18.9.13

Mobile phone cloud storage have serious defects, learn more

In the past few years, I've used iPhone 4S and Lumia 920 phones. Apple and Microsoft have their clouds working quite well, and at first glance, it seems amazingly good and simple: you snap a photo with your phone, and bam, it syncs into cloud, and from there, to any device you so wish. Same works with new contacts, calendar, videos... no wait, it doesn't.

Apple does not support automatic syncing of videos to cloud from your device! You can publish them manually, see https://www.apple.com/icloud/icloud-photo-sharing.html

Microsoft SkyDrive doesn't sync 1080p videos, and with photos, it downscales them from 3552x2000 to lousy 1278x720 pixels, without notification! Before noticing this, I bought 100 gigs of space from Skydrive, and oh boy do I feel stupid now, I was ready to delete the photo originals! With world of 4G and fast Wi-Fi almost everywhere, this is just plain ridiculous. Well, ridiculous, as far as first world problems go.

You have to manually plug your Windows Phone (at least my Lumia) with USB-cable to PC, and copy your hi res photos and videos from there. With Apple, you can sync over local Wi-Fi but you have to start your iTunes first, or do the same USB-cable stuff as with Windows Phones.

Rant, rant, rant. Apple, Microsoft, is this the best you can do?

7.9.13

Free tip for map websites, especially for desktop use

Please show the street name when I hover the mouse over a road. It's driving me insane that I cannot make out the street name, and when I try to zoom in, you make the road name even smaller! I don't care if you have it in the driving instructions, I want to see the street names in the frigging map, is that too much to ask for a map?

Bing's mouse hover brings text "Drag to modify your route", yes, after thousand times using it, I know what it does. How about using that space to say "Street name: xxxxxxx. Drag to modify your route."?



Google Maps has done a bit better lately, they've enlarged the street names, but still, why not use the hover function? When I use it for navigation, it draws the blue line from point A to point B, and if you mouse over the street, it gives you instructions like Microsoft, please drag yaadidaa.

If you feel that most of the people wouldn't like this feature, please add it as an option I can change from the settings! Though I'm pretty sure no one would take offense if you could see the street name when you hover your mouse over it. Ngggh, sorry for the rant. At least it got me off my blog-hibernation.