Author Archives: Gangadhar

Some hidden good and bad iOS5 features

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Now that I have spent sometime with iOS5, I am finding that there are many hidden features (including apps) and some annoying changes too.

 

The first of the annoyances have to do with the Twitter integration with iOS. When you read about the integration, it sounds like a good thing (it probably is). But if you are someone who has multiple twitter ids to manage, the management of multiple ids has been taken out of the twitter app into the main settings app. I do not understand why something should be made harder when it was easy to begin with.

 

Another annoyance is how one has to get rid of notifications. So iOS has copied the Android notification feature. You swipe down on any screen to bring up the notifications and weather screen. So far so good. If you have apps like NYTimes installed, you will find breaking news alerts included in the notifications (breaking news from two days ago? It stays until dismissed or more breaking news comes up on top). You see an “x” on the top which indicates that you can dismiss these set of alerts by tapping on it. NO! Tapping the “x” brings up “Clear”. You need to tap clear to clear the notifications. I wonder why we need a two step process when one step will do. (This was probably done to prevent accidental dismissal of alerts, but it still is an annoyance).  Similarly, the “Mark as unread” in email has become a two tap process.

 

Now that we got rid of the annoyances out of the way, we can talk about some cool features. One of them is the location based reminder feature embedded in a new app called “Reminders”. You will get this app preloaded when you install iOS 5. You can schedule a reminder to remind when you reach a particular location or when you are leaving a location. The only catch is that you have to choose the existing addresses in your addressbook. You cannot add a new address into the reminder (bummer!). But it does pick up the current address. So you can setup a reminder for when you leave or arrive back at the current location (on the same day or a different day).

 

The reminder can also remind you if you want to be reminded on a particular day/time. Somehow this is not linked to the calendar.

 

The other new feature is the option for indenting your email. To get this feature, double tap in your email editor as you would to enable copy, paste functions. The copy, paste functions come up with an arrow pointing right. Tap this button and you will access the “Quote level” option to choose what quote level you want your email text to be.

iOS 5 upgrade issues and a cool feature

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Apple released the long awaited iOS 5 update yesterday. I wanted to upgrade the iOS version on my iPad and iPhone since I wanted to take iMessage for a spin with my friends all over the world. I started the upgrade process last night and it finally ended this afternoon. I am writing this blogpost to share what I learnt. I hope this will smoothen the upgrade for you! (In this post, when I refer to iTunes, I mean the iTunes on your computer).

 

Make sure that you are ready to give this process at least 3-4 hours (apart from the iOS download time). Since I tried to download iOS on the first day, I encountered multiple problems in downloading and connecting to the upgrade server. Hopefully these errors are now resolved.

 

I am going to skip the obvious steps like connecting the iDevice to iTunes, then choosing to upgrade the iOS version on the device.

 

Before you upgrade the OS, ensure that you take a backup into iTunes. The backup should take place if you do a complete sync of your device with iTunes. This is important since the iOS 5 upgrade process is not the smoothest.

 

After the download is complete, you will notice that iTunes restarts your iDevice a couple of times. I did not count mine since I left iTunes to its devices. Let it complete the process. IMPORTANT: Before you unplug your device from the computer, ensure that the restore process is complete on iTunes. This is a change from the normal process where the device displays a sign that it is syncing with iTunes. Here the device will act like normal but iTunes will still be restoring from backup. If iTunes shows that it is restoring from backup, let it complete.

 

In my case, since I disconnected the iPhone from iTunes while the restore was still on, many of the apps were in some sort of a limbo state. The App store on the iPhone showed that I had 40 apps to update. When I tried to update them, all of them hung with a waiting sign. The app store went back to proclaiming that all my apps were updated!

 

I took a picture of the screen at this point so that I could figure out what was going on. I lost that picture later (you will see why).

 

I had to go to iTunes, update all my apps there and then connect the iPhone to iTunes to sync up all the apps. It claimed that it updated the apps but the apps were still in “Waiting” mode.

 

I also noticed another change. The apps were scattered all over my iPhone instead of their normal folders. This coupled with the apps in “Waiting” mode made me realize that the I might have to restore my iPhone from its backup.

 

So I went ahead and restored my iPhone from its latest backup and then all the above problems went away. This time, iTunes did complain that the previous restore process was interrupted. This also meant that the picture that I had taken of all my apps in waiting” mode was now gone.

 

I had to set up iCloud and the iPhone a couple of times. But it is now lesson learnt! When I upgraded my iPad, I did not mess with it when iTunes was restoring from backup. The backup restore process alone took about an hour.

