After taking some personal time the last couple of months, I am once again recharged and will be posting some more tablet goodies in the very near future — including information on the Microsoft Metro interface, among other findings made these recent weeks.
Stay tuned and thanks again for reading.
Posted in iPad
I encountered the following erratic looping behaviour viewing Google+ in “desktop view” with Safari on a wifi-only iPad 2 running iOS 5.1. The only other application running was Settings. A screenshot with the iOS version settings can be viewed here.
Although the looping can be halted using the previous page button, I am curious if anyone else has ran into this odd behaviour using Google+ (or any other page) on their iPads fully updated to iOS 5.1 whilst using Safari.
Posted in iPad | Tags: Google, Google Plus, ios 5.1, iPad, iPad tips, page looping, Safari
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| Maps application. | Tap location arrow. | Settings. | ||||
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| Configure Location Services. | Find my iPad configuration. | Enable Find my iPad. | ||||
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| Tap System Services. | “Privacy” switches. | App-specific location settings. | ||||
We live in a time when an ever increasing number of corporations, marketers, despotic governments, and fraudsters are prying in the personal business and affairs of tablet, mobile, and desktop computer users. Not only is this blatant abuse of powers quite despicable, the scum (esp. the corporate variety) that practice this abuse of power actually feel entitled to your personal data, much like a spoiled rich child demanding a designer handbag.
Logically, it would behoove (I have been looking for an excuse to use this word.) one to use any means at ones disposal to make the job as difficult as possible for the scumbags that practice the digital equivalent of opening sealed envelopes. To complicate matters further, some applications that run on your iPad or iPhone need access to a smidgen of your personal info for legitimate uses.
Location Services on the iPad and iPhone is an example of a situation where the user would prefer to share information with a specific app or small handful of apps, and in turn deny the privilege to others. As demonstration, and a practical example for use in the real world, I chose the Maps application on the iPhone and iPad in the screenshots above to illustrate how to singularly permit Maps access to your personal whereabouts and deny it to all other applications.
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| Select language. | Select country. | Disable location services. | ||||
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| Tap OK to confirm. | Select Wi-Fi network. | Enter Wi-Fi password. | ||||
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| Wait for activation. | Tap Setup as New iPad. | Sign in options. | ||||
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| Sign in with Apple ID. | Tap Don’t use iCloud. | Tap Don’t use Dictation. | ||||
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| Tap Don’t Send diagnostics. | Toggle Register with Apple on. | Start using iPad! |
If you do not purchase your iPad at the Apple Store, or opt to setup the device yourself, there are some decisions that must be made shortly after turning your new iPad on the first time.
Fundamental to your decision making process is the amount or type of data about your person that you feel comfortable sharing with Apple, third party application companies, and marketers.
If you are reticent in the slightest about sharing personal data with faceless third parties, use the screenshots above as your visual guide in locking down your new iPad. Keep in mind that keeping your personal data private is becoming more and more of a battle that must be fought as time marches on. A perfect example of this concept is the contentious subject known as Location Services. I know of no valid reason that office applications, games, utilities, eBook readers, et al. need to know my physical location in order to work properly. The only types of applications that have a “need to know” are proper mapping or direction finding apps.
In my opinion, any excuse or reason offered by an application to log location data is for the most part a poor, thinly veiled excuse to build a profile of your usage data and in turn sell or share this information to marketers, spammers, or worst of all – large corporations. The next topic on glasskeys.com will show how to enable Location Services to make it available only for the Maps application on the iPad or the app(s) of your choosing (please choose wisely).
I opted to skip iCloud signup as I don’t consider it a cost-effective solution, especially for backups as the free iCloud account is a scant 5GB and only works with iOS, the Mac and PC, skipping Android devices entirely. If you want similar free cloud storage that works with virtually every device use Dropbox instead. Read this article on how to use Dropbox with all of your devices, or check out this list of all of the Dropbox topics available on glasskeys.com.
