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QR Code Vino




So are QR Codes going mainstream?

A few weeks back I mentioned how I had seen one for the first time on mainstream television. Now as I was opening a bottle of red wine (present from a friend) I noticed the QR Code on the back of the bottle.

I have found in the past that the iPhone is not the best phone for reading QR Codes and in the end I found that the best QR Code application was Optiscan.

Optiscan lets you create, scan and share QR codes straight from your device.

Having tried a few free apps, I found that if you have an iPhone 3GS then this app works the best. As the camera in the iPhone 4 is better, you can have more success with some of the free apps, however (as I have it already) I use Optiscan on my iPhone 4. I like how fast it is, how it can capture virtually all QR Codes I aim it at and the subsquent actions I can then take. For example it is very easy to e-mail my history of scans so I can use them on a desktop computer.

So though I have had very few issues with Optiscan with other QR Codes, I did find scanning the QR Code on the bottle quite a challenge. It took a fair few attempts to get it captured, but once I did it bought up a URL which then opened in the mobile browser.

Impressed it was a mobile version of the website and in French!

However one click and I was in the English version.

Now there wasn’t much on the site, no more than was on the bottle really.

However at least if I wanted to buy the wine myself I now had a record of it on my phone. Much easier with a QR Code than typing in an URL on the phone (which to be honest is the point of QR Codes really).

So that’s a TV programme on cooking, a bottle of red wine, wondering where my next encounter with a QR Code will be!

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Halftone

I recently reviewed this app on my e-Learning blog, it was good value then at 69p, however for this weekend Halftone is free, so well worth checking out.

What it does is take a photograph and convert it into a comic style image that can then be used on a blog, in a presentation, or on a print document.

Tthis is a nice simple cheap free app that allows you to create a vintage comic panel from one of your photographs in a particular style.

Get Halftone in the iTunes Store.

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Overpriced?

Is the iPad overpriced?

One criticsim I hear a lot about the iPad is that it overpriced. Someone recently said that you shouldn’t buy the iPad as it as too expensive.

Well £399 for the 16GB WiFi model is a lot more money that the £69.99 that you can buy an Android Tablet for from Amazon.

That isn’t really a fair comparison in my opinion, as it isn’t a proper Android tablet, as it’s not running Honeycomb and only has 2GB of RAM.

The Acer Iconia TAB A500 is a much fairer comparison, it costs
£349.96 from Amazon (though the list price is £417.80 which is more than the iPad!!!).

So you can not only buy a similar specified Android tablet for cheaper than the iPad you can also buy really cheap Android Tablets for less than £100 even from Asda.

So is the iPad overpriced?

Well yes the price is more than the price of Android tablets, so from that basic definition yes it is overpriced.

However though some people are price sensitive, price is rarely the only factor that we take into account when we buy something.

For example, very few people buy the value cola from the supermarket, most people will buy Coca-Cola or Pepsi even though it is more expensive.

Price is one factor to consider when buying something, but generally other factors come into play.

It’s the same with the iPad, though its price is more than the price of similar Android tablets, people buy the iPad because of factors other than price. Saying it is overpriced is irrelevant as the price is generally not the deciding factor when buying a tablet. This is echoed in the sales.

1.21 million Android tablets have been sold, and in the same time period 28.73 million iPads have been sold by Apple. These figures were derived from a recent article by John Gruber.

Breakdown by Google of Android devices in use by screen size. “Xlarge” is defined as any screen 7 inches or larger. By Google’s count, only 0.9% of activated in-use devices are tablets. Multiply that by the 135 million total Android “devices” that Larry Page announced last week during Google’s quarterly analyst call, and you get 1.21 million tablets. Compare that to the 28.73 million iPads Apple sold through the end of June.

This is not a small difference in sales, this is a huge significant difference in sales.

The reasons are probably varied, but price isn’t going to be a big reason. People buy the iPad for many different reasons and to say that the iPad is too expensive or overpriced says more about you than it does the iPad.


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150 Million Images

Number One

150 million images have been uploaded to the photo service Instagram have announced in their blog.

…we’re excited to announce that more than 150 million photos have been shared on Instagram and Instagrammers now share photos with one another at a rate of 15 photos per second. If you don’t yet have Instagram, you can find it for free, exclusively in the Apple App Store.

I really do like Instagram, it’s quick and easy to use and also importantly I think fun.

The filters, though nowhere near what you can do with pro tools such as Photoshop, are nice and to be honest with Instagram you are not trying to be a professional photographer, no you are messing about with an image and sharing it with friends.

As well as posting to Instagram you can share the link with Twitter, Facebook and upload the image to Flickr. You can also do Tumblr, Foursquare or even e-mail.

I use the images I have taken a fair bit too, by uploading them automatically to Flickr I can then use the Flickr embed code to add them to my blogs.

Welsh Castle

If you have an iPhone then do check out Instagram and have a play. If you have an Android phone, well maybe one day you will be able to join the fun!

