Well I have now owned my iphone 4 for a few months and I have encountered an issue with the camera
Not sure if it related or not but also I am getting issues trying to use apps that employ the rear flash as a torch facility whereby the flash either won’t come on or does sometimes but only intermittently and then goes back off.
Both the camera and the flash worked 100% when i first received the iphone 4
The camera problem is even more unusual. When you click on the camera icon to open up the camera app you are presented with a virtual shutter image that reveals to open the view out of the camera lens.
In my iphone 4 however what is happening is that the virtual shutter remains closed thereby preventing you from using the camera at all.
Tried numerous things but I am left to believe it is a hardware fault.
I am in the call queue to Apple support atm so will update once I get their response.
I was chatting to my collegue and mentioned wouldn’t it be handy if we could simply click on a phone number in a browser similar to the Skype add-on and our Snom Voip phones would dial the number.
well a flurry of googling later and up pops telify telly
this extremely handy Firefox Addon once configured is simplicity itself to use, all phone numbers on any webpage are highlighted and if left clicked on present a small menu to either click on the number to dial or to edit the number and dial (used if formatting of number is unusual or international)
We have tested this on a Snom 320 and 360 and works perfectly and shaves precious seconds of response times and saves typos when entering numbers read from a web page into the phones.
Well I succumbed and purchased an iPad, I do have a business requirement for one due to us developing apps on the AppStore for the iphone which do run on the iPad but not in native mode.
I phoned PcWorld in Exeter and asked if they had any in stock, to which the reply was yes so off I drove. upon arrival though the only model left was the 64Gb WIFi+3G whereas my gut decision had all the models been available would have been the 32GB WiFi only model (which according to some online research appears to have also been the dominant purchasing model that others had selected).
I opted for the O2 network carrier version purely because it was PAYG and I don’t foresee me being a large mobile iPad user (note the 3 network seemed to be the best value for money version if you envisaged being away from WiFi a lot with a 10GB per month allowance for £15 per monh)
Upon unpacking the first screen you are presented with is the standard iTunes activation screen so a quick connection to the office pc later and we are ready for the off.
As an iPhone user the interface is second nature and the main 2 aspects of improvement in the iPad form factor are the vivid screen presentation (due to the much higher spec screen and resolution) and the onscreen keyboard is so much easier to use without numerous typos due to miskeying the small key icons on screen)
Another big plus point which I wasn’t aware of pre-purchase is that you can install for free on the ipad any apps already purchased for your iPhone although some developers have bypassed this with the specific release of iPad apps which have been tweaked as a separate new binary and appended with “HD”.
The number of apps that are available for the iPad is growing constantly with some notable exceptions such as the ubiquitous Facebook native iPad app (you can use the iPhone app version in the interim)
The best iPad apps that I have found thus far are documented below:
1. Tweetdeck – My favourite of the numerous Twitter apps around and even easier on eye with the larger screen space afforded to it on the iPad.
2. iBooks – Apples foray into the ebook market gives an insight into what the iPad is truly good vat I.e. Presenting information in sumptuous high res !
3. Ebay – Monitor your online auctioneering with this official app.
4. F1 Timing App – Again another iPhone app that is much better on the ipads greater screen space.
5. The Times – smooth and well thought out iPad version of UK newspaper although it is missing the crosswords and Sunday times edition.
6. WeatherProHd – gloriously colourful interface with enough info to keep any aspiring weather fan happy
7. iTap Rdp – utilises the largest screen estate of the iPad to good effect to remotely control windows pc
8. Wordpress – This blog entry was created on it 
9. Toodledo – iPad version of the superb iPhone app
10. Atomic Web Browser – much better browser than the built in Safari offering tabbed browsing
11. Pulse News. – News feed aggregator with a well designed interface
12. RealRacingHD – Car racer that aptly demonstrates how slickly the iPad can perform as a handheld console.
Tags: iPad, iPad review
If like me you have encountered the above error a few times when trying to remove all files within a folder where there is a huge file list to work through and used your cunning to bypass it by deleting partial file lists, filtering etc then this quick tip will mean you are more of a *Nix guru
Simply type find . -name '*' | xargs rm in the folder that you wish to remove all files in and lo and behold they are gone (Note used at users risk as this really deletes all files in the folder)
Have you encountered the issue with all iphone apps crashing yet ?
Today I was using my iphone 3G (OS v3.1.3 7E18) as normal when i went to open an app and it crashed immediately.
hmmm i thought maybe I am low on memory as once before an app had exhibited similar behaviour and I resolved it by using the excellent System Activity Monitor App to free up memory but upon launching the self same app it too crashed on startup, after a fraught 5 mins of trying lots of different app I found it was device wide issue.
