Ben’s Blog

Well, muchly stuff has happened lately. I’ve been learning Cocoa (Fun!) which has been entertaining. I have updated my iPod touch to v2.0, and installed several Apps, including the ridiculously difficult, addictive and fun Super Monkey Ball. Oh, and It’s my birthday.

Cocoa really is a lot of fun. It is so much simpler than writing in .NET or anything like that, and the foundation frameworks are amazing. I have now written a speech synthesizer which gets a list of system voices, displays them in a table, lets you choose one, type in a line to say and then speak it.

iPod touch 2.0 is a MASSIVE improvement over the old 1.1.4. The App Store is great, and so are the new functions, like the scientific calculator and push email. DEFINITELY worth £6 of my money.

It’s my birthday! After much thunking, I have decided to get an Apple Universal Dock to stop my iPod getting scratched and falling off the deck when I sync it - quite a nice bit of kit - the main complaints are with the video out features which I won’t use. I was talking about upgrading my computer with the remaining money, when my father said that if I saved up to buy a completely new PC, then he would contribute money towards it if I replaced the family computer with my current one. This seems sensible, so here is a list of components: (mainly for reference purposes)

Vista Home Premium (unfortunately)
Coolermaster CM690
Corsair HX620
Random SATA DVD drive
500GB WD SATA HDD (Plus current 120GB *nix drive)
2GB of OCZ DDR2 RAM
Zotac 8800GT (Yay!)
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel C2D E8400

Comes to about £600 - probably a bit less. I should be able to get it around Christmas, as I already have monitors, keyboards, speakers etc.

I finally have it! I’ve just opened it, and am thinking WOW! In fact, I’m typing this on it! More later…

*edit - I’ve had to disable comments on this post due to the ridiculous amount of spam comments I’ve been getting.

It feels like someone has turned the light on! The iPod touch has arrived! And trust me, it’s about as high as you can get on the list of ‘Things that I must get as soon as possible’. It is basically an iPhone without the phone, which was always the dodgy bit (ATT…). It has twice the capactity, and half the price. Admittedly, it has less applications built in. However, to quote from Apple, “It uses the same damn binaries”. If you want to know more, then gizmodo have a nice bit on it here.
That means that I could install any of the myriads of iPhone apps on a touch! This will remove any thing that the iPhone had over the touch, as I wouldn’t need the phone bit.

Also, I discovered a nice little iPhone app called iPhone SIM Free. This can unlock your iPhone, and make it useable with ANY SIM card. It’s completely legal as well. Tough luck, ATT…