The clock just ticked over to Christmas Day in New Zealand. I wish you a happy Christmas day and hope today is great and you have a good feast and get fat. Also say hello to all your relatives from good old yum9me. Have a great day and enjoy your presents. Sorry about not getting my one, the shipping container fell into the sea and destroyed them all.
See you in a few days after I’ve finished playing with my beauty below. 
…for now.
Not too long after PDC 08 (Professional Developers Conference) where they showed Windows 7 for the first time, a pre-beta build of Windows 7 leaked onto the internet. I decided to snap it up to play around with for a bit. I did use a little hack so I could get the fancy new taskbar working in this build as it is disabled and hidden away by default. I am so glad I did get this because it has made me excited for this operating system. There are many reasons why, and below are just a few of them from the 6801 build.
I’ll start off with the most apparent new feature in Windows 7, one that I had mentioned above, the redesigned taskbar. The taskbar is now a bit taller than the previous one, and it shows icons by default instead of names of the windows. It works similar to the dock in Mac OS X with your running programs/windows and quick launch all together in the same area. you are free to pin programs to the taskbar by either dragging or assigning them to the taskbar. To differentiate from a quick launch icons and open windows is a orange glass behind the icon. Multiple windows of the same program are grouped together and can be accessed by hovering or clicking over the icon which brings up a preview bar with showing all the open windows. They have also changed the behaviour of the notification area. By default, there are your 3 or 4 main items such as sound, network, windows defender and battery. When you have programs that use the notification area, by default they are hidden. You can however change the options to show there all the time. I think this is interesting as it make the taskbar less cluttered, especially for those of us with heaps of notifications taking up a reasonable percentage of out taskbars. The whole taskbar is a little weird to start off with. i was a bit worried I wouldn’t like it, but it is something you do eventually become accustomed to.
While explorer stayed pretty much the same, the significant improvement was the the sidebar. In Vista, it use to show favourite locations. While it still has that, they have added so much more, including Libraries, Homeshare, Network and Computer and everything underneath them. This makes accessing specific locations much easier in Windows 7 compared to previous versions. Libraries is a great addition to explorer. A library is a virtual folder which hold the contents of multiple folders including you user folders and network shared folders. There are all put together in a virtual folder, with the same categories we’ve been used to such as documents, music, video and such. You are free to add different locations to the library, for example folders from an external source such as USB hard drives. They have also introduced federated search into Windows 7 which allows you to search from external sources. One good example for this that I have used was a Flickr search. This allowed me to search Flickr for picture from explorer, and all tags and information were viewable from explorer, just as if they were local images. One last thing I did notice in Computer was now external flash drives and media cards show the used space bar, similar to hard drives to there. This is a small thing but I wonder why it wasn’t included in Vista.
They have done a bit with the networking in Windows 7. Seeing and selecting wireless networks is easier now. You only have to click on the notification to get the list of networks and connect to them. Also the network stuff in explorer has added a bit. First off, in the sidebar in explorer, you can launch a Remote Desktop Connection to a computer on your local network just by right clicking on the computer name. Also in 7, you now have the ability to make shared folders from other computers made available to you offline, with synchronization as well. The would be great for sharing media over a network and store it on multiple computers without having to copy every time the host machine adds to it. You can store the files offline for you to access and synchronize any changes to the folder on the machine. The last thing they’ve added in Windows 7 is Homegroup. Unfortunately I don’t have another Windows 7 machine to actually play with this feature but by the sounds of things, it is going to be an interesting part of Windows 7.
Dragging a window up to one of the edges of the screen does something very useful. If you drag a window to the top of the screen, it goes fullscreen. If you drag it to either the left or right sides, the window takes up half the screen space on that side. One way this could be utilized is in a copy and paste or dragging situation. You can have 2 windows on either side of the screen at the same time and move stuff from one window to the other. You could also put 2 programs up and use say a chat client at the same time as browsing the web and be using the maximum amount of screen real estate with no overlap between windows.
