I arranged a very last minute trip to the west country to try to find a relaxing space to do some thinking and a bit of work. The Country Ways web site came up with a late availability, and I thought it looked good. I was not mistaken – this is a collection of small cottage buildings within a farm that offer the visitor a really good standard of accommodation. The units are all converted out buildings, by the look of them, and inside they are very well appointed. My residence for the last few days has been the ‘Dray’ – big enough for two people, with one double bed a bathroom (en-suite) and a modest but very comfortable living area complete with kitchen.

The ‘resort’ (if you can call it that) also has a laundry facility, a gym, pool room (the table based game, not a swimming variety!) and a whole load of open space, swings and walkways, etc.

Located between Dartmoor and Exmoor, south of Barnstaple, it is ideally located for North Devon walking and trips to some of the best coastal resorts, such as Westward Ho! and Bude, amongst many others.

The units are self catering, so bring food! There is no supermarket nearby – the closest being in Torrington which is around 8 miles away. There is no nearby petrol station either – again, you go into Torrington. This suits me, but if you are hoping for all the mod cons of living in the London area, or any urban area for that matter, you’ll be left wanting! This is Devon, and life is different here!

Just to add, last night I was able to see more stars in the night sky than I can remember ever seeing – a truly awesome sight – no light pollution, just the outer spiralling arm of our galaxy. Wow….

The Apple iPad

I’ve been a very lucky chap this Christmas, and after months of saying I don’t need one, I was given an iPad (32Gb WiFi only) ! What a brilliant gift to get, but I was a little sceptical about how useful it would be. After all, I have a decent Mac laptop, and I have long had an iPhone, so what could I possibly need an ‘inbetweener’ device like an iPad for?

It turns out that since opening it on the 25th, I haven’t actually put it down, which tells me something must be quite good.

First up, battery life. The iPhone is notorious for the need to re-charge every day, often before the whole day has finished. The thing is, using the phone as much as I do for work, it soon runs low – calls, emails, occasional browsing and the odd gam or two whilst on a train all take their toll. The device just doesn’t have the level of power I need. The Macbook, on the other hand, is amply blessed with power – running for about 4-5 hours between charges. Simply put, it’s not enough for a whole day on battery alone, and needs a charge at least once during the day. Now, the macbook is in use constantly, all day, every day whilst at work. It gets used for high level activities such as film editing, 3D design, DVD authoring and so on, as well as email, web browsing, presentations and such like. All in all it is the workhorse of the work place. The iPad has been charged once since I got it – it runs about 8-10 hours before needing more power, and this is pretty significant.

Screen size – as I get a little longer in the tooth, so I find things harder to read without adequate light, and distance. The iPhone is just about bearable, but I more often than not turn it to landscape and enlarge the images (especially web pages) just to be able to read things. So I need glasses… but not when I use the Macbook Pro – everything is dandy there. Lovely screen, everything perfectly sized for me. The iPad is also pretty well sized, and what I need to enlarge on the iPhone I don’t on the iPad. The screen is gorgeous.

Apps are available for iPhone and iPad – many simply transfer with no problems from phone to pad. Some do still run at the same size as the phone when on the iPad, but there is a handy ’2x’ button to enlarge the display. This is used more frequently than you can imagine. The Facebook app, for example, is not yet able to run natively at full size on an iPad. Others, such as the Twitter app are fine, and the BBC News app is simply brilliant on the iPad. It’s OK on the iPhone, but crashes from time to time.

Other apps, like those I use regularly on the macBook Pro are there too – ‘Keynote’ for presentations, ‘Numbers’ for spreadsheets and ‘Pages’ for word processing. They are pretty fully featured copies of the software for a fraction of the price of the main application, and well worth buying.

One or two things in the apps annoy me. When typing I find it very very easy to hit a command button, often located along the top edge of the keyboard layout area, which does me no good. More than once I’ve been typing a blog post to see it all disappear in an instant! Frustratingly, it is more my fault than the software, but I wish these sorts of buttons weren’t put so close to the typing area!

