A quite legitimate criticism of iOS for some time has been the fact that you seem to end up with multiple gigabytes of unexplained “other” disk space usage after using the device for some time. It’s frustrating, especially on smaller devices.

Reinstalling iOS and restoring from your most recent backup would clear the mythical “other”, at least for a while.

It seems that the latest update to iOS, version 10.3, introduces a whole new filesystem technology, APFS. This wasn’t mentioned in the release notes, and is only really detectable by the end user in the form of a much longer upgrade process than would be needed for a typical iOS release.

Since upgrading a few devices, I have noticed a big jump in the available free space on those devices. The pesky “other” is still there, but appears to have shrunk significantly.

Hats of to Apple for fixing what was a criticism going a long way back, and for managing a quite potentially disruptive filesystem migration in such a transparent way for the end user.

May the “other” space usage forever remain small.

Some very raw and unfiltered thoughts on today’s Apple announcement:

I thought after all this time there’d be more content deals for the new Apple TV — the “apps” focus suggests that they are having to concede their former approach entirely and acknowledge that they won’t funnel much TV content through iTMS at all.

Harry Potter photos!

4K video capture on a phone is pretty amazing.

The MLB Apple TV app demo with watching two games at once must have been a Back to the Future II reference for 2015 — “give me channels 5, 9…”. Right? Right?

I’m interested to see (hopefully non-fanboy/girlish) thoughts on how the iPad Pro will compare with the Surface range. It’s interesting to me actually that if MS get the touchy style apps done well (they have to do a better job than with Win8!), the Surfaces also having the flexibility to run classic Windows apps too might make them more competitive in that “pro tablet” area.

I want to go play with 3D Touch when I can! If they’ve done it well, it could be quite cool.

I’m no artist in drawing terms, but the Pencil looked pretty amazing. I was deriding it at first as a silly stylus. I was wrong.

So. Much. Stuff!

I continue to really enjoy the iPhone 5s camera — it may not have a mind-boggling megapixel count, but it seems to do an amazing job with its autofocus and in particular, it seems to capture the light in a balanced way.

This is my iPhone 4. I purchased it more than three years ago.

You don’t get into the technology world without, begrudgingly or otherwise, accepting that things move very fast. What is relevant today may be completely superseded in a matter of months.

A big reason why I have ended up a user of Apple’s iOS ecosystem is that, unlike some of its competitors, there seems to be a genuine focus on the relationship with the customer after you have purchased the device. I can run this old iPhone 4, using the latest operating system that was released this month.

From a security point of view, upon which I can’t resist to comment, the pace of mobile OS development is such that security fixes are not routinely backported to older OSes. You end up with the situation we have today with Android — scores of vulnerable devices out there in the wild.

Aside from some frustrations I do have — the original iPad that was released in the same year as my iPhone 4 is now stuck back on iOS 5 — Apple actually seem to think about device lifespan the least cynically of all the manufacturers. When they were developing the iPhone 4, they clearly thought about how it would run the next three operating systems yet to come.

It can’t be denied that the iPhone 4 isn’t quite as quick and responsive with iOS 7 as it was when it shipped with iOS 4. It doesn’t enable all the fancy features of the new OS. What it is, though, is in line with the performance you would expect from a device that is a little older now. It is definitely acceptable, and probably even good.

This is why I make the purchasing decisions I do. As long as you avoid first generation products(!), you can make an investment in a piece of Apple kit. It is so much more than just a product to shift off the shelf.

Ever since updating my iPhone to iOS 5, I was unable to complete a sync.

It backed up fine (thankfully), it did the majority of the syncing, it just got to the last ‘stage’ of the process and hung there perpetually. I saw messages such as “Waiting for items to copy”, “Waiting for changes to be applied” and so on.

It wasn’t a complete showstopper, since I could sync the majority of content, make sure I was backed up, and then just cancel the sync at the last stage, but it was something that needed a fix.

I had read various threads on Apple Support Communities — it seems that many people are having this issue.

I get the impression that this symptom is caused by various syncing issues and that some solutions have worked for some people, and not for others. Bear this in mind — this solution worked for me, but it might not work in every case. 🙁

I believe I have now solved this problem on my iPhone.

Delete All Copies of Voice Memos

I deleted all of the synced Voice Memos in my iTunes library, then also went into the Voice Memos app on the iPhone and deleted each and every one there. Upon the next sync, the locking up at “Waiting for items to copy” did not happen, and the sync completed successfully.

This suggests that one of the causes for this issue is Voice Memos. If you are experiencing this issue, try backing up and removing all the Voice Memos from iTunes, removing them all from the Voice Memos app on the iPhone itself, then syncing again.

(The iPhone does still sync Genius Data each time it syncs, but this does complete successfully. Perhaps this is normal — I am not really sure!)

The opening of a new Apple Store is always an interesting experience — and one that never fails to inspire enthusiasm unheard of anywhere else in retail! I actually went along three and a half years ago to the opening of the WestQuay store in Southampton, but today, there was the Grand Opening of the new store in Festival Place, Basingstoke.

