Jul 27
MoggyAngry Birds, App Store, iPhone/iPod touch
Currently (as of 27th June ‘10 in version 1.4.0), there are 14 Golden Eggs to find in Angry Birds. This is comprised of 10 new levels, and 4 other eggs.
Screenshots for each are coming soon!
1. Tap a few times on the sun on the main menu level selector.
2. Press the “i” button on the main menu, and watch the credits. At the end is a golden egg.
3. Within any level, go to the help screen. Tap through the different types of birds, and a golden egg is at the end.
4. Level 1-8, tap the treasure chest a few times.
5. Level 2-2, use one of the blue birds to destroy the beachball.
6. Complete all the levels in Episode 1 (Poached Eggs) with 3 stars. This will earn you a golden egg.
7. Level 4-7, zoom out, and use the yellow bird to hit the egg which is hiding in the top right of the screen.
8. Level 5-19, zoom out and hit the egg which is hiding high in the air above the rocket.
9. Complete all the levels in Episode 2 (Mighty Hoax) with 3 stars. This will earn you a golden egg.
10. Level 6-14, using the ‘boomerang’ green bird, burst the gold coloured balloon in the bottom right.
11. In the Episode 3 level selector, scroll as far left as possible, as to the right of the Theme 8 levels is a golden egg.
12. Level 8-15, zoom out, and you’ll see the golden egg hiding beneath the catapult on the bottom left of the screen. Use a ‘boomerang’ bird to get it.
13. Complete all the levels in Episode 3 (Danger Above) with 3 stars. This will earn you a golden egg.
14. Level 9-14, zoom out and hit the golden egg hiding underneath the yellow helmet on the far right. See this post.
Jul 25
MoggyAngry Birds, App Store, Apple, Software, iPad
Sketchbook Pro (£4.99)
I love this app, and in many ways the best I have. However there are a couple of niggles that stop me from rating this 5 stars, and with any luck these will be addressed in forthcoming updates.
- when importing a photo for a new layer, there is no way to rotate, resize or adjust the imported photo on the canvas, which is very restricting
- a crop tool would be nice, rather than the standard 4:3 canvas
- a text tool, so we can type into images
The great thing is that I apart from these things, I can’t find anything to complain about, as such. 
Tracking my finger is very good, the zoom is fantastic and best of all, I brought it when it was half price!! Horrahh!
My rating: 4 out of 5
Pages (£5.99)
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Pages app, and recommend it, but here are a few annoyances that I would like to see addressed in future updates:
- being able to save and upload to MobileMe iDisk. Currently you to sync via iTunes, or use the buggy iWork.com service.. Or email.
- being able to print wirelessly… Just make it work!
- ability to import/add more fonts to the iPad library.
- a way to draw directly (ie. Diagrams, pictures, etc) into the app. This would be really helpful for lecture note taking.
Other than that, it’s very polished and good to use.
My rating: 3 out of 5
Angry Birds HD (£2.99)
The HD version couldn’t have been executed better, it really is brilliant. I was effected by the previous version that kept on crashing on opening when connected to the internet, but it was fixed quickly which shows great feedback response. However, I have two digs with the HD version…
1. Is it really worth £2.99? The original app is 59p, which is five times less, but I wouldn’t call this game five times better.
2. Thanks, your making my iPhone feel really annoyingly small!
My rating: 4 out of 5
The Metro (free)
Right, the good…
- free, very intuitive and easy to use
- really takes advantage of the iPad’s large screen
- not very buggy, simple and effective.
The bad…
…the Metro can’t report news for ****. The articles seem to be written completely by blind, brainless idiots who I’m surprised can only just string together a sentence, most of which are about whatever new errand Cheryl Cole or Russell Brand are up to.
If you are looking for quality journalism for free, just head over to the newly designed BBC news website, and add the icon to the home screen. Simple.
My rating: 3 out of 5
Jul 25
MoggyAngry Birds, App Store, Mobile Phones, iPhone/iPod touch
Golden Egg 14 is found within the latest Angry Birds update with Theme/World 9.
Head over to level 9-14. The level looks like this:
Zoom out:
The golden egg is found underneath one of those yellow helmets to the far right of the screen. The picture above shows you where it is.
Use the green ‘boomerang’ bird to hit it, as the two red ‘fat’ birds can’t travel that far.
And this is the 14th Golden Egg level:
If you are struggling to complete it, hit the structure next to the second horizontal wooden pole up on the left of the structure. That should take the whole thing down.
Enjoy!
