Apple must come clean on the actual size of apps

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

I got a nasty shock on my iPad this morning. Midway through downloading Real Racing 3, a pop-up balloon appeared warning me I was running out of available storage.

I’ve only got a 16GB model, so I’m pretty used to juggling apps to clear space on my iPad. The iTunes store listed Real Racing 3 as a 700MB download, so I’d cleared off a couple of old games in advance to leave me with just shy of 2GB of unadulterated space for Real Racing to run around in.

So I was taken aback to discover that the app, once unpackaged and installed, consumes a whopping 1.8GB of storage space – comfortably the largest, single app I’ve ever installed on my device, consuming roughly 13% of the device’s total available storage.

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Seven devices my iPhone and iPad have made redundant

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

“You’re never off that bloody iPhone,” is a common remark in our household. And it’s true. A survey this week claimed that we check our smartphones 150 times a day, and is it any wonder when they do so much for us?

Between them, my iPhone and iPad have made at least half a dozen other devices redundant, taking on all manner of tasks and often doing a better job. Maggie Thatcher would be proud of them.

Here, then, is a rundown of the things my iPad/iPhone combo has lain waste to. While this blog focuses on Apple devices and apps there’s no reason why a combination of Android/Windows phone and tablet couldn’t do likewise: most of the apps mentioned are cross-platform or have equally competent equivalents.

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The techs to watch in 2013

Monday, December 31st, 2012

With the January sales looming, you might be wondering whether it’s time to grab a bargain, or whether you should  hold out a little longer and see what technologies the new year brings. I’ve been closely watching the industry in 2012, and keeping track of announcements for the coming year – and below you’ll find my predictions of what’s going to happen in various areas of technology in 2013.

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How to “fix” an unresponsive home button on an iPad/iPhone

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Last week, my iPad 2’s home button – the physical button in the bottom bezel – started behaving erratically. It would take two or more presses to return me to the home screen, or occasionally register double-clicks when I only tapped once.

So I did what any member of modern society does: I moaned about it on Twitter. Before you could say “trip to the Apple Store”, my old chum and editor of iOS magazine Tap, Chris Phin, shot back “Google ‘recalibrate home button’”.

I did as I was told, and followed the top result detailing a simple procedure to supposedly recalibrate the home button. In a nutshell, you launch “one of the stock apps” (such as Weather or Calendar), hold down the top power button until the “slide to power off” prompt appears, release it  and then quickly press and hold the home button down until both the power-off prompt and app disappear.

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Four ways to get PC Pro every month

Friday, November 9th, 2012

At the risk of sounding like a Stephen Fry voice-over, it’s never been easier to get your hands on PC Pro every month. We now have four different ways to pick up the magazine in either print or digital form, and to help you decide which suits you best, I’m going to run through the options here.

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VMware Mirage: run a Windows PC from your iPad

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Someone at VMware, I reckon, is a Doctor Who fan. Not only have we had the cliffhanger ending to Tuesday’s session, with the data centre administrators griping about the awkward and ever-changing requirements to run vSphere Administration consoles on their super-nerd custom-special workstation PCs, but also, yesterday, we had the (partial) answer to a mystery, which involves an iPad that’s considerably bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

This is the result of a good few years of development and acquisitions, and has hidden behind a variety of codenames while development has been in progress. This year it’s demonstrable, and it’s called Mirage – a stack of technologies, protocols, and tools that conspire to hoover up your laptop’s hard disk in its entirety, make it safe within a farm of VM hosts, and then either put it back down on a newer machine when you upgrade, or play the same image within the VM Hypervisor, displaying everything that was on your old laptop via the new iPad remote access client.

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The school that swapped its laptops for iPads… and wants to switch back

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

There have been several well-publicised stories of schools bringing iPads into the classroom. However, a PC Pro reader has got in touch with a cautionary tale from the other side of the fence.

The reader, who asked not to be identified, is an ICT co-ordinator at a secondary school. He tells how his “image-conscious” headmaster was seduced by a scheme that allowed all the school’s staff to replace their laptop computers with an iPad 2.

Our source says staff were initially thrilled at the prospect. “Most staff are IT illiterate and jumped at the chance of exchanging their laptop for an iPad,” he writes.

Now, however: “the staff room is full of regret.”

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Kindle Fire HD means price is now everything for Microsoft

Friday, September 7th, 2012

So Amazon has launched its Kindle Fire range in the UK, and it’s no understatement to say the two we’re getting in the UK come with sizzling price tags. A 7in Android 4 device with an IPS screen and access to all of Amazon’s various media libraries and services? That’ll be £159 for the 16GB model. Yes, £159.

If you don’t mind a lower resolution and some lesser specs, that falls to a faintly ridiculous £129 – and that’s for a 7in tablet that’s fully capable of playing video, downloading magazines and doing all the things an Android tablet normally does.

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How to use your iPad in the kitchen

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Just spotted this video – five months old but utterly timeless in its themes. And just in case anyone is going to accuse me of being ageist, the link was passed on to me by my (equally timeless) father!

Oh, and if anyone could translate this for me I’d be very grateful…

The Coldplay Piano Song Book for iPad

Friday, July 13th, 2012

I’m not a big consumer of mobile apps – especially not iPad apps, as I don’t have an iPad. But when I heard about the Coldplay Piano Song Book for iPad I couldn’t resist pinching my girlfriend’s tablet and trying it out. It’s not a new app, but it’s just been updated to version 2.0, with some new interactive features and a new marketing push.

As the name suggests, the app contains solo piano arrangements of 15 of Coldplay’s biggest hits, along with guitar chords and lyrics. You can start by listening to a playback of how each song goes – a little blue line follows your position in the score, karaoke-style. Then, when you’re ready, simply turn the iPad down and play along on your own keyboard. (more…)