One. Steve Jobs has sadly passed away.
Two. It’s getting really cold after a lovely warm start to October.
Three. Apple have just released their newest iPhone in the range, the iPhone 4s.

Now, I’m a bit of a sucker for Apple tech… They’ve got me each and every year since the original iPhone was announced back in 2007. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it’s 2011, and I’m preparing for (yet another) upgrade from my iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4s. Now, I’m not going to debate whether its a viable upgrade for one main reason: My 18 month upgrade has come to an end (3 months early as I’m a gold priority O2 member), so it’s time to get a new phone!

I decided to take a look at a couple of options, and found that there is a more cost effective way of buying an iPhone than the typical 12/18/24 month iPhone contracts that O2 provide (Yes, I’m on O2, so I’ll be focusing on that.. Although similar tariffs will undoubtedly be available on Orange et al!).

Here’s the round-up for an 18 month contract (which I signed up to 18 months ago!).

Minutes: 600 per month
Texts: Unlimited (Debatable!)
Internet: 500Mb per month
Handset Cost: £140.00
Cost per Month: £42.00
Contract Term/Length: 18 months
Total Cost:(18 x £42) + £140 = £896.00

Now, bare in mind that if you intend to upgrade when the new phone comes out (presumably in 12 months) you’ll be eligible for 1 month early upgrade (as you paid over £520 already in the past 12 months) so will have 5 months worth of contract / £210.00 (18 months – 12 months paid – 1 month early upgrade = 5 months x £42 = £210.00) to pay off.

Here’s the alternative: Upgrade to a simplicity package.

(The one I’m upgrading to is O2 simplicity 600 12 month)

Minutes: 600 per month (same as above)
Texts: Unlimited (Debatable!)(same as above)
Internet: 500Mb per month (same as above)
Handset Cost: I’ll come back to this!
Cost per Month: £21.50 (Half as much as above)
Contract Term/Length: 12 months (6 less than above)
Total Cost:(12 x £21.50) = £258.00

What’s it all mean?

Now, that total cost does look a lot less.. But you do have to buy the handset at it’s full amount. This is usually around £500. Add that to the cost and you’ve a grand total of £758.00.

Now, Simplicity’s £758 is £138 less than the iPhone tariff mentioned above (£896). There is one major advantage, and one minor disadvantage to the simplicity method:

Advantage: The Simplicity method means that after 12 months, when the new iPhone comes out, there is no contract to pay off. If you think about it logically, with the iPhone tariff you’d not only have to sign up to another 18 x $42 a month contract, but also pay £140 for the phone and an additional £210 contract cancellation charge. That’s a total of £111 (18 x£42 = £756 + £140 + £210 = £1106 over 18 months). The simplicity tariff means you’ll not be paying any contract cancellation fee, simply signing up to another 12 month £21.50 per month contract and buying another handset.

The slight disadvantage is that you have to find the bulk of the money (£500+) at the beginning of the upgrade, where as the iPhone specific contract you pay a more even price over the 18 months. That said, if you upgrade each year then expect to pay at least [handset cost] + ([# months] x [cost per month]) at the beginning of the next upgrade!

Still confused?

There you have it. It’s a bit confusing, I know… To be honest writing this article helped me understand it myself a little better. Basically, if you can afford to pay the £500 for the handset (SIM free) and signing a “SIM ONLY” contract, then you’ll be saving money (around £138) over 12 months, compared to the bundled contract and iPhone deals.

FaceTime (by Apple) is good, but seems a little glitchy and disconnects the most of any that we used over the week. Another contender was Skype; This was much better, and I’ve used it before with no problems, but it seemed poor in signal quality and did drop out occasionally. (Although I blame her internet connection, as she could hear me perfectly! – Not sure if that’s how it works?)

Finally, we came onto Viber. Unlike other applications Viber allows a more traditional phone call experience, as the voices aren’t automatically on loud-speaker, meaning you can have more private conversations. There isn’t the feature of video conferencing either, meaning signal strength (for the most part) are stronger. It does drop out occasionally, but again, that’s a poor internet connection rather than the application. To top it off, the audio quality seems BETTER than when talking via actual phone calls!

Moral of the story; Get Viber! It’s free, and it will save you money (and presious contract minutes!).

I’ll start by reiterating; This isn’t a hack. It’s a simple work-around! No coding knowledge is required..

The “Film to Go” app gives users a promotional code which can be redeemed on iTunes (once per week, on a Thursday!) to download a specific film (chosen by Orange).

To get the App, simply download it from the Apple App Store. Next, you’ll need to get an Orange phone number from a friend or family member (Preferably one without an iPhone, so they can’t take advantage of the offer anyway. In my case, my Mom!).

