Computer Solutions in the greater brisbane area.
June, 2009
Archive for June, 2009
iPhone 3GS
Today’s the day for iPhone fans; The new iPhone 3GS is now on sale in Australia. This updated model comes with a slew of improvements moving the iPhone further in front as the leading smart phone in the marketplace.
The 3GS features a faster processor that the previous model, which take the good user experience of the 3G and bring it to a new level; Also, there is more mobile network hardware in there, which may mean improved performance on some networks.
The camera has been improved, and now you can take video as well as photos, and you can even trim the video and upload straight to Youtube!
Apple has shoehorned a compass into the new model, which allows the maps to rotate to match your direction.
If your phone carrier will let you, the new iPhone can also be used as a broadband internet modem for your laptop; That may not be that useful here in Australia unless local carriers offer up a bit more in the way of download quota though.
iPhone 3.0 Firmware is out today
June 17th; Today’s the day, and if i have timed this post correctly, the 3.0 firmware for the iPhone should be available via iTunes. Talk is it will be rolled at at Midnight in the US, which means it should be live here early this afternoon.
This new firmware has loads of new features and is really a must install, unless you did something silly and hacked your iPhone, in which case your mileage may vary!
Some of the reasons why you’d want this update immediately include;
- You can foward SMS messages now (please, not to me!)
- You can send MMS messages (you could always have just emailed them previously, but okay)
- Cut / Copy / Paste – much screamed for, but I have only ever needed it twice in the year I’ve had my iPhone.
- Support for stereo Bluetooth accessories – This is a good improvement.
- Landscape View – meaning you can get the nice wide keyboard on everything, not just some things, and I believe you can now rotate your email to landscape mode as well.
- Assisted GPS – I’m still waiting to see if I can eBay my Garmin GPS, but apparently we’ll soon be able to get full turn by turn assistance right on the iPhone itself.
- Full Search – searching now searches every corner of your iPhone; contacts, emails, calendar, notes, everything!
- Tethering – provided your phone company allows it, you can use your iPhone as a broadband modem for your laptop.
There’s plenty more, and the upgrade is free, so I highly reccomend everyone take 15 minutes out of their day and install it, I know I will be 
Update: As of 2:50PM Aussie Eastern time, still no release of the firmware. No word yet on exactly what time it will be released.
Update: Turns out they aren’t releasing it until the middle of the day US time, which, if I’ve done my calculating right, means we get it at Midnight. Guess I’ll be staying up late
Movie buff add on for Firefox
If you are really into movies, and you are using firefox, then we might have found an add on for firefox that is right up your alley;
IMDB Movie Review 2.0 can be easily installed into firefox, after you agree to take the risk, as it is listed as an experimental add on at the moment; Once installed, highlight any text that mentions the movie title you are interested in, and right click it, choose “IMDB Review” and be taken to the Internet Movie Database for more info on the film.
Twitter delays maintenance to help Iranian protesters
The twitter service not only came into it’s own over the past few days, but also proved to be fantastic world citizens by postponing scheduled maintenance that would have seen the server offline for almost an hour.
Since the recent elections in Iran, twitter users inside Iran have been posting updates on the violence and brutality that has ensued after protests sprang up contesting the result.
Earlier this morning australian time, twitter announced routine scheduled maintenance was due soon, and within minutes, wave after wave of message was posted to the service begging the engineers to postpone the updates so that communications with people in Iran could continue to use the service.
It’s a testament to the management of Twitter that they did indeed announce that this maintenance would be postponed until the situation subsides in Iran.
For up to the minute info about the situation in Iran, check out the twitter feed for #iranelection
Update: talk is that the Iranian government is actively blocking the twitter tag #iranelection, so the folks using twitter are switching to #iran9
Cool leaf wallpapers
I know a lot of our clients can not get enough great wallpapers, so here is a site I just discovered full of really great “leaf” wallpapers; Mostly with a very autumn feel to them, they are really gorgeous, if you’re into that sort of thing.
IE8 Breaks Windows Mail
Users of Windows Mail on Vista may be interested to learn that installing Internet Explorer 8 will break Windows Mail’s ability to open attachments; No word yet from Microsoft of a fix, at this stage, there are only three work arounds;
- Uninstall IE8
- Upgrade to Windows Live Mail
- Save the attachment to your documents and open from there.
As we suggest our clients should be using Firefox anyway, I think the best bet is just to uninstall IE8; In your control panel, open “Uninstall a Program”, then click on “View Installed Updates”, find Internet Explorer 8 in the list, and remove it.
Now you can Bing! for stuff online
Microsoft have launched their newest search engine, named Bing, and for once the software giant is actually making some headway in the search market.
Bing has managed to leapfrog Yahoo into second place after only a week or two; Time will tell if this is just curiosity, or if people are really switching their day to day searching to Bing.
I am certainly liking it, and have switched to it for my general searching; In particular I like;
- It’s pretty; much nicer looking that Google
- Video searching is awesome
- Image searching has more options
- The explorer pane makes searching easier
There is also some under the hood technology to make searching for shopping and health queries return more reliable and higher quality information, although I have yet to use those features.
Go check it out at www.bing.com and let us know what you think in the comments.
Twitter users prepare for the apocolypse
Just quick post to alert anyone who uses Twitter, and who might care if it stopped working, that they have run into a problem similar to the Y2K bug of nearly a decade ago;
Like any database, every tweet has a number that uniquely identifies it in the stream, and that number is about to reach the limit for a signed integer, which the word is that most twitter software would be using to store the number;
So if twitter is down around june 12-13, thats probably why, and if you use twitter software (such as twitterific on the iPhone), you may need to get an updated version.
UPDATE: Around 11:30AM local time, this in from the twitterific folks;
Twitterrific 2.0.1 for the iPhone is indeed experiencing problems with the Twitpocalypse. Investigating now, we apologize for the problems.
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