ALLGBMINI – Page 99 – M&I / GBMINI

iPhone OS 4

Posted on June 10, 2010February 16, 2017 by Ian C.

iPhone users have been waiting a long time, and now – with a bit of effort – I have iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS (though honestly I’d much prefer to have it on my iPad!)
Initially, everything is rather too busy – because the install ported my lock screen picture to my “home” background, too; I went in and changed the background to something less busy; a quieter background makes the App icons a bit easier to spot, but there should be a way to reduce brightness/contrast as well as scale/position the photo:

I set up a couple of folders – doing it in iTunes 9.2 beta is a serious pain as the interface is much too ready to create a folder when you drag an App, rather than inserting it between other Apps – on the iPhone itself though, this works quite well. Hopefully they will fix iTunes before it is fully released.
To be honest, folders are a bit of a let-down; they should have existed so long ago and now that they are finally available, there’s no “wow” moment, at least not for me anyway:

And of course, background Apps don’t work – presumably because they have to be rewritten / updated; if I “background” Pandora, it stops playing just like it always did:

Hopefully Pandora and a few other “critical” backgrounding Apps will be available when iOS 4 is officially launched, otherwise there will be lots of disappointed iPhone 4 users …

(if you’re interested, I started from this site and then did quite a bit of Googling!)

Safari reader view

Posted on June 8, 2010February 16, 2017 by Ian C.

Today’s update of Apple’s Safari browser brings a new “reader” view, which seems to be available only sometimes, but with no website effort … I tried it on GBMINI; it wasn’t offered on the main page, or on the most recent post, but Safari did offer “reader view” on my last MINI Takes The States post. Here is the normal view, and the Safari reader version:

There’s nothing special that I’ve done to that post, it’s a bit of a mystery how Safari chooses whether or not to offer the reader view. Which do you prefer?

MINIsOnTop 2010 Packing day

Posted on June 6, 2010February 16, 2017 by Ian C.

A little strange after the last few years – but for MINIsOnTop 2010 I’m just helping out the organizers Richard and Sarah; and today headed in to Boston to assist with packing day. Once again, around 230 MINIs and close to 500 people will be attending, so it’s a few hours of work putting together 230+ mailing packages containing the needed MOT booklet and other paperwork, meal and auto road tickets, Tshirts, antenna balls, cling decals, etc, etc.
Of course, I took a few pictures too 🙂

Tasks divided, with different people focusing on different parts of the job, makes for fastest packing – Lynn did auto road and food tickets, Richard sorted name tags and checked envelopes, Sarah checked / applied address labels, while Michael and Josh selected Tshirts (I drove the front end, with the easy task of putting “same for everyone” stuff in each envelope!); and to ensure the least chance of folks getting the wrong stuff, we had Quality Control check each envelope – Brian, Kevin and Shannon!