One aspect of my life I’m working on improving this year is removing a lot of clutter that has built up in my life. I look around my bedroom and ask myself: “Why?”. Why did I choose to buy that, put it there and at the end of the day, does it really need to be there at all?

By asking myself these questions I’m able to give a yes or no answer and chuck it if necessary or keep it if it’s something that I use every day and has worth.

Here’s one example, my desk. It used to have resting on it: my MacBook Pro, a Griffin Elevator, wireless keyboard and mouse, various cables, books and notepads and of course, a stack of post-it notes. I’m not going to go through every item and tell you in detail the decision I came to when I asked myself these questions, but as an example. “Don’t I have an application that works just as well as post-it notes?”.

You might be asking, why sorting through clutter and minimising the items you own and use matters. I think the answer lies in the word focus. To me focussing is exemplified by being able to get on with a job without getting caught up in unnecessary distractions (I don’t even want to think how many times I checked Twitter when writing this post) and getting on with what really matters, the task at hand.

By removing those items that we don’t really need in our lives, we’re in fact reducing the amount of trivial decisions we have to make and instead of working out the best way of doing a task, we’re able to simply get on with it.

This year, I’d like to be able to be in a position where many of my day to day items can fit in a backpack, and not feel the need to overpack for every eventuality, because there are less of them, but just have what is needed to get the job done. I would suggest that it’s a good idea to ask yourselves these questions if you want to remove the clutter in your life so you can get on to the task at hand, after all; the less things you have, the less things you have to worry about.

Though it appears that the world is entering the age of the web app, I personally have an aversion to them in general. Why? I’m not really that sure to be honest. Maybe I don’t like relying on on something that could go away tomorrow, taking my data along with it. Or perhaps I prefer the ’solidness’ that (most of the time) defines one’s experience when using a Mac.

I’m inclined to think that it’s the later. I like the idea of opening an app to do task X, the concept of opening Safari, navigation to website Y to do task X doesn’t resinate with me.

I’m very much aware of the distinct advantages of of a cloud based application but right now, owning both a notebook and iPhone I’m very happy sticking, for the most part (because there are a couple of exceptions), with desktop applications.

On the 27 August 2009 I will receive my GCSE examination results. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous – I am. It’s been an uphill struggle for the last two years, learning not only all the material for the ten or so subjects I was taking, but also practicing the examination technique. On top of that, several subjects have required coursework (not something I enjoy or am particularly good at. Unlike some people) which has varied between dissecting Romeo and Juliet and studying the CBD of Gloucester.

My overwhelming fear is that after so much effort, some of the subjects that I struggled with (I’m looking at you Maths and French) won’t receive the results that I feel I deserve. The whole idea of an exam is strange really, how is a two hours really meant to gleam what you learnt from two years of work – I wish there was a better way.

It’s a very strange feeling, looking back at a single exam. It seems that the inevitable question that I didn’t understand, or in reflection know I got wrong, shines through. Rather than all those areas that I feel I nailed.

I wait with eager anticipation for August 27. For better or for worst. I’ll know where I stand.

One of the truly great things about the App Store is that one can go through the entire catalogue of applications and know, when they download an app that it will run on their iPhone, whatever the model. This is a breakthrough in mobile applications that no one seems to have picked up on. No worrying about getting the same application to work on varying pieces of hardware. You can install an app on your iPhone and know that it will operate perfectly as there have been no other models to ‘distract’ the development of the application.

However, with the release of the iPhone 3GS, I think that Apple are making the first steps to diverging the iPhone line, in terms of different hardware functionality. And this will be a problem in the future.

Right now, we’ve got two models of iPhone on sale. The 3G and the 3GS. Both these phones, on the whole are very similar, with the 3GS only having a handful of features, such as video capabilities, voice control, a magnetometer and a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus differentiating it from the previous model.

This leaves very few extra requirements that an iPhone application may have for added functionality or a certain feature to operate at its best. And yes, a lot of the time, we’re only seeing quality improvements. For instance, a barcode reader, to be effective might require the autofocus lens of the 3GS. As with the 3G, the application would struggle to get an accurate image of the barcode. But the app would still be able to function, it’s just that a lot more care would have to be taken in scanning the iPhone. Be it, making sure the lighting conditions are okay and keeping a steady hand.

Now imagine the iPhone landscape a few years down the line. A couple regular iPhones? Plus an iPhone Nano with a smaller screen? This leaves Apple with a very large problem. With there being different capabilities and physical limitations on the iPhone product line – we’re going to see several versions of a single application; first changed depending on physical capabilities, and secondly, games may be changed depending on the speed of the hardware that they run on.

