Web Warp Blog has been retired. For new posts please head to dmather.com.

Thursday 9 December 2010

Bear Grylls: The Bear Essentials iPhone App

Bear Grylls is the star of extreme survival program Born Survivor and Man vs Wild. This evening Bear Grylls unveiled his iPhone App at the Apple store in Regent Street, London. The app contains information on survival techniques such as building a fire and building a shelter. It also includes a variety of games to test you on your survival knowledge.

There is also a special section of the app for the Scouts. Bear Grylls is the Chief Scout in the UK. Bear described how his time in the Scouts put him in good stead to move on to the military and his career in survival.

The iPhone app aims to provide practical advice through text, pictures and videos. The app is coming soon to the iTunes store. You can follow Bear Grylls on Twitter here.

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Testing Chromium OS

Google's Operating System is highly anticipated by the computing industry. The integration with your Google Account, 'instant on' internet access and 'no-fuss' computing promises a new age for netbooks. The OS is actually a product of the Chromium Project, the open source project behind Google's web browser Google Chrome. Once complete Google reckon boot time will be around 7 seconds. Chromium OS is completely different to the existing main stream operating systems, it stores no information locally and is entirely based on a webbrowser (Google Chrome to be precise).

Although it isn't officially out yet as a completed operating system it's source code is available (for free) to download. To then create a working distribution requires skill, time and effort. Fortunately there are several ways to download distributions of Chrome in it's current state of development. The easiest (and the method I used) is to run Parallels on an Intel powered Mac. From the File menu choose 'Download Chome OS' and your ready to start using it! I was very impressed with the automatic download and installation.

You can also download a build of Chrome OS called Flow from Hexxeh. You can install it using Parallels or VM Ware Fusion 3 on a Mac or with VirtualBox on Windows, Mac or Linux. I would imagine that you could also install this using Microsoft Virtual PC, but I've not tried it out.

Let me know your experiences testing Chromium OS using virtual machines on Twitter: @webwarpblog.

Friday 3 December 2010

iOS 4.2 on the iPhone 3G

Apple have updated their iPhone operating system, iOS, to 4.2. This latest version advertising many new and exciting features. However, not all the new features work on all devices but Apple don't make it very clear which features work with which device. On their webpage: http://www.apple.com/ios/ they state: "Not all features are compatible with all devices. For example, multitasking, AirPrint, and VoiceOver are available on iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch (3rd generation and later). AirPlay and Game Center are available on iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch (2nd generation and later)."


This blog post aims to clarify the available features for everyone. The table below shows the features and their compatibility. As you can see the iPhone 3G doesn't really benefit with any new features although the iPhone 3G does get a speed boost with the new update.