Design

The bag is made of soft but sturdy canvas and has a very comfortable nylon shoulder strap. The 3 internal compartments and 2 pockets offer plenty of places to pack things and thanks to the bright interior colours, you’ll be able to find your things later as well. The Hoxton is available in beige, grey, green and brown with matching interior fabric colours.

Yay!

The bag is fairly simple – in a good way. There aren’t thousands of internal compartments with subdivisions to get stuff lost in, it’s just a well though out bag for everyday use.

It’s nice and light, so it’s comfortable to wear for long periods of time. It’s also not too bulky and fits easily underneath the seats on a plane or on your lap if you’re on public transport.

A magnet keeps the bag shut and two front slip pockets with headphone cable flaps allow you to get at your music player or phone without digging around inside the bag.

I was afraid the light beige colour option I picked would get dirty easily, but after several weeks of being dragged to Brussels, Hamburg and all around Munich, it still looks great.

Meh…

The overall quality feels very good, however I did notice the zipper on the back compartement came apart once or twice. But since it’s an internal zipper, it’s not a real worry.

Conclusion

I really like this bag. It’s a bit too small for most notebook computers, but in a pinch I can fit my MacBook Air in it. But it’s perfect for an iPad, camera and the other bits and bobs I usally lug around.

It’s more of a “lifestyle” bag than a computer bag, but for those of you that have embraced the iPad way of computing, the TinTac Hoxton is highly recommended.

At £40 / €47 / $60, it’s great value for money and I could see this bag being a popular gift this holiday season.

TinTac Hoxton website

Well the Eye-Fi cards promise to have a better solution for copying photos: these cards can transfer your digital snaps wirelessly. Yep – despite being the same size as a normal SD card, an Eye-Fi card can connect to your computer over a wifi network. Let’s take a closer look at the Eye-Fi Pro | X2 – their latest and greatest.

Getting started

You need to download special Eye-Fi software for the initial setup. You connect your Eye-Fi card to the supplied USB adapter and configure it to connect to your existing wireless network, or you can either have it create its own ad-hoc network for when you’re on the move.

Then, just pop the card into your camera and away you go.

How to use the Eye-Fi card

The Eye-Fi card works just like any other fast SD card. Pop it in your camera, take pictures (RAW or JPEG or both) and movies – that’s it.

Once your camera has been on a few seconds, the Eye-Fi card will power up its wireless feature and look for your existing network. Once connected, the special Eye-Fi software on your computer will copy the photos over the air onto your PC or Mac.

If you haven’t got a wireless network nearby, the card can alternatively create its own wireless network. You connect to this network (named something like “Eye-Fi 132456″) and then the copying magic starts.

Performance

Despite having pretty impressive wireless performance, it will take a bit longer to copy the huge files produced by today’s modern cameras over wifi than it would over a USB card reader. However, you can optionally choose to only copy your JPEG images, leaving your RAW copies on the card ready to by copied over USB later.

The software is an Adobe Air app, so it isn’t the best Mac app I’ve ever seen, but overall it isn’t too bad. Once you have your card configured, you won’t need to use it too much anyway. Kudos to Eye-Fi for having a cross-platform solution for us Mac users that works.

Other handy tricks

Geotagging

Certain Eye-Fi cards can also make use of the wireless chip inside to geo-tag your photos. They do this by looking at nearby wifi networks. These are later matched by the Eye-Fi software to a database that knows the geographical location of tonnes of wifi networks around the world and uses that to give your photos a rough geographical location.
It’s not perfect, but it’s usually good enough to help you figure out which side of town you took a particular photo.

Endless Memory

Need to take a ton of pictures? No problem! If you’re on a wifi network, your Eye-Fi card will shove pics over to your computer and free up storage for new pictures, which means you’ll never run out of storage. This is only useful for certain scenarios, but if you need to take a lot of pictures and don’t want to have to switch cards it might come in useful.

Picture uploads

I didn’t test this feature, but Eye-Fi also offers an online storage and sync option, that allows you to share pictures with friends or between devices.

iPad app

One other great feature is the fact that you can use the Eye-Fi card with the free companion iPad app, allowing you to use your iPad as a giant photo preview screen: snap a shot, wait 2 seconds and it shows up on the iPad. I used this feature to turn my iPad and a camera with an Eye-Fi card into a rudimentary homemade wedding photo booth.