Not a clue what this post is on about? Angry Birds is a hugely popular game for iPhone, Nokia Ovi phones and the iPad. The game contains a number of hidden ‘golden eggs’ or the gamer to find, unlocking hidden bonus levels – typically with impressive designs! The first 9 golden egg locations can be found out here.
Jul 22
MoggyEducation, Geography, Life, Politics
Of all the realistic and possible ways of governing a country, it is clear that a capitalist democracy is the best, and many would agree.
However democracy in the UK has it’s limitations, and I intend to make my thoughts clear here. You may remember that in early May, we had a general election. People voted in their millions, all picking MP’s from their constituencies to help govern the country. It worked, turns out the Tories got the most votes, but whilst doing so, lacked a majority, and instead took the Lib Dems in with them forming a coalition.
And now they are demanding five years of this. Great, an election with 29,691,780 votes, and not one of these actually voting for the coalition we got. Not to mention it was Nick Clegg who chose to join the Tories in coalition, shaping the future of the country – a decision so massive for the future, and was conducted by a man who’s party shares only 8.8% of the seats in the House of Commons.
Some people think that Proportional Representation (PR) is a good alternative to the current first-past-the-post system. And whilst it may deliver more proportional results for the winning party, PR increasingly opens up more opportunities for smaller political parties (such as UKIP, Green Party, BNP, Independents, etc.) who will gain more MP seats, reducing the number of the main political parties – meaning it will be even less likely for the main two parties, Labour and the Conservatives to get their crucial majorities.
The other reason for my dislike of PR is that voting in a general election will require you to indicate in a rank order who would like to see as your next governing party. This may be ok for some, but my idea of voting is to vote for the ONE person I would like to see in power, simple as that. In constituencies where political parties, such as the BNP, which you may highly disagree with – you will be forced to vote for them somehow in that rank order.
Not even to mention that given the votes in the 2010 election, the BNP gained twice as many votes (563,743) in the popular vote than the Green Party (285,616) did, so who would you expect gets the elected MPs? The Greens got 1, but the BNP got none. If these results were under proportional representation, the BNP could have ultimately got 2 or even 3 MP’s into the Commons for this government. Think of it like that.
Aside from PR, I think the coalition is doing well. It is about time that we had a strong government trying to structure a decent economic recovery.
However Monday’s news was the “Big Society” plans being announced by David Cameron. I admit that I am more a Conservative supporter than any other party, but this Big Society bullshit is really rubbing things in. I, as a citizen on this country, do not need to be told how to live my life – let alone being part of a voluntary group that takes control of certain public services – which I personally feel is an insult to those hardworking people that do this already as their paid job.
And then it raises the question about who is right for what job in the cabinet, and it doesn’t take long to see that what we see in some positions is clueless people making huge decisions about sectors they know nothing about. Take for example, Andrew Lansley, the current Health Secretary – who has never been a doctor, nor has ever studied medicine. The closest he gets is his father, formerly a pathologist. Therefore how are we meant to believe for a second that he knows what’s best for doctors and nurses in the NHS? Surely a better person to ask would be Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary… He was a GP before becoming an MP, and he read Medicine at university, but no, Fox now has a job controlling the armed forces – something he knows nothing today.
The same goes for Micheal Gove, the Education Secretary. Never a teacher, nor head teacher, examiner, schools governor, etc. The closest he gets is an arts collection and a wife whose a journalist – surely he’d be better suited as an advisor to the Culture and Media Secretary?
I could go on, and turns out Labour was even worse. Over the past 13 years they had charge, cabinet ministers dotted between jobs all over the place in different sectors, as if they were teenagers looking for work experience in different industries.
So this is it. Democracy, where the cabinet contains people that can only presume what’s best for the sectors the instruct. Great.
Jun 24
MoggyMac, Software, iPhone/iPod touch
The iBooks app is something I feel the iPhone has needed for a long time, and in this how-to post, I’ll be showing you how to make your own PDF iBook’s for the iPhone.
Ok, the first thing you’ll want to do is create your TEXT (.txt) file. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m going to start off by using a pre-made eBook (To Kill A Mockingbird) that can be downloaded from this website.
Open the file in Pages.
Once the document has opened, the first thing you want to do is open the Inspector panel. If you don’t have it open, use shortcut: Option + Command + I
We need to change a few things here. Observe the BEFORE and AFTER stages here:
The highlighted areas are those that need changing. Firstly, press the Page Setup button. This will bring up the dialog box below:
Select the Paper Size drop-down, and choose 3 1/2 x 5 (it’s near the top of the long list)
Hit OK and that’s that.
Going back to the Inspector window, change all the values of 2.54cm in the four margins boxes, to 0.5cm.
