Don't you hate it when free is not really free?

One of my pet hates is things that are advertised as free when they aren't free at all. They are just con tricks trying to get you to try stuff before hitting you with a bill. It is not that I don't like paying for stuff or that I expect stuff to be free, the problem I have is being told something it is clearly not.

It often happens with software on the internet and it could be Windows or Apple Mac software, it happens with both. One way in which people try to deceive you is by describing software as a 'Free download!' You can make anything a free download and you are rarely charged to download anything.  When you see this phrase it usually means 'we won't charge you to download it, but if you actually want to run it you'll have to pay $123.99 or whatever.' I usually avoid software described as 'Free Download!' because it means it is most definitely not free.

I was browsing the Mac App Store today and was looking at the Top Free charts. I looked at one app, Billings Pro, but it could have been any one of a number of apps. It is in the Top Free Business section. The buy/download button says Free, the price in the information box on the right says Free, but guess what? It's not free. Well, technically the app is free, but it relies on a subscription to an online service. To be fair, it does say this in the description, so you are warned, but some developers don't even do this nd you don't discover that something isn't free until after you have downloaded it and installed it.

The Newsstand app on the iPhone/iPad is particularly bad and every single app is listed as free. Of course they aren't free. Well, yes it is true that the apps are free, but they are just a shell with no content. If you actually want to read any of the newspapers or magazines you have to pay, either for single issues or a subscription.

I don't have a problem with paying, it is just the description and the word 'Free' in everything when nothing is free. It would be much better if instead of Free it had the price of an issue, or perhaps the app instead of being free was the price of an issue of the magazine or newspaper. So when you buy a Newsstand app you get one download issue of your choice. More issues or a subscription could be purchased in the app as before.

It's not just an Apple issue and many Windows downloads as described as free when they are actually 30-day limited trials. You don't discover this until after you have downloaded and installed the software. I like 30-day trials of software because you can try it before you buy it, but I don't like being told something is free when it's not.

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Dumbing down Apple Software Update

I use Windows PCs as well as Macs, but if you look back through all these blog posts you will find more rants about Apple than Microsoft. Windows is far from perfect and sometimes I have problems with it, but it doesn't really bother me. It's Apple Macs and OS X that get me worked up. I think it may be because Apple can be so brilliant and yet so dumb it provokes extreme reactions, whereas Microsoft is bland and doesn't really excite me or irritate me so much.

I checked Software Update on Mountain Lion and as any user will know, the old Software Update that we have had for years has been replaced by the Mac App Store. The old app would scan the Mac and display a list of updates and most importantly, their size.

I'm sometimes out with my MacBook and while I'm having a coffee at Starbucks I might run Software Update and if there are some small updates I'll download them. Sometimes I'm at home, but I'm busy and don't mind installing a small update, but if it's a gigabyte download (OS X updates are sometimes huuuuge), I will put it off  and do it on a day I'm not busy.

Mountain Lion no longer displays the size of software updates. OS X 10.8.1 is available, but the Mac App Store does not say the size. Clicking the More link displays more information, but not the size. Clicking the hyperlink opens a web page, but again there is no size information. Is this update 1Mb or 1Gb? Will it take 5 or 50 minutes? Has it already downloaded in the background and just needs installing? There's no clue. So here I am at Starbucks (I should buy shares the amount of coffee I drink here) and I don't know whether to click the Update button or not. I think I'll wait till I get home. I've got some Windows stuff that needs doing. I can set the update going and if it takes an hour or two it won't matter.

Microsoft Windows Update is much better than Apple Software Update. I've used both for years and there's no contest.

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Store notes in your Google Mail account

Sometimes you need to jot something down, such as a name, an address, a book you have heard about that you want to read, a website URL, or something else. Where do you store your notes? There are note taking apps, sticky notes, text editors and so on, but one option you may not have thought of is to use Google Mail.

In the left panel in Google Mail I have Notes. I don't know how it got there and perhaps I created it years ago or it could have been some software I was using. Looking at the list of system labels in Google Mail settings, it is not there, so I'm not sure how I came to have a Notes label. It doesn't matter because it is easy to create a note taking facility in Google Mail.

