Apple on Much Ado About IT

iTunes Finally Hits the Windows Store - What Does it Mean?

Julian Knight — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 08:11:13 +0000

iTunes on Windows has always been a horrible application. It is highly intrusive, installing many background services. It also has a terrible UX/design. So, now that it is available in the Windows Store, is there a difference? Improvement?

Yes, this will, or at least should, make a difference.

The reason is that Windows Store apps are actually wrapped in a sandbox environment. This means that your actual Windows environment, including your registry, will not be littered with rubbish.

It also means that, not only will iTunes be updated for you automatically by the Store, but if (when!) you decide to uninstall it, it will be totally gone. Unlike the standard installation that leaves behind all sorts of rubbish that slows down your PC.

Here are some articles that describe the Windows Store Sandbox and its implications:

And one more link that is relavent to the Windows Store version of iTunes as this is very likely how it has been built: Desktop Bridge – The bridge between desktop apps and the Universal Windows Platform – App Consult Team

Unfortunately, the expected raft of announcements on the various tech news sites, as so often, miss the whole point of why this is an important release. Most make no mention of the protections, performance and update benefits or if they do, they don’t explain why they are important:

Apple iOS 5 and iCloud, The verdict

Julian Knight — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:12:25 +0000

So I’ve been using iOS 5 on both iPad 1 and iPhone 4 for a couple of days now and I thought I’d follow up on my previous post about what I thought would impact me.

The first thing to note is that it took two days to update the two devices. That’s due to how long it takes to download over a relatively slow link, and how long it takes to re-flash the OS followed by a very long, slow restore of all data – around 30GB on each of my devices.

Likes

I love the ability to fire up the camera without needing to unlock the phone. Though why Apple require a double-click of the home button I’ll never know! Why not just always make it available? Double clicking home also gives access to iPod controls on the same screen again without unlocking which is also useful. It may be just me but the camera seems to start up faster now too. Using the volume button to take a photo really is so much better and results in a lot less camera shake. The notifications system will take a while to tweak to the best settings I think but is vastly better than the previous version. Photo Stream is certainly useful but somewhat confusing as it effectively seems to be a copy of photos from whichever device takes them. See also my dislike below. Not part of iOS itself, but the ability to synchonise iWork files (Pages, Numbers & Keynote) between devices is good though I really hope the extend this capability to the iCloud desktop client as well. Keeping track of expenses, kids pocket money, holiday allowance, etc. is now much easier.

Dislikes

5GB of free iCloud space is useless for backups, don’t even bother. Even worse when you have more than one device on a single account as of course you will as you want to share information between them. Just my iPad filled up 5GB with backup even after turning off the backups for most of the apps. Even worse, if you enable iCloud backups, you don’t get local backups! Like I really want to restore a 32GB device from the internet! Taking photos on the iPhone 4 with the phone in the logical position to use the volume button – e.g. landscape with the buttons top-right – results in the images being upside-down in Windows!! Is no testing done by Apple!! I noticed this is one of the iPhone picture sharing apps too. Photo Stream is not an album! That means that many photo management apps cannot see the pictures, you have to copy them to an album before you can do anything with them unless you are in the native Photos app or another Apple app that recognises the Stream. Ugh! You seem to have to “Save to Saved Photos”, then switch to Albums then to Saved Photos, then click the share button, then select the photos, then click “Add To…”, then click “Add to Existing Album”, then choose the album. Fantastic! 8 clicks and changes of screen just to copy photos out of the Photo Stream to an album – ARGHHHH… Memory management on the iPad one is still poor with far too many apps crashing, even Pages. Is it just me or does the camera seem to take much darker photos sometimes now? I notice that in a number of cases, where I would previously have expected the camera to take a flawless outdoor picture, that I couldn’t get the auto-exposure to get it right and the HDR pictures were coming out quite dark. Again, not directly iOS or iCloud related but the latest version of Pages is still rubbish. Too much stuff just silently disappears without warning – such as fields and inter-document links. Also too much formatting is still lost such as lists within table cells. I’m also getting lots of crashes on the iPad 1.