Enter the phone number into the app (More -> Settings -> Mobile Number). A few seconds later your friend/family memeber should receive a four character/digit code. Simply enter that into your app and you’re ready to go.

If you do this on a Thursday you’ll get a promo code right away, and you can go download/watch your film – May I suggest you invite your Orange-phone-number-mate round to watch it with you, you probably owe them one!

It started off with an innocent update; and then it hit me – Formatted phone. No more apps, no more contacts. Oops! It was my fault really, so I don’t want to blame Apple (too much!). But that was that. One late night later and another lucky turn (most contacts were backed up on my Mac) and I was running almost normally again. Apart from the seemingly laggy camera feature. After a while (say a week) the lag on several applications was unbearable.

So, another format! (At least this time everything was backed up to the cloud, which is a great ‘new’ feature, by the way!). This time everything seemed smoother, and so far it’s been fine! I’ll be glad when Apple officially release to the public though; Hop fully it won’t be ANOTHER format?! (Especially with over-the-air updates!).

One gripe; Bluetooth streaming music seems less high-quality.. It could just be me, but the bass seems a little ‘off’? Also, track syncing (which is now a feature with the iPod functionality of the device) isn’t replicated by Spotify’s application. But I guess that’s down to Spotify!

Moral of the story; Back up your phones kids!

Why? Because its a little dull. Sure, Iv’e got other work to be doing, like a 20 page report discussing the real-time happenings of a car’s engine control unit. Or start revising for Business Analysis and Project Management exams at the end of May! But none of this really seems to come close to the challenge, diversity and excitement of developing an iPhone application.

The iPhone application was not easy to produce. Tutorials online helped to an extent, but problems specific to the application’s code meant there were some late nights, Starbucks sessions and bloodshot eyes in the process of problem-solving! Although it was at times stressful working out why pages wouldn’t transition, images wouldn’t appear and random crashes occurred, Objective-C made it an exciting and fun activity. Moreover, the xCode debugger and online community of developers really helped!

Development was much more than just Objective-C coding too! There are always ‘software engineering’ final year projects which focus heavily on producing the cleanest, most efficient code. That wasn’t something I wanted to get into, instead opting for a more rounded project incorporating graphic design, project planning and client awareness (together of cause with a bit of coding!).

Finally, the excitement of producing an application which I could say I’d developed, on one of the most famous software stores (the AppStore) in existence, running on one of the most famous mobile phones (iPhone) of all time; Well, it was just an exciting time! Especially when the finished product was ran on the phone, the dissertation was bound and the demonstration video was completed!

Basically, the whole project felt like a great achievement, as it should! Now I just need my next angle to develop another iPhone application – Watch this space!

“Probably the most important report you’ll ever write”.

That’s what we were told at the start of academic year in September. Fast forward eight months and it’s typed, printed, developed and handed in! Now that sounds flippant, but trust me when I say, it was a complete adventure to get done.

I’m talking of cause about my Final Year Project, details of which can be found over on the ‘Final Year Project’ page. To give you an overview, it’s an application for a smart-phone device (the iPhone, naturally!) aimed at marketing a small organisation based in Nottingham, UK.

The principle was simple: Pull content from the client’s existing website and Social Media sources, add locational information utilizing the mobile device’s built-in GPS features and bundle it all in one place for delivery into the palm of a user’s hand!

More than 240 days, 135 pages, 80 source files, 5 Tabs and 1 iPhone Application!

After iterations of development, implementation and testing, not to mention typing over 130 pages of research, product ideas and project management, the application was finally compiled for the final release!

So, it was quite a large project, as you’d expect from a final year student… Consequently I’m going to write a bunch of blogs over the coming weeks, discussing more precise details ranging from the project methodology to development of particular features. Stay tuned!

Retail stores play a huge part in the overall “Apple experience”. When I went to buy my MacBook Pro (for my Final Year Dissertation) walking into the Apple store in Birmingham (UK) was a really exciting experience. I went early to avoid mid-morning crowds at busy peak times. This was a good strategy, with only a few people being seen around town and a relatively empty car park. Except for the Apple store. Considering the lack of people around, the Apple store was still quite busy, and was by far the most popular store. This gives a good indication to the prestige which many consumers hold for Apple as a company, its products and their services.

Now, It’s probably important to mention here that a lot of computer scientists, software engineers, and basically your average “Tech Guy” don’t like Apple. Why? Because they over-price for products which “Don’t perform” as they should. I’m not one of these “Tech Guys” because I love Apple. I seem to find myself time and time again defending their products, trying to convey that they aren’t targeted at the technical end of the spectrum (like Linux) and are more about beautiful design and providing a good interface between your average consumer and a wealth of features. Ok, so they are expensive, but it’s an Apple product!