The irony of this of course, is that at WWDC 09 Phil Schiller called out Nokia for this exact issue:

Not all the apps run on all the phones. It’s really complicated so we took a lot of the phones and added them together to make a bigger number [to give a number of apps on the store].

In this scenario, we’d be stuck with possibly hundreds of thousands of apps on the store, some that can run on your specific iPhone model, but other versions that may not. My feelings are that, for Apple to solve this problem they’re going to have to take a tough stance.

Imagine, you bring your shiny new iPhone home after picking it up from the store. Once you’ve plugged it in, the iTunes Store would detect which model you were using and only display the relevant apps that operate on the model you own. So when you go searching for that game that requires a certain CPU speed to run, you won’t purchase the version that doesn’t operate well on your iPhone. In fact, you won’t even know the other version of the app exists. In turn making the browsing experience of the App Store (which right now is pretty poor) a lot more tolerable.

I favour this idea because it hits two birds with one stone; it simply cuts down on the amount of apps in the store and allows you to not have to worry about getting the optimum experience from applications from your iPhone. Not being a developer however, I’m unsure how they’d react to such a system. I’d envision a series of boxes for the developer to tick, suggesting which iPhone models the app will run on.

The other option, of course, is to go to the simple, and effective method of stating ’system requirements’ in the app info section on the store, requiring the purchaser to check if the application is compatible with their model of iPhone. I just feel that the afore mentioned solution is a more elegant way of handling this inherent issue with the current way the App Store functions.

PS: My bud, Chris Gilbert, has written a piece on this very same topic, it’s worth a read.

One of my goals for 2009 was to become more proficient at web design on the whole. And I have made strides in the last few months, but I’m not in a position yet to be happy with my work. A few of you may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks, the design of the site did change.

In that case, it was my own design. However, I wasn’t satisfied with final version, so I pulled it. I learnt a lot about the design process and have taken a lot away from it. But the end result just wasn’t good enough. It was a mistake to put it up there, it didn’t make me feel proud of my content and nor did it really inspire me to create something new.

So for now, I’m going to be using a WordPress theme that I purchased off Theme Forest – a great resouce for various website templates. Derek Herman has created a beautiful theme that makes great use of large text. You may find it a little overwhelming and first. But trust me, you’ll soon warm up to it.

One thing to bear in mind, is that I’ve decided to step back from link list entries for now. I’d really like this place to be somewhere where people come to read articles rather than links specifically. And due to this, posts that were originally asides before the new design, will look just like regular posts.

Any anyways, it seems all the cool kids are using Tumblr, so maybe I’ll jump on the bandwagon at some point.

Furthermore, there are still comments. Although, I think it’s great that if you have something to say in response to something I’ve written, it’s most of the time a great idea to publish your thoughts on your own terms. I understand that the convenience of a comment is what a lot of people are looking for.

So, if you’re reading with an RSS reader, come on round, and take a look. I’ve rewritten my very uninteresting Colophon and just tidied up a few elements of the site. If you see a bug or two, please drop me a line.

PageMorph, a new form of ‘homepage takeover’ ads:

Thoroughly immersing audiences in an ad experience, the PageMorph takeover format is just what marketers and publishers are looking for, according to Erin Quist, vice president of enterprise solutions at EyeWonder.

This paragraph sums up everything that is bad about the entire concept. Really, it should be what the readers are looking for – more relevant advertising.

Glenn Wolsey offered some interesting thoughts on the direction that Apple seems to be taking the MacBooks:

The direction we’re heading in makes it quite clear that the merging of the MacBook and the Air lines would make sense, and is certainly possible. The Air becoming the MacBook whilst the Pro line remains as is in three excellent size choices.

I find it very hard to imagine the MacBook Air becoming just ‘MacBook’. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The MacBook is a consumer notebook, and the Air isn’t. Imagine the uproar if a consumer marketed notebook lacked a superdrive and for most, the lack of USB ports is an immediate turn off.

The only folks who would buy the new MacBooks, in this scenario, are those who would have bought the Air in the first place. Apple just wouldn’t get anywhere with their product line.

Instead, I see Apple filling the void left by the MacBook with the much rumored tablet or perhaps even a netbook aimed primarily at the consumer market that the original MacBooks left. Relatively cheap and portable – but at the same time offering a great everyday computing experience. Be it browsing the web or checking email.

The Air, would be left in its current position. With no price change. I don’t think Apple would, even if they could, lower the MacBook Air prices any further. Though the Air is cheaper, it’s still a premium product, and Apple want to keep it that way.

This morning I checked out my RSS feed subscriber count to see that it had increased dramatically. So I delved a little deeper and found that I had gained fifty-one new subscribers from ‘friendfeedagg’. Very odd, considering during my entire usage of using FeedBurner, that aggregator or feed reader had never been used.

