If you try to update some of your Mac apps then you might receive the following error message…

Unfortunately App updates don’t appear to be fully working for some apps and the message that Apple are providing definitely is the wrong message. Am I sure I didn’t purchase Clarity with another Mac AppStore account? Yes, quite simply I only have ONE AppStore account, so the error message Apple are displaying is definitely incorrect.

Just to verify I pulled up my purchase history for the same account and it shows I purchased Clarity on 1st February 2011…

Let’s hope it’s not a wide spread problem and Apple sees it and fixes it soon!

That’s a lot to live up to! Let’s see how well The Daily has done in living up to it’s claim.

So how good is it?

Well, the first thing I need to tell you is that it’s only available in the United States of America. Anyone outside of the US of A will not be in much luck. You can get around Apple’s bureaucracy and create a US iTunes store account, login and then download but that’s a lot of hassle for the regular person.

I gave The Daily a try to see what all the hype was about and you can see in the screenshots below what it looks like.

Opening The Daily you’ll see the following for the first time

So far so good until you now start to try and actually do what they want you to do and that’s read the newspaper…

Unfortunately as you can see from the above screenshots you most of the images don’t load for each article, and you might as well be reading The Daily in plain text in a text editor. In-fact you would be much better and have a much richer content by just opening up Safari and going to the web to read an article on a news website.

Getting past the “We’re only going to provide it to US customers” which is a big hurdle to overcome, I can really on say so far that trying to read the articles is troublesome at best. The navigation (carousal) that you can spin to get to the next news article is slow, the animation is very jerky and makes you long just to have an index page where you can just tap a photo that doesn’t try to over do the animation.

That said, if I could get past the above problems, there’s then the other problem of the news content is only updated on a daily basis (like a newspaper). I’m sorry but that’s not good enough. If I want to read a newspaper then I would go out and buy one. When it comes down to news you want to get the up to the minute news, so for me Twitter, blog sites and news websites are still going to be my main focal point in getting the latest news.

All in all with not being able to read The Daily as you’re supposed to, I’m glad News Corp have provided The Daily free as a trial. I really can’t see many people signing up for the subscription model unless they sort out these problems.  People crave news now, they want it when they want it.  This is why there is a decline year on year for newspaper sales, and I think it shows that News Corp just don’t understand this theory and why they’re publication circulations are down year on year.

I’ve been finding Dropbox a very good system until today, and I’d like to explain why suddenly I’m reconsidering cloud computing.

Last week I received a new credit card and I did what usually do and that’s update the information into my secure eWallet. The eWallet file is now on Dropbox and when I save this, it should then replicate it to my MacBook Air, which in turn when I sync eWallet to my MacBook Air from the iPhone and iPad, then transfers to these devices and all should be great. A perfect experience! Well I updated the credit card details including my PIN as it’s a new pin and I couldn’t remember what it was, synced my iPhone and iPad to the MacBook Air this morning then went out to do some shopping.

I did my shopping and reached the checkout and was ready to pay for the products I was buying, whipped out my iPhone and opened up my secure eWallet and……CRAP! The Credit Card isn’t showing in eWallet! What happened?! I know it was there because I checked it over several days on my PC. Thankfully I had another Credit Card I could use and was able to remember that PIN but it seriously made me think about how I synchronise between computers to the cloud.

I remember I made a whole host of other changes last week to my eWallet and needless to say these changes aren’t there either. Unfortunately I can’t remember what all the changes were, so now I’m in trouble. I checked Time Machine and these changes weren’t on the Mac, so it looks like either:-

1. The PC didn’t write the eWallet file to Dropbox
2. The PC did write the eWallet file to Dropbox but at some point when I opened it on the Mac it took that as a newer file and overwrote it without downloading the update to the Mac

Either way it’s not good. Looking at the Dropbox Events I see that the eWallet file was modified but unfortunately unlike Windows Live Sync, DropBox doesn’t have detailed logs on which computer modified the file.

I’m going to have to scrutinise Dropbox more carefully now when saving files as it looks like it isn’t synchronising as I would have hoped between devices.

Many other UK banking apps are limited to viewing your account statements and provide no additional features for managing your account and making payments.

Obviously it goes without saying that you need to have a First Direct bank account of some sort to use the service and be registered for First Direct internet banking.

The First Direct app has been designed very well, uses your same Internet Banking credentials and is very fast and sleek. All in all a great looking app!