It is a really convenient store for me — it is just a 20 minute train journey away, so it is now even easier to get to the Apple Store should anything need fixing, or anything new need purchasing. 😉

I have put together a short video of the Grand Opening event, which you should see embedded below.

Definitely nice to go along, share in the experience — and pick up that all-important Festival Place Apple t-shirt to add to the collection. 🙂

I just came across an interesting post on the ESET Threat Blog (ESET being the antivirus vendor who are responsible for NOD32) about smartphone apps and the risk they potentially pose in a world when we install all sorts of applications, including those that deal with important and sensitive information, on the same device.

In particular, General Hayden remarks that ‘In the popular culture, the availability of 10,000 applications for my smart phone is viewed as an unalloyed good. It is not — since each represents a potential vulnerability. But if we want to shift the popular culture, we need a broader flow of information to corporations and individuals to educate them on the threat. To do that we need to recalibrate what is truly secret.’

Yes, each app that you install on your smartphone is a potential vulnerability. It is precisely for that reason you should be making decisions about what you installed based upon rational thought processes. There are some things that the reward is not great enough to warrant the amount of risk taken. For example, you might choose not to drive 120 MPH (193 KPH) because the cost of potentially getting isn’t worth the benefit of arriving sooner, or perhaps even the benefit of the fun of driving so fast. If you do choose to drive that fast where it is not permitted, and you do get caught, you may discover that the consequences are so extreme you wish you hadn’t have taken the chance.

When it comes to installing software on your smartphone, take a good look at what you may be risking. Do you do online banking or shopping with your smartphone? Do you have business contacts? Contact for friends? How about access to an email account with private emails? All of the information may be compromised if the wrong app is installed. After you identify what assets you have and their value, then consider the app you are installing. What is the benefit it poses to you? Is it worth potentially risking your information for a funny picture or a game you might play a couple of times a year and can probably play online, rather than installing it on your smartphone?

It’s an interesting read — and should remind everyone using an app-capable mobile device that it is a powerful computer, and with that comes a certain degree of risk. While the major smartphone software platforms have a higher level of technical separation between apps running on the same device than you typically get with a desktop PC, we should still be thinking about what apps are sharing ‘the floor’ with others, especially those which deal with more sensitive information, like mobile banking.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 for iPhone (UK iTunes App Store link). Yep, that’s right — the original game from 1991 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

It’s a fun game, albeit one which I’m not really very good at, having only made it to Spring Yard Zone so far (even with the assistance of the Level Select ‘feature’).

One thing that struck me about this game, though, is the technical limitations of the original hardware this game was designed for. When you have a 7.61 MHz 68K processor, a total of 512 colours (only 64 of which can be on the same screen at the same time) and sound that has to be generated through a rather primitive Programmable Sound Generator chip, you have a lot of things to work around and a lot of restrictions to work within to create a fun, entertaining video game.

Despite all these technical limitations — in fact, even because of them, you end up with an artform that becomes uniquely beautiful, because it is so technically constrained. The fact that all the sound has to be generated by this one chip, all the colours used have to be painstakingly thought out ahead of time so that the palettes will work out and you have the colours you need, the fact that the whole game has to fit inside a few megabytes — it enforces simplicity.

It’s something that’s easy to forget about when we can carry around extraordinary processing power in our pockets and the computers we use at our desks have such technical capability.

Video game programming twenty years ago demanded a different mindset — efficiency, simplicity and a degree of pragmatism about making things fit around the limitations. This game for me sums up where the binary, definite nature of digital technology, with all of its 1990s limitations, can meet with the full expression of human creativity.

The upgrade from a first-generation iPod touch to an iPhone 4 is a significant one, in many ways. 🙂

If you haven’t seen the iPhone Retina Display, it genuinely is as good as the marketing suggests. No matter how close I hold the device to my eyes, I can’t make out individual pixels; the rendering of text is the best I have seen on any pixel display.

Other than the excellent additional hardware features of the iPhone, like the camera, GPS capabilities and of course, having internet access wherever I am, the other biggest upgrade is the sheer speed of the device compared to the first-gen hardware. The responsiveness of the UI on the iPhone 4 is as good as, if not better than, that of the iPad. Everything about the interface is fluid, responding immediately and directly to what you do. All the apps feel so much faster and it makes using the device a lot more natural when you aren’t waiting, even for a quarter of a second, for the next screen to load.

I’m very pleased with this as an upgrade to my mobile computing. 😀

Jony Ive on the iPad:

I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me… There’s no right or wrong way of holding it…

Steve Jobs, on the iPhone 4, following some complaints about the signal strength dropping when people hold the sides of the device:

Just avoiding holding it in that way…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really interested in the iPhone 4 and I think it looks like a great device.

I just couldn’t help noticing the irony in the disparity between those two statements.