Additional providers of free storage include my favourite – the very secure SpiderOak. I was so impressed with SpiderOak, I opted to upgrade to the paid version of this service for secure backup of my home desktop machines. Box, a cloud storage provider used by many in the corporate world, gives away 5GB (and occassionally offers 50GB) of free storage to new users. More storage is available with SugarSync, Wuala, or create your own cloud storage service using Tonido.
So in light of this cornucopia of free or low-cost storage options, paying a subscription for additional iCloud storage seems rather pointless and silly.
Disclaimer: I am not associated or employed by any company producing software reviewed on this site.
Finally the New iPad is available for purchase, with yours truly receiving his via trundling delivery van earlier this morning. With the rush of a new retina display dissipating, I pulled out my trusty iPhone and began snapping some obligatory unboxing photos that are expected of every new iPad or tablet review.
Because I believe that “unboxing” photos are becoming a bit cliché, I decided to justify my snap-happy fun and compare the new iPad with older models by way of a few side-by-side shots. These side-by-side pictures help show the “evolution of the iPad” from first to latest iteration.
On a related note, the photo of the iPads turned face-down best illustrates the differences in thickness between the three generations of the device.
 PicsArt - Photo Studio |
PicsArt – Photo Studio provides a hefty set of easy to use image tools for image and photo editing, |
PicsArt main menu.
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Photo Editor Ultimate Free takes minimalistic design to a whole new level. |
 Photo Editor Ultimate Free |
The “Welcome message” and first of many messages you will see whilst using Photo Editor Ultimate Free.
I recently decided to review nine different Android image editing applications to decide which ones are best suited to use on my Asus Transformer TF101, currently running Honeycomb version 3.2.1. All of the apps in this review were running on this tablet with the same memory and OS configuration.
I can say with certainty that not all apps still run with this configuration – some have been gratefully uninstalled from my tablet and hopefully from my neocortex and hippocampus in the near future.
The “Gang of Nine”:
Posted in Android Tablet Applications, Android Tablets | Tags: Android, apps, Befunky, image editor, Little Photo, Photo Editor, PicSay - Photo Editor, Review
Windows 8
Posted in Announcement | Tags: Announcement, developers, Metro, tablets, Windows 8, Windows 8 Consumer Preview
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| Safari app. | Select Desktop View. | Close-up of view settings. | ||||
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| Tap gear icon, then select Labs. | Setting menu close-up. | Enable Default Text Styling lab. | ||||
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| Select text, then choose colour. | Red background colour. | Yahoo! mail view. | ||||
Recently, a reader named Amir asked a good question pertaining to email text formatting on the iPad: “How [could one] change the font size and forecolor when writing new emails in iPad?”
I had a ready response for the font size portion of his question, the changing the colour of email text portion of his question was another matter altogether.
And so I began an investigation, quickly determining that the built-in mail app bundled with the iPad doesn’t support colour text and so this led me investigate alternatives starting with Gmail.
The Gmail support page titled Formatting, fonts, and colors provides the answer assuming that Gmail is used as one would use it on a desktop machine with a web-browser such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE. The support page provides a brief explanation of text formatting features available if the Google Labs feature in Gmail called Default Text Styling is enabled.
This of course wouldn’t do much good on an iPad…unless the view mode could be switched from the mobile view that Gmail normally uses by default on the iPad to a desktop view mode. A technique suggested by Glasskeys reader Ilan in the How to create or delete GMail folders on the iPad & iPhone post provides an easy way to do this. His comment briefly explained how one can switch the default view mode in Gmail on the iPad by scrolling to the bottom of the left pane and tapping the “View Gmail in Desktop” link.
Consulting the screenshots above can give you a step-by-step of the entire procedure: Turning on Gmail desktop mode, enabling the Lab option, composing an email with text colour formatting changes, and finally how the email appears whilst reading with another email account such as Yahoo!
Posted in iPad, iPad Tips | Tags: email, gmail, iPad, iPad tips, text color, text colour
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