MTTS 2010 roads

Posted on by Ian C.

I’ve been trying to review MINI Takes The States 2010 to see where they plan to send our MINIs, and whether I want to “go with the flow” or just join the group sometimes … for example, I might prefer two nights in Las Vegas, by skipping Phoenix!
Trouble is, MINI really haven’t published anything yet! They’ve named hotels, and said there will be Rise & Shine rallies – but no route details and nothing about other possible events at the intermediate hotels … so time to figure things out for myself!

Looking at the route around Winter Park, CO, i see this:


And way back in 2003, Margaret and I found Nebo Loop Scenic Byway south of Salt Lake City, UT – I said at the time it was a MINI road, so we should definitely try to drive it!

Nebo Loop, Utah

 

I wonder how many more interesting places there are …

iPhone OS 4

Posted on 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 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?