Now the bigger issue – connectivity. With just the wifi version I don’t have a simple way of connecting to the internet when out of range of a wifi hotspot. My phone has a 3G signal, and I have a 3G dongle for the macbook. the iPad without a 3G connection may prove to be infuriating, although I have a plan.

The iPad has no USB port (what?? I can’t quite understand why…) and so no way of attaching a broadband dongle. The Macbook has two USB ports, of course and so no such limitations exist. However, the broadband dongle is a pay as you go device, with 12Gb data to use over a 12 month period. That time is nearly up, so a new dongle will be needed. Rather than buy a straight replacement, I think a ‘MiFi’ device will be needed! These superb little gadgets connect to the internet using 3G as usual, but they act as a wireless hotspot as well, allowing up to five nearby devices to share the connection they make. Genius. With a strong password it should be fine to use in a public place, I think… I’ll let you know when I get one and try it out!

Smaller irritations include the fact there is no simple ‘video out’ – to do this I need to buy an adaptor which plugs in to the dock connector and converts to VGA. I would think it a considerable improvement to add this to the box with the iPad, but no, it’ll cost a further £20 to have this ability.

Finally, no cameras. Is this a disadvantage? personally, I think not. Whilst it would be nice to have the occasional video chat through an application like AIM, I am not distraught at not being able to. I have lots of other ways to take photos, after all, and if I need to video chat with folk I think I’d prefer to do so on the ‘workhorse’, not the iPad. As for connecting cameras to the iPad, or just connecting a memory card, or even a USB device to transfer images, this is a bigger cause of complaint. The iPad boasts the ability to display images like a digital photo frame. Wonderful. However, getting images onto the iPad is a bit of a performance, requiring iTunes to achieve it. How much simpler it would be to just insert an SD card, or a USB hard drive to transfer files directly.

In conclusion, the iPad is a superb piece of kit. I have been astonished at how often I use it when I was convinced there was no place for it in the line up of tools at my disposal. I can see now that it forges it’s own niche very easily, and is simply brilliant at doing the simple things that an iPhone makes tricky. In terms of processing power there is more than enough there, but I wouldn’t use it to edit video – it’s best placed for lightweight work -the occasional presentation, word processing or spreadsheet work, but ultimately it is brilliant at displaying web pages better than an iPhone ever will be. And better than getting the laptop out too – far less intrusive, lighter in weight and pretty well capable of doing most common tasks.

But by far the biggest advantage over either phone or laptop is the battery life. It is outrageously good at staying on! With the ability to run for 8 hours easily, it more than compensates for any shortcomings it may have.

Oh, and did I say it looks pretty snazzy too?

The iPad then is a rather good device. It is slightly overpriced (most Apple gadgets are, though) and has some features missing that you’d expect to be there. However, it is a very good device, and one which I am surprised to say I didn’t know I needed until I had one for about two hours. From then on it was obvious that I needed it!

This sort of awards cerony generally happens at university graduations, and I’ve never seen a ‘FE’ version until now. Even better, Cleveratom were one of dozens of companies sponsoring the awards, so I got to stand up and present a trophy, certificate and small cheque to a couple of students.

The event was excellent! Well organised and run and cheery in just about every way! It was held at the Forum (nibbles and dinner) and St. Peter Mancroft church just opposite. It was a delightful feeling to see the look of joy on the young people’s faces as they collected their awards, and to know that Cleveratom played just a tiny part in it all.

We sponsored two awards, and next year I would hope we sponsor more, but I am reliably informed that we can’t do more than three, no matter how much we want to!

Well done to Harry Greiner - an admirable Master of Ceremonies, who had to keep on top of just who was collecting the awards as many students couldn’t make it and were represented variously by families or members of the students’ union. A quick handshake for all was followed by a few rapid photographs – a copy of which I should get to put on the office wall. I can’t wait!

Pictures show the ceremonies inside St Peter Mancroft, and the evening at the Forum. What I didn’t get a picture of was the dance group from the college performing at the Forum, or the Norwich Youth for Christ Gospel Choir, who performed flawlessly.