Conclusion

If you just need to grab a few photos quickly, the Eye-Fi a great solution. I could see it being particularly useful in scenarios where you’re frequently taking a small number of shots and need to quickly preview them on a larger screen.

The geo-tagging feature is also quite nice and a good alternative to using geo-tagged iPhone pictures as a reference.

The Eye-Fi Pro | X2 does exactly what it claims. The wireless performance is pretty good and it can be a huge timesaver if you often need to preview your pictures in between shots.

Recommended

Waterfield bags are designed to be very tough (not surprising as the company was founded by a former bicycle messenger), so I was keen to take a closer look at the Waterfield Cargo bag.

Features

The Waterfield Cargo looks like fairly typical messenger-style bag at first. It has a shoulder strap, front flap and a buckle. But there are ton of nifty design touches that make the bag very practical in everyday use:

• The top zip makes it easy to get stuff from the main compartment without lifting up the main flap
• The interior fabric is a bright colour, that makes it easy to find things inside
• The back pocket is great for your iPad or a folder with papers

Design

This bag looks pretty good, but the design isn’t the main reason you’d buy this bag. It’s a very functional design and it’s“tidy” enough to take into any office, without looking too corporate.

You can also customise the look quite a bit by choosing various trim and colour options.

Quality and Durability

Waterfield state that the bag was inspired by ruggedized bike messenger accessories and it certainly feels every bit as durable as its heritage. The nylon fabric is extremely tough and feels much more durable than the fabrics used on similar products from other well-known manufacturer’s bags I’ve owned.

This is how much I can easily fit in the Waterfield Cargo:

Contents of my bag

As I mentioned at the outset, I plan on commuting by bike quite a bit with this bag, so I want something that can be strapped to the back of a bike rack and withstand a bit of wear and tear. So far, the Waterfield Cargo has been more than up to the challenge: Despite being bumped around on the back of a bike for several weeks, kicked around on the floor of the subway and dragged halfway across Malaysia on my honeymoon, it still looks like new. Any dirt or muck you get on the bag easily brushes off, and all the seams and zips are rock solid.

Bonus Round

There’s a lot to like about this bag, but here are a few extra tidbits I particularly like:

• The strap can easily being adjusted just by lifting an adjustment flap at the side, but it doesn’t accidently lift or slip
• Underneath the front flap are two slim pockets that are almost hidden – perfect for storing your passport or other valuables somewhere hard to access while travelling.
• The interior pockets don’t get in your way, so you can use the space inside the bag to the fullest.
• If you do need extra compartments, the Sleevecase accessory is perfect for documents and laptops (it has two compartments, perfect for a MacBook and iPad), while the Cablepouch is great for all your accessories and cables:

Conclusion

At $189, the Waterfield Cargo is certainly one of the more expensive laptop bags out there. But this Waterfield bag, which was handmade in San Francisco, is extremely well made with high-quality materials used throughout, so I’d argue that the price is more than justified. If you’ve got a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air you’re carrying around, it’s worth investing in a good bag to protect it.

Unlike other messenger bags that I’ve owned, that have all started to fall apart at the seams after a few months of owning them, this bag feels as though it will give me a good few years of use.

The attention to detail and everyday practicality is very obvious — someone really thought about every aspect of this bag while designing it – and it is very versatile, equally useful as a travel bag for longer journeys or as a daily bag for the office.

Overall, highly recommended.

There are a number of utilities available that make it easier to launch apps in a specific language, however they all usually require a number of extra clicks and typically only work with apps in your Applications folder — making it cumbersome to open development builds that aren’t installed there.

I’m a big fan of the keyboard launcher tool Alfred and was thrilled to see that the developer recently added extension support for Alfred Powerpack users (at just £12 / $19 the Powerpack is a steal – highly recommended).

I’ve written a collection of Alfred extensions (basically shell scripts) that will allow you to quickly open an app in the language of your choice:

Simply type the application name, choose the build of version you want to launch, hit the action key and then type the language. Although this may sound like a lot of steps, in practise it’s very easy and fast:

You can download the extensions here, I hope someone else might find them useful as well. Note that you’ll need the Alfred Powerpack to use extensions (but if you use Alfred on a regular basis, I think it’s worth buying just to support continued development).