To create and store a note you just have to create a new email and enter your own address as the recipient. Just email it to yourself. It may sound like an odd thing to do, but it does work and the message goes to the email server and comes straight back to your inbox. All you need to do is to select the email using the tickbox on the left and then click the Labels button at the top. The first time you do this you will need to create a Notes label. Then you can simply assign the Notes label to emails you want to save.

Sending emails to yourself is a handy way to store information you want to remember. Don't forget that an email can contain images, hyperlinks and attached files, so your notes can be used to store almost any information. It's useful for storing things for work projects, items found when browsing the web and similar things.

It is a bit of a pain having to select emails sent to yourself and label them as notes, so why not configure Google Mail to do this automatically? Go to the gear icon, Settings, Filters. Create a new filter and in the From box enter your own email address. Click Create a filter with this search. Select Apply the label and choose Notes, and also Skip the inbox. This makes it only appear when the Notes label is selected on the left and not in your inbox.

Now when you send an email to yourself it will automatically be added to Notes.

Bug fix update: It didn't take long to realise that there was a flaw in this. Google Mail doesn't just apply filters to incoming messages, it applies them to all messages. Messages you send are not placed in the sent Mail folder, they are simply tagged with the Sent Mail label. When you select Sent Mail you see just those emails with the Sent Mail label. Of course, all mail I send is from me, so the filter turned every email I sent into a note! The solution is simple. Just edit the filter (or when you are creating it), apply the Notes label to emails with your email address in both the To and From boxes. That way only emails you send to yourself become notes.

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Get OS X Mountain Lion free

There is a catch of course, there's always a catch. To get OS X Mountain Lion for free you need to have bought a new Mac between 11th June and 25th July.

The Mac will have come with OS X Lion installed and if you have not yet upgraded to Mountain Lion, go to this web page and there is a button to request your free copy of Apple's new operating system.

Bear in mind that this version of OS X works best if you have 4Gb of memory or more. I wouldn't like to run it on a Mac with only 2Gb.

Time is running out. You have until the 24th August to claim your free copy.

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Microsoft Surface tablet to cost $199?

Enter 'Microsoft Surface $199' at a search engine and a zillion results will be displayed. It is all over the web that Microsoft's Windows 8 tablet will costs a smidgen under $200. In fact, it will match the price of Google's Nexus.

All those stories on the web can't be wrong can they? They could be. All the stories appear to be quoting just one source and it seems that Engadget got the rumour from an anonymous source at a Microsoft TechReady15 conference. It may or may not be true, but everyone is writing news stories and blogging about it.

If it were a 7in tablet then it would be believable, but not for a device with a 10.6in screen, magnesium case and 32Gb of memory for the base version (pdf spec sheet here). An iPad 2 has 16Gb of memory and a 9.7in screen and costs $399. There's no way Microsoft could make a tablet with a bigger screen and twice the memory for half the price.

I think $399 would be a more realistic price for the Microsoft Surface RT (the cheaper of the two versions, the pure tablet as opposed to the Pro version that actually runs Windows). This is $100 cheaper than the iPad 3, which would be its main competitor. It cannot cost any more than than an iPad if Microsoft wants to grab anything other than single digit market share.

Selling computers at cost price would lose you a lot of money, but the same isn't true of tablets, which are more like mobile phones. Phones can be given away cheaply and even for free because of the monthly contract fees we have to pay. With a tablet that is locked in to an online store, Microsoft will earn money on every app sold in a similar way, so there is a remote possibility that the device could be cheaper than expected if this is factored into the price.

I wonder how many apps the average person buys over the life of a tablet? Is this a factor in the pricing? If the real cost is $399, but Microsoft reckons it will make $100 on average through app sales per device, it could sell it for $299 and still make a profit. I think that's the best we can hope for.

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How long will Apple's iCloud last?