After doing a quick Twitter search I found that I was not the only case. Many other people were reporting similar increases in subscribers.

What is ‘friendfeedagg’? It turns out that yesterday, FriendFeed, enabled a new feature that adds your blog’s FriendFeed subscribers to your FeedBurner stats, as explained here:

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you’ve added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog’s feed.

Here is the issue. Are your FriendFeed subscribers really ’subscribed’ to your weblog? They might not have actually taken interest in your weblog, but instead want to read your comments or see your Flickr images. I’d, personally, be more interested in the subscribers who have gone out and directly subscribed to my weblog, for its content. Not as a side effect of wanting to see another one of my ‘content streams’.

So, the real question is, are subscriber numbers now inaccurate? Will we get to the stage when people ask for our subscriber count, that we automatically subtract the, perhaps disinterested, readers from FriendFeed.

What I’d be interested in seeing is an opt-in for the FeedBurner subscribers. Perhaps a preference that enables me to ignore the subscriber numbers. The problem remains however, for those who may decide to opt-in to glorify their subscriber numbers.

Can we trust that FeedBurner’s stats are accurate? Because, let’s face it, they haven’t been in the past.

I’m not an audiophile, far from it. I’m not sure if I could tell the difference between a £100 pair of headphones and a £200 pair. And just to put things in perspective for you: up until recently I used the headphones that shipped with the iPhone. And on top of that, I didn’t think they actually sounded all that bad.

That was the main reason for why I never upgraded to some Dr Dre Beats or fancy Sennheisers. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But eventually, I ran my original iPhone headphones into the ground. First, the remote on the chord stopped working, then only the left headphone was operational and surprisingly, I managed to put up with it for quite a while without too many issues. But the nail in the coffin was when my trip to Italy in the Easter for a week was coming up. There was no way, that I was sitting on a plane and bus for hours and only having one operational headphone.

It was time for action. I didn’t have a big budget, but I wanted an upgrade from the bog standard headphones, primarily in noise isolation (Read: sitting on a noisy plane with even noisier people is not my idea of fun) and better build quality. I treat my headphones very roughly. I fall asleep listening to them and often use them to their limits.

In the end, after reading a lot of folks’ opinions on various headphones I settled on the Apple In-Ear Headphones. Over the course of this review, I’ll discuss various elements of the headphones and where they fail and succeed. But first, a little context:

For years, Apple have been trying to create a good set of headphones for use on iPods and they haven’t done very well at it. After all, the current shipping headphones you get with an iPod or iPhone aren’t particularly stellar and Apple’s previous attempts at creating a slightly more impressive set of headphones were mediocre.

So, as far as most people were concerned, Apple had to get this right, very right or they might have turned into another dinosaur product like the iPod Hi-Fi.

Packaging

Apple is very good with packaging. They manage to make a product look great, even before you’ve opened the box. And it’s obvious that they’ve made an impact on the industry. Because everyone is following suit. Look at the Pre for instance, very iPhone-esque.

In the case of the in-ear headphones, Apple has kept up the top notch design for their packaging, at least when you get into it. Unfortunately, because the product is sold on shelves rather than locked away behind the counter, it’s been made with some super strong plastic packaging to envelope the box to stop thieves (I presume).

It took me a long, long time to get into the things, heavy duty scissors and a lot of brute force.

However once I was in, it was easy to admire the simplicity and usefulness of the package’s design. The headphone are stored in what Apple have called a ‘travel case’. Which really isn’t one; instead it’s an object to wrap the headphone around with a cover. There is also a capsule that contains the varying sizes of earbuds which is very well designed offering easy storage and access.

Design

The earbuds are made from a combination of plastic, metal and rubber based cabling which as a combination give it a real space age look and feel. The headphone cords are made of the same – rubber like – material as the iPhone’s which are designed to stop tangling. In my experience though, this has not been the case.

If I put the headphones in my jeans’ pocket for a while, I find that when it become time to pull them out, they’re already tangled and take a good couple of minutes to untangle. Yes. It does take me that long. The cause? surprisingly enough, the new material, though designed to stop tangles in the first place, they don’t make it easy when the cables inevitably do become tangled. The wires stick together and cause a lot of friction when being pulled along another wire.

Replacing the actual earbuds themselves are very easy, which does have it’s disadvantages (I’ll go into that later on). All one has to do to replace the earbuds is pull them off and slide on a new pair. I’ve never changed them, so I don’t understand why they don’t create a mechanism that requires a little more thought by the user but alleviates them popping off every time some force is applied to the cables.

Remote & Mic

The in-ear headphones ship with a remote and mic attached to the right earbud cabling. The remote as well as enabling music to be paused, played, rewinded and fast forwarded also acts as a handsfree mic. There are also volume controls, which I have a problem with.