Download “Open in Language…”

If you have any comments or suggestions or just want to let me know how you’re using this, please feel free to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you!

I started thinking and thought it would be cool to have a setup that would allow people to see their snaps rights away, without having to go around to the camera itself. With a DSLR that supports remote control from a laptop, that is fairly easy to set up, but as it turned out, my cameras don’t support remote control over USB. So I started looking into alternatives and soon hit on the idea of using an EyeFi card and my iPad. (A few weeks after I started planning our photo booth, a story popped up on Engadget about a similar, albeit more professional, setup.)

What you’ll need

• A digital camera with remote shutter release (I used the Panasonic GF-1 with a cheap wireless remote shutter release from eBay)
• An EyeFi SD card in the camera (make sure it’s a newer EyeFi card with support for “direct mode”)
• An iPad connected to the EyeFi network running the free EyeFi app
• A tall tripod
• A table or stand of some kind for the iPad
• (optional) A frame, backdrop or props of some kind for guests to pose with

Camera, remote shutter, iPad and EyeFi card

The photo booth setup – the iPad is just off to the side on a table

One of the snaps from the photo booth

Other Tips

Getting a SIM card and choosing a carrier

I spotted a Maxis booth in Kuala Lumpur International Airport and headed over to purchase a prepaid SIM card and data plan. Maxis, Celcom and DiGi are the three largest providers in Malaysia and from what I have read, Maxis has the best 3G coverage. Their prepaid plans are marketed under their brand “Hotlink“, and you can find shops selling Maxis/Hotlink top-ups all over Malaysia.

The helpful staff at their sales booth had a micro SIM cutting tool and configured the data plan for me using the “day plan” option, which comes with 500MB of data a day. I assumed it would auto-renew and the total cost would be about €20 for 2.5 weeks.

My wife booking hotels on the iPad at Kuala Lumpur airport with Maxis 3G and personal hotspot

Pick a data plan

It turns out that the day plan needs to be renewed every day after exactly 24 hours, which is a bit annoying after a while. Plus, if you forget you’re charged by the megabyte, which will quickly wipe out your prepaid credit.

Fortunately, while topping up credit in a mobile phone store in Melakka, the dealer recommended I switch to the “internet broadband 1 week” plan instead. I think it’s intended for laptop users with USB 3G sticks, but it worked fine with the iPhone as well. The one week option comes with 1.5 GB of data, which should be more than enough for casual use on holiday.

Coverage & Cost

Coverage was brilliant, with 3G service and full bars nearly everywhere we went – the only time I couldn’t get 3G was on a tiny tropical island 45 minutes off the mainland. There’s no way we could have travelled around as much as we did without a data plan and access to TripIt, TripAdvisor, Agoda.com and other services.

Overall I think I spent about 120 ringgit on the SIM card and various top-ups (about €28/ $39). That’s a bit more than necessary, as I lost quite a bit of credit the first few days due to not renewing the day plan in time.

Don't forget your iPhone SIM tool

Worth it?

If you’re planning a trip to Malaysia, I’d definitely recommend picking up a Maxis/Hotlink prepaid card for your stay. Hotel wifi was often flaky and sometimes only available in rooms near the reception desk, so I ended up using Maxis 3G almost everywhere. Be sure to look up the best data option on their website – the day plan is easiest but not necessarily the most affordable.

I had been on the lookout for the Panasonic 20mm prime lens, as it’s considered to be one of the best Micro Four-Third lenses out there. When I spotted a package deal that offered the 20mm lens with the GF-1, I couldn’t resist. Although both the GF-1 and E-PL1 have both been succeeded by newer models, I thought I’d share my impressions after using the GF-1 for about two weeks.

Advantage GF-1

• Autofocus lamp
• Build quality
• Screen resolution
• Jog wheel
• Custom settings dial
• Remote shutter

The GF-1 had a substantially higher retail price than the E-PL1, so its superior build quality is to be expected. While the E-PL1 can certainly survive a bump or two, it does feel quite plasticky and cheap when compared with the GF-1, which has a metal body and rock-solid switches.