One major annoyance in Windows Vista was the User Account Control. This lead to people getting very frustrated when doing tasks such as running and installing software with the UAC cutting in with the black screen until the prompt was dealt with. This lead to people disabling it so it wouldn’t be annoying and in turn, it reduced security of the OS. They did a much better job with fixing it so you aren’t tempted to disable it. The prompt is now non intrusive and you can deal with it at your leisure so you can continue on doing your computer tasks without being disturbed by these UAC prompts. They’ve managed to change how this works to make it much more user friendly and give people no reason to want to disable this. Thank you so much for this!
After having a not to pleasant experience with Windows Vista and trying to get it to install drivers for a Intel Webcam, I decided to take it to Windows 7 to see how it handled it. In Vista, I plugged it in and spent about 3 to 5 minutes waiting for it to identify the device, search for drivers, download the drivers and then install them. It does pretty much the same thing in 7, just much faster (just over 1 minute, which for most was the downloading of the driver) and it gives a better indication of what it is actually doing, including download percentages for the driver. It is such a small thing and I am happy it works right in this version.
This is just an introduction of a small selection of some major features coming in the next version of Windows. There is still more to come in terms of features, but nothing that major. Most of the stuff is under the hood which improves performance and reliability. This became very apparent to me when testing this operating system on an older machine, one that would slug with Vista on it. Windows 7 performed pretty well on this older hardware, better than expected to be honest. I really enjoyed using it and if the public beta, release candidates and release versions of Windows 7 are as great as this, Windows 7 is going to be a phenomenal operating system when it come out next year. I can’t wait!
Screenshots of Windows 7 can be seen here. A picture is worth a thousand words so there are an extra fifteen thousand.
Windows 7 was used on an Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz CPU with integrated ATI graphics and 512mb of DDR2 RAM. Experience may differ depending on system.
On Saturday morning, my friend Josh and I were up bright and early to hit the road for our first out of town Geocaching trip. This is the first time we have been out of the Dunedin Area together to get Geocaches and we had planned this trip carefully to maximise efficiency of getting a large number of caches, 67 to be exact. There is no point travelling so far and using so much petrol to waste time piddling around. Preparation for this included printing off maps, the cache pages, making labels and uploading GPS data to the GPS receivers.
To start off, about 1/3rd of the caches we planned to getting were on the way up to Oamaru. Unfortunately for us, the first cache on the road we passed before we knew it, so were started off pretty bad, but then we managed to get seven for seven on the next map which rose our spirits again. We did considerably well on the way up there finding half of the ones on the road, missing the other half with a few did not finds but mostly we skipped the rest so we could make out way to the main destination for food and because we would maximise the number of caches we could get in in the same time period.
When we got there, we stopped for food. For some reason, all the fast food places were really full of people, there was some concert thing in a park and the main street was an absolute mess. Lucky for us, we don’t need to be there so after eating, we made our way to the first cache we plan to get in Oamaru. When we were going to our first one, there was a lady walking around there which we though would make it difficult to get to the cache. Lucky for us, her husband was down underneath getting the cache so we were lucky enough to meet a fellow Geocacher.
Next we slowly made out way to the closest caches to the previous one and made our way around. We were cutting it for time so we had to cut all the more difficult multi-caches from our maps. Still as we went around, we again only found about half of the ones we attempted. There are way more caches in Oamaru than you would expect and a lot take a bit of time to get to, and time is something we didn’t have much of. When we realised we only had about an hour left before we should start heading back, we decided to just go for the easy ones to get to and do them and then make our way back home.
Unfortunately for us, we only managed to find about 1/3rd of the ones in Oamaru. We will definitely need to come back here some time to acquire the rest. Although if there is a next time, we won’t be spending a great proportion of our time getting the ones on the road there. Partly because we have already got half of them. Our trip wasn’t as successful as we would have liked with some of the caches no where in site and mostly us running out of time to find the other caches. Our final stats for the day were 27/67 caches. Not too bad although it would have been nice to get them all. Maybe next time our trip will go as well as we planned. Still had a blast roaming around looking for the Geocaches anyway!
