How to Enable Multi-Tasking Guestures in IOS 4.3

It's easy to enable your iPad with iOS 4.3 to control multi-tasking. You will then be able to:

- Pinch for the home Screen
- Swipe up to reveal multitasking bar
- Swipe left or right to move between apps

First download XCode from the Mac App store (£2.99 if you dont have it already)

After you have installed XCode and started it select Start a New Project from the home screen - it doesn't matter what you pick as long as it's an iPad app.

Next connect your iPad to your Mac and wait for XCode to notice it and then the Organizer window is displayed. Select your iPad and then click the big button 'Use for Development' You will be prompted for an Apple developer login- just click cancel and voila!

On your iPad go to the Settings app and you will see the Multitasking Guestures switch in the General tab- it should be switched on by default.

Windows 7 - and Sun VirtualBox - Free Computing

Want to try the new Windows 7 Release Candidate but are you unwilling to trash your Windows (or Mac) computer to install it? Then Sun's VirtualBox free virtualisation software makes an ideal companion for your adventure.

VirtualBox provides a free virtualisation environment - this means you can run multiple operating systems at the same time on your PC or Mac. You can download it from http://www.virtualbox.org/ for free.

After you have downloaded and VirtualBox, head over to Microsoft to download the Windows 7 release candidate, again for free. This fully working copy of Windows will run until . You can start the download process at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/. Don't forget to make a careful note of the Product Activation code displayed on the web site after you start the download - you will not be able to use the Windows 7 software without it.

The download from Microsoft is an ISO DVD image, so you will need a DVD burner to create the installation DVD and some software to burn the DVD image to the disk- WindowsXP Explorer did not want to play ball so another free download helped here in the shape of: http://download.cnet.com/Active-ISO-Burner/3000-2646_4-10602452.html?tag=mncol

After installing the Active@ ISO Burner and burning a DVD from the Microsoft downloaded ISO we are ready to go, so I started VirtualBox and selected NEW virtual machine and it started a wizard that quickly and painlessly sett up a new virtual environment. I opted to allow the new virtual machine's harddrive to grow in size as needed.

I then inserted the install DVD when prompted and clicked the virtual machine into full screen mode so I could better follow what was going on.

Windows 7 installer started with a prerry blue splash screen and the install wizard started, and I was a little confused when it detected a previous installation of Windows but I put this down to a foible of the VirtualBox environment and clicked continue and the setup then started to copy the temporary installation files to the harddrive.

As I watched this happen my spider sense started tingling so a thumped atl-tab to see what was going on and saw a VirtualBox window containing a Windows 7 installer sitting at the welcome screen... the Windows 7 installer I had been working with was running in my main WindowsXP environment as was poised to wipe my hard drive - not a good idea when this is happening on my employers laptop! I hit the CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL key, several times and ejected the DVD to force the installation to abort.

Phew, close call.

Once the XP instance of the Windows installer had cleaned up after itself, I carefully switched back to the VirtualBox window containing the Windows 7 installer and continued with the installation. (Another reason why Macs are safer than Windows- I could not have made the same mistake if the host Operating System had been OSX rather than XP)

Once I was installing the Windows 7 software onto the right (virtual) computer, the installation completed smoothly and flawlessly- much smoother than the XP or Vista installers - in fact it was really quite mac-like.

Windows 7 and VirtualBox appear to get on well together and not additional steps were necessary to allow Windows7 out onto my home Wi-Fi network and out onto the Internet. The Wi-Fi connection of the Host XP environment appears to have been used as Windows 7 did not request any Wi-Fi credentials.

The Windows 7 and VirtualBox experience can be further enhanced by installing the VirtualBox drivers into the Windows 7 environment. This provides support for more video modes by installing a new video driver that makes screen resizing and resolution management automatic as you change the size of the window that Windows 7 is displayed in. New keyboard and mouse drives also improve the easy of switching from the host to the virtual environment. The extensions are easy to install, simply by clicking on an icon at the bottom of the VirtualBox desktop window. This causes VirtualBox to mount a virtual DVD to Windows 7 which you can then use to install the drivers.

Clicking around the Windows 7 desktop is fast and response, and a world away from the sluggish responsed of the first generation Virtual PC environments.

Next we needed an office suite, so off to www.openoffice.org to download the latest free version and 10 minutes later wordprocessing is up an running- again all for free. Open Office 3 looks and feels a lot like MS Office 2003 and also feels a lot snappier and more responsive running on Windows 7 than Office 2007 in the XP environment.