The instructions from our friends at Google are simple enough – use MS Exchange, add in your account details and you are good to go… but must first enable mobile devices in your Google dashboard (obviously this doesn’t apply to a personal Google account, only a business or academic one). In the instructions it lovingly tells you all will be well, but doesn’t mention what to do if all is decidedly unwell.

Every time I have tried to do this, I have managed to get my main default calendar only. It doesn’t matter if it is iPhone 2.0 or 3.0… still the same. And still the frustration mounts!

Having upgraded to version 3.0 today, I was fired up and ready to try a final time. Not easily put off when facing defeat, I tried for three hours, all to no avail. What a waste of time. I then read some other blogs and came across a third party service – www.nuevasync.com – and since it is free, decided to try it.

Lo and behold, after typing in the right details to Nuevasync, my iPhone shows ALL of my calendars, not just the general one. Glory be!

Now, if Nuevasync can do this, I’m pretty sure it is possible for Google to do it. I don’t see why we need a third party in the loop here, but for goodness sake, nobody let Nuevasync go out of business!

I now get to see all of my calendars in iCal on my phone, can add events and they sync to the main google calendar, add others, and have others add to my diary (yup, it’s a preference setting for work based calendars)… it ALL works as it should.

If you are as frustrated as I was, go to the Nuevasync web site, sign up for a free account and edit the settings. You’ll be running in about three minutes where before you were plodding.

Just be a little careful with your contacts and email though – if you enable these through Nuevasync, you *will* lose everything off your phone when the first sync happens. Be sure that you have got everything you need backed up, or in Google… or both!

It’s a shame Woolies has gone, but in the cold light of day you have got to ask what on earth were their buyers doing?! How completely out of touch.

picture of iPhone

Google have recently released the voice search application for the iPhone as a free download from the app store (for you non-iPhone users, this is a place where you go to get the latest applications and games… lots of them free, including this one). The promotional video is quite exciting to watch, and the results are simply stunning. Imagine – you speak a search term into the Google search engine and it responds in seconds flat to give you a location aware set of results. Search for films and you get cinema listings for your location. Search for conversions from farenheit to centigrade, and once again the power of Google leaps into action to deliver almost instantaneous results.

So how does it work in practice for those of us not blessed with a North American accent? In a word, poorly!

Ok, to be fair, I am keeping my voice down and probably not speaking too clearly, but even so I searched for ‘Hal MacLean’ three times, and only one returned anything close to what I said. Mostly I get things like ‘how to clean’, ‘How McCain’, ‘Al Mclean’ (the closest), ‘Harold Mclain’ (arguably closer still), ‘How Much Rain’ and goodness knows how many other variations. What I didn’t get, not even once, was the correct results returned. I even tried in an American accent, and Australian, too. Neither seemed to work.

So I tried other people, including Matthew Eaves to get equally odd results (mac tv, macky’s dc, etc).

Not that I am disappointed in any of this.

In fact I rather enjoy using it for the fun it gives, but more importantly for all of the other apps it comes bundled with, including Mail, Calendar, Docs (you can only read, not write them or edit those you have started), RSS Reader, News, Notebook, Photos, Translate, Maps (why??), You Tube (again… why?) and Earth (I say yet again… why…?)

Apart from the fact that the last apps already exist on the phone, and some hae limited functionality, this is a fun collection to have access too.

The only thing I’d say is that you either need to have a north american friend on hand to speak the search terms (I’ve yet to find anyone willing to test this), or you have to accept that you’ll get some wild results and chuckle at what turns up. Just don’t rely on it finding what you want without reverting to typing out the query! I expect in time that this will get more and more refined, and I for one would find it really useful if it worked! C’mon Google… you can do it!

City College Norwich have been working with Geo Mapping – using a GPS enabled device (called a ‘Trackstick‘) to log locations every few seconds and enable the user to download the data which can then be added to Google Earth. The result is a path that shows as a line across the map, and which, with careful planning, can be made into all kinds of shapes!

