Comments for Alex Mace's Blog

Comment on XMPP Library by Dmitry

Dmitry — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:13:43 +0000

Hello Alex,

I’m just looking for XMPP bot I’m an IT guy and I want to use your XMPP driver with Phergie in our IT chat room for daily jobs – get stats from McAfee ePO, find IP, display tickets etc…. Just trying to get the thing together with no success for now. Could you write a couple of words just to get me in the right direction ?

Thanks

Dmitry

Comment on Royal Mail Online Postage by Dennis Walker

Dennis Walker — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:13:59 +0000

Hi, I can no longer find the option to top-up my online prepay account and after reading some of the comments on this site I can only assume RM don’t want me to top-up my prepay account because it free and their expecting me to update to the paid account and pay them a monthly fee, what you get for paying this fee is nothing, next thing you know they will be charging people just to enter a post office to buy stamps.
The last time I used a post office I had to queue for 20 minute just to send a small parcel. What I am doing now is weighing any parcels and buying my stamps from the local newsagent and trying to package parcels, so they fit into the post box.

Comment on Why I'm Selling My Nexus S by olivier

olivier — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:24:36 +0000

I’ve just bought a NS. I’ve considered the iPhone 4, but I have an iPad and iOS is just boring ….

Comment on Why I'm Selling My Nexus S by Ruth

Ruth — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:36:07 +0000

I got a G1 the day it came out and absolutely love it. I do find a lot of the problems that you’ve stated, but I couldn’t feel all right with myself ethically using an iPhone. The G1 is ancient now, so it’s annoying to hear that not much seems to have changed in the newer versions. I did upgrade when my original contract ended to an LG Touch or something, which had touch sensitive ‘buttons’, I think I had it for the same – about three months before I sent it off to envirophone. Why anyone ever thought touch buttons would be a good idea is beyond me. I use Steel as a browser which works good for me. I think a lot of it on an android phone is finding the right apps for yourself, which can be time consuming, and battery consuming =S
I really wish these developers would take it a bit more seriously. Android has all this potential that it’s not living up to. =(

Comment on Why I'm Selling My Nexus S by Rich

Rich — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:13:11 +0000

I’ve had an android phone for nearly 2 years now, and it sure does have some Grade A annoyances. My number one is probably the stupid ‘Back’ button – sometimes this goes back to a previous screen of the same app, sometimes it closes the app and just takes you to the home screen.

The failure to make sensible use of the physical buttons is a big missed opportunity. I don’t know what spazwunt thought that ‘Back’ non-functionality would be so great, when there is a separate ‘Home’ button anyway. Pressing back when you have been dumped on home does nothing of course – it could take you to the last app you were in, like a trail of activity that would actually be useful, but instead it does nothing, except very very quietly laughing at you.

I reckon the next most significant usability failing with the platform is lack of easy access to text messaging app. This is a mobile phone for chrissake, people send texts. I don’t know about the US where people are perhaps more friendly, but here in the UK half the time we don’t want to hear the bastard we’re communicating with, we want to text them.

And on Android, there simply is no way to easily bring up the text messaging app. My normal way is to go to the call log, press on the person’s name that I want to text from my call history, and then choose ‘send text message’. It’s another clumsy workaround, of which there are too many on this platform, and obviously it’s no good for people I text regularly but rarely call.

As for the stock browser – what a complete piece of cack that is. Fortunately some good alternatives are available – I use Dolphin, which is very good, with tabbed browsing, on-screen gestures and other stuff that makes it a genuinely useable mobile browser.

The other winning feature about my phone (HTC Magic) is its relatively small size. Also GPS and decent navigation apps on such a small phone are invaluable for finding a friend’s house when drunk at 3 in the morning.

The other great thing about Android is I LOVE WHINGING! And it certainly delivers on that front

Comment on Me and My Moustache by Ian

Ian — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:22:27 +0000

A whole month? Oh dear me.

Comment on Raduni Indian Cuisine by Paul

Paul — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:29:24 +0000

Hi there, I know this might be an old page, or news or site.. but i was wondering if you would be interested in writing a small testimonial for your experience at the raduni. I’ve just re designed their website as the previous one was really REALLY bad.

If so, you can drop it over to me via Email…

Thanks in advance

Comment on Using Amazon S3 to back up multiple Subversion repositories by Ciaran Dolan

Ciaran Dolan — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:21:01 +0000

Your page is unreadable due to that photograph as a background.

Comment on The iPad Buying Decision by Andrew Bate

Andrew Bate — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:51:45 +0000

Someone at work read a few weeks ago that an iPad had been taken apart and it already had the enclosure where the forward facing camera would go. I do love Apple product but it does drive me mad how they drip-feed features.

Comment on Royal Mail Online Postage by John

John — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:29:38 +0000

Couldn’t agree more with previous comments – there’s really no excuse for the new interface to still be this buggy when it’s been out for weeks. Here’s some of my current issues:

1) If I use a “favourite mailing” then it will NEVER auto-complete for me, I have to enter the address manually. I’ve given up trying to use favourites because of this, so as far as I’m concerned this part of the software effort was all a waste of time
2) Sometimes when I want to create a second mailing, the service gets changed – typically, it comes up as 39p instead of 61p – and it won’t let me edit the service to correct it, it steadfastly sets it back to 39p and I have to log right out to convince it that I want a large stamp.
3) I also had the same issue as a previous commenter re. return address length. Even after I convinced that to work, it frequently used to forget my return address from one session to the next, but that seems to be OK at the moment…touch the wood of the chief developer’s head…

Even on the few occasions it DOES work right it takes me far longer than it used to, with all those extra pages and button presses. WHY can’t it just remember the service and print format I used at the end of the last session?

I’ve also asked Royal Mail to PLEASE revert to the old, perfectly good interface – or at least offer it as a “classic” option – no response yet.

I strongly suspect that this is just a sneaky way of providing such a poor service that they entice customers off the free service and onto the paid SmartStamp service…