Apple has a poor track record when it comes to internet services. It has launched them almost like clockwork every three years and has then shut them down and abandoned them. Anyone remember .iTools, .Mac. Mobile Me, Ping? OK, Ping is still with us, but it is on its deathbed. There has been talk of poor numbers of people using it and little enthusiasm. It's only two years old, so it has one more year at most and then it will be closed. All the news stories around the web can't be wrong.

The problem Apple has is a clash of cultures. The internet is open and Apple is closed. Anyone can use the internet from anywhere, any operating system, any computer, any software and any device. Apple like to lock things down, reduce the options to a minimum, and totally control everything. It doesn't work with the internet.

Take Ping for example. It can only be accessed from within iTunes and there is no web access, no third party clients, no access on devices, computers and operating systems that don't have iTunes. It is not the only reason Ping is failing, but it is probably the biggest one. How do I check Ping or post a comment when all I have on me is my Android phone, or when I'm on my lunch break at work and my computer doesn't have iTunes? It's bad enough having to run iTunes just to access Ping.

iCloud has similar problems and unless Apple changes it, it will fail like all of the company's previous internet efforts.

There are two parts to iCloud and one is the syncing of calendars, notes, reminders, and so on. This mostly works, although I've had to turn it off on my iPad, but that's another story. It is the online file storage that Apple has got completely wrong and it must change significantly if it is to be useful.

The problem is that Apple has simplified and locked down online storage to such a degree that it is unusable. Run TextEdit for example, and you can store files online in iCloud. No other application can access those files, only TextEdit. Run Preview and you can store files online in iCloud, but no other application can access those files. So TextEdit can't open a file stored by Preview and vice versa.

You can't access the files of either app on an iPhone or iPad because they don't have Preview or TextEdit. You can't access the files by logging in to iCoud with a web browser, you can't access them from a Windows PC or an Android phone or tablet. You can't even access them from another Apple Mac unless you're logged in to iCloud with your own ID, which may not be possible if the Mac isn't yours.

Storing files online in iCloud is only useful for Pages, Numbers and Keynote. These are available on iOS devices and so can share files with the Mac. What's more, you have internet access through the iCloud website. There's an iWork section in iCloud that enables you to view your files and download them or even upload files. (iWork is another abandoned internet service.)

I see no reason to use iCloud for file storage except for rare occasions where I want to work on the same file in Pages, Numbers or Keynote on my Mac and iPad at the same time. This is actually quite rare. To make internet services useful Apple has to open them up. All apps with iCloud access should be able to see all file stored on iCloud. There should also be access to your files through a web browser, the ability to restore deleted files or even previous versions of files. Other services do this, why can't Apple?

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Problems opening text files on Mac and Windows

Computers and software are far more intelligent these days than they ever were in the past, but sometimes they can still be very frustrating. How hard can it be to open a text file stored on the disk drive? It turns out that it can be a lot harder than you might think. I've just spent the last quarter of an hour trying to open a text file and it was harder than it should have been.

The problem was that the file, a plain text document with a .txt file extension, had been created on Windows. I can't remember whether it was in Microsoft Office or LibreOffice, but it had been saved as plain text as a .txt file. I wanted to open it on my Mac and that's where things started to go wrong.

Double clicking the .txt file opened it in the default application, which is TextEdit. Now TextEdit is a handy little word processor/text editor, but it messed up the file. The problem was that dashes (-) and apostrophes ('), and possibly other characters too, came out as foreign letters with accents, making the document all wrong. Changing the font didn't help and there didn't appear to be any way of correctly loading it. I suppose I could have copied the characters, pasted them into a search box and replaced them, but I wanted to open it correctly in the first place. TextEdit couldn't do it.

I tried TextWrangler, which is really a programmer's text editor, but seeing as it was plain text anyway, I tried it. It was wrong. I then tried Bean, a handy word processor that requires little disk space or memory, which is useful. On opening the text file a window appeared asking which character set I wanted to use. There was a pop-up list of character sets and a preview box showing the text. It didn't take long to work out that Western (Windows latin 1) was the one that was required. Selecting this opened the text file correctly.