So, what makes Apple really stand out from the crowd? For me, it’s not about the functionality, the price, the retail stores or even the products. For me, it’s the way Apple operate. The anticipation of the latest Apple product is exciting, and you know it’ll only be a couple of weeks between announcement to rolling out! Jobs does a great job (excuse the pun) at this, his enthusiasm and natural presentation skills at keynotes really pulling consumes in!

Most importantly though is my favourite line when trying to justify Apple’s greatness; “Apple don’t design new products, they design new categories“. Take MP3 Players. They were (lets be honest) a little crummy before the iPod came along. Fast forward to now and all other MP3 players are pretty much obsolete. Let’s try phones. The iPhone came along in 2007, and completely revolutionised the way which phones are today. Phones boasting touch-screen technology, Apps and other similar features are common place, but still can’t rival the fluidity and popularity of the iPhone. Finally there is the iPad. Don’t get me wrong tablets were already around, but the iPad took it to a whole new level. Competitors didn’t know what to expect and had to go completely back to the drawing boards.

To conclude, Apple are different. Some people love them. Some people don’t. But either way, you have to admire what Apple have done for the industry. Ask someone you know to name the first “hand held device” that comes into their head, and I think they will probably say something like “Oh, like the Apple <insert product here>”

For the design stage, I will create a flow diagram style image of the iPhone during various user interactions. For this, I will require a template to work with. (NOTE: the screen resolution of the old iPhone is 320 x 480 pixels. The iPhone 4 is 960 x 640 pixels. For the creation, I will produce a large image and scale down the for older versions.)

To make the flow diagram look as realistic as possible, I am going to use an iPhone 4 Graphical User Interface (GUI) Photoshop template, which you can download here. This is an awesome file which has almost all the individual pieces you need to create a great looking design! You can even download the high resolution “Retina display” version of the file from here. Beware though, this file is big (20+Mb), and takes a lot of processing power (It’s 4074×2986 in dimension!), so bare than in mind before opening up and editing!

Another great designer tool is ‘MockApp‘, which is put to particularly good use in PowerPoint presentations. This template is less resourceful than the last, and also allows you to interact with the design. For example, a product manager could, when presented with an iPhone image on a projector, click the app icon to open up the splash screen, and then the home page of the app. This gives a realism to the design which the flow diagram misses, and is a real good seller to stakeholders who are 50/50 about the idea of an app. But MockApp doesn’t stop there! Not by a long shot. You can present the PowerPoint slides on the iPhone itself, for added bumph! This is a real gem, and gives a good insight to developers and managers alike as to what the finished app will be like.

So, to conclude, the first resource any iPhone designer should use is a good high quality PSD Template, as mentioned above. Design the overall screens, and make it look fantastic! The other step is to use the lower resolution images from MockApp to design an interactive version, following the flow diagram where possible, to create an overall package which will blow whoever you present it to away!

So, that’s the design stage began. Check back soon in the Final Year Dissertation category for more blogs about my progress!

The problem was a missing base SDK, the file required to debug and run the application. To fix this was relatively simple. Go to Project > Edit project settings > Build > Base SDK and change that value to iPhone Device 4.0. Next, go to the dropdown box in the top left corner in the main window and select ‘simulator’ below device. Also make sure that ‘Debug’ is selected over ‘Release’.

This should allow the project to run in the iPhone simulator, simulating iOS 4.0. Don’t forget however, that if you want full functionality for your app, it’s worth debugging on an older version of the OS too (I’m going back to 3.2 which is what Xcode recommends) in order to make sure it works across all platforms! It’s worth also mentioning that this issue should only occur with projects created before upgrading Xcode, as the new Xcode will point to the new SDK’s by default, where as older projects will still be looking for the old (now non-existant 3.1.3). Now all I have to do is build this killer app!

Either way, Apple have responded by claiming there was a glitch in the original software regarding the signal bars, and that an update to come soon will make the signal bars more accurate and representative of the actual signal strength. To be honest it all seems a little suspect!

But all the blame can’t be put on Apple, as mobile reception can easily be boosted by carriers. For example, back when Chris Moyles was climbing kilimanjaro back in 2008 he reportedly called O2 to moan about his signal to his iPhone. O2 responded by ‘Boosting’ the signal, allowing him to have a flawless conversation with the BBC radio 1 team! Now, obviously O2 and other carriers can’t be expected to do this for every customer, but surely something should be said to the carriers as well as Apple? Scratch that, it seems AT&T are being sued too!