Related Post: Instagram on the Desktop

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Foursquared Out

I can probably blame (thank) David for this.

I am now no longer using Foursquare and no longer checking in to places. Though depressingly at the time of writing I am still the Mayor of Morrisons!

After having a podcast discussion with David about it (over on the e-Learning Stuff Blog) I did question why I was using Foursquare, what I was getting out of it, and potential benefits to me. I also wondered what educational benefits there were with learners using such a service within college.

To be honest apart from the satisfaction in “earning” badges I didn’t really see much benefit from using Foursquare. Very few of my “local” friends were using it, so even if did check-in to my local Costa, as none of my friends were using it, I wouldn’t know they were there…. well I guess I could just look round!

At the end of the day, for me it was a game, that wasn’t really that entertaining and when the GPS failed to lock on was quite frustrating. After chatting with David, I started to use it less and then just stopped. Not missed it at all.

There is probably something to be said to learners checking into college and seeing if their friends are there, or their co-collaborators and meeting up, but not sure if Foursquare is the best tool for that. At least with something like Places on Facebook there is chat built in too.

So are you still on Foursquare and if so what are you doing with it, or getting out of it?


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How long….

Last night I needed to download a 364MB update file.

I was totally surprised that according to Safari that it was going to take nearly ten hours!

I knew it wasn’t my end as my connection was working fine. I even checked by downloading the 666MB iOS 4.3.5 update from Apple, and though it was nearly twice the size it only took three minutes from the iTunes servers.

Putting it down to the remote server, I left it to download overnight. Reminded me of the time when I was less fortunate and didn’t have the speed of fibre.

Came down the next morning to find that the download had failed to download properly.

So I set it go again, expecting that it would take a fair few hours again…

Nope did it in a couple of minutes!

Putting it down to the remote server having issues last night.

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Instagram on the Desktop

Playing around with Instagram today I found out about two desktop applications for the Mac that allow you to interact with your Instagram feed from your Mac desktop.

Neither allow you to post from the Mac (which is a pity) but both do allow you to “like” and “comment” on the images from your feed.

Uploading images is forbidden by Instagram which allows only uploads from mobile devices.

Instadesk

InstaDesk lets you not only browse your or your friends Instagram pictures, but easily explore the social graph and find new people to follow.

Instead, with InstaDesk you can browse beautiful pictures, newest uploads of your friends, or interesting people to follow. Furthermore, you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows.

Download Instadesk from the Mac App Store – £1.49

Carousel

Carousel is a simple, beautiful way to explore Instagram on your Mac in a minimal footprint. View your feed, popular photos, your photos, comment, like, save photos and much, much more. We’ve also implemented a full set of keyboard commands to make operation flawless and four wonderful themes to personalize Carousel to your liking.

Download Carousel from the Mac App Store – £2.99

Of course there are a few web based services out there that allow you to view your Instagram feed in a browser. However the couple I have tried are either not very reliable or are limited in how you can share feeds with non-Instagram users (not that you can do that with a desktop app).

Though Twitter is available in the browser, lots of people use Desktop Apps to access Twitter, these apps for Instagram may work for you allowing you to access your Instagram feed from your Mac rather than your iPhone.


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BookBook Case for iPhone

Clicking a link on Twitter I did enjoy watching this little video about an iPhone case.

Yes I know I need to get out more, but, well there is no but! I really need to get out more.

I do like this case and am tempted to get one for my iPhone, compared to other iPhone cases I didn’t think $59.99 was too bad a price, especially as it will replace my wallet.

The company also make similar covers for MacBooks and the iPad, but think I like the case for the iPhone best. Though you can the MacBook cover and the iPad cover on Amazon, you can’t at the time of writing get the iPhone case in the UK yet. Soon I hope.

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OneNote in the UK (finally)

Finally OneNote for the iPhone is now available in the UK.

If you work within a Microsoft Office ecosystem and have access to OneNote on your PC then this app will be a really useful addition to your iPhone.

Microsoft OneNote Mobile is an easy-to-use note-taking application for capturing all of your ideas and to-dos on the go, brought to you by Microsoft Office.

With OneNote Mobile, create searchable notes with text, pictures, bullets, and checkboxes. Then keep your notes in sync using free Windows Live SkyDrive cloud storage to access, edit and manage them from virtually anywhere, from your PC or almost any web browser.

Worringly it does say…

**Free for a limited time**

So get it now before it becomes expensive!

No idea why it was US only before, but geographical limitations on apps and services seem to be the norm these days.

By the way if OneNote sound a lot like Evernote then yes you would be right. Having immersed myself in an Evernote ecosystem, I probably won’t be using OneNote. Evernote is available on the iPhone and the iPad for instance, as well as native apps for Mac OS X, Windows and through the browser. However if a lot of people in my college start to use OneNote and we’re sharing notes then I may need to use it more, so pleased to see the iPhone App now available in the UK.

Get OneNote for iPhone from the App Store.