OhRyan.ca » apple

Siri Can’t Map Canada

RyanN — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:46:39 +0000

My desk neighbour showed up to work this morning with a brand new iPhone 4S. He let me play around with Siri a bit.

Looks like Siri is not fully functional in Canada.

Referencing location (eg. “Where am I?”) results in an error message stating that directions and maps are unavailable in Canada.

Update: Now with a screenshot.

Will Siri Work In Canada?

RyanN — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:40:42 +0000

My friend @iamhabitat on twitter just pointed out that Siri is not listed as one of the features on Apple Canada’s iPhone 4S page.

Does this imply that the feature will not be available in Canada? How disappointing would that be?!

I had assumed that it would. I guess we’ll find out when iOS5 comes out tomorrow.

Update: Yes, Yes it does. But it doesn’t seem to know how to map in Canada (at least not yet).

My favourite thing about the iPhone 4S

RyanN — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:48:22 +0000

…so far,

The HTML5 animations on the website.

Interesting to note that they’ve switched form jQuery to Script.aculo.us to handle the magic.

Correction: They may have been using script.aculo.us for some time now (ie. always).

My Teardrop iPhone 5 Prediction

RyanN — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:43:15 +0000

With less than 48hrs to the next iPhone announcement, I thought I’d weigh in on the iPhone 5 teardrop prediction with some first-hand experience.

I have a TV remote that’s roughly teardrop shaped and every single time without fail I hold it upside-down.

In this blogger’s opinion, there will be no teardrop iPhone.

How To: Hack Into OS X Lion

RyanN — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:55:27 +0000

Yesterday one of two things happened, either a) I completely an entirely forgot my OS X login password or b) OS X refused to accept my password. I have no way of knowing which was the case, but regardless, I was unable to access my computer.

I almost had a major meltdown, until Google informed me that OS X Lion is horribly insecure! Horribly, horribly insecure.

You can gain access to (almost) anyone’s Lion account in 3 simple steps.

Restart the machine in recovery mode by holding down cmd+r on reboot.
Open terminal in the utilities menu.
Type `resetpassword`.

Voila.

Am I missing something? Is this not as bad as I think it is?

Canadian Tech Roundup 14: The one where we talk about iPad2

RyanN — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:33:20 +0000

iTunes Link

RSS

Flash On iPhone with Cloud Browse, Sorta

RyanN — Sat, 15 May 2010 04:22:18 +0000

Double-U Tee Eff, it’s cnettv flash video streaming to my non-jailbroken iPhone, in Firefox? Yup. This is all thanks to the Cloud Browse app.

The app details don’t give any information about how this is actually working. As far as I can tell the app makes a VNC-type connection to a virtual machine on Amazon EC2. Works like a charm.

Get it while it lasts though, seems like the sort of app Apple might pull from the App Store.

iPhone OS 4.0 Predictions

RyanN — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:25:13 +0000

Apple have borrowed one or two ideas from the jailbreaking community in the past – the app icon rearranging functionality comes to mind, I’m sure there are others. I think many of the new features we’ll see in iPhone OS 4.0 will be based on functionality added by the community.

Don’t have time to fully explore these ideas in a blog post this morning, but here’s a breakdown of my ideas/wishlist. In order of probability.

Background processes
- Not much of a hit to battery or CPU performance with simple apps like twitter or IM clients. Apple could tweak the OS to handle background processes even better.
- All new smartphones have this ability. iPhone needs it to stay competitive.
Themes
- New source of revenue
- Could be what the paint splotches on the invite are alluding to
- Only reason not to do it would be inconsistent UI. But, with themes officially supported Apple could apply their stringent review process.
Lockscreen
- The lockscreen functionality is really cool.
- Current jailbroken functionality doesn’t seem fully baked. I think Apple could make major improvements.
- A dashboard widget type interface would seem to make sense.

// end stream of consciousness.

Apple’s January 27th Event Prediction

RyanN — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:48:07 +0000

Apple will not release a tablet. They will instead release something unexpected. My money is on AppleTV², a new AppleTV that is actually a TV.

Blogging About Apple Store Service

RyanN — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:46:43 +0000

Take heed, apparently blogging about apple store service is an an excellent way to generate backlinks. According to Google webmaster tools my post late last month about my poor Apple Store service experience generated 625 links. The next highest, How To Watch Comedy Central Videos From Canada only garnered 27 – and that post has been up on reddit a few times.