Author Archives: Tom

The iPad 1 – Marco.org

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iOS 6 dropped support for the first-generation iPad “iPad 1”, which was sold from spring 2010 through spring 2011. In other words, everyone who bought an iPad at least 19 months ago has an iPad 1, and their unsubsidized, non-contract, $500+ tablet is going to grow much less useful over the next year as apps start to require iOS 6. This has naturally angered a lot of iPad 1 owners.

via The iPad 1 – Marco.org.

This is a great write-up on Apple’s move to drop support for the original iPad. However, I’d say we have a lot more useful life in our old 1s than a year. Everything you can do on your iPad today you’ll be able to do next year and after. You can’t get the shiny new apps and certainly many updates will leave you out, but the apps that you use today will still be going strong next year and after. For the things you do with your iPad now, it will still work next year.

That said, I’ll certainly be looking into a new model soon… mini maybe? Mini and a 4…? As Marco points out, Apple incents us to upgrade to get the great new features, and I’m certainly ready for some of those. Our iPad 1 will still see plenty of use here though, with a couple of kids to fight over it for Netflix and FB and the loads of games that I always find in the multitasking list.

I guarantee you that my kids don’t give a rat’s derrière about what version of iOS it’s running. In fact, this whole discussion would merely warrant an extended eye roll and ‘daaaaad, omg, what EVER.’

Verizon Subsidized Unsubsidized iPhone 5

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Verizon Family Plan Vs. Share Everything

I currently have the Verizon Family Plan with 1 iPhone 4 and 2 basic phones for the kids. They love them and don’t need smart phones (yet). Our usage is like this  (averaged over 6 months):

  • 130 minutes talk
  • 1800 texts (did I mention they’re two teenage girls?)
  • 50 MB data

We share 700 minutes talk and have unlimited texting. I have a grandfathered unlimited data plan, which I obviously don’t use much. Most of my data usage is over wifi at home. However, I wonder how much that might increase with LTE speeds.

In order to get a subsidized iPhone 5 I would have to make two changes to my plan:

  • Switch to a Share Everything plan
  • Drop the unlimited data

Quite honestly I would drop the data. Whatever Verizon. But here’s the sticky bit. Moving from the Family Plan to Share Everything with the lowest amount of ‘shared’ features will cost me $30 per month more. And this won’t buy us anything new. The kids won’t use any shared data. We’ll have  unlimited minutes, of which we’ll still use about 130. If we do move the kids to smartphones, that’s another $40 per month each.

So… If I buy an iPhone at retail, I can keep our plan as-is. The upfront cost is $650 (using the 16 GB for comparison) and over the course of two years, I would come out about $400 ahead (whichever model I choose). And, I wouldn’t be under contract. Disincentivized much?

I don’t know about the long term, but right now buying the unsubsidized iPhone 5 and taking the $400 savings from Verizon seems like the way to go.  I suspect at some point something will tip me to needing to change my plan and they’ll nab me. I just hope by then one or more of the pre-paid carriers are ready to step in and get some business.

Disclosure Indicator or Detail Disclosure

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I’ll post this just to show how wet I am behind the ears… When setting up a bunch of TableViews for lists and detail views, I came to need both the Disclosure Indicator and the Detail Disclosure. I understand when one is used vs. the other, but wasn’t familiar with working with them in code.

The long and short of it is, the Disclosure Indicator is pure eye candy. There is no callback, no way to create an IBAction for it (even if you press the control key really hard…) nothing. You just handle the row taps like any other:

tableView: didSelectRowAtIndexPath:

Detail Disclosure gets a shiny action all it’s own, built in to every NSTableViewController as part of the delegate:

tableView: accessoryButtonTappedForRowWithIndexPath:

I guess the 3d look of the Detail Disclosure vs. the flat Disclosure Indicator is a clue, but sadly it was lost on me for too long as I was working through so much else.

Fresh Start

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After having my old site hacked and blacklisted, I decided the most expedient cure was the old slash and burn. I may try to recover the old posts from a db backup, but since the, ahem, newest, was over a year old, I don’t see a lot of value in spending the time.

If you’ve still got me in your RSS from my RoR days, you may want to change channels. I may post occasionally on RoR, but mostly for now anyway, the topics will revolve around iOS. After several fruitless years in the Apple Developer program, I finally got off my duff and started an app for real. It’s been great, and I’m looking to post some notes on things I’ve sorted out along the way.

There’s already a ton of great documentation (thanks SO!) but sometimes it seems I have to assimilate a multitude of notes to patch together a solution. I’m looking at you, DatePicker, NSDate/NSTimeZone/NSCalendarComponents and Core Data and NSPredicate…