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Enjoying Apple TV in the UK

January 12, 2012 Apple Mac OS X / News
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It January 2012 and Apple TV (second generation, also know as iTV) has taken three major leaps forward I the UK and really has become the heart of the AV setup in my sitting room.

First came iCloud support in the UK. I’d always been. Put off downloading films and TV shows in iTunes because I knew I’d soon run out of disk space. Now with iCloud you can delete the content when you’ve finished with it and download again from Apple if you ever want to watch it again. The Apple TV is actually even better than that. Instead of streaming the content from you Mac or PC it now streams the content from iCloud so you no longer need you Mac switched on. Indeed the average consumer no longer needs a Mac or PC in their home. It’s still annoying that photos can’t be stored in iCloud forever, as this is as far as I can see the only reason an average consumer still needs a PC or Mac. So for me the ability to buy content, not have to worry about storing it and backing it up whilst still having access on demand is really amazing.

The next great improvement came when the BBC updated their iPlayer App to support AirPlay. To watch BBC programmes I used to connect up my MacBook Air to the HDMI port on the TV which works but is a bit of an annoyance. Now I can just sit down with my iPad or iPhone, find the programme I want to watch on iPlayer and the press the AirPlay button to transfer it to the big screen and audio in the sitting room. This works really well and is amazing. I just hope that ITV and Channel 4 now catch up and allow this in their player apps.

Finally this week NetFlix have arrived in the UK. Netflix has been integrated into the Apple TV in the US since it launched. I immediately signed up for Netflix and enjoyed cancelling by LoveFilm subscription. Films and TV program’s stream smoothly from Netflix and are integrated really well into the Apple TV. I was really impressed that they have fully embraced the Apple TV menu system and maintained the whole Apple look and feel. Netflix isn’t perfect at the moment. They have a lot of content but equally lots of notable TV shows and films are missing. That said I’m sure that now they have launched in the UK they will quickly start putting the deals in place to make more content available in the UK. Either way it’s great for consumers that LoveFilm finally have a serious competitor in the UK. I’ll also happily live with Netflix because it’s integrated into the Apple TV so neatly.

For me, it’s as if very little changed during 2011 and then in the first few weeks of 2012 everything I’ve been waiting for arrived at once.

We’re back…

June 4, 2011 News
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We’ve been busy over the last few weeks moving some of our older sites to better hosting platform and this has taken longer than expected.   There are a few lessons that have been learnt along the way.

  1. When you are just starting out with a brand new blog you don’t worry too much about the hosting.  It’s easy and cost effective at the time to just put your blog on a low cost shared server.  A few years down the line and as the blog traffic takes off it becomes more important and you need to move it to a professional hosting platform.  My advice to people now is when starting a blog or probably any website buy the smallest hosting package you can from the provider you will want to be with in a couple of years time.  The good hosting companies will be able to upgrade your package and move you to their bigger servers with minimal disruption.
  2. We’ve been doing this for a while now but back when we originally set-up this blog site we didn’t document the build and all the server tweaks.  For any hosting I really recommend that you keep a log of all the build steps and tweaks that you make.  We do this now by having a Word Document which details our procedure for building a WordPress site and then a site specific document which details anything unique to the site such as the name of the template used and any extra plugins.   This will save you a lot of time later wonder how something worked.

We’ve got lots of great ideas for articles over the coming weeks but as ever we are also interested in receiving guess blogs or products or services for review.  If you would like to get in touch please see the Contact Us section at the top of the site.

My technology wish list for 2011

January 4, 2011 News
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Rather than try and predict what will happen this year I thought I would instead write my wish list of technical developments I would love to see in 2011.

1. Apple TV to support BBC iPlayer, add BBC radio stations to the radio section and add an app store.

2. The Mac App store will be a great success and lead to copy cat App stores on Windows and Linux machines. I would like to think that Apple will support applications developed using Java in their App Store.

3. Languages like Java and Objective C are far to technical for the vast majority of business apps. For business apps we need to revisit the objectives of COBOL and have a simple development language which frees developers to focus on the business applications functionality and usability rather than memory management, resource allocation etc.

4. Similar to the above point I would like to see BigDecimal support in Java greatly improved and ideally supported as a native data type. Doing decimal business calculations in Java is painful and the language could learn much from COBOL and RPG in this area. I know Java was never designed for business applications, you don’t need simple decimal support in set top boxes but it’s about time this was added.

5. ITunes in the cloud. Why should I have to backup copies of the music I download from Apple when they know what they have sold me and still have the original?

6. Better cloud based backup solutions. I want something as well integrated as Time Machine storing my data off site.

7. Time Machine gets updated in Lion to properly support file versioning rather than just snapshots. I find myself using Dropbox a lot now as I know the data is backed up and I can easily get access to previous versions of my documents.

8. A new approach to search engines emerges. I expect to see a subscription based search engine sooner or later. The problem is that although the people at Google are without doubt some of the cleverest people on the planet they are out numbered by the sheer number of average people trying to spam their search index. I could imagine paying for a service which is curated by a team of humans.

9. IE6 finally dies. A good slice of the budget for any major web site project is being wasted making the site work on IE6, the money would be much better spent on features for newer browsers and content.

10. Solar energy becomes more affordable and becomes mandatory in new buildings. Actually I’d like to see this go further and make sure that manufactures are required to make their White goods solar energy friendly. This can be as simple as allowing for a hot water fill in washing machines and dish washers.

I’ve stopped with my top 10 and look forward to seeing how many of these happen in 2011.

Java update installing Yahoo toolbar by default

April 1, 2009 News
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Sun seem to be pushing out update 13 for Java 1.6 this week. It’s annoying that by default the update is installing the Yahoo browser tool bar. You need to watch for the tick box and remove the tick for the Yahoo toolbar if you don’t want it. I can see this catching out many end users, which will no doubt cause lots of calls to help desks when their browser isn’t quite the same any more.

I couldn’t see a way of removing the Yahoo toolbar from within the browser – I may well have missed this in which case please let me know. To remove the Yahoo Toolbar you have to go into Start > Control Panel > Add / Remove programs and then remove the Yahoo Toolbar.

In the last few months we’ve seen Apple install additional software with iTunes updates and now Sun additional software with Java updates. I don’t think I’m turning into a grumpy old man yet, but I do think installing additional software on someone’s computer without their explicit authorisation is bad manners and shows a lack of respect for people.