Teething Problems
I tried to enable the VirtualBox Shared Folders feature, which would have made a folder on my host XP system look like a network share to the virtual Windows 7 environment - VirtualBox said it was working but Windows7 would not see the share - I need to work on this a bit more, it would be because Windows 7 is in HOME mode rather than OFFICE mode which appears to alter the way it behaves on a network and how it manages shared resources. This was the only thing that I could not get to work.

In Summary

First impressions of Windows 7: it's what Vista should have been - clean, fast and stable
Sun Virtual Box: Easy to use, great value and full featured.

Toyota Prius - Long Term Test

We've lived with the Toyata Prius T-Spirit for 3 years and 37k miles, and we still love it. It's not been an uneventful journey- but the dramas have been few and far between.

Economy

The Prius has published mpg figures of diesel-nudging 65mpg. In the real world I've only got close to that when driving at 50mph with the cruise control turned on, on long journeys. Real world driving for our household sees two 208 mile journeys each week from home to Swindon and the remaining 5 days spent pottering around town. That combination sees a consistent 50 mpg+ from every tank, which is still a very welcome improvement on the 35 mpg we say on our previous Nissan Primera.

Driving

The Prius is a smooth and easy drive - it's not a sports car, but it is quick from a standing start thanks to that electric motor which has all of its torque available from the first blip of the throttle. This makes the Prius nippy around town if you want to push it, but most Prius drivers tend to be quite light footed- having that big economy guage in the centre of the dash tends to focus the mind. That said, it will 0-60 in just under 10 seconds.

The gearbox is a CVT based system so the gear options are only Drive, Park, Reverse and Braking (which is a 'keep the gears low and revs high' and use the engine for braking mode). Cruise control is a welcome standard feature and on the motorway does help to keep the mpg at the right end of the scale.

Inside the cabin is comfortable and feels well made from high-quality materials, although some of the door trim around the window is not as hard wearing as I would have liked as I managed to scratch it when filling the car with rubbish for a trip to the recycling centre. That said, the chosen trim does look and feel very nice, being a soft to the touch plastic and making it hard and scratch resistant would have made the cabin feel more utilitarian and down market to most buyers.

Tech

The Prius is a geek's dream- brimming with Tech and Toys, we have the range toping T-Spirit so other models will not have all these features:

Hybrid Synergy Drive

The heart of the Prius is the petrol-electric drive train that automatically uses the petrol and electric engines in variable combinations according to the second-by-second needs of the driver. Sitting in a jam? The petrol engine will shut down and the car will shuffle forward silently using just the electric engine (and keep the air-con running using the hybrid's battery system); as soon as you hit the open road and put your foot down the petrol engine springs to life and accelerates at a healthy clip. Lift your foot off the accelerator and the kinetic energy of the vehicle is used to turn a dynamo that recharges the hybrid's battery- so you never have to plug the car in to charge, it uses energy that would otherwise we wasted during braking to recharge its reserves.

Pan-European DVD based SatNav

The SatNav is easy to programme using the large colour touch screen in the centre of the dash. The screen can operate in many levels of zoom for the map and I like that it always gives you a choice of this different routes allowing you to, for example, easily pick the route that avoids a problematic section of the M25.

The SatNav also links into the Traffic Data System transmitted over the FM radio and the system will offer to re-route you based on live traffic updates, which is a neat touch but beware that the TDS system does not cover B and local roads and so you can find yourself removed from a queue on the main road only to sit in worse traffic on the local roads.

I also like the thought that I could get in the Prius at home in Hertfordshire and set the SatNav to take me non-stop to the in-laws in southern Spain- not that I ever have but I like knowing that I could, if I wanted to.

Audio

The Six CD in dash changer sounds great through the 7 JBL speakers (yes seven, there is one in the centre of the dash) and for tech lovers there is a jack plug to connect your iPod or MP3 player inside the front central armrest next to the 12v power socket. Being only an audio jack you can not control your iPod from the Prius audio system- there is no control integration - but to be honest I have never found this to be a feature that I have missed.

The Bluetooth phone system integrates nicely with the audio pausing the CD or fading the iPod or Radio out and in at the ends of the call.

Voice Control

The Voice Control system covers many of the features of the SatNav, Audio and Phone systems including phone dialing from the Prius' own address book - but I've never found it to be 100% reliable and it invariable embarrasses me when giving the 'neat feature' demo to friends.

Self Park

I did not indulge in the £400 self park option, as Mrs Faffer rightly said, I would only ever use it to show off to my friends, but it is an impressive little toy that parallel parks the prius into a space you select using the in-dash display. The car turns the steering wheel itself and you only have to control the speed of the vehicle using the brake.

Reliability

The core systems of the Prius have been reliable - not a hint of a problem from the Hybrid Synergy drive system however we have had a new door lock and a air conditioning compressor under the 3 year warranty.