When the App Store for the iPhone was launched about half a year ago, us Geocachers have been waiting to see how the technologies in the iPhone can be use for Geocaching and enhance that experience. After a lengthy wait with a few third party apps, finally Groundspeak, the people behind Geocaching.com, launched their official Geocaching App. This popped up in the store for a small price of $13.99 NZD ($9.99 USD). I didn’t hesitate to buy it because I thought it would be a worthwhile investment. After a few updates with bug fixes and a couple of extra features slotted in, here is where the Geocaching App currently stands.
When you launch the app for the first time, you are greeted with a terms notice which you have to accept. After this, everytime you will launch the app, it will search for your current location. For a lot of people, this is where your first issues with this app will show up. If you don’t have location services enabled, you will have 3 different popups get thrown at you to “okay” to. This happens everytime you launch the app, unless you enable location services. Otherwise, it will find your location and give you a search page where you can either manually enter a Postal Code, Address or GC code. This will show you the caches that meet the criteria, same as the results on the Geocaching.com website. You can also select search for nearby Geocaches. This takes your GPS co-ordinates and shows you the caches around where you are. If you don’t have an iPhone 3G, this feature is pretty useless to iPhone 2G and iPod Touch users. In the first version of the app, there was an issue with the search coming up with caches you’ve already found. They managed to get it to not show them in an update by entering your Geocaching.com login details into the app. The search is pretty solid and works great when looking for caches. The location services stuff is pretty useless on a non-iPhone 3G device, which is expected.
When you search for a cache, you are given a list of the caches that it finds (unless you enter the GC code.) In this page, it shows you the type of cache it is (traditional, multi etc.) and the direction and distance it is. It also shows the difficulty and terrain info as well as the cache size. When you select a cache, it shows all the same info as on the search results page along with the co-ordinates to the location. From here you can choose to save the cache info into a database, navigate to the place using the built in GPS of the iPhone 3G, or map it which launches Maps.app to pinpoint the location on Google Maps. On this page, you can get the description of the cache, 5 most recent logs, any travel bugs with the cache and the hint. This is all the information you would get from the Geocaching website for the cache, all accessible on the iPhone. If you do choose to save them, you see all the same information but without having to have a connection to the internet. This is very handy if you are going to a place without good mobile reception or you want to store all the cache information so you can access it easily.
Do I think it is worth the $13.99 I payed for it? To be honest, not really. The app isn’t very stable and crashes at random times and when trying to load some saved caches. This can be very frustrating when you are in the middle of nowhere and relying on the Geocaching app to give you all the information on the cache you are trying to acquire. Also if you don’t have an iPhone 3G, a lot of the features of this app are lost. The only useful feature for non-iPhone 3G devices is the ability to save caches onto the device, even then, this isn’t the most reliable app. Only get this app if you are a Geocacher with an iPhone 3G and willing to lay down $13.99 NZD (or $9.99 USD) on this app. It will definitely be a much better experience for you as the 3G was the device this app was mainly developed for. Maybe one day I will get to take this app out for a run with an iPhone 3G and the whole experience with this app will be much much better. Until then, I’d say this app is average at best.
Last week, Apple released iPhone Software 2.2. This update had many new features including Google street view, emoji‘s for Japan, improved performance and podcast downloading. Podcast downloading has been on the list of features people want on the iPhone ever since Apple rejected the Podcaster app. Fortunately I was able to get it onto my jailbroken iPhone and had been using it up until IPSW 2.2. Since I have now had a good chance of playing with them both, I can have give my opinion on these two different ways of getting podcasts into your device.