Indifferent

iCloud contact sharing means that contacts previously only stored locally on my device are now shared between all devices which is better. But why can’t I move contacts to one of my already shared contact stores such as Gmail (uses Exchange sync)? Rubbish. I can’t even export from iCloud.com. Also strange is that I can now create contact groups on iCloud.com but NOT on my local devices!! Why doesn’t iCloud sync everything to my desktop? I can’t understand this unless Apple are going to have some kind of “premium” offering later. iCloud bookmark syncing, while useful to keep devices in sync, doesn’t allow changes from iCloud.com which would be very useful. The update process for iOS 5 was not entirely seemless, on my iPad I ended up with quite a mess with icons scattered all over and not restored to where they were before. OK, I’m bored now so that’ll do. I’ll try and add some more another time.

Hope you find this useful.

Apple iOS 5, What does it change for me?

Julian Knight — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:22:07 +0000

There are some really nice looking changes on the way for Apple mobile users lucky enough to have a device that can be upgraded to iOS 5. I thought I’d throw together a quick look at how this will change things on a practical level for me as I use an iPhone and an iPad for work and personal use. Update: 2011-10-13. I’ve added some more details.

Perhaps the biggest change will come from the inclusion of the new iCloud service free with 5GB+ of space. Apps, books, and music purchased via Apple don’t count towards the 5GB and neither do synchronised pictures which is handy given the size of pictures now. In the future then, apps that are iCloud enabled (Numbers, Pages and Keynote for example) can be set to automatically synchronise between your Apple devices – this is great because I wont have to think about whether my expenses spreadsheet is more up-to-date on the iPhone or the iPad. Annoyingly though, this doesn’t extend to the PC/Mac where you have to copy documents using the web interface to iCloud. Pictures and videos taken on the iPhone will be automatically synchronised to iCloud and then to both the iPad and the laptop. iCloud keeps the latest 1,000 photos for 30 days, a connected PC (or Mac) will keep them permanently. Update: Synchronising Mobile Safari Bookmarks will certainly be useful. Having a single set of bookmarks on both iPhone and iPad without having to sync via Internet Explorer (which picks up loads of irrelevant IE bookmarks) will be very nice and will be a quick way of being able to start looking something up on the iPhone then carrying on at leisure on the iPad. Update: Music, of course, can also be synchronised via iCloud and songs purchased from Apple will not count towards your space allocation. However, this isn’t a lot of use to me as I don’t like to be restricted by ridiculous, costly DRM; nearly all of my music comes from CD’s. The same applies to books; in fact, the economics are even worse generally for books since most sources of eBooks are stupidly expensive given the restrictions on them. The iPhone and iPad will be backed up to iCloud too so I no longer have to worry about traipsing up to the office to back them up using iTunes. There are other iCloud features of course but I won’t be using them as they are too little, too late. Google already provides me with synchronisation of calendars and contacts and allows sharing with non-Apple devices as well. ToodleDo gives me synchronisation of tasks. Dropbox, box.net and Google Docs gives me sharing and synchronisation of documents. Find My Phone is useful of course, I already have that, but Find My Friends wont be as many of them don’t have Apple devices. Update: One exception to the above is that I will be using the Notes synchronisation as using Exchange based mail for synchronisation of Notes is pretty bad. Update: One warning about iCloud. You can backup your iDevices to iCloud but, if like me, you have say 2 32GB devices this could get very expensive. I have a map application for example which can have many GB of data, if I back this up to iCloud, I’ll be paying a lot for the convenience (US$2 per GB per year). So the bottom line is that we are not PC/Mac free just yet. The second warning is that you will need to be careful if you connect to the Internet over 3G not just WiFi; with all of this automatic synchronisation going on, things could get even more expensive when you go over your data limit! (Thankfully, my iPhone at least is on the UK’s Three network with unlimited, uncapped data) In addition to iCloud, Apple claim over 200 other improvements in iOS 5. The ones that will impact me are:

Notification Centre

Notifications are a pain at the moment, the changes in iOS 5 should make them usable again.

Update: Better still, you can change the settings for each app so you can have some apps with no notifications, some with the new banner style and some with the old alert format. You can also control whether the alerts for an app will appear in the lock screen.
Email Improvements

At last! Email gets the capability for some simple formatting. You can also add a flag. Not much but at least a start. Apple’s understanding of heavy email use is still an awful long way from a useful reality.