The students from City College Norwich had to plan their routes using maps of the area around Picadilly, and make sure that they created an interesting shape. They then stepped out on the town to walk the walk, returning to download their data. Once they had it in Google Earth they didn’t stop there! They took screen grabs and manipulated the images using ‘3D Maker‘, a small app that makes a number of 3D files, some of which require a pair of 3D glasses to see – you remember the kind, one red lens, one cyan lens…?

The result was a lot of walks in the shape of cup cakes, boats, shoes, geometric designs and all kinds of interesting images. However, of far greater importance was the ability of the students to undertake a considerably complex task (which they did with ease) but also to communicate it to the many visitors who were intrigued as to what was going on. The highly demanding environment of a show such as this really tests the nerve of people who are normally reluctant to talk to people, and I am delighted to say that each of the young people at the event from Norwich were excellent ambassadors for the college.

A quick word about ’3D Maker’ – it is a superbly simple application and needs no real tuition to use. You simply take your image, scale it to fit on the screen when at 100%, then select the items in the image that are to become foreground in the 3D output. You trace around them and adjust a single slider and the app does the rest! You can set foreground, middle ground and background items pretty easily, adjusting the extent of the ’3D’ effect. Wearing a pair of 3D glasses really brings the images to life. If you are even remotely interested in tis kind of artistic imagery, go and buy a copy of 3D maker!

A quick word also about Tracksticks – wonderful little devices that just work as you expect. Turn them on, let them acquire a satellite signal, and go for a walk! When you get back to your computer you’ll need the Trackstick Manager application to download the data to, and then export in the appropriate format. Google ‘.kmz’ files are a snap, and loading them in to Google Earth is a double click away. One slight reservation about the Tracksticks and that is with the software which is PC only right now. A nice and friendly mac version would be the icing on the cake, and really help make the trackstick experience very good indeed.

What is of interest is that we needed to provide a complete CMS system that would allow the lead members to update the information as and when needed and use some simple tools to aid them in the process. This could actually have been quite a tricky task given the scope of CMS tools available and the ease in which the systems can be managed.

It was whilst searching through the various tools available that we decided on using ‘CMS Made Simple’, which as the name suggests is a simple, but powerful CMS system.

Running on PHP and MySQL, the system is open source and works right out of the box. The simplicity of it is in the way that page templates can be created for a number of different styles. The plug in architecture aids the creation of new modules, but the system comes complete with quite a package – certainly enough to create a reasonably sophisticated web site.

User management tools are good, with different levels able to be set up and each given different privileges to allow for editing and authoring and so on. The one area which seems harder than it ought to be is the menu creation aspect – this is a tad convoluted but appropriately enough the extra steps needed to create a menu allow for some useful features to be included. For example, you can create a menu which acts as a ‘nugget’ and can be incorporated into other menus you make. This nesting ability allows the author to create a flexible and yet dynamic menu system with relative ease.

The system is relatively new to the market and consequently isn’t well documented, but there is enough there to get you going and to answer most general queries. Over time I expect this tool will mature into quite a useful but simple system, and I hope that above all else the developers keep a tight grip on the need for simplicity.

More information, updates and so on are available on the CMS Made Simple web site.

There are three main windows for the Mac version of the software instead of a single interface. The Viewer displays the image last taken and gives you a file browser window, with some additional controls. It would be useful to be able to pick the size displayed more precisely than relying on full image in the window, 50% size and 100% size. For the want of a little more code, we should be able to pick any size needed.

The main window with the camera controls and settings is very useful indeed, and is where you can take an image without touching the camera – ‘AF and Shoot’ could be excellent for self-portraits, for example, or for situations where you just don’t want to touch the camera at all. The third window is the current status, either waiting for an image or downloading one. Twirl open the small triangle there and you get to see your histogram. Again, I’d have thought this would be more prominently placed and not buried in quite the way it is.

The menu bar has the usual entries, but the ‘Camera’ view is really quite good – giving access to a lot of tools there. The Settings is less full, but does allow you to set the option to see the image in the viewer when captured. Other menus allow rotation of images, save and recall of settings and so on.