The screen resolution on the GF-1 is higher than that of the E-PL1, which loooks very grainy in low light. And speaking of low light, none of the Olympus M4/3 cameras have a focus-assist lamp (that annoying orange lamp you’ll find on every cheap point and shoot camera). This means that they are terrible at focusing in low light situations whereas the GF-1, which does have a focus-assist lamp, has no problems at all. I have no idea why Olympus refuses to add an AF assist feature to their M4/3 cameras, but after a few weeks with the GF-1, I really do miss it on the E-PL1.

The other features are nice to have, but wouldn’t necessarily convince me to get one over the other – although the remote shutter feature will come in handy this summer, where I plan on rigging up an iPad photo-booth contraption (like this one) at our wedding.

Advantage E-PL1

• In-body image stabilisation
• Slightly smaller & cheaper
• Bounce flash
• Better grip
• More accessory options (external audio)

Part of the attraction of the M4/3 cameras are the large number of cheap “legacy” lenses you can use on them with appropriate adapters. Old Nikon, Konica and numerous other old 35mm lenses can be bought cheaply on eBay and used with a M4/3 camera. The sensor size is well suited for them and the old lenses offer great optical quality at bargain prices (provided you’re willing to focus manually).

Panasonic’s M4/3 cameras forego a built-in image stabilisation feature, as Panasonic prefers to use in-lens stabilisation instead.  The E-PL1 however has a sensor stabilisation feature, that will work with any lens – even old legacy lenses. This is quite useful to have, particularly when using longer focal lengths or when shooting at low light.

The E-PL1 also has a slightly better grip to it and its built-in flash can be pointed to the ceiling or just above your subject, allowing you to avoid overly bright direct flash in your images.

It is also often said that Olympus cameras produce nicer JPEGs that require less post-processing – something which I am also keen to avoid for casual shots, if it can be helped. So far, I would tend to agree that the colours and white balance in my E-PL1 shots are usually better than the GF-1, where I’m still experimenting with different settings and options.

Conclusion

Both cameras have their merit and I haven’t yet been able to make up my mind which one I want to keep.

The GF-1 is certainly more versatile, particularly in low-light settings, but to really get the most out of the body you may want to to invest in Panasonic’s more expensive M4/3 lenses with in-lens stabilization. The camera also feels much more solid and nicer to use as a whole.

The E-PL1 has a certain cheap and cheerful charm to it: the design and construction are certainly never going to win any prizes and its quirky menu and buttons don’t exactly inspire confidence. But after using it for half a year, I can attest to its ruggedness and it’s a really solid camera that delivers great shots every time you take it out – provided you don’t need fast focusing in low-light situations. It’s also hard to beat on a budget.

Enter the Dodocase for iPad 2 – a hand-made, book-like case with an elegant wooden frame. The DodoCase has a moleskine-like design and elegantly encloses your entire iPad like a hardback book. On the right side of the book sits a wooden frame that has special cutouts for the iPad, while the left has a trademark ownership label and customiseable colour  lining.

Likes

Protection
The DodoCase is great for toting your iPad around inside any old bag and you don’t have to worry about the Smart Cover sliding off and it getting scratched or dented.

Look and feel
The case itself looks great and it’s quite nice to carry around. It’s fairly easy to get the iPad in and out of the DodoCase, with squishy corner fasteners making sure that it stays firmly in place. The wooden frame has cutouts that allow access to the connection ports and right-hand controls and an elastic band ensures the lid stays firmly shut. It’s also comfortable to use your iPad while it’s in the case (particularly in landscape mode), but it’s also fairly easy to take it out if you need to.

Weight
The bamboo used to construct the DodoCase is really light, so despite its considerable size (see below), it doesn’t add much weight to the iPad at all. Since I usually take my iPad with me when I want to avoid lugging a heavy laptop, this was quite important to me.

Dislikes

Magnets

I’ll start with a big one: no magnets. The DodoCase for iPad 2 does not support the iPad’s sleep/wake if cover is opened feature, which is quite disappointing for a case that isn’t exactly cheap. You can however jerryrig your own solution by sticking a slim fridge magnet in the right spot of the cover, but I would have assumed that  wake-on-open support would be a no-brainer for this type of product. The FAQ on the DodoCase website seems to hint that future versions of the DodoCase will have magnet support though, so it may be worth checking back in the near future.