Podcaster is an application available on Cydia and it does pretty much what you expect, lets you download podcasts right on your iPhone. When you open the app for the first time, you will want to subscribe to podcasts. This is a very simple thing to do where you enter the address of the RSS feed and it will look for podcasts. Then you can select the episode you want, go into it and press the download button, and it goes into the download queue. At anytime, you can press the refresh button and it will look for any new podcasts in any of the feeds you’re subscribed to, and shows you that there is a new podcast available to download.
Unfortunately this app isn’t at well built as I’d like. The program crashes randomly or when you try and give it something to do. This is especially bad when it is downloading a podcast, because you lose what you have downloaded up until the last time you paused or quit the application. Another issue I had was when download, it didn’t hold the Wifi connection. Whenever the iPhone turned the screen off, the Wifi connection would drop shortly after, which would cause the program to crash when you woke the device back up again. To get around this, you ould have to stop your iPhone from going to sleep, which would reduce battery life significantly. The last little grip with it that I had was the slow and somewhat unresponsive playback of podcasts. When you push the play button to continue playing a podcast, you would have to wait a while for it to start playing. Sometimes you would have to tap some of the icons multiple times to get it to respond. These gripes are frustrating!!!
One the other side, we have the new Podcast downloading support that iPhone Software 2.2 brought to the device. For iPhone podcast downloading, you go into the iTunes Store, search for the podcast you want and then tap the download button beside the episode or episodes you want. You do this for all the podcasts you want. This puts them in the download queue and they go and download in the background and go to the iPod app when they are done for you to play. The podcasts pretty much behave in the same way as they do if you synced them over from iTunes. From each of the podcast pages in the iPod app, there is a button which takes you to their page in the iTunes Store so you can download any new episodes when they come.
There are limitations to this app, all of which Podcaster doesn’t have. These include the lack of any RSS feed downloads. You are limited to the selection of Podcasts they have in the iTunes Store. Although they have the majority of podcasts and for most people, have all the ones they would want, but it would be nice if that restriction wasn’t there. Another issue is that you can’t subscribe to podcasts. If you want to download podcasts, you have to manually navigate through the iTunes store to their page and tap the download button. There is no notification of new episodes, no notification of podcasts currently on your device, nothing. It is all manual, no automated downloading or anything. This is something they really missed the ball on because it would make it close to perfect. The last problem I had was with iTunes syncing. In the iTunes application, I have it set that it won’t sync podcasts. You would expect this to mean leave podcasts on iTunes and the iPhone alone, do not do anything. Well what it turns out to mean it sync all the downloaded podcasts on the iPhone and delete them from the device. This is not what I want. I want to keep them separate and I want them to stay on my iPhone and out of my iTunes library. This is by far the most frustrating feature/bug with the podcast downloading and hope it is fixed in the next iTunes/iPhone update.
Both of these app have their ups and downs. For Podcaster, I like having my podcasts separate from iTunes and my music library. I also like being able to subscribe to podcasts and check for updates. For iPhone podcast downloading, I like having the experience the same as when I listen to music and the better integration with the iPhone features and functions. I also like the stability of the whole process and the background downloading. What I dislike about Podcaster is the crashing, instability and unresponsiveness of the app at times. I also wish it could hold the Wifi connection and make the downloading process smoother. It would be nice to also have better integration with the media player already on the iPhone. What I dislike about the iPhone podcast downloading is the whole manual process of downloading podcasts and the lack of subscription and automatic downloading. I also hope they fix the iTunes syncing issues I have because they are just a huge pain in the arse.
As you can see, I am very torn between the two apps. They both have very strong good points, but they also are weak in others. If only each of them could take the strengths of each of the applications and fix all the problems, we would be left with two amazing apps. For someone who manages their podcasts in iTunes and only wants to be able to download podcasts on the road, the podcast downloading in 2.2 is perfect. For someone who keeps their podcasts separate from their music and enjoys a less messy way of getting their media, Podcaster is a great app for that. I hope that they can both sort things out so they can both be used by any podcast consumer.
