Ivan's blog

By default your activities on your iOS 6 device are tracked by Apple and advertisers in order to provide you with targeted advertising. The data gathered is not associated with your real person, but you may still decide to disable it. Follow these 4 screens and you switched it off for good.

First open Settings. Then select General / About / Advertising (scroll all the way down) and finally Switch ON the Limit Ad Tracking option.

Apple Maps is fast and beautiful, but it is not as up-to-date with points of interests as Google Maps and sometimes contains incorrect information too. However Apple is committed to get the maps better fast as Tim Cook expressed in his open letter on the subject.

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

Various tests and sources including Android sites confirm that the iPhone 5 has a very solid build and high quality electronics. It consistently outperforms the competing popular phone the Samsung Galaxy SIII. See these three videos that specifically focus on macro photography, drop and water damage tests.

Fourmatch is a rather expensive ($890) plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS5 which allows you to authenticate images and see if they are original or not. Watch the video to see how the app does it.

The new iOS 6 3D flyover maps really do look impressive where available just as promised by Apple at their latest Keynote. Check out these quick screen shoots I took below of US cities. The more you wait for the data to download the sharper and more detailed the images get. I find this feature very nice because it gives me a quick understanding of the 3D space around a certain area especially as I turn the viewing angle around. This is a big further improvement over the flat satellite images.

Apple releases OS X 10.8.2 with new Facebook, Messages and FaceTime features. You can now not only Tweet right from your desktop but also post status updates to Facebook. See the images of how it looks like to share webpages from Safari, share a post from the sidebar notification window and post a picture from your desktop. Facebook integration also allows you to add your location and select the audience for your status updates. If you're posting an image you select the album too.

Jony Five and others talk about the iPhone 5. :)

As the image demonstrates for most people the Samsung Galaxy S3 needs two hands and Apple iPhone 5 needs just one hand.

You can of course perform basic operations with one hand on the S3 as well like answering a call, but if you need to reach and tap on the full screen you will probably hold the device in one hand and tap with the other. People with unusually large hands or long thumb fingers will be able to reach the whole screen using just one hand, but for the most of us it's a two hand device for most situations.