Airpods Order and Other Stuff

Air Pods Order has been placed

This morning I’ve put in an order for the Air Pods. It’s hard to understand why after this amount of time they are still hard to come by. The delivery date proposed is 9th of June. I’d like to think that they’re going to under promise and over deliver. I do have some Bluetooth earbuds already, but they have a wire going between the two. I find this wire particularly annoying when it’s rests upon the back of my neck. Also I’m not getting the best use out of Siri by having non-Apple earbuds. I do have the wired Apple earphones, but having that wire dangling down to the phone is also pretty annoying.

Cheaper Car Play

I’d really like to complete the circle, as it were, by having a Apple Car Play device in the car. Since I was last looking at the price of one of the devices, a Panasonic, the radio has reduced in price slightly. Before when I was looking, it seemed like I was going to have to spend around about €500 and now I can see it priced at €384. Plus what ever it costs for an extra cable needed. I’m not keen on the idea of having to add special connections to make it work with the car. There’s something you have to do to make it work with the steering wheel controls. It seems it is also necessary to add a GPS antenna which will look slightly out of place if I put into the front dash of the car. It is also necessary to add a microphone and I’d need to route wiring cables for the microphone. I could put the microphone up near the sun visor. It can also be possible to put the microphone just behind the steering wheel and maybe that would look slightly less intrusive. In any case, I really don’t fancy the idea of going to pull apart parts of the car. These things, when you pull them off they never seem to go back just the same way as before. The advantage of having car play would be proper integration with the car radio which you don’t get with the manufacturer version. At the moment when I connect up with Bluetooth using the iPhone I can’t do the hey Siri trick. For some reason or other when I do that it seems to want to make a phone call. It got so annoying with the way it worked that I stopped using Bluetooth and always connected using the cable. It would be nice also if when I reconnect the phone to the car if it would remember what it was I was playing last. Even though I’m nearly always listening to podcasts rather than music, the connected iPhone jumps to the music on the phone. I then have to go through the whole rigmarole of going to the podcast listening app I use, Pocket Casts to get back to playing the podcast. That is kind of annoying.

Sorting out applications on the iPad

I love trying out new applications and seeing if there is an app which will do something for me that other applications I already have can’t quite manage. I have a lot of interesting art applications for digital drawing and painting. As well as the digital art applications which you can use for manually drawing things I also have a number of art applications which will take a photo and do some automatic work to turn it into an artistic piece. Even though on many occasions the art application does most of the work there is still room for creative choices. It annoys me on the digital art forums within Facebook and I see “artists” who have just taken somebody else’s photo and slapped a filter or effect on top of it. For a start off I think the true artist would use their own photograph in the first place. There’s nothing wrong in using these iOS artistic tools if you use them in a creative way and combine them with other artistic choices. It’s easy to grab what you’ve created in one art application to put into another in order to continue working with the image. So why not mix and match.

Arrangement of Apps

There was some sorting out required because I keep adding these applications, playing with them for a little while and then forgetting what it is I can do with them. I like to have my application sorted out into groups or sections. It makes them easier to find though sometimes you could just as easily say it hides them away. Sometimes a good idea just to scroll past the first set of 16 applications in a group to see what else you’ve added and to dive back into one more time. It can be a good idea to put the new ones at the front for a while.