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Thinner, lighter, better?

So a new iPad, and the same three age old points of view resurface. The pro Apple, the measured, and the anti Apple stance.

A good many years ago I used to hate Apple venomously as many of my peers will recall, and with good reason. Their products were prohibitively expensive, flawed and rather inflexible for mainstream use. I was very much part of the anti apple brigade. Move on a few years (OK, a decade) to the time of OSX and iOS. Arguably Apple have only fixed one of the three problems I’ve listed, yet my venom has long since vanished and I like to think I joined the measured group.

Why?

Well, Apple now make very good flawed products. Remove the marketing and simply use their products, and it’s hard not to enjoy the experience.

I bought an iPad on release day. I wasn’t going to, but the idea of tablet PC always had a strong appeal for me. I was already very impressed with the unparalleled mobile browsing experience my iPod touch afforded and I was in PC World on launch day. They had one 32GB 3G model left and I reasoned I could always sell it on for profit in those early weeks.

Since then and much to my wife’s discontent; the iPad has seldom left my side. My ageing “sofa laptop” hasn’t seen the light of day since. Indeed even my iMac and well equipped gaming laptop can spend weeks silently wondering what they did to upset me. After using a computer for 8 hours a day at work, using iOS at home is an absolute pleasure. I don’t want complicated configuration menus, 3rd party task managers,  USB ports, and I certainly never intend to drag and drop thousands of music tracks from another machine all day.

So it was with obvious curiosity I waited for iPad 2.

What do I think?

Brilliant

I’m not upgrading, certainly not in the short term at least. iPad already does everything I actually want from a tablet. I can’t stress that enough; it’s a perfect solution to the current needs I have.

But the features added are exactly the right features to make the iPad an even greater success. Detractors mock the connectivity and list endless benchmark figures from competing products not yet even on the market! They use these as grand reasons that iPad 2 is a doomed product, as they did for the original. Others criticise that the iPad should run full programs as background tasks, and chastise the walled garden. But this doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter to me, an experienced software developer who arrives home from work, and wants to check Twitter, schedule a SKY+ recording, or play console quality games; and it doesn’t matter to a mother, checking out the latest status updates on Facebook.  We both want the best, quickest and most pleasurable way to digest and interact with media, and the iPad is that product.

This is my measured view – not a blinkered pro Apple stance.

iPad 2 removes nothing from the success of the original and adds many more new touches which, whilst not individually astounding; make for another product that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

So here’s to Apple, and the device I think will be celebrated as one the defining achievements of this still fresh decade.

However the solution was actually rather simple. The problem lies with the default 1and1 .htaccess file which needs a small update to enable PHP5; which in turn unlocks these self-install features. A secondary bonus is a small performance increase to the overall rendering of the website.

In order to enable PHP5 one simply needs to add this line to the .htaccess file

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Now – I can enjoy direct access to plugins right from the WordPress Dashboard, and perhaps arguably a quicker but less safe route to upgrade.

Now one could use terminal to navigate to the file, and then edit using a vi or an emacs derivative – or perhaps chmod the file attributes temporarily; but for me personally – I didn’t fancy this approach every time.

A quick internet search yielded this solution:

To turn on hidden files in Finder, open Terminal and execute

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

and to revert back simply use:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

killall Finder

It is possible to manually edit the Finder preference file to always show hidden files; but I prefer this neater temporary solution.

Flash finally gets native 3D support. Too little, too late?

“Molehill” is the code name for a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that will enable advanced 3D experiences across screens through the Adobe® Flash® Platform runtimes. These new low-level APIs will provide advanced 3D and 3D engine developers the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains. Today, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, renders thousands of non z-buffered triangles at approximately 30 Hz. With the new 3D APIs, developers can expect hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles to be rendered at HD resolution in full screen at around 60 Hz. Using the new 3D APIs in Flash Player and AIR will make it possible to deliver sophisticated 3D experiences across almost every computer and device connected to the Internet.

The 3D capabilities enabled by the new APIs will also be available to the broader developer community through popular ActionScript® 3D frameworks, such as Alternativa3D, Away3d, CopperCube, Flare3D, Minko, Sophie3D or Yogurt3D.