By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit

Apple Stuff

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a trailer for a BBC outline on Steve Jobs over the weekend, with a description of Jobs taking a gift Mac to Sean Lennon's birthday in New York and working with Sean and Andy Warhol on the floor of the apartment with other members of the glitterati looking on. The program apparently airs on 5 October.

With Apple setting up data centers all over (we reported last week on plans for one in Hong Kong), Julie Kuehl on The MacObserver has information on Apple's purchase of land in North Carolina for a second solar farm. The first is to produce some 20 MW and the new one will double capacity.

What a sauce. We hear sometimes of liberties that Thai retailers take, like insisting on 3% for credit card purchases, despite this now being illegal here, but there is a report in an item by Simon Sage on iMore of a Sprint retailer who insisted that any sale of an iPhone 5 had to be accompanied by an accessory bundle of around $80. Sprint denied all knowledge and were said to be investigating.

In a Tweet Richard Barrow let readers know that on Saturday "Prices of iPhone 5 at MBK this afternoon were higher than expected: 16GB 36,500 Baht, 32GB 40,500 Baht & 64GB 44,500 Baht" - I was going to wait anyway.

Last week we mentioned the first reports about what the A6 chip in the new iPhone was and some of the implications. There has been some more analysis and Daniel Eran Dilger on AppleInsider reports that this processor has 3 GPUs and 2 CPUs. There is a closer look at the processor with some useful images and some more speculation as to what the future may hold.

Also new was the Lightning connector and information from Neil Hughes on AppleInsider tells us that the device includes an authentication chip, so don't expect 3rd party solutions just yet.

I have had an app on the iPhone for a couple of years that shows me all the LaTex commands. For many people that may draw a blank, but this is used by a lot in the academic field for typesetting thesis work: a very powerful set of commands that makes sure the standardised output is of a really high quality. I used something like this when editing a graduate handbook back in the 1980s (some commands looked like forerunners of html).

Recently an app that allows complete setting up of a manuscript using LaTex has been released for the iPad. TexPad is not cheap at $8.99 and works without an internet connection, although there are some valuable, additional online features, such as cloud typesetting and Dropbox integration.

The developers have a useful explanation of how the app was created and some of the limitations they had to work with. This is sure to hit home with some.

I was sent to an Android fan page -- Android Authority -- at the weekend by a posting on FaceBook.

I watched a video made by a rather biased young man (iPhone: the device we love to hate) who dropped the two devices (Galaxy thing and iPhone 5) from a number of heights. The Samsung came off worse, so he tried the iPhone one more time, but still it was undamaged. The test was so unscientific as to be worthless and I wrote a comment about it which I put on the website. Apparently I was told in a message that the same guy had done this with the iPhone 4S and that did break, so he was hoping for a repeat.

Next morning I was given a link in an email to another test (although just of the iPhone) by iFixYouri that is on YouTube. It took several drops to cause any damage of the white iPhone 5 used, and the last one which did crack the screen, but did not break the phone, was not so much a drop, more a gentle throw to the ground from above head height. The first comment below was, "iFixYouri". It's more like "iBreakYouri". I am sure we are going to have a host of these copycat drop videos.

However, there may be a quality control problem as some owners of brand new, out of the box iPhones are finding scuff marks on the sides Mikey Campbell reports on AppleInsider. These need replacing immediately and a check made as to why they are being put in boxes in this condition. The images with the article make it look almost as if they had gone through an Android Authority test.

Later in a Twitter chat with Richard Barrow we discussed Maps and the App store on the iPad (not the same on the iPhone) and in a discussion about the iPhone 5 he mentioned panoramas. For the life of me I had thought that was iPhone 5 only, but when he told me it is iOS 6 I had a look right away.

In the Options section there is a Panorama button and that brings up a panel on the screen. We take a photo by panning with the camera button pressed and there is a warning if it is too fast. The first result was a mess, but the second one a few seconds later was quite good in a poorly lit room. I already have a number of panorama apps, but it will be interesting to see the output. That first successful image was 7904 x 2332 (18.4 MP) and was 11.73 MB.

When looking at it in Aperture (I used PhotoStream) I saw that it is possible to change the order of the metadata sections, but clicking and dragging. With the 3.4 update to Aperture that appeared last week there were a number of changes including to sharing photos. When I started it after the installation there was a new registration panel and I hoped for a few seconds that this would mean my earlier purchase of the software would be recognised in the Mac App Store. No such luck.

Back on the iPhone, one of my favourite features, especially these days, is the camera and I am interested in the improvements that have been included in the iPhone 5. Leanna Lofte on iMore has a complete review of this feature and writes that there are "noticeable improvements to the hardware of the the camera" although some of the images she includes on the web page look a little under-saturated: that may just be the web images of course. Leanna doubled up on this on Sunday with a comparison between the cameras on iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. One interesting point that confirms my comment above was that "the iPhone 4S photos are much warmer." She concludes, "there isn't that big of a difference between the cameras on the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5." So an upgrade just for the camera may not be worth it.

On the other hand, the iPhone 5 is faster -- much faster -- than the 4S and Allyson Kazmucha on iMore puts the two through some tests (real tests) which are quite revealing.

I wrote email last week to Glif who told me that a new version of the iPhone tripod attachment was to be developed and this weekend I saw in an article by Matthew Panzarino on The Next Web that this has now been announced for $20. As the iPhone is not here just yet, I can afford to wait, but this is such a valuable tool that I will be buying one as soon as my new iPhone arrives (whenever that may be).

Half and Half

Other Matters

I was looking for comments on Apple Maps on a number of sites and noticed that Josh Ong was shown as contributor: the China Editor of The Next Web. I had been used to his contributions on AppleInsider and thought they had tailed off. AppleInsider do not list contributors (like CNET, say) and the search of "Josh Ong" revealed nothing, so I guess he has moved on.

Those wonderful tablet things from the direction of Microsoft are beginning to come closer to being offered for sale and Sean Portnoy reports on the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 which will have a price tag of $799 as well as a keyboard. How do they think they are going to make inroads with that price.

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Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.