I just got an iPad recently, and being the fiscal conservative I am, I got a 2nd hand iPad1 with warranty left. Pretty good deal if I must say so myself.
So being my first apple product, I didn’t know what to expect, since theres always stories that apple tries to lock people into doing what they want them to do.
Unfortunately, it’s true.
You can’t share photos and songs, you can’t copy things to it without itunes, you can’t install apps that is not apple approved, you can’t plug a usb drive or a sd card to it (unless you pay more for the accessories), you can’t this, you can’t that. They even try to prevent you from using facetime or skype if you are using 3G, rather than wifi. Gah.
So anyway, it seems one of the easiest ways to have access to things is to install DropBox.
Essentially DropBox is a cloud computing model, where you would have a 2gig (and more) space online. You would then install a software on your computer and any other devices. So once you copy a file into the designated directory on your computer, the DropBox software will automatically upload it to the cloud space, and then you can download it with any of your other devices. The key thing is having it as seamless as possible, by having the directory recognised as one of the local directories.
Will have to test it out further, but from the looks of it, it should be good news! But as usual for apple, I would expect a lot of limitations. Don’t understand these apple fanboys.
Also, they have this referral program, where if you have someone open an account with DropBox, you and your friend would get an additional 250meg in your DropBox, up to a maximum of 8gig! Pretty decent indeed. Definitely worth a try for iPad users!
Recently my friend Cheryl Tay blogged about Mytransport.SG(news link), which is basically a mobile transport portal to cater for both drivers and public commuters.
The only problem with Mytransport.SG(mobile site) is that it is only accessible from a mobile browser. That means you can only access it from your mobile phone.
It consists of 12 icons, in a typical iphone look-a-like fashion, covering both public transport and car drivers.
At the moment, I personally use Google Maps on my android phone, as well as http://gothere.sg for searching locations, finding directions on public transport, general mapping and GPS. On top of that, I use SBSTransit’s Mobile Iris to find the estimated time for the bus services.
Mytransport.SG’s implementation here is basically a set of links to those sites. The benefit of the website would then be for people who do not know about those sites in the first place. One thing useful for me would be that they have all the taxi company’s contact number available there, since I don’t keep those numbers in my handphone.
It does seem a lot more useful for car drivers though. The 2 main data available is basically traffic info (by way of graphical display, live cams, real time news), and parking lot info. Traffic info is always useful, especially in car congested Singapore. Having real time info on where potential jams are at will definitely save tons of time!
Parking lot guide is basically a rehash of the electronic signboards around town. They display the number of lots available in the individual parking lots at the various buildings. Again, very useful for drivers, particularly on a weekend.
Then there are also miscellaneous information available on the site such as ‘Park and Ride’, Premium buses, COE info, and various links. Usefulness? Not much. I would probably prefer to surf such information on my computers than on a mobile site. There’s no immediate need for such info that I would want to research it specifically on my mobile device.
It is probably not as fast as having bookmarks to the dedicated sites such as mobile iris and gothere.sg, or even apps like google maps.
However, I have to say that the biggest advantage of this is to create a larger awareness about the existance of such webapplications.. Most people I know are still not familiar with gothere.sg or mobile iris, or even just google maps. This site will definitely benefit those people.
