For people seriously considering a Windows 8 tablet as their next tablet OS here is something that might sweeten the deal a bit.
While the iPad has built in viewing capabilities for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slidepacks the ability to edit them as part of the base operating system is absent. The situation is the same with OneNote notebooks although you can download a free app from the App Store for iPhone or iPad that will allow you to view and edit notes up in SkyDrive. The Android side of things is a bit scant in terms of native support although you can also download the official Microsoft OneNote app from Microsoft.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft is going to offer native support for Office documents in Windows 8 tablets, particularly given the support in Windows Phone 7. You won’t get the entire suite though but you’ll get Office 15 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote which should cover most bases. I guess we won’t be seeing Outlook as we know it but there will be a Metro mail app (perhaps called Outlook) that will be better designed and optimised for the touch interface.
While this might have benefits for consumers it should also have a positive influence for small businesses and enterprises still assessing what sort of tablet deployments they could potentially undertake. Sure, tablets may not necessarily be the best content creation devices but for smaller bouts and minor document modifications it’s probably not a bad thing having such capable versions of Office 15 in Windows 8 for ARM devices.
Here’s a quick software pick for the Mac users out there.
CCleaner, which I have covered in a prior post, has now been made available for Mac OS X. Windows users have been able to use this utility for quite some time to remove a lot of the built up cruft from their computers and other important pieces of software like web browsers. It also included a registry cleaner (arguable beneficial depending on who you ask) as well as the ability to tidy up orphaned entries in the list of installed applications.
A number of features have been ported across to the Mac OS X version including the standard cleaning functionality, application management and free space erasure whilst providing direct access to verify and repair file permissions (usually found in the Disk Utility application). Over time, I can only figure that its capabilities will expand as it has for the Windows version.
Anyway, CCleaner is free to download right here and can be a simpler way to keep your Mac clean of built up rubbish.
No, I’m not recommending that you try pouring coffee into your favourite Mac but if you hate having to go into the Energy Saver preferences to frequently change the settings then this might be for you.
There’s an app called “Caffeine” in the Mac App Store that allows you to toggle whether or not your Mac is in “insomniac mode” or using the Energy Saver preferences. The app adds a little icon of a coffee cup at the top of the screen which is initially empty but if you click the icon it will fill up signifying the “insomniac mode” in operation. Disabling it is simply a matter of clicking on the coffee cup again.
If you think you might need this sort of functionality then you can grab the app which is free in the Mac App Store.
Browsers these days are blessed with the ability to have many webpages open across a number of tabs and mobile devices are no different. However, in the case of iOS devices you’re not going to be able to open perhaps the twenty or thirty tabs you might do on your desktop or laptop computer.
Furthermore, web browsing may not necessarily be a linear activity. While you are browsing you might find something you might want to read but you don’t want to deviate from your current line of browsing just yet. On a regular computer you can just open up a link in a new tab and get around to it but on a mobile device you may be limited to how many tabs you can open (usually around nine tabs before they dropped in favour of newer content).
So how do you workaround this limitation on iOS?
Well, if you have iOS 5 on your device there is a new feature in Safari called the “Reading List”. Think of it as a temporary list of bookmarks you can create while you are browsing and then read through later on. It saves you having to juggle precious tabs and remember where you saw something you might have wanted to read but couldn’t (or didn’t want to) accomodate at the time.
All you need to do to add an item to the “Reading List” in Safari is hold your finger on top of a link until the menu comes up and choose “Add to Reading List” from the options. It should then jump up to the bookmarks button. To browse your Reading List just tap on the bookmarks button and then the “Reading List” item. You can then toggle between your unread items and all items that have been added to the list. If you want to delete something from the list, just swipe your finger across the item (left to right or right to left) and tap the delete button that appears.
Enjoy a more streamlined and decluttered mobile browsing experience!
As veratile as the iPad can be it can often be a right pain trying to type on it particularly when holding it in both hands when it is in landscape mode as the centre keys are often too far away from each thumb. It can also be a problem using the keyboard when in portrait mode if the weight of the iPad is too heavy thus placing strain on your wrists.