[First Direct iTunes App Link]

We will be working on the Android and iPad My3 apps early next year. No confirmed dates at the mo. Will keep everyone posted.

There is already an iPhone app available although it really doesn’t do much other than give you a portal opening to the My3 page which then opens up in a separate Safari window.

It will be interesting to see if this is just a port of the iPhone app or whether it will have more features than the current iPhone app.

3 are embracing the new mobile devices quite quickly and are now selling iPad’s and Android phones to compliment the iPhone 4.

UltraEdit is a favorite app for many Windows developers and HTML website developers and was first released in 1994 as the main alternative to Notepad on Windows.

I for many years have spend countless hours manually editing HTML code and developer code in UltraEdit and although there are equally a lot of apps on the Mac already like TextMate, BBEdit, TextWrangler and TextEdit, it’s a refreshing site to see a hardcore text editor like UltraEdit make it over the battlefield to the Mac.

It took a massive fifteen years but it’s finally here.

UltraEdit offers advanced find and replace functionality such as column-based find and replace, both inside and across files. Unlike most editors that support searching only open files, UltraEdit will search directories and subdirectories, with support for regular expressions (Perl and Unix flavors).

UltraEdit for Mac has been released as version 2.0, with most of the same features as the Windows version 16.x.

UltraEdit for Mac runs on all OS X systems 10.5 and later (Leopard and Snow Leopard), with support for Intel-based processors only. You can buy the Mac version for $79 or a multi-platform license for $99.95, switch from a Windows version to Mac for $49.95, or upgrade the Windows version to multi-platform for $79.95.

Now to be quite honest (and to defend the purchases/money spent) this includes apps for the iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad over several years. It also includes some magazine subscriptions although mostly not as most of mine are through Zinio and don’t go through the iTunes AppStore.

When you look at the price of what you’ve spent so far it really does hit home. Maybe this year I should start pulling back on how much I spend on the AppStore in 2011.

Do you have a New Years Resolution to cut down on what you eat and exercise more? If so, RunKeeper could be for you and best of all it’s free throughout January 2011!

RunKeeper uses the GPS technology found in the iPhone to track your fitness activity, giving you comparable results to an expensive GPS watch at a fraction of the cost. Now, you can also enter your activities manually, including your treadmill runs too!

The intuitive and easy-to-use interface of the app makes it easy to track how far you went, how long it took, what your pace/speed was, how many calories you burned, and the path you traveled on a map.

Once your activity is completed, the data is synced to the RunKeeper website (www.runkeeper.com) where you can view a history of all of your activities, and cumulative totals of all of your vital stats. You can also share your progress with friends by posting your activities to Facebook and Twitter, and creating a profile page that allows people to view all of your public activities.

The BBC app is beautifully designed for the iPad and works in both Portrait and Landscape mode with news index categories that can be flicked left or right to rotate through the news in that section.

You also have the ability to watch BBC News 24 live through the app.

The BBC app is an online news easer, not offline like a lot of RSS news readers, so you do need a high speed Internet connection, either 3G or WiFi (for video playback).

The BBC app is great but it does have a few teething problems that hopefully will be fixed in a future update.

Problems found

1) On initial launch I received a green screen where the news category index should appear. Power cycling the iPad will resolve this. It only happens some times in Portrait mode.

2) intermittently if I try to play the BBC News Live Feed I am greeted by a message saying streaming is not possible outside of the UK, yet I’m currently in the UK on a WiFi network. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This might be an over capacity problem possibly.

Other than that, the news app is a great addition and well designed for the iPad! Brits just now have to wait for Sky to create an iPad app to have the news complete.

Still loving Gowalla over Foursquare even though its the under dog, it also has much nicer designed pins and buttons too

For checking into over 1000 places, I’ve also earned myself a Epic Voyager pin

Unfortunately Google are still taking the stance to install apps by default to the main internal memory when purchasing and downloading apps from the Market Place, but you will have the ability once an app or a game is installed to manually move each one to the SD card.

Although this is a welcome move and means you don’t need to jail break or install Apps2SD, it’s still a manual process which isn’t great.

I really hope Google would consider giving you the option when you install to always install to SD but override it to Internal Storage Memory if you so wished. For advanced/technical users this change we’ll see in Froyo isn’t a problem, but for the standard user that might not fully understand the consequences, they would still fill up their internal memory quite quickly whilst installing apps.