I wondered what LibreOffice on my Mac would make of this plain text file. That turned out to be harder than expected too. Right clicking the file and selecting Open With, LibreOffice would only allow me to import it into a spreadsheet. On the plus side, it did recognise that it wasn't a standard file and it offered a list of character sets to choose from and a preview pane to show what it looked like.

To get LibreOffice to open a plain text file in LibreOffice Writer isn't that obvious. You have to start LibreOffice and click Open. In the Open dialog click All Files and there is a long list of file types. You have to ignore the obvious Text Documents entry and scroll further down the list. The file types are then organised by application. You have to select Text Encoded in the text document section and not the spreadsheet section. What's more, you have to select Text Encoded and not just Text. Selecting Text, even in the word processor section still opens it as a spreadsheet with every word in a different cell. You must choose Text Encoded. It is then opened in the word processor and you have a choice of character sets.

Sometimes things are harder than they should be.

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Is a 7in iPad possible?

The court battle between Apple and Samsung is likely to continue for some time yet. One thing that has come to light is that Apple has been seriously considering a 7in iPad. You can see the email in this CNET article here, and apparently some people at Apple were in favour. It all stems from a blog someone wrote about the iPad not being portable enough and that the 7in format was superior.

I have a Google Nexus 7, a 7in screen tablet, and the iPad, a 9.7in screen. So which is better?

Neither is better and they are both different. A 7in tablet is in many ways superior to a 10in one, but in some ways a 10in one is better. I like both, which might seem like I'm sitting on the fence, but it's like asking which is better, my desktop PC or my laptop. They are both good in their own ways and I use them for different purposes.

The Google Nexus 7 is a great tablet and it is smaller, lighter, easier to hold and more portable than the iPad. It actually fits in the pocket of the trousers I'm wearing right now (but don't ask me to bend over or sit down). It certainly fits a jacket, coat or bag. If I wanted to go somewhere with a tablet, it is the one I would choose. If I want to read a book, it's the one I prefer. It is better for many apps like books, news, email, notes, reminders, calendars, and so on. This is all because it is small and these apps suite the small screen.

The iPad is better for apps that need more screen space, such as Pages (word processor), Numbers (spreadsheet), iPhoto (photo editing), GarageBand (music editing) and others. Apps like these benefit from a large screen and they just wouldn't work as well on a 7in one.

It is interesting to see how Android phones are growing in size and I'm leaning a bit towards this myself. I'm wondering if something a bit smaller, but more portable might be better. Something like a Samsung Galaxy Note. There's a new one coming out soon and it is rumoured to have a 5.8in screen. Now that's big for a phone and some people may find the idea of holding it up to their ear ridiculous, but to me it's more like a tablet that fits my pocket, but lets me make the occasional phone call too.

I have an iPhone and it's far too small. I use the apps so much and the phone so little that I would prefer something with a bigger screen. The screen is cramped and the text is so small on some apps I'm struggling to read it, so I hope the iPhone 5 is bigger.

I think there is a place for large tablets like the iPad, but also room for smaller, more portable devices too. Being half the size and half the weight of an iPad makes a big difference in your hands.

Will there be a 7in iPad? Only Apple knows the answer to this. Steve Jobs said no, but that was a long time ago and if the 7in market continues to grow then we may well see a 7in iPad.

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Outlook is the new Hotmail

Hotmail has been given a makeover, no make that a complete redesign from the ground up. Yesterday I logged into Microsoft's new outlook.com site and it is basically a completely new interface for Hotmail. Everything is there that was there before, only with a new look.

It seems to have permanently switched me to outlook.com and now I get it even when I enter hotmail.com into my browser. Not that I would want to go back to the old style web mail, but it would be nice to have a choice. Maybe there is a link somewhere to get back (OK, just found it, it's on the gear icon menu), but I actually prefer the new style.

It is very plain, very simple, and very clean. It is obviously designed to fit in with Windows 8 and it looks just like a new Start screen app. There is already a Windows 8 Start screen email app that does Hotmail and this simply gives Hotmail through a web browser the same look and feel.

Give it a try, go to outlook.com and switch to the new Hotmail, or Outlook as it is now called.

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