 

When I used the iPad with iOS 5, I noticed a cool new feature where you can undock the keyboard and split it into two. You press and hold the hide keyboard button on the keyboard and it brings up two new options “Undock” and “Split”. Using these options, you can make the keyboard hover over your text and split it where you need extra space. Once you split or undock the keyboard, it stays that way in other apps too.

 

If you have uncovered any such undocumented features, please include it in the comments. I will update the post if I find any other tips or features.

Hindi Music at Hair Salon in France? Oui!

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So you must have seen all the blog posts that tell you how bad the service is in the retail outlets in France? We did too. We were very concerned about this after our move to France. Thankfully, we have not had such experiences except with bankers. Bankers are a different story for a different day.

 

But today, I had such a positive experience that I wanted to share it with the world. I normally go to a hair salon near our apartment. The people there know that we do not know French all that well. The entire process goes very silently with them asking only the most important questions and we answering in rudimentary broken French. But I keep dreading that they might ask something complicated in French and I will not be able to answer.

 

Today, I saw that they had new staff in the salon. I was a bit concerned about this but still went in bravely (having too much hair is any day a worse situation!). There was English music playing in the salon and this reminded me of how Hindi music is played all over India even in places where they hardly understand the language.

 

When my turn for haircut came, the music suddenly changed to Hindi! The lady hairstylist was actually humming to it. Since I could not believe this (and unfortunately did not know the song), I had to pull up my iPhone and use an app (Soundhound) to find what song this was. Seeing this, the lady told me in broken English that this was from the movie “Fanaa“. We then went onto having a conversation (of course in broken French and English!) about Bollywood, languages in India and how much she likes Kajol (a bollywood actor)! She told me that I can get all the bollywood music that I want from youtube.

 

Anyway, it was quite amazing that she took the initiative to play the Hindi music which made my experience so much better. Hopefully, people traveling to France can see this post and have such a positive experience too.

A new type of vacation rental company

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I had to travel to Brussels recently to participate in the Mobile Health Industry Summit. Thanks to my delayed planning for the trip, when I looked for hotels, the prices were pretty high (€100 and up). I also checked AirBnB and I found some good places but they were too far away from the conference location. Now I had to come up with a solution to make this work.

 

Fortunately, I knew the founders of MorningCroissant. This is a french version of AirBnb. The main difference between these two is that MorningCroissant offers personalized help if we do not find anything on their website that suits us. I was a bit skeptical of this claim since it is difficult to find suitable accommodations. I was also skeptical about finding accommodations outside of Paris, where MorningCroissant is based.

 

In my case, I did not find any rentals in Brussels. So I thought of checking out their claim of helping us to find the right accommodation. I contacted Laurent, one of the founders with my dilemma. He got back to me in half a day and got me an apartment rental 10 mins from the center of Brussels for €60/night! I was very surprised and impressed.

 

When I traveled to Brussels, I stayed at this apartment. Turns out that it was even better than I thought. It had awesome views of the city. It was also well connected to the metro and tram stations. The host was very hospitable who offered me maps and directions to the places that I had to go to. All in all a very enjoyable experience.

 

If MorningCroissant can maintain this level of service to their customers, I am sure AirBnb has a huge threat coming at them. It remains to be seen how they can scale up this personal help to travelers.

 

I completely understand that this experience can be biased due to the fact that I know the founders. But if they are capable of providing this type of service to me, I am hoping that they can provide this level of service to regular users of their site. This is the main differentiator for them.

Interesting New Children’s Educational iPad game

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One of the advantages of being part of the Founder Institute is that you hear about products being launched by other founders all the time. Recently, I came to know of a founder who launched an iPad game for kids called Grow Your Garden HD.  Since I am always looking for interesting and educational apps for my son, I asked and received a promo code to try it out (Ok, that was a disclaimer there!).

The app is a game to teach math for the kids. The objective is to water and grow the plants in your garden. As you grow the plants, they will give you flowers that you add to your flower collection. The education part comes in how you water the plants. You get some watering jars to water your plants (see image below). The plants can only take a fixed quantity of water to grow. If you give it more water, the plant will die. So you have to figure out the right quantity of water using a combination of jars provided in order to water the plant. When I saw this, I wasn’t sure if kids would understand or like the premise. So I gave the app to my son to try it out.

 

The first few minutes, he was trying to figure it out. Then he was on a roll. He liked the fact that the game becomes more and more challenging as you move through the levels. I was actually surprised that he played with it for more than an hour before getting tired of it. After a while when he wanted to use the iPad, he went right back to the app and completed all the levels! He did ask for my help with the last level though.

I was very impressed with the way the app is built. When I played with it, I could feel myself getting involved with the challenge. I think this is a great way to combine education and games. I am sure I would have loved to learn math this way!