Giles Turnbull - page 27

Apple published a letter to iPhone 4 users this morning, in which it apologized for the device’s reception weirdness.

But it turns out there’s nothing wrong with the hardware. Turns out Apple’s been using the wrong formula for calculating and displaying signal strength, and has been doing so since the 3G model came out.

So if your phone told you signal strength was four bars, it might have only been two. And where it said you had two bars, it might have been non-existent.

Oops.

The letter says:

“To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.”

The changes will appear in a forthcoming software update (which will also apply to 3G and 3GS models).

Apple signs off with a hopeful: “We hope you love the iPhone 4 as much as we do.”

Here’s my iPhone 3G. It’s a bit scratched and a bit cracked, but it still works just fine. At least, it did until I upgraded to iOS4.

The update turned my reliable friend into a pain in the backside. Simple things, like swiping between springboards or calling up the virtual keyboard, suddenly took an age.

In short: iOS4 on a 3G was painful.

I’m not the first to notice this, of course. You can find discussion threads about it all over the net, and a post by m’colleague Adam Rosen from earlier this week.

Quite a few kind Cult readers responded to that post with their own suggestions and comments, and I’ve been trying some of those in the last couple of days.

Laurent Bourrelly, who likes to collect a few Apple-related things, had a great idea for a USB memory stick: how about make one out of some old Mac junk?

Here’s the result: the command key stick. If you want to make your own, Laurent has published some instructions – they’re in French, but you’ll be fine with just the pictures.

Then again, if you can read French, you might enjoy Laurent’s blog about all things Apple: pomme-c.

On Windows, it’s easy to cut and paste files and folders between locations; but that’s one of the first things people notice missing from Mac OS X.

The Windows system works just like cutting and pasting text or pictures inside a document, which is why it’s so popular. People understand what’s happening when hit the “cut” command and the file disappears – they know it hasn’t been deleted, but that it’s gone to the clipboard, ready to be pasted elsewhere.

On OS X, things work differently. In short, there is no built-in way of “cutting” a file to the clipboard. But you can copy stuff.

I was still shooting JPG on my digital camera until a few months ago, but buying a new MacBook and being given a copy of Aperture gave me a chance to switch to shooting RAW.

That also meant a new workflow for managing and editing photos. I didn’t want my Aperture library to be filled up with crud, so I decided to import images to a folder and manually weed out the useless shots before transferring what remains to Aperture.

After doing this in a Finder window I realised I needed a better tool for the job, so I went looking for lightweight image browsers.

And what I found was Xee.

It’s only been about three weeks since Safari 5 was released, and with it support for Safari extensions.

Since then I’ve been exploring all the delights posted at the Safari Extensions Tumblr and finding some really great stuff, and lots of ideas.

A normal folder is simple; it’s a thing you store files in. You choose which files are there, you have complete manual control over what’s inside that folder.

A smart folder is one whose contents are partly or completely determined by a set of rules that you’ve created.

To set up a Smart Folder, make sure you’re in Finder and then select File -> New Smart Folder. You’ll see a Finder window appear, but it’s slightly different to normal ones.

OK. So what have we got here?

Hey kids, look what uncle Steve has made for us overnight: a new Mac mini.

It:

• is tiny
• has HDMI
• has an easy-to-remove lower panel for replacing memory
• has an SD card slot
• is tiny (did we say that?)
• still has a Core 2 Duo processor
• supports up to 8GB RAM
• looks amazing
• is tiny

That’s all I’ve discovered after three minutes of drooling and surfing; more posts with more details coming later.

Stefan Magdalinski is well-known in British geek circles, having made a name for himself building websites like They Work For You, Up My Street and moo.com before moving to South Africa to work for mobile business directory Mocality.

Stef wanted to surprise his wife, who loves chocolate and Apple in almost equal measure. So he made the best possible gift: a chocolate-coated iPad.

Whole civilisations have risen and fallen while the Mac community has discussed notebook applications. Everyone has tried different notebooks, and everyone has their own preference.

It’s hard to pin down just one, because the best ones each offer something unique; as a result, there might be a few mentioned in this series. But the first to qualify is Evernote.