Lastly, uncheck the two tick-boxes next to Headers and Footers.
Now that is done, go to the main document and use these two shortcuts: Command + A, which will select all the text in the document, and then Command + T to bring up the Font dialog box.
The default font for .txt files is Helvetica, which is okay, but I prefer changing it to something more readable, something like Georgia. Also note that I have bumped down the font size to 10:
That’s the formatting done!
Your document should look something like this…
All that remains now is to export it, and sync it to your iPod touch / iPhone. To export, go to the File menu, and select Export…. This will bring up this dialog box. Select PDF, best image quality, and Next…
Save it to somewhere (it doesn’t matter where!) on your Mac, and then go ahead and drag the PDF file into iTunes. If you have the iBook’s app, next time you plug in your iOS device, the PDF will automatically sync. Done!
This is what it the book will look like on your iPhone:
May 29
MoggyApp Store, Apple, Technology, iPad, iPhone/iPod touch
Given that Apple announced the iPad in January, and it is now late May, and the shiny device has only just reached the UK, I am pretty irritated with Apple’s incompetence there. Despite this, I am very happy to finally see the iPad, and delighted that people can actually go use one, rather than just talk about them.
I have been rather quiet about my opinions on the iPad. Since it was announced, I have always said that the iPad has huge potential when the developers get their hands on the SDK, and will only do significantly well with the public at the right price. Now we can finally review those two things. Horrah!
I’ll start with addressing the many things people dislike about the iPad.
- Lack of flash support – In my opinion, this is something that I, if anything, am glad about. Flash is buggy and becoming a dead technology.. and I congratulate Apple in bravely progressing forward with the move. From a personal point, I honestly don’t use many flash sites these days – even I, as a web designer – don’t use flash in my designs.
- “Too much like an iPhone, just larger” – They have the same software operating system (to an extent), but thats about it. If anything its probably more like a MacBook than a iPhone. When you look closer – they are worlds apart, mostly because of the interaction element, just you wait to touchscreen full, non-mobile websites on the utterly gorgeous 9″ screen.
- “Not a computer” - I’ve said this time and time again. That’s because it’s not meant to be a computer. It’s a multimedia device, and in that, there is no need for USB ports, physical keyboards, massive speakers, etc. Too right, if it’s software was not iPhone OS, but Mac OSX and designed to function as a computer, then yeah, I’d be annoyed… but it’s not a computer!
- No phone function – well what are you going to do!? Hold the damn thing up to your ear? Yeah, you’ll look cool. If you are really desperate… there is a Skype app for you.
Talking of apps, I am very pleased to see some great names out there. My favourite iPhone game, Angry Birds, now has an Angry Birds HD for iPad. Newspapers such as the Guardian (free) and Murdoch’s Times (a tenner a month) are making their content available on the iPad. And this free IMDb app, sums up the whole 9″ touchscreen format, and I think if developers go down this route, the iPad has a very promising future.
But there are flaws, and annoyances. I am annoyed about the lack of camera, I would have liked to hear of better sound quality, and I am irritated by Apple’s constant going on about “HD movies on the iPad”. The iPad has a terrible 4:3 screen resolution of 1024×768, when the minimum for a HD quality video is 1280×720. Not good enough, Apple! Only say that when you give the iPad 1280×960 screen, please.
But my biggest gripe of all, the one that really matters – the price. Thanks to the clueless American mortgage lenders who initially started this whole mess, the dollar to the pound is terrible, and while many thought my price predictions were too high, they were for the most part, pretty accurate (give or take a few tenner’s). The cheapest iPad will set you back £429 (which is roughly the same as an iPhone 3GS on pay as you go) – and If you don’t already have an iPhone, I know for sure which I’d get first.
So would I get one? Put it this way – If I was given one, I would be delighted, use it to it’s potential and love it. If I had to buy one at my own expense from hard earned cash? Not at that price I wouldn’t…
And after all, this summer I intend to buy myself a new iMac. Money needs to be saved for that!
May 13
MoggyApple, Mac, Website
The other day I purchased a GelaSkin cover for my MacBook Pro – it was about £20 – and unlike most retailers, is actually designed for my non-unibody old MacBook! Woop! I decided to get this Union Jack cover – I’m so patriotic!
For those that don’t understand – GelaSkins, according to their website are “removable covers for protecting and customizing your portable devices. They feature stunning, photo-quality graphics ranging from fine art prints to contemporary urban images designed by our growing family of artists from around the globe. Stand out in the crowd with personalized protection from GelaSkins.”
