Monthly Archives: September 2010

Why do I get a warning…

Posted on 2010/09/04 by

The AppStore is improving all the time. It has it’s shortcomings (poor searching and sorting to name but two of them), but I have become tired about being warned when I am NOT spending money with them. I would much prefer a warning about when I AM spending money with them.

For example, and as has recently happened to me, I went searching for an app I had previously bought, to reinstall because frankly I got tired of it and I wanting to give it another go. I went to reinstall it. Now I wasn’t at home, so resyncing wasn’t an option.

I found the app, and there is no ‘reinstall’ button, you have no choice but to re-’buy’ it. I don’t want to buy it, I’ve already bought it. I just want to reinstall it. But to do so, I have to go through the motions of buying it again.

I click INSTALL and then BUY and AppStore quits (I hate this too, let me queue things and buy/install/update multiple items), and moments later I get a message box telling me I won’t be billed for this. I am being warned about NOT being charged… Cool… NOT

But on this occasion, I WAS charged and I don’t have the option to back-out, because (after all) I had selected to BUY IT.

After some research I discovered I actually had TWO iTunes accounts, one being my email address and the other simply my username (sans ‘@myemail.com’). How this occurred I will never know, but when I wrote to apple about this they just maintained I had bought it via two accounts and had no recourse. If I was presented with a last minute ‘You’re about to be charged for this’ message box, I would have kindly not purchased it and found out about the 2 accounts. Instead, I just get billed twice.

Now I know not everyone would want this, and some people would find it annoying, but there can be an option to turn this off (or on, as the case might be).

Feedback to apple submitted this date

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C’mon Apple, get your act together

Posted on 2010/09/03 by

The iTunes terms and conditions have changed again! This is beyond a joke!

What ticks me off about this:

  • the amount of times I have to do this, and the only time I get prompted for this is when installing new apps. When you have multiple devices this is a PITA
  • Instead of telling me bout what’s changed, they hit me with 101 pages of material to read! Hang on, I just wanted to download a free app!
  • The only way I can tell what’s changed is to make sure I download each one and do a compare on them, but…
  • I have just entered in 4 different email addresses and I’m getting an error ‘could not send email, try again.’ I have tried four! how many do you want me to try, and yes, one of them WAS the address I registered the account with. (This leads me to believe they are hiding something in this agreement they don’t want to share with me)
  • Why can’t I just use the old agreement? It’s worked fine for so long now

Imagine if you bought a car and once a week or at some random time, you got into the car and turned on the ignition and your car speaks to you, “sorry, the terms and conditions of you using this vehicle have changed, please accept this new 101 page agreement before I let you start it!” But to make matters worse, you’d have to go back inside your house to accept them! (after all it does throw me out of the app store and I have to restart what it is I was doing)

Seriously, take it for granted I accepted your old terms and conditions, just show me what’s changed! Don’t make me read EVERYTHING, because as we all know, that’s not going to happen.

I’m sorry, I do love grApple, but I seriously hate them too!

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Gmail Shortcut Keys

Posted on 2010/09/03 by

I’ve never used them, and saw an article today about them.. So I thought I’d give them a go. I looked them up, there’s a ton of them!!! Massive amounts of keyboard shortcuts to do almost everything in gmail…

Let’s try it… G then S

nope, didn’t work…

Tried playing around a bit, different interfaces, checked settings and found they were disabled. I enabled them, went back to the inbox, pressed G then A (to go to ALL MAIL folder…)

Nothing happened…

Tried J and K which is supposed to move the cursor up and down… Still didn’t happen… Couldn’t figure it out…. I’m in Chrome, I’m on a mac running OS X. Should work… (one would think)…

I opened my mail in firefox and it all works like a charm.

I’ve been playing with them for a short time, not bad… Handy.

What is strange however, gmail shortcut keys don’t work in their own google browser (Chrome), maybe this is OS X specific, I don’t know, but it’s a bit of a bummer!

Here’s a link to google help with a list of existing shortcut keys:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594

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Dave and his iPad

Posted on 2010/09/01 by

So, I bought the iPad a few days ago and doing my first post using the WordPress application designed specifically for the iPad. There is also an iPhone version which I have used before and it is pretty good too.

This app seems to have it all, I’ll look more closely at it over the next few days.

What do I like about the iPad?

Well for starters it has made me remember some features of the phone that I had forgotten about. There is the nice addition of 4 punctuation symbols accessed through two keys on the bottom right. The feature I had forgotten about is tap/dragging where you tap the modifier key and then drag to the desired key and release. Works great on the ‘?’ and the ‘!’. But it also works great on other punctuation when you only want one followed by an alpha character. Such as when you type an open bracket (such as this).

Surprisingly the keyboard’s lack of tactile-ness doesn’t REALLY seem to be an issue. There is the quickest of learning curves, but it doesn’t seem to last long. The iOS error correction seems to pickup some (or most as the case may be) mistakes and it’s pretty good – in landscape mode. The portrait keyboard is simply too small and I often opt for the landscape one. But you get use to it. If you persist with the portrait keyboard, then going back to landscape the keyboard is massive and takes almost half the screen.

Moving on from the keyboard, when you get an app that’s specifically designed for the iPad, it is very sweet. Just about everything apple has a new and welcomed interface. Some could be better, but overall, pretty good. The speed over the iPhone is pretty good too.

Youtube has a great interface, which really I wish youtube would bring to their website. Some of the games for the device are simply awesome, and the apps are great too. I did purchase Numbers and Pages for the iPad and their flexibility is great.  Numbers even brings a minor addition over the OS-X version in that it auto freezes the first column and row in the table. Something you just cant do in the desktop version.

Anyway, I think this device is really a whole new paradigm in computing and interfaces. Now if only I just didn’t have to touch the screen at all!

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