The Pushover Simple Notification Service

I’m a huge fan of the Pushover Simple Notification Service for receiving critical alerts about the servers for which I am responsible. It’s beautifully simple — in short, it takes the ‘walled garden’ of Google or Apple’s push notification system and extends it, so that you can push any text notification you want through their API, and it’ll get to your phone.

In this post, I will share how I get critical alerts from a Microsoft System Center Operations Manager instance to Pushover.

» Read the rest of this post…

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.

I finally had time to walk into an O2 store today and have a brief play with the iPhone.

And I’m pretty impressed. On a sidenote – I’ve decided to go for an iPod Touch, which is actually scheduled to arrive tomorrow, but since it’s a part Christmas present, it won’t be getting any usage for 42 days from today.

I was a little concerned about the iPhone keyboard, but even in about 10 minutes, I picked up how to use it and became pretty good and considerably quick for a small keyboard. Which is a good sign, as I’ll be getting used to it more on the Touch.

The applications all worked really well – the multi-touch interface is very well done and it feels very intuitive to just pick up and use. I mean, I would say that, as I tend to pick things up quickly anyway, but it did seem genuinely intuitive.

My only complaints from what I’ve seen about the device itself are the fingermarks on the screen (the demo iPhones there had seen a lot of fingers) and Safari occasionally rendering a little slowly on some pages. I can confirm, however, that my site looks just as it does in Safari on OS X on the iPhone. 🙂

Of course, my major complaint is the contract lock-in, which is why I’m getting the Touch and not the iPhone itself. It’s a shame, as Mail, SMS, Google Maps and the Phone functionality on the iPhone do look very nice.

Quick tip if you do walk into O2 or the Apple Store and play around – if you do log in to anything in Safari. and then just idly tap the Home button thinking you quit Safari, beware. Anyone who goes back on Safari will arrive at the page you were last – logged in and all. I’d recommend you log out explicitly from whatever sites you visit, close all pages with the bottom right icon in Safari and then clear History, Cache and Cookies in Settings from the home screen. Or, don’t log in to anything. 😛

I’m now going to have to resist the temptation to walk back into O2 during lunch breaks just to have another play! 😉