Rating

Tech lovers will enjoy the Prius with all its toys and green credentials and it makes a useful family car - big enough for five adults and all their luggage (note however that you can not use the prius to tow a trailer or caravan).

Fuel economy is good, but you can easily match it with a modern diesel but the Prius will be less polluting overall.

BlightyByte Rating: 4 Stars ****

iPod Touch

I've been living with the iPod touch for three months now and overall I think it is great. Here's why (and a few why nots as well)...

Using it

Like the MacBook Air, the iPod Touch comes packaged in a work of art- the box is robust and is still sat beside my iMac looking for something to store in it - I refuse the throw it out.  Once unboxed, the Touch simply connects to the compute with the enclosed USB cable and iTunes bursts into life inviting you to register the iPod against an iTunes account.  Making this link then enables the iTunes mobile store application on the Touch to purchase and download songs via your existing iTunes account and then automatically sync them back to your computer and authorise them to play the next time you sync your iPod- very neat, very easy- very Apple.

In use the iPod Touch is quite reliable but I have seen a couple of music player crashes and many Safari crashes.  I overheard an iPod genius talking to another customer about this and he said you should reset (full power off and on) your Touch once a week to keep it reliable. I've been doing that for 3 weeks and have not had a crash since and I was seeing several a week so it sounds like good advice!

Mobile Safari is easy to use and a very good browser - I just wish it would synch my Safari bookmarks from my Mac to my iPod Touch.

The photo application is very good, with some pretty iPhoto like transitions which hint at some of the horsepower hiding under the hood of this tiny little device. That said, I find the photo application gets most use as a means to show off the device to friends and let them play with the multi-touch gestures rather than anything else.

The contacts application is simple but effective and allows you to email contacts easily when you have a Wi-Fi signal to hand.

The Mail application is really good and integrates with my gMail account reliably.  The Mail application provides the most use for the onscreen keyboard which I have found more reliable the more I use it, but no where near as fast or reliable as my old BlackBerry.  Not a major issue for an iPod Touch if you only use it for adhoc emailing but if we were talking about an iPhone then I would have reservations about it being able to replace my blackberry for heavy email and texters - much as I would love to have one.

I like the Google Maps application and having submitted my home wi-fi router to SKYHOOK's database, I expect to be able to use the auto-position feature any day now- from home anyway.

What really makes the iPod touch exciting are the new raft of web based and soon to be native applications being developed for the iPhone - dont forget they work on the touch as well.  The BBC iPlayer is a dream over a wi-fi connection and the native FaceBook and Encyclopedia Britanica applications are great to use.  I can't wait to see what the iPhone SDK produces in the summer.  Then we will see the game change as we realise the iPod touch is not an iPod with a browser built in, it is a pocket computer with an iPod built in.

I've got the 16GB version and find it full most of the time - just add a single move and lose 10% of your capacity in one go.

In the UK iTunes movie purchases are not yet available by my iMac has Elgato EyeTV software with a digital TV (DVB) tuner so I regularly record TV programmes and movies and then EyeTV can export them direct to iTunes in a touch compatible resolution for easy synching and watching on the train.

Problems

The Screen and casing of the Touch feel strong in the hand, but the silver rear casing was looking scratched after just a few days so I quickly invested in a case to keep it safe.

The iPod Touch has no external volume control, you can only change the volume through the touch screen- which will pop up the screen saver and lock after only a few second in your pocket so given my Touch is in a case I have to take the touch out of my pocket, open the case, slide the unlock control on the screen and the adjust the volume slider... by that time the mobile phone has stopped ringing or you have missed a quiet bit of the podcast/ deafened yourself with that unexpected loud blast of rock.

Overall the iPod touch is a 4/5 bit of kit and an external volume control would up that to 5/5. The additional software scores a 3/5  - expect to see that rise to a 5/5 this summer when the SDK starts producing.

Available from: apple.com/uk at £269 for 16GB

MacBook Air

Our new MacBook Air was purchased as Mrs Blighty's main computer to replace a much loved but somewhat battered 12" PowerBook G4.  Mrs B works from home a lot, with her computer on her knees but also has to lug it into the office and around to the 26 schools she and her team regularly work in.  So the requirement was for a horsepower upgrade from the G4 CPU to allow the latest multi-media gizmos to be used in the presentations while also being light weight and robust for all that travel.  It sounds like the MacBook Air should be a perfect fit - was it?

The Ordering

The MacBook was ordered from the Apple store online in the UK- I played by usual trick of loading up the shopping basket and then waiting for a few days to see if I really wanted to buy something that expensive - and also to play chicken with the Apple sales managers.  Again they blinked first and I got a friendly email from Ger in Ireland saying he had noticed the saved basket and was there 'anything he could do to help.'