From Barcelona-based Herraiz Soto (the same people who brought you zen text editor Ommwriter) comes another idea for your notebook Mac: Bros and Mos, aka Stick with me baby.

They’re decorative stickers that add a little personality to the Apple symbol on your computer’s lid.

The Bros are hairstyles; the Mos are moustaches.

The stickers are made with 3M Controltac (whatever that is) and the designers say they won’t leave any nasty sticky marks on your laptop. But they are easy to put on and peel off as the mood takes you.

Each sticker costs eight Euros – about $9.60 at today’s exchange rate. But that does include shipping.

Step 1: Open Safari 5’s preferences, and go to the Advanced tab.

Step 2: Click “Show Develop menu in menu bar”

Step 3: In the Develop menu, select “Enable Extensions”

If Safari 5’s new Reader feature sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not a new idea.

The Readability bookmarklet has been doing a very similar thing for a year or so now, and of course works in many different browsers, not just Safari. Incidentally, Readability’s developers are delighted about Reader.

There’s a lot of new stuff in Safari 5, but one of the most interesting new things isn’t a software feature at all: the Safari Developer Program.

Apple might have overtaken Microsoft in terms of market cap, but Windows remains the world’s most popular operating system by a long way. That means there’s a lot of Windows-friendly stuff out there on the web that won’t necessarily play nicely with your Mac.

Not unless you have Flip4Mac WMV Player installed.

Information management application Yojimbo was updated today, and version 2.2 adds an interesting new feature called “Sidekick”.

Sidekick creates a kind of “Yojimbo-to-go” export of all your notes (or a subset of them if you prefer). This is done by turning the notes into a self-contained mini website that you can put anywhere on your Mac or your network.

We all know what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, and the steps he’s taken to keep it well away from his mobile devices.

But Flash is a fact of life on the web, and avoiding it on your desktop computer isn’t quite so easy. But not impossible.

If you like to power your way round the web, you’re probably in the habit of opening lots of links as background tabs to read later. If those tabs contain Flash content, things can quickly get annoying. Either stuff starts playing automatically and you can’t find the right tab to stop it, or too much stuff loads and your computer’s fans start whirring as if their lives depended on it.

As a former Londoner myself, I can give you clear advice from the outset: don’t take your car into London. It’s slow, expensive, and bound to end up a frustrating experience.

The Windows era is over announces Joe Wilcox at Betanews. Is it?

He certainly makes a compelling argument. Like other tech behemoths before it, Microsoft’s products are simply being rendered irrelevant by new technologies, new ideas, and new products that have come out of the blue and swept them aside.

Egretlist is a neat idea for an iPhone application, based on the data you store inside Evernote.

The app looks inside your Evernote notes (Evernotes?) for checkboxes, and extracts those items on their own. Then it re-arranges and re-displays them in a very smart, Moleskine-style notebook format.

What I like about this idea is that the todo items retain their context inside Evernote. You can keep a short list of todos with the other notes and info that relate to them – then, when you simply want to see the todo list as a whole to see what you should do next, Egretlist gives you that at-a-glance overview.

The Evernote team are impressed as well, and they’ve published an interview with the Egretlist developer that explains the thinking behind it in more detail.

If you’re in the Oakland area in California some time in the next couple of weeks, you might like to pop along to the second iPhontography exhibition.

Organiser Knox Bronson (we’ve mentioned him before) is a keen proponent of iPhone photography, which he considers an entirely new artistic medium.

Panic, the company that makes awesome applications like Coda and Unison, got a little surprise in the mail yesterday – a Faux Apple Design Award, sent in by an extremely appreciative user of their best-known product, Transmit.

Mail Act-On is a unique plug-in for Apple’s own Mail application. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it is an excellent tool for managing lots of email and keeping it all organized.

It serves the needs of two distinct sorts of person: those who live most of their working hours inside Mail, and those who want to minimize the time they spend in it. Either way, Mail Act-On is a godsend.

Windows has its Control Panel, and your Mac has one too. It just has a different name.

Where you would once have looked for the Control Panel, you now need to look for an application called System Preferences.