I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Month: February 2013

Channel Light Vessel

Posted by on in Listening, Music

IMG_7720

As a big Bill Nelson fan I felt that I had to try this stuff out. It isn’t bad at all really. In fact I’ve just bought another disc from Channel Light Vessel.

Doctor Who: Dark Eyes

Posted by on in Books and Audiobooks, Listening

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I was really looking forward to this box set from the 8th Doctor, and it was well worth the wait in the end. A great story and a bit of a change for Paul McGann’s Doctor too. I enjoyed it.

I’m hoping that there’ll be some more 8th Doctor stories in the not too distant future.

iOS and Automation (or, a solution in search of a problem)

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

I wrote yesterday about an app called drafts. I was showing it to a friend today and it made me realise that actually, whilst I do look out for these kind of automation app they rarely, if ever, do what I need them to do or end up being part of any wider automation solution that I’m looking for. So, why bother? Well, that’s a good question, and one that I find myself asking quite a lot.

I looked at Drafts yesterday, which seems to have some quite good features in it, like the ability to include additional actions using javaScript. Apparently you can use JavaScript if it’s interpreted by Apple’s built in JavaScript engine. I didn’t know that, but it makes a lot of sense now. Anyway, using this, Drafts can load new ‘actions’ that allow it to integrate with other apps and get them to do some simple things, but, that’s the problem. All they do is simple things.

Another app that showed some promise was (is) Launch Center Pro. The idea of this app was to be able to launch apps with specific criteria. However, it suffers the from the same limitations as Drafts. What it is able to do is limited to simple app launches and actions like, ‘launch app X and search for Y criteria’.

The last one is called triggers. Triggers is a different beast altogether. It’s more about creating physical parameters and when those are met it triggers a response. Quite interesting really, but again limited. The app doesn’t work in the background, which means that it can’t track it’s physical activities when it isn’t on. So, not much use.

So iOS is in many ways a good deal behind the likes of Android when it comes to automation. Nothing like Tasker (Android app) exists for iOS. If it did, if Apple allowed it, that would be amazing.

Here’s a quick list of the apps I mentioned:

Drafts
Drafts - Agile Tortoise

Launch Center Pro
Launch Center Pro - App Cubby

Triggers
Triggers - Luke Wakeford

Drafts for iOS

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

I’ve only just heard about this app for iOS which seems to be a great companion to apps like Launch Center Pro, but both seem to come into their own when used with tweaks or hacks like these from lifehacker.

I’ve been looking for better ways to automate things in iOS, ideally in a similar way to Tasker for Android, but nothing comes close, at least not so far. However, things are improving. So I’m going to have to have a look at some of these automation ideas and see where they can take me next.

I’ll keep you posted on how the experiments are going.

Drafts at the app store
Drafts - Agile Tortoise

Launch Center Pro at the app store
Launch Center Pro - App Cubby

Considering a meeblip

Posted by on in Music

Having got a taste for this kind of thing from using my Shruthi-1 I’m now considering getting a meeblip, which looks like a lot of fun too. Initially I was looking at the meeblip micro, but as it’s out of stock for now I’ve moved on to the meeblip SE.

I even checked if there was a TouchOSC template available for meeblip. There is! So if I can control it using TouchOSC I can do a lot with it.

I may have talked myself around.