I got mine today – and it looks great! The application was no problem at all, the design is brilliant (matching much of my other Union Jack memorabilia), and the skin comes off just as easy as it goes on.
Plus, I am happy to see so many more designs for every other person out there – trust me, there is something for everyone. You can browse the GelaSkins website, Amazon, or the site I got mine from – UrbanRetro. Prices vary a bit, but I spose it’s up to you!
Anyway, I’m out. Can’t be arsed with a full review, but a star rating? Dunno… maybe 5 out of 5?
Apr 29
MoggyBBC, Politics, Web Design, Website
With the General Election coming in a month, many of the news websites have fantastic interactive map guides to the constituencies and the political party each MP represents. Here is a guide to the 5 best maps online:
Summary: My favorite is The Times, followed by Sky. They are both accurate, to scale maps with detailed information on each constituency. The Times more so because of extra features (such as the predictions) and it seemed to run a bit faster for me.
Mar 07
MoggyApple, Keynote Event, Rumor, iPhone/iPod touch
In today’s strain of boredom, I had a look at Apple’s iPad pricing, and decided to work out what the most probable prices for the device will be when it gets released here in “late April” (cheers, Steve, you promised us late March back in January).
For starters, these are the confirmed US Dollar prices in America:
And then, I did a bit of Maths.
- Firstly, taking a direct exchange price into GBP at today’s exchange rate
- Then adding 17.5% VAT
- Then adding an average inflation based on other Apple products and their UK pricing
- Then making a logical decision of UK price points.
You can see all my working out in this PDF document.
And then, I finally came to these 6 price points. Lets see how close I am when the real prices get released 
Update (9th April ‘09): It’s been a month, and since then, the exchange rate has changed (for the worse!) from 0.661 to 0.651, meaning the prices could be a bit more that this. Having said that, I doubt it will make too much difference…!
Mar 06
MoggyBBC, Media, Politics, TV
Recently we have been hearing that there will be three live debates, featuring the three main political party leaders in the UK, broadcast live on TV, before the election day coming up this year (currently widely assumed to be May 6th).
The idea is based upon the similar American debates that happen on the other side of the Atlantic – and usually, a political strategy that has crossed the pond to us usually has me worried. But not this one…
To sum up for those who don’t know, here is a short quote about the debates from a Guardian news article:
The first programme, to be presented by ITN’s Alastair Stewart, will cover domestic affairs and come from the north-west. The second show, presented by Sky’s Adam Boulton, will cover foreign affairs and come from the south-west. The third, presented by the BBC’s David Dimbleby, will cover the economy – seen as the most important election issue – and will be broadcast from the Midlands.
And here are my main opinions:
- Firstly, the three debates are on three different broadcasters (starting with ITV1, followed by Sky News, and lastly the BBC), meaning there can be no ‘blame’ or ‘bias’ to a single broadcaster or host for a single show. I know it’s against broadcasting law to be politically bias, not just for the BBC, but for all channels in the UK, but I suspect Sky News will show their true right wing colours at some point… or maybe thats just me.
- I am also interested to see that none of the three debates will be held in London, but in varying locations across the country. I would like to see at least one set somewhere in the countryside, so people who don’t live in urban areas (which makes up rather a large proportion of the UK’s population) feel their opinions are heard.
- Which party will benefit most? For me, the Lib Dems. As mentioned on a Question Time debate a few days ago, the Lib Dems will be on the same level or debate as both the Tories and Labour. I suspect that a larger proportion of the mainstream public will change their viewpoints to the Lib Dems.
- I am also glad to see some of the ’strict’ rules put in place for the debates’ format. One that particularly grabbed my eye was the rule that the audience may not applaud during the live debate, and will only do so at the beginning at the end of the show. By not applauding, TV audiences will not be influenced to what the party leaders say based upon what the studio audience thinks. That to me, is a good thing, as the public needs to make their own mind up.
- I am, however, not happy at the reaction given by some of the smaller parties, such like The Green Party, UKIP, the SNP, etc. The thing is, these live debates are for the mainstream, large parties, which are their to promote a future prime minister, not to reinforce opinions of local MP’s – which is what these smaller parties need. Plus, the SNP and Plaid Cymru can bugger off, their policies have nothing to do with me living in England – don’t you dare say that their opinions need to be heard throughout the UK!
So, finally – my political opinion? Well, as I have made it clear before, I am more of a right-wing person, but I will promise myself to base my political opinion solely on the outcome of these debates… this should be interesting!
Sources: BBC News / The Guardian / Sky News / PA; Image source: Sky News
Update: Here is a good graphic I have created to summarise the 3 debates and their dates:
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