Stand
If you flip the cover over, the case will also prop your iPad up a bit, giving you a better angle for typing. However the Smart Cover has a slightly higher angle. You can also stand the DodoCase upright , but unless you have a sufficiently grippy surface, the whole affair is a bit wobbly – the Smart Cover wins again here.

Size
While the DodoCase does add quite a bit of protection for your iPad, it does feel unnecessarily large, compared to the thin and sleek design of the iPad 2. The case is roughly 2,2cm thick when closed, which is 2,5x thicker than the iPad. When the iPad is inside the case, there looks to be a bit of space between the back of the iPad and the case, which seems unnecessary.

Conclusion

The DodoCase for iPad 2 is a great-looking case that is really well made. If you mainly plan on using your iPad around the house, I would probably stick with the Smart Cover, simply because it is more convenient. But if you plan on taking your iPad out a lot, the DodoCase is a great and stylish alternative to getting a bag with a laptop pouch.

So ignore the workaround below, update GarageBand and you’ll be all set.

At the time of writing (March 2011), the Mac version of GarageBand can’t open files created with the iPad version. Instead, you’ll get an error message and the file won’t open. This is presumably because the iPad version has some features, instruments and loops not yet available in the Mac version.

Apple has promised an update, but for the time being, I’ve found this workaround.

Before you  try this, let me stress that it’s a workaround with issues: your files won’t open perfectly, but at least you’ll be able to get some of your project onto your Mac. However, please do make sure you make a copy of your project file first.

The project on my iPad

Can't be opened on a Mac

First, copy the project file onto your Mac with iTunes. Then, right-click the project file and choose “show Package contents”. Find the “projectdata” file and open it, preferably with the Plist Editor, but a plain-text editor should work as well in a pinch.

Look a the “version” key with the value “45000” under “$top“.  Change that value to “40000” and save the file.

Now, when you open it with GarageBand, you’ll receive a warning (as opposed to the earlier ‘error’ message), but you should be able to open the file, albeit with some errors and warnings.

Just ignore the warnings

Success

Note: There’s a reason Apple changed the version number and you’ll find a lot of things won’t work (e.g. certain Apple Loops and instruments will be missing – note the empty drum track in my screenshot). But if you just want to get the basic project information and the bits you played off your iPad onto your Mac, it’s worth a shot.

Presumably Apple will soon be releasing an update for GarageBand on the Mac, so hopefully this hacky workaround won’t be necessary much longer. If you’re reading this long after March 2011, make sure you have all GarageBand updates first.

Sparrow first caught a lot of attention last year when the initial public beta was released. I have to admit, I was quite skeptical after a first look: it seemed like a weird rip-off of Tweetie for Mac combined with everything I disliked about the Gmail web interface.

But the final 1.0 release has really won me over. Sparrow gets rid of the visual clutter caused by lists of folders, unread count badges etc. and puts your email front and center.

Thanks to its robust support for Gmail’s ‘labels that kind of work like folders’ system, label-fans as well as users that prefer a more traditional organization with folders will feel right at home.

The quick reply feature shows a small reply box just above a message, instead of opening a new window. By encouraging users to bang out quick one and two line replies, I found myself clearing emails from my inbox faster and getting distractions out of the way.
   

I currently use Sparrow for all of my private and blog emails, however for work emails I currently still rely on Mail.app. Part of the reason that Sparrow works so well is probably because so much of the heavy lifting is taken care of by Gmail: It has all my filters, labels, aliases all set up. It’ll be interesting to see how well Sparrow fares with regular IMAP accounts that require the email client app to offer more in terms of email management.

##Likes
- Clean, no-fuss interface
- Encourages quick, immediate replies
- Growl integration
- Support for multiple Gmail aliases

##Caveats
- Only supports Gmail accounts at the moment (although full IMAP support is promised for March)
- “Missing” features such as automatic image resizing, client-side filtering, multiple signatures, etc. (could also be seen as a feature)

##Conclusion
If you’re looking for a full-featured, kitchen-sink type email client, Sparrow probably isn’t for you. But if you want something to use with Gmail, that gets out of the way and lets you get your inbox cleaned up, Sparrow is definitely worth checking out!