Steven Moore's Blog

TomTom for iPhone : Voice Volume

2010-03-30T14:42:00.000+01:00

Occasionally I was finding that the voice instructions on my TomTom for iPhone were randomly becoming very quiet. I'd keep setting the voice volume to full, and it would be fine for a while, but then a while later it would go quiet all of a sudden.

It turns out that this is easy to "fix". And I quoted "fix" as the behaviour is by design.

Simply go into "Settings", then "Audio" and disable the "Voice Volume" feature. When this is enabled, the voice audio will be set at a percentage of your music volume.

I had been setting my music volume quite low when listening to podcasts at work so this reduction in volume was being reflected in TomTom.

The woes of email management

2010-03-23T16:27:00.002Z

It's a challenge that faces most of us; email and lots of it.

But how much time are we spending, or indeed wasting, on managing our inboxes?

At the weekend I responded to, acted upon, delegated and deleted as many emails as I could and reduced my mail count to a very pleasing 18 emails. It's not even noon on Tuesday and I've currently got 74 emails staring at me. It would actually be higher but I've been deleting and responding to as many as I could as and when they came in.

Whilst this technique seems the most efficient way of managing my emails, in reality it is probably very different.

Eagerness to provide quick responses and resolutions is the driver for this approach but if you take a moment to consider how much of an impact it is having on my time perhaps an alternate solution is required.

Plenty time management gurus encourage the "Deal with it tomorrow" approach; allocate a set time each day and deal with yesterday's emails only. Clearly, this allows you to focus non-email time on getting your non-email workload done. But are we really in a position where we could potentially ignore our inbox for 24 hours? Does that match with our customers' expectations?

How about we scan our inboxes for emails marked as high priority and deal only with those when we see them? But then do our customers always use this feature?

Perhaps a halfway-house solution is to allocate three windows per day to see to emails? We could do yesterday's emails from 09:00 to 10:00, the morning's emails from 13:00 to 13:30 and those of the afternoon from 16:30 to 17:00. Anything received after half four will wait till the next day.

Now, I appreciate you've read this blog post and I haven't provided you with a solution. I'm not even sure there is one. I'm more hoping that this post is food for thought and a subject on which you are interested on commenting.

For the meanwhile, I will continue mixing the "deal with it now" approach with allocating set windows for email management as I see fit.

I look forward to your own thoughts on this subject by the way of comments.

How to reboot the Apple iPhone.

2010-03-15T15:51:00.000Z

Today I discovered that quite a large number of people didn't know that the iPhone could be rebooted. Perhaps this is an indication that the iPhone OS is so stable that most users don't need a reboot. However, there may well be a time when an application hangs or the operating system fails to start properly from powering up. In either of those scenarios you need to do the following:

Simply hold the power button (top of the iPhone) and the home button (front and bottom of iPhone) together until the screen turns black and the Apple logo is shown. Upon seeing the Apple logo you can release the buttons whilst the iPhone reboots. Easy.

There are some rare(?) occasions that the above method will not work, such as when the iPhone is suffering from a bootstrap error. Read the following ehow guide as to a potential solution:
How to reboot iPhone when power and home buttons failed

Let's Go

2010-02-27T09:36:00.001Z

New blog; first post.

Here I hope to share my thoughts and ramblings on all things web.