I usually by my Macs from the Apple store online, but it's always best to speak to a person rather than just place the order online- why? Because the sales staff have some discount discretion that you only get if you talk to them!  So I talked with Ger about what we wanted, how it was going to be used and by whom – this last bit turned out to be important as Mrs B heads up a charity that works in schools in our county and Ger disappeared for 10 minutes and then called back with education pricing and we saved enough on the MacBook Air and iWork 08 and other software to buy me an iPod Touch (look for that in a later review) 

The Arrival

The package turned up a week earlier than the advertised 'expected' date which was great news - as it turned out to be the day before a conference Mrs B had organised so MacBook Air was quickly co-opted as media player for the event.

The unboxing

The MacBook Air comes packaged in a solid and surprisingly small box, with a fit and finish like a Rolls-Royce.

I wont rework the 'unboxing bore' stories that abound the web from each new Apple product, but I will say that for the first time, this products packaging is as much a work of art as the product itself.

The migration

Migrating data from the existing PowerBook running Tiger to the MacBook Air running Leopard was not that obvious - the Tiger migration assistant requires a Firewire connection and the Leopard Wireless migration assistant would not talk to it.  The answer is simple, stick the leopard install DVD that came with the MacBook Air into the old laptop and install the migration assistant from there- there is a stand alone installer provided for this scenario.  The only problem was no-where in the documentation with the MacBook Air did I find this gem of information- it took some input from Mr Google and a search of the Apple support forums to find the answer.

Once the migration assistants were up and running on the two machines we were ready to copy the Mrs B's life from the old machine to the new.  I found the migration assistant was not has granular as I would have liked - I would have liked to choose which applications to copy across rather than the simple binary of all or none.  In the end I decided to copy them all and to see what happened...

Several hours passed while all the email (she never deletes or archives) and media files (lots of iTunes songs) copied across and the applications.  

When it finally finished we were ready to go- apple mail worked right away and overall I was impressed with how the migration tools had worked- the only thing that failed to work was Office X for mac- the associations with the all the office file extensions (.doc, .xls etc) were broken and none of the Office applications themselves would run.  A return to the Apple forums found similar but not identical issues and in the end I deleted the Office X folder and copied it back across by hand- and it had worked perfectly ever since.

The using

Using a MacBook Air is a real joy - on those few opportunities I manage to wrestle it out of Mrs B's hands - and she loves it to and the admiring glances and comments it regularly solicits.  It really is much lighter that her old machine and any other laptop I've ever used and that makes it so much more comfortable to use on your lap.  Running iWork and Office the machines just flies along and smoothly plays video files and the most creative Keynote presentations we can come up with- as a work a day multimedia office machine it is a dream.  Playing DVD in classrooms also works fine requiring just a little faffing to plug in the external superdrive (optional extra) and video adapter cable (supplied).

In use the MacBook Air feels solid and well made - actually feeling more solid than the 12" powerbook it replaces - and the fit an finish is impeccable.

The rear light on the keyboard was put to good use the first day after the MacBook Air arrived when it spend the day as the media player at a conference Mrs B had organised running a huge keynote presentation with lots of embedded movie clips.  Sitting the back of the darkened auditorium the illuminated keys were a god-send while driving the keynote and I'm sure this will find the MacBook Air a place in many conference centres, schools and places of worship for just this reason.

The screen is one of Apple's new LED based units and it is bright and clear and a joy to use.

Both the screen and keyboard light levels can be manually controlled or left up to the ambient light sensor which normally does a fine job of setting the levels for you.

My only reservation about the whole machine is that the cables on the SuperDrive and Video Adapter are very thin and feel a bit fragile- I've seen no evidence that the actually are after 8 weeks of regular use but I will wait to see if they will last a long as their heavier weight predecessors.

The final thoughts

The MacBook Air is a great little machine and as long as you don't want to do lots of video editing or GarageBanding I don't think you will ever notice the smaller drive or marginally slower CPU compared to the rest of the Apple Laptop range.  Some people call it expensive but don't forget its actually £100 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook Pro so for people who want to be able to take their laptop with them where-ever they go it makes a fine alternative to the MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Highly Recommended 5/5

MacBook Air from £1199 available from www.apple.com/uk

Welcome to Blighty

Welcome to Good Ole Blighty, land of warm beer, hot tea, green sports cars, bad dentistry and the Blighty Byte Review - reviewing the latest gadgets and gizmos for use in real life, by real people, who happen to live on the Eastern edge of the Atlantic.