What most people may not realise is that you can undock and optionally split the keyboard to get around these problems.
Whenever the keyboard is on screen, just hold down the keyboard button on the bottom right corner of soft keyboard and you’ll get two options to undock or split the keyboard. Simply choose whichever option you fancy.
Normally, the keyboard would look like this:
iPad Soft Keyboard (Standard)
When you undock the keyboard, it will look like this:
iPad Soft Keyboard (Undocked)
Finally, the option to split (which also undocks the soft keyboard) looks like this:
To put the soft keyboard back to its docked and merged form simply hold down the keyboard key again in the bottom right corner and choose the option to “dock and merge”.
In some of the earlier models of the unibody MacBook Pro the battery was deemed to be a “non-user serviceable part” meaning that if something happened to the battery (its capacity deteriorated or stopped working) you would have to send it back to get the battery replaced or swing by an Apple store. This was addressed in later models of the MacBook Pro but this doesn’t help if you have an earlier model.
However, you can replace the battery yourself with a little care and effort. You’ll also need to source a replacement battery which I got from Macfixit in Melbourne, Australia for a reasonable price. I show you how its done and some things to watch out for along the way.
That said, enjoy the video!
FYI – the video will be available in up to 720p (YouTube can take a little while to process the higher resolutions) if you right click on the video and choose “Watch on YouTube” and change the resolution setting.
WinAMP is now available as a desktop application for Mac OS X including the ability to sync with Android devices (something which has been lacking somewhat on Apple gear). The interface does differ somewhat from the traditional one found in the Windows version which is nearly fifteen years old now but should be fairly straightfoward for most people.
It’s also a great way to get podcasts onto your Android devices without having to manually sync them across.
One thing to bear in mind: this software is in beta so it might crash or have missing functionality so your mileage may vary.
Given that the first update to iOS 5 came out and one of its much touted features was the ability to update the device without tethering it to iTunes on a computer I thought I would make a video showing you the execution of this process. I did cut quite a bit out of it as most of the time was spent waiting for the device to do its thing (i.e. downloading, unpackaging, installing, etc) but left in all of the important bits.
Also, as part of the update to iOS 5.0.1 for the original iPad, the missing multitasking gestures were added back in after being present in the developer builds but went mysteriously missing in the final release of iOS 5. I show how to enable and use the gestures on the iPad.
That said, enjoy the video!
FYI – the video will be available in up to 720p (YouTube can take a little while to process the higher resolutions) if you right click on the video and choose “Watch on YouTube” and change the resolution setting.
Just a heads up for those who were using developer versions of iOS 5 on the original iPad and had grown to like the multitasking gestures until they were disabled in the final build. The iOS 5.0.1 update re-enables these gestures for the original iPad.
The missing gestures allowed your to do a four fingered swipe left or right to change between applications or a pinching motion with all five digits on one hand to close an app.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you these gestures as well as how to execute the new “Over the Air” update right on the iPad itself.
Since the iPhone 4S came out Siri, the enhanced voice control functionality found only on the iPhone 4S (for the time being), has become a a focal point for the state of the art of speech recognition. With smartphones packing quite a punch in terms of CPU power and access to the cloud becoming ubiquitous through traditional fixed broadband connections and popular cellular connections (GPRS, 3G and LTE) getting voice queries processed is becoming easier, more efficient and more accurate.
Of course, Google has had speech recognition in Android for a while now but it has taken a while to evolve to its current point and some people might say its fallen behind Apple’s offering (which was admittedly an acquisition).
So why is Google trailing?
My take on this is that Google relies heavily on its current ad model to bring in the cash (so ten links on a page, ads on the right hand side) and the diversion of search to a voice channel bypasses the opportunity to serve up ads without being obtrusive. Trying to slip in a spoken ad at the beginning will turn people off using a voice channel while putting it at the end will simply see people ignoring it by terminating the channel.
While the current method of obtaining information may be through a web browser it might not always be that way. With enablers like Siri, we may be moving to bite sized chunks of data to fulfil a search request or a query rather than pages and blocks of data that we receive now. Google needs to work out how voice will work for consumers while innovating its business model to support it.