Officially, these headphones are not, for some strange reason, supported officially by the iPhone. All of the features of the remote work perfectly, apart from the volume controls. Why? They work perfectly with the iPod Touch, don’t they?

One final nitpick I have about the remote and mic is the placement of it. It’s uncomfortably high up on the cable. This means that one has to raise their arm up to their face when they want to change song. I understand that it was put there to achieve better sound quality, but I would sacrifice that to have it placed lower down in a more convenient location. I use the device far more often as a remote than a microphone.

Apart from those two nagging issues, I’ve found the microphone to be of a very high quality and easily audible. The design and layout of the remote is perfect and easy to use without looking at. Moreover, the clicking conventions (i.e one click to play/pause) are seamless and easy to get the hang of.

Sound

I’d like to reiterate quickly, that I’m by no means an audiophile, so if necessary, take the following few paragraphs with a grain of salt. The best thing you can do is go down to a store and see if you can test them.

From my experiences, the headphones on the whole sounded great when listening to music, podcasts and the odd audiobook. There was a good range of sound and as long as the volume was kept at a reasonable level I heard no distortion created by the headphones. However, there was very little bass from the headphones. It seems that even with two audio drivers – a tweeter and a woofer – there was just not enough base on music.

Though the headphones don’t seem to employ any specific noise isolation technology, the tight seal they create around the ear managed the stop a large amount of sound from the outside world effecting you. That said, for the money, I think the sound quality on the whole is fair. Just watch out if you want to listen to some more bassy songs.

Comfort

It doesn’t matter how good headphone sound, if you can’t keep them in your ears and they feel uncomfortable, your listening experience is going to be hampered. Interestingly, Apple have designed the in-ear headphones to work for both within the ear, but also just resting on the ear – in a similar fashion to the standard iPod headphones.

My initial instinct, at first, was to use them as if they were normal iPhone headphones and that felt fine. But I soon realized that for the best comfort and listening experience, digging them into my ears was the best option. The earbuds fit snuggly into both ears fine with the medium earbuds, but as I mentioned earlier, they do ship with a smaller and larger size for varying ears.

One issue, that I alluded to earlier, is however, the problem that if I accidently tug on the cords hard enough, the actual headphones will come out, but the earbuds will stay in your ears.

Very, very frustrating and on the odd occasion – embarrassing when you don’t realize that the earbuds are still in your ears. Yeah, it happened.

I have come very close, on several occasions to loosing the earbuds – they’re tiny – and very hard to find when dropped.

Durability

I’m not going to lie. The build quality sucks. It only took a couple of weeks before the grey rubber that protected the connection between the headphone and the wire became loose – on both sides. Now, it just slides around on the wire having revealed an ugly, black piece of plastic.

Furthermore, I made the mistake of leaving the earbuds out in the open and not stored away for a while. When I returned I found that both of the earbuds had picked up an incredible amount of fluff and dust. However, it was easy to clean it off as the earbuds come off so easily (both accidently and on purpose).

I have yet to have any audio failures apart from the odd occasion when the remote suddenly stops working for a while and then starts working later on in the day.

Price

I originally purchased them after Ryan Block posted positive thoughts on the headphones saying:

I think Apple’s got something good on their hands here. These headphones sound out of their league for headphones under $100, especially considering most dual-driver headphones start at a couple hundred dollars and go up from there.

For all the small, and sometimes frustrating problems I’ve had with the Apple In-Ear Headphones, at the end of the day. They sound good, are comfortable and are available for a fair price. What more can one ask for?

When Apple first released some details of the 3.0 update I was slightly disappointed. Why? Because I felt that Apple had missed a key element of the iPhone experience out of the updates. The iPod. As slick as the iPhone’s media interface is, along with the overall user experience; I feel that there are certain elements that can be improved and features added to streamline the way people listen to their music and watch their videos.

I make a lot of playlists and I would probably make a lot more if Apple could shoe-horn some decent playlist creation and editing into the iPhone. I’m not talking about those rubbish “On The Go Playlists” here. I want to be able to make smart playlists and give them proper names. Also, who’s idea was it, when creating a smart playlist not to allow one to scroll by alphabet? Do you really expect me to navigate through five gigabytes worth of music?

One interesting concept I had the other day was ‘Wireless Podcast Progress’ or WPP to be fancy. In which every time you listened to some portion of a podcast, the progress (i.e the exact time) that you made would be sent up into the cloud, and then directly synced with your iPhone and vis-versa.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started listening to a podcast on my Mac. Then had to pop out and wasted two minutes trying to navigate to the point that I am up to while I’m away. In fact, this would work with audiobooks very well also.

Both of these ideas head towards making the iPhone as independent and capable when you simply don’t have your computer on you. After all, that is why I bought an iPhone.