the capability to their iPhone app to deposit checks. I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step. I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)… So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week). [...]

My friend Nick in Hong Kong emailed me recently eager for some recommendations to fill up a few screens of his iPhone (I should really send him to the King of Apps, Marco Torres, who I am sure has filled to the max his screens). Rather than trying to page through screens and type names, I found a slicker and more elegant solution for sharing your apps – the AppsFire site/tool. You download a small addon for your desktop (a preference pane for Mac OS X) that does some sort of communication (I am guessing) with your iTunes to get a list of installed apps. From there, you can go to a web site, where you have options to share all or selected apps by link, email, widget, or social media tools. Here’s the widget version of my apps (no snickering) Each icon leads to the link to the app [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ruben Bos I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory). But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one): The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are [...]

I’ve been late to the game to jump for joy over Evernote, and I am just beginning to see it as being more than just a place to store bits of information. It pretty much can capture any kind of information, be it text, image, sound, document- store it in the cloud, and syncs it with your computer and almost every flavor of mobile device. It’s been on my machines for months, and to date, my great use of it has been to store my airline frequent flyer numbers, my prescriptions, and someone;s flight details I saved when I had to go to down to the Phoenix Airport. But it was reading Guy Kawasaki’s 14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote that some neurons began to snap, like: Photograph business cards. Rather than collecting a pile of business cards that you’ll never go through, photograph them with your iPhone and send [...]

All the video/app/being-on-the-net-anywhere fun of the iPhone comes at a cost- the limits of its battery life. And yes, you cannot carry a spare. Since I have some long distance travel I’ve been interested in some for the battery boosters for the iDevices. I was almost ready to go for the Richard Solo device– it appears in a lot of the magazines, but in late April I heard on engadget about the mophie juice pack air– it is a battery source of extra power that is built into a plastic case for the phone. Here’s my quick little demo of it in action: It charges up when you charge the iPhone (blue light indicators on the back show how much juice is in the juice pack). There is a standby switch so I run my iPhone battery down, then flip the mophie power on, which then recharges the iPhone. I [...]

Sure I want the newer camera and video capabilities. I want a compass. I want the 32Gb of space. I want the speeeeeeeeed. But like others who find the notion of an “upgrade” for buying the most recent model an interesting term….. apparently the pirates known as AT&T want to Ssssssuck more money out of the Apple love. I went to check how I could buy an iPhone. The “early upgrade” fee of $18 which is really $36 which is really $236 if you are a sap who owns a 3G. That $299 iPhone 3GS will cost me $499. It is explained really clearly: As a valued AT&T customer, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 01/19/2010. In the spirit of Tom Woodard, I am close captioning this for the [...]

I have to admire and respect the radical gusto with which Stephen Downes postulates What Not To Build — it matters not even if I agree or disagree (which I do), is that he puts out there no holds barred, as he has done for longer than some of you kids have known what a browser is. And I always learn things– My sort of environmental scan is a bit different from what you’ll get from consultants and venture capitalists. Don’t ask me what companies are developing what products, how industry stocks are performing, or where all the ‘smart money’ is going. I don’t know and I don’t care. What I can tell you, though, is what technologies are working, what technologies are flopping, and what technologies are fads. It’s practical, down-to-earth advice. For example, if you are a technology developer, you already know that you should not try to [...]