Love the iOS 7 Control Centre

So I've returned to iPhone after a disastrous experience with the HTC One.

Love the translucent overlay of the Control Centre over the background image.

This particular one is nice!

iPhone Photography at the Neighbourhood Park

I was having a relaxing time in the neighbourhood park on a cooling Sunday morning and decided to start a "iPhone Photography" post to share some nice pictures I've taken there.

Here's a close up shot of a nice flower:

And another one showing some big red ants having their morning work routine:

Quick Review of my Surface RT

Here's a real quick thought of my newly-purchased Microsoft Surface RT.

Good points:

• Great for videos. Better than my iPad 3 as it's wide screen.
• It can read/write to portable harddisk!
• You can view Music videos from YouTube using IE. Mobile tablet like iPad cannot play YouTube music videos of well-known artistes now as they are blocked by YouTube.
• Some settings like wallpaper are synchronised for both the rt and my normal laptop running windows 8 and using the same hotmail id to sign in both.
• With a desktop Microsoft Office program built-in together with my separately-purchased "Type Cover Keyboard", it really makes the RT a great productivity tool.

Bad points:

• The number of good apps is pathetic!
• It cannot run normal desktop .exe programs. 

Fortunately, the community has come out with a "jailbreak" utility to allow the RT to run desktop programs.  There's a catch though.  These programs must be built and compiled for the ARM architecture that the RT is made with.

Without doubt, I jailbroke my RT without delay.
There are not many RT-compatible desktop programs now. Only few like 7zip, notepad++, FileZilla and several more are available now.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the RT as I'm not buying it to replace my laptop, but as a better capable tablet.

Updates to Jovial Clipboard (version 1.0)

Gonna add the followings in the coming release:

1) fix timestamp display issue for AM

2) add exporting of clips to filesystem

Here's the URL to the project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jovialclipboard/

Update to Jovial Clipboard (My 2nd C# Freeware Project)

I've promoted Jovial Clipboard from alpha stage to beta.
Which means essential features are all in.

Clips entries have also been increased to 20.
Deletion of individual entry is also added in this version.

In the next version, which I will probably strip off the "beta" tag, I'll add in the saving of Clips to storage.

Here's the URL to this freeware of mine:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jovialclipboard

My 2nd C# Project

Continuing the great momentum of my recently-released C# project, "Jovial Notepad", I've started on a new "Jovial" C# program.

It will still be a small little utility.

I will be releasing as "per-alpha" release to sourceforge.net tonight.

I think this will also be a useful freeware to all. 

The Hunt for the Best Portable Tablet Writer

Today, 14th July 2013, Microsoft slashes its ill-fated Surface RT tablet by as much as 30% (US$150) for the 16GB model.

This news is of utmost interest to me.  I've been hunting for the past weeks on a good bluetooth keyboard casing for my iPad 3rd Gen.

I've bought and tried this one as shown below.



I ditched it eventually due to its non-attached design, making it very clumsy to use.

I may not type alot on the iPad, but when I really need to type, e.g. for emailing or blogging, I would wish a hardware keyboard is there.

Then comes Microsoft Surface RT.  It looks sleek.  It is sleek.
With the "Touch Keyboard" or "Type Keyboard" attached, it's a perfect dream mobile writer for me.





I know I have to get it.  But with a price tag of Singapore Dollars $668 for the 16GB model and not including the keyboard, it's never a sound deal to make.  I'll wait.

The big news came 2 days ago when I read that Microsoft is slashing its RT price by US$150.  To convert to Singapore dollars, that's around S$180, thus making the 16GB model pricing at around S$480!

The new price has not been announced for Singapore market yet.  But at S$480, I will make the dash for it!

Can't wait!