Update: You can also mark multiple emails as read which can save some time.
Lock Screen Changes

You can now take photos, listen to answer phone messages and see multiple notifications without having to unlock the phone.
WiFi iTunes Sync

Long overdue and maybe a lot less relavent if iCloud backup and sync works well. Of course, 3rd party apps have taken over a lot of cases where iTunes was needed – podcasts for example, currently you have to connect a wire to get podcast updates automatically so I use a 3rd party app that deals with podcasts much better and auto-updates directly. Annoyingly, WiFi sync only happens when you connect to a power source.
Update: Keyboard Improvements

The new split keyboard will be useful on the iPad when using it on the go (typing with thumbs).
Update: Custom Alert Tones

The constant bleeping of iPhones gets painful, you can now make this slightly better by assigning custom tones to many alert types so you are more likely to be able to know what the phone is trying to tell you.
Twitter Integration

This is not terribly significant but will probably encourage me to use Twitter more (not sure that is really a good thing though!).
Camera Improvements

You can now take a picture without unlocking & by using the volume + button, both nice features. You also get a positioning grid and manual focus/exposure hold. Of course 3rd party apps have had all this for ages and much more. Simple photo enhancements are also baked in to the camera app.

Update: You can swipe left/right in the camera app to get straight to the photo albums. You can also finally create new albums.
Safari Improvements

Like the camera app, Safari is playing a bit of catch-up with 3rd party apps. I’ll still be doing serious browsing in iCab though. The internals have also been updated and HTML5 support is now closer to desktop Safari.
Update: Map Improvements

Directions now show alternative routes which can be very useful.
Update: Built-in Dictionary

You can now look up many words in the built-in dictionary. Not sure if there is any control here though and not sure how many languages are covered or how many words.
Update: Keyboard Shortcuts

Hooray! You can define simple keyboard expansions. E.g type “e-” and get your email address. Not a replacement for Text Expander but it is available to every app.

Data Cleansing Tools

Julian Knight — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:51:32 +0000

It is very common to receive information in a format that cannot easily be formatted and processed as you want it to be. For example, you may have an unstructured list of information that you need in a table; or data in a table that you need as XML; or data in a web page (HTML) that you need in Excel. So many information professionals maintain a tool-kit that allows them to manipulate all sorts of information in different formats. Here is a small list of tools aimed at cleansing and structuring data.

Text editors [Free and commercial; All platforms] Often the first port of call for manipulating un- or semi-structured text. Anything beyond simple search/replace and manual editing is likely to use Regular Expressions (see below).
Spreadsheets [Excel – Commercial; Windows, Mac. OpenOffice – Free; Windows, Linux, Mac. Many similar free and commercial software tools] This is often my second tool of choice as they are more structured than plain text but not as restrictive as a full database.
Regular Expressions – Quick Reference. Often incomprehensible but very powerful text transformation “language”. Commonly found in good text editors though it is sometimes easier to use one of the web training tools as long as the text to transform is not too big. Well worth learning as many, complex transformations can be built up using a series of regular expressions and they are available from many tools. Also available in any decent code editor or IDE, Microsoft Office (via VBA code), PHP, JavaScript, Java, Linux command line tools, etc.
Google Refine [Free software; Windows, Linux, Mac] Run locally to manipulate tabular data. Quite powerful but not especially well documented. Part of the Freebase project. Support is provided by the mailing list. Can save and re-run, easily undo steps. Cannot run in batch mode as a transformation engine. Useful when transformations and cleaning in a Spreadsheet don’t cut it.
DataWrangler (Alpha) [Free; Web] From Stanford University, they have a demo version online. Similar to Refine.
TextPipe Pro [Commercial US$ 30-400; Windows] “industrial strength text transformation, conversion, cleansing and extraction workbench” Once you have structured data, there are a number of types of tools that are used to extract, transform and process data – ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), Business Information (BI) and Data Mining. Typically though, these are enterprise class tools and only really worth bothering with when you have large-scale data and need repeatability. Here is a small list of such tools for reference.
XSLT [Free and Commercial, All platforms] This is an XML transformation language. It is used for transforming an XML scheme into another one. Perhaps may be thought of as regular expressions for XML.
SQL [] Structured Query Language is the standard language for manipulating relational databases.
Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 [Free?; Windows] Desktop BI add-in for Excel 2010.
Pentahoe [Free and Commercial]
RapidMiner [Free and Commercial]
Orange [] Visual programming, visualisation, data analysis
Talend Open Studio [Free and Commercial] Aimed at data integration
CloverETL [Free and Commercial]
IBM Data Stage [Commercial]
Ab Inicio [Commercial] It might also be worth looking at the BI Verdict web-page for the latest analysis of the strongest players amongst the BI vendors and products