Cars are one of the most popular subjects for photographers, they’re designed to look stylish and evoke an emotional response. Most men would probably love to photograph cars for a living but few people are lucky enough to make a living doing that. No, most of us will have to be satisfied with doing it as a hobby but that’s ok, it’s still a lot of fun!
I have decided to break this tutorial down into several parts as it’s too much information to digest in one go.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I managed to break off a key on my MacBook Pro keyboard. If you can find a replacement keyboard online they tend to run in the £70 - £80 range and of course you have to fit it yourself. I dread to think what Apple might want to do the repair…
Luckily you can sometimes buy individual keys from Ebay or other online sites (expect to pay around £4-£5 inc delivery). If you do so, it’s important to note that an individual key consists of two parts, the key cap itself (the silver bit you see) and a white plastic scissor mechanism that holds the key to the keyboard base. If you have only damaged the silver cap portion, then you can reuse the scissor mechanism, but to be safe make sure any replacement you get includes both parts.
He’s full of curiosity about new things and is willing to learn so we know he’ll fit right in (although he can be distracting for other team members as he’s a pretty funny guy!):
We’re trying to do some research into the typical browsing speeds on our beloved iPhones so we’ve knocked up a simple web app for the iPhone that runs a speed test. The results are logged by connection type (eg 2G, 3G etc). We feel this information will be valuable to developers such as ourselves as iPhone connection speeds to web apps are something of an unknown quantity.
Please point your iPhone to:
Apple are quick to mention the internal sensors fitted to the iPhone, the info is right there on the website:
Sensors
Accelerometer
Proximity sensor
Ambient light sensor
What they don’t mention is the secret 4th sensor. A water sensor. You can see it if you shine a torch into the headphone socket of your iPhone (or iPod Touch). It’s a round disc at the very bottom of the hole. If that sensor comes into contact with water it changes colour, permanently.
According to the Q3 financial results conference call, Apple’s next fiscal quarter (Q04) will experience a secret “product transition” that will drop the company’s overall margins from just under 35% to just over 30%. It would seem that Apple is concerned that their high margins make it easy for competitors to release similar but cheaper products…
According to Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer “these state-of-the-art products will have technologies and features that others can’t match”, but he refused to reveal anything beyond that.
Annoyingly the 3G iPhone doesn’t come with a dock, but no matter, those of us who bought the Apple Bluetooth headset have a dock anyway. Except the 3G iPhone doesn’t fit a dock that was designed for the 2G iPhone…
In the early hours of this morning the iPhone Dev team released the latest version of their “Pwnage Tool”. This software modifies the iPhone firmware to unlock and jailbreak the phone.
To the uninitiated, unlocking the iPhone lets you use the phone on other networks than was originally intended. For example, in the UK if you want an iPhone you have to sign up to an 18 month contract with O2. If you’re getting a better deal with a different network you can’t just put that sim card in an iPhone, it won’t accept it as it’s locked to O2.
So if that’s unlocking what’s “jailbreaking”? Well, prior to July the 11th you couldn’t install any new applications on your iPhone, you were stuck with what came with it. On July the 11th Apple launched the App Store in iTunes which lets you download free (or low cost) applications and install them on your iPhone. The only catch is that Apple decides which applications go in the store. Jailbreaking your iPhone lets you download any iPhone applications off the internet and install them.
With sales of 1 million handsets in the first 3 days alone, the latest 3G iPhone stands a good chance of becoming the most popular way for people to browse websites with a handheld device.
With just a few limitations (lack of flash compatibility for example) an iPhone can happily browse most standard, well written web sites. So why bother going to the trouble of making a specific version of your site for the iPhone? There are several reasons:
Make the experience a lot more pleasant for the user by helping them avoid zooming and scrolling around
Pull out the iPhone incompatible bits so their experience is flawless, while maintaining eye candy for regular users
Make the experience quicker (and thus bearable) for the users who are browsing over a (relatively) low bandwidth connection.
