Milestones

Got Engaged - This was the biggest event of my year by a long shot. Fiona and I have shared a great relationship over the past few years and despite our relatively young age we decided that we wanted to get married. We are both looking forward to starting the rest of our lives together and can’t wait for the wedding in 2010.

Started my job at Aquidata Excel - This is also another fairly big milestone this year. My new job has been great and I can’t believe I’ve been here for more than 6 months now. I have learned so much already and the experience I am getting here is really fantastic. It also looks like this might be my first job in my career after I graduate which would be great.

Lanched ProgTuts - I suppose this is the biggest web based event that has happened this year. ProgTuts is a tutorial website for programmers and I have had loads of fun running the site and writing for it. It’s also been great to get help writing for the site from Jamie so big thanks to him. I have been neglecting the site recently due to my priorities being elsewhere however I hope to get more into the site again soon.

Site Redesign - Although I seem to redesign my site more often than not I thought I would mention this here. The site redesign this time was based on a template bought at ThemeForest which has really seemed to help me as my design skills are… well not fantastic anyway. I finally decided to splash out and spend some hard cash on my site and I am pleased with the results.

Mini Projects - I have put into practice some of the knowledge I have acquired over the last year and created some small projects which I have enjoyed creating. CheckR was my first .NET experiment which I still use on a daily basis and taught me a lot about .NET. WP-CMS was also fun to make but unfortunately I won’t be updating as of Wordpress 2.7. The other thing I have done recently is created a few website themes to sell on ThemeForest. This has also been great for me to push my learning and try and get my design skills sharpened up.

Statistics

Just for fun I will share with you some of my site stats as of Dec 2009.

• Total Posts: 247
• Total Comments: 178
• Blocked Spam Comments: 908
• Subscribers: 30
• Total Visits (2008 - 2009): 10,615
• Total Pageviews (2008 - 2009): 20,004
• Avg Visits/Day: 30

Looking forward to 2009

So a big thank you to all my followers during 2008. What is in store in 2009? I have another six months to work at Aquidata and then I am returning to Uni in September. This means that the first half of this year there probably won’t be too much activity on the blog. But as of July I will have more time and probably be more active on the interwebs.

So to everyone I wish you all the best for 2009. Have a good one.

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Enjoy.

So after having it for over a week now I decided I would share my thoughts on the iPhone.

Good News First

So I’ll start with what’s good about the iPhone. In true Apple fashion the design is stunning. It’s elegant and beautiful. The UI work’s very well and is very intuitive, the default apps are top notch, the app store itself works really well, integration with email is simple and this is not including the stunning array of 3rd party apps that you can download from the App Store.

So naturally I was very impressed. Even comparing it to Google Android the iPhone feels far more composed, sleek and professional, which, sadly, seems to be always the case with commercial projects compared to open source. So all is well and great if you want to buy an iPhone this Christmas. Or is it?

Bad News Second

Before you go rushing out to buy you brand spanking new iPhone there are some things you should consider that I have come across while using the iPhone over the last week. Although the majority of these gripes are not major downfalls and are solvable with a bit of work, they do take away from the nice, elegant experience which the iPhone can provide.

You can only sync to iTunes on 1 PC

This is by far my biggest gripe about the iPhone (although not strictly the iPhones fault so much as iTunes incompetence). You can sync your iPhone to a PC with iTunes great and it all works really well. Until you take your iPhone to work and want to put a video you have on your work PC on to your iPhone. When you try to do this iTunes tells you that your iPhone is synced to another PC and asks if you want to wipe your iPhone and sync to your current PC. Fail.

Now don’t get me wrong I understand that there are DRM issues and the like so, to a certain extent, I can understand why the decision was made to restrict syncing to multiple PC’s. However it’s such a functionality nightmare. In my example above you can see how annoying it can be.

Fix: I found a good article on how to use a small hack to let you sync to multiple PC’s at http://www.andrewgrant.org/2008/03/30/how-to-sync-an-iphone-with-two-or-more-computers.html. Extra note: If you need a good free Hex editor for one of the steps in this tutorial use HxD Hex Editor. It worked fine for me.

You can’t set your iTunes Music as a Ringtone

This is another gripe about the iPhone which really annoyed me. I mean why not? Other phones let you do it. Even my only Sony Erricson let me do it. So why will the iPhone not let me set my iTunes music as a ringtone? Theres not even a DRM excuse this time. Fail #2.

Fix: Theres a great article at http://theappleblog.com/2008/08/07/free-custom-iphone-ringtones-using-only-itunes/ which tells you how to do it. Again its a bit of a hack and not very user friendly but it works. I’ve been told you can also get apps that will convert iTunes songs to ringtones for you.

Syncing your Google Calendar to your iPhone Calendar

This is a my final gripe about the iPhone. Although you can easily sync your emails and even your Gmail contacts to your iPhone, there is no easy way to sync your Google Calendar to your iPhone… for free anyway. I believe there might be some apps that do this for you but it’s not something I’m willing to spend hard cash on. Fail #3.

Fix: You can actually set up an Exchange Mail account to sync to your Google Calendar. This article tells you how to do it http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/sync-google-calendar-with-iphone-3g/.

No Windows iPhone SDK

Unfortunately there is no, easy, fix for this one, and I’m really gutted about it. I don’t own a Mac, and I don’t want to. However I do want to develop apps for the iPhone. You can actually develop apps for the iPhone on windows using some home made tool chains that are available but you need to jailbreak your iPhone to install the apps, which voids your warranty. So until Apple pulls their finger out there won’t be any official apps being developed on Windows. Fail #4.

Fix: None… yet

Get BBC iPlayer Videos on your iPhone

This one is a little treat for you (UK users only I’m afraid). If you use the BBC iPlayer to watch videos but get really annoyed that when you download the portable version its in a WMV format and can’t be converted. I found a nifty little app that downloads videos from the BBC iPlayer in MOV format so you can put it on your iPhone. Remember to keep it legal and delete the video after you have watched it.

Fix: Download the Windows GUI from http://po-ru.com/projects/iplayer-downloader/.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I really enjoy my iPhone and it works very well. Apart from the hickups mentioned above, which I now have all working, the iPhone is fantastic. The only thing still to be fixed, in my mind, is letting Windows developers get access to a SDK so we can develop on the iPhone. What do you think? What are your experiences with the iPhone?

I’m not going to say much more about it other than download it now! Really if you want to run a blog, Wordpress is the way to go.

URL: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

However there is now an alternative. The Fuge Icon set from pinvoke.com. Again an absolutely stunning set of 1000 icons released under a Creative Commons license. Which means we can all use them for free.

I would like to point out the Fuge Icon set is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. So please respect the fact that the author has put a lot of work into creating these icons so don’t rip them off.

URL: http://www.pinvoke.com/

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Enjoy.

On a side note I was featured on CSSMania and CSSWow the other day. My first appearance on any CSS galleries. Quite chuffed.