Once you have set this software up with the right settings for you, it really is a simple but incredibly powerful tool to have. It is the initial setting up which I have some small issues with. For example, you have to go into the tools menu and select the option to display the captured image in the viewer – I think this really should be ‘on’ by default, after all, it is what I would think most people would use the system for and the ability to preview your images live on a screen somewhat larger than the back of your camera is essential. Why it isn’t set to ‘on’ I don’t know, and this is what I meant in my earlier review when I referred to the software as ‘counter-intuitive’. However, this is really a small gripe and something easily overcome, but it indicates that there is an opportunity for Nikon to further develop this software.

Another slight gripe has nothing to do with the software, as such. Taking a 15Mb RAW file and sending it to the computer for it to appear takes around 15 seconds. Obviously JPEG images arrive far faster, but 1Mb per second seems slow. It may be my connection, of course, but I suspect it is a combination of file size, download speed and software that is at play. If you really can’t wait 15 seconds between shots, you can rack up a load of images (try shooting in continuous mode) and let them arrive when good and ready. Curiously, when I did 15 shots in this way, the speed improved slightly, taking around 11 seconds to appear on screen, with all images arriving in marginally under 3 minutes.Overall, this software does seem to be a worthy tool to have. I am still not convinced that it should be priced quite as high as it is and with the new version of Aperture supporting tethered shooting as well it may be that this software has a increasingly diminishing life span. Having said that, I think there are folk who would rather pay £70 for this than £200 for Aperture, and unless Aperture can match the ability to change camera settings, restore previous settings and do all of the other things that CCP can do, then on balance I think this will stay useful for lots of people for some time to come.

OK, first, it almost works well and certainly I was able to shoot images and see them on my laptop screen, writing direct to hard drive. I could control the camera settings from the laptop and generally not have to touch the camera at all – good if you want to keep things still, certainly.

However, I have some gripes. Chief amongst them is that this software costs money, and it really isn’t all that good as an application on a Mac. In fact, it probably works better on a PC, since the layout of it was pretty counter intuitive. For example, when you use mac software you generally get a very logical experience. So when you take a photo and send it to your computer you’d expect it to appear on screen right away (or as soon as it ‘lands’), right? Well, no… you have to set a preference so that the image can be viewed. This just isn’t right, in my opinion.

Then you get the issue with speed. Resizing the window takes an age, whether you are viewing a RAW file of 15Mb or a JPEG of around 4Mb. There are only two size options pre-set – 100% (way too big for a laptop screen) and 50% – usable, but not great. At 100% you get scroll bars, which do not move. Where is the ability to set the scale exactly as you want it? Or do we rely on the infinitely slow resize the window and click the button that fits to the size you create?

Moving back and forth between images… ? Be prepared for a wait. A long, long wait.

It was excruciatingly slow and I thought there must be an update. There was – I had downloaded and installed version 1.3, and there was a version 2 ‘Pro’ application as a trial, too. The change og didn’t look impressive – basically added some functions for the D300 and D3 cameras. Fair enough, but I wanted to try it all the same. I downloaded it and ran the installer, which kindly informed me that it had to remove the earlier version before it could continue.

And that’s where it all stopped.

Version 2 wouldn’t even install on my system (OSX 10.5 ‘Leopard’) and just sat there eating resources as it did very little of any use. OK – it could be that it isn’t keen on the current flavour of OSX, and to be fair there is a suggestion on Nikon’s web site that hints this might be the case, but again – if it doesn’t work on Leopard, don’t let it start the installer (there’s plenty of apps that check the system before they install)!

So I am left with a great urge to shoot ‘tethered’ and no ability to do so. And the price for this is around $70, so I shan’t be parting with that money just yet, then.

This software really ought to be free. I can’t imagine anyone using this and thinking it was a good experience, and yet the potential for it is simply massive. As a free download I might live with it (and wouldn’t use it much). As a paid download I would feel absolutely cheated. Its a good job there is a trial period!

So come on Nikon – get your act together on this one. Give us the right functionality, get it working in an intuitive way, and get ALL of the features running at the right speed, please! I’d be happy to help you do this if you need someone to act as part of a focus group of testers – but until then I won’t be giving you any more money (well, for software at least).