A google later found me a post referring to all sorts of in depth resolutions such as restore via iTunes, full erase and restart etc, but one person had mentioned that they had got around the issue by launched AppStore on their iPhone and performed an update that was waiting for a 3rd party app.
Luckily I had a few updates pending so a few minutes later after installing an update to my Currency converter app the phone was back to behaving normally.
Looks like the apps get caught in some form of cycle and a way of breaking it is to simply update any app
HTH others who have problems with iPhone apps all crashing.
Our Campsite app has finally cleared appstore gate guards and is now for sale 
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/icampsites/id360405766?mt=8
One annoyance is that I wanted to generate promotional codes to give to friends / family / reviewers to allow them to use the site with no payment, but the iTunesconnect site does not allow you to generate codes for any country other than US, so if you are configured with UK store in iTunes they cannot be used.
Bit of a huge oversight methinks as plenty of app store users outside of the USA, so come on Apple allow promo codes to be used elsewhere !!!
I submitted an app to the App Store on Saturday and waited with baited breath.
The app was outsourced and the development team did a good job but the app didn’t get through Apples stringent vetting process.
The issue was the icon and button for the feedback functionality was an “Action” type whereas human interface guidelines apparently specify “Compose” type button / icon
This has now been sorted and the app re-submitted, here’s hoping it gets through this time
More info on our other site at http://www.iphonecampsites.com
Well I am sat here in the Birmingham NEC Car park, strange place you are asking to be doing a blog update, but I am actually onboard a sort of temporary office space.
I am using a loan motorhome, it is actually a Swift Kontiki 679 which is the flagship vehicle in the Swiftgroups range of motorhomes. I am lucky enough to have it on long term test review loan.
It has been fitted with aftermarket kit, one item of which is the Alden Netmaster (Now superceded by the Alden Sat Net)
This remarkable piece of kit gives me mobile broadband, not just in the UK but with satellite footprint coverage throughout Europe with the dual purpose ability to watch satellite TV through the same equipment !
I have for some time now used Genie Soft Backup Software on my main office pc to backup Windows and associated profile info + Outlook 2003 .pst files etc to our office NAS.
However I cannot seem to get it to backup correctly when running on Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit Edition. Genie Soft Pro v8.0 has support for VSS but without digging too much further I don’t think it is fully compatible with Windows 7 as It keeps skipping open files such as Outlook .pst files when doing backups.
Without spending more funds I had a look at the integrated backup client with Windows 7 and looks like Microsoft has put a lot more time and effort into improving this aspect of windows.
The new backup and restore centre has the ability to utilise the built-in “Shadow Copy” features to restore previous versions of individual files or folders, and make only iterative backups if required.
if only part of a large file has been altered, instead of doing the entire file only that part has to be transferred and copied over.
Windows 7 backup also supports backup to any shared network space and external drives such as NAS.
I fired up Windows 7 backup and restore centre, selected to use network storage as the destination for the backup and browsed to my NAS, selected required files to back (profile data etc) and start it off
Came back (a long time later) and it was complete and it had successfully backed up the Genie Soft previously skipped files
Our Motorhome Website aka MHF has a huge database of campsite reviews which would be very useful in a mobile format, As an iPhone owner myself I wandered how easy it would be to get an app programmed. A little googling revealed that iPhones utilise Objective C, C++ language and can of course run javascript / html language based apps.
iPhone
As I have only briefly tested the water with C many years ago, it was going to be out of my field of expertise (not that I have any expertise lol) So I researched the market size for the app on the forums on MHF and found there would be quite a few interested parties in such an application for the iPhone.
So bearing this in mind I set out to sub contract the work, a UK Developer who i chanced upon quoted a not inconsiderable sum of £3k+ for my idea, this would be totally our of price range bearing in mind the limited market available, I then contacted a number of continental outsource contract coders and eventually got the price down below $1000 (Global economy and all that !!)
I have also ascertained that I will need to enroll on the iPhone Developer program which costs a further $99 !
I have had to enroll in order to be able to submit my app to the app store for sale, so nice money spinner there for Apple
On top of this $99 Apple also take a 30% cut of the sale price of the App !!!
You are ring fenced in however as there are only 2 options available to you, the first is ad-hoc distribution whereby you can “share” your application with up to 100 users.Apple still retains signing rights to the app and so any over-reaching of these figures might cause Apple and in turn you distress . The second distribution medium is via the jailbroken iPhone which immediately limits market size as most users with limited techie backgrounds will not be willing (or able) to start hacking their iPhones.
