I subscribe to Google Alerts for the word Alertbear, and it just found me this. It’s a very thorough review of the original Alertbear release, the RSS reader that I designed. It really is quite a gushing piece, which makes me feel great. It’s only a shame that the project died a death.
And that a didn’t get rich from it.
My PC broke. All of a sudden it started randomly giving me blue screens, either before I managed to login, or shortly afterwards. To determine whether it was a problem with Windows or the hardware itself I decided that installing Linux wouldn’t be a bad idea. That didn’t work either. It doesn’t even get 80% of the way through the installation before it just gives up, freezing completely. I’ve installed Linux just fine before, so it definitely seems like something is amiss.
I’m at the stage now where actually debugging something like this is not what I want to do, I just want the thing to work. So since the machine is a few years old anyway, time to order something new.
I didn’t want to spend a fortune, and I’m no big PC gamer these days, so top of the line specs aren’t really that big a deal for me. I want it to be quiet. I want it to be reasonably good looking. I want a big screen. So here’s what I ended up with…
* Antec Sonata III Case
* Asustek P5K-E/WIFI-AP
* Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33Ghz
* 4GB RAM
* 500GB Hard Disk
* GeForce 8600GT
* Samsung 20x DVD Writer
* Microsoft Vista Home Premium
* 24″ Dabs Value LCD
* Logitech X-230 Speakers
Total cost is about £800, which I think is pretty awesome considering the spec.
The worst part is that I now have to build the thing, which is something I didn’t want to have to deal with anymore. But from a price point of view, it still seems like the way to go, if you’re up to the challenge of picking the parts. There are so many model numbers, so much choice, and Intel and Nvidia are innovating so fast that it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of their respective product lists. It took lots of Googling and lots of looking at other peoples complete systems to come up with this one.
My original idea was that I would install OS X, and the parts I’ve bought are specifically chosen to allow that. But then I read that 10.5.2 turned machines that weren’t real Macs into bricks. Now there’s a workaround to that, if you follow a specific set of instructions, but is that something I really want to worry about? Do I want to put a whole bunch of data in there and then find it breaks one day because Apple make a change? No. I don’t. That’s why I bought Vista.
So there we go, my new home PC. Not top of the line, but easily a step up from what I’ve got at the moment. And not just because that’s broken.
ISP’s in the UK have decided that since the BBC’s iPlayer is being so successful that they should contribute to a network upgrade to properly handle the new traffic.
The job of an ISP is to allow access to the Internet for their customers. For that service, they charge the user on a monthly basis. Why should the BBC, just because they are providing a now popular destination for those customers, provide any sort of financial backing to the ISP? The ISP is charging for a service, if they are unable to provide that service at the cost they are passing onto the consumer, then their business model is flawed and they should be charging more than they are.
And why single out the BBC? Are the ISP’s going to make similar demands to anybody else who creates a site to which customers flock? Is YouTube on the line? Or Flickr? Are they going to come knocking on my door if I create something that really starts pumping out those bits?
The ISPs seem to have misunderstood their position in the Internet hierarchy. They are a gateway to content, not a gatekeeper (and they don’t want to be a gatekeeper, for that makes them liable for everything that passes through). Asking to be paid from both sides is not only greedy, but it starts a slippery slope for both consumers and web content providers.
The Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD fight that has been going on over the past couple of years has had all the hallmarks of any good format war, mainly that they’re bad for business, and bad for consumers. Getting anybody to go out and invest in your new HD disc format is hard enough, especially when normal DVD’s are already so entrenched. But when there are two competing formats trying to do the same thing, most consumers decide it’s too risky to choose either, and nobody wins.
Thanks to the inclusion in the Playstation 3, along with strong studio support from the start (it helps when you own one yourself), Sony’s Blu-Ray has been seen as the market leader for a while now, although sales of each format weren’t too far apart thanks to HD-DVD players being significantly cheaper. But in the end, price just proved to not be enough, and with a number of announcements this year from people like Netflix, Best Buy and Walmart saying they would only be supporting Blu-Ray, the writing really did seem to be on the wall for HD-DVD.
And then, in a surprising twist, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Toshiba took HD-DVD round the back of the barn, and shot it dead. In a press release this week they announced that they would no longer be producing players, discs, or continuing to promote the format.
Wow.
Never before have I seen a company just admit defeat so readily. Formats normally die slowly as less and less people buy them, and stores fill up more and more with their competitors. Sony never pulled the gun on Betamax or Minidisc with quite the same ferocity, they just kept on going as VHS and the Compact Disc rolled over the top of them. But not Toshiba, they knew they were down and there wasn’t really any comeback, so they did the sensible thing both for their shareholders and potential HD format consumers everywhere and simply held up their hands, congratulated the victor, and moved on. And I think you have to applaud them for that.
Now does anybody want to buy a barely used Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on?
If you know me at all you’ll know that I like to do yearly Linux installs, just to see how far it’s come. Usually I’m disappointed, there’s always too many things wrong, from the way fonts are rendered to the inability to do simple things like play video from the web. It being October, the second Ubuntu release of the year has just arrived and I was keen to try it out.
Like every Linux installation I’ve done for the past few years, what I get right away is a lot of errors. It really doesn’t like my hard disks. I don’t know what it is, but it seems to think one of them is full of errors, even though checking the drive in Windows doesn’t show any problems and it always passes a fsck once finished. This happens on every boot too, but it seems to be unique to the PC I’m installing on. I also don’t understand why they’re now insisting on the default install being via a live CD. It’s actually worth installing via the alternate text-only download. The live CD is just slow, it takes forever to boot up and is totally useless once you finally get it going. It’s never a good experience because everything just seems to take forever to get anywhere.
Personal hardware and installation woes aside, once I actually got it on the machine, I can actually admit to being quite impressed. Fonts still don’t look right, the anti-aliasing is just wrong somehow. I don’t know what it is, it’s just wrong. Everything else however - very nice. A quick switch to a different theme (who picks brown as their default OS colour?) and everything is shiny and inviting. For the first time in a Linux install it’s also easy to activate Broadcaom wireless and Nvidia graphics card drivers straight from a menu, although you need to be connected to the net by some other means first (which is hard if you’re wireless only). Proper graphics card drivers also means you get to use all the funky animation effects, wobbly windows, transparencies etc, there’s even a nice control panel that lets you decide just how much funkiness you want. Disappointingly, despite this being the first version of Linux that automatically detected my dual monitors, it disabled the funk as soon as I tried to use them. Awww.
Also on the plus side, a nice looking version of Firefox, easy support for Flash and best of all - full video playing of Windows Media, Xvid, and anything else relevant without any real hassle. At last! They’re starting to realise that not everybody cares whether or not every piece of software they have is free (as in speech) or not and making it easy to install the closed source, proprietary stuff - and oh what a difference it makes. I even found a Perl editor that didn’t suck too much.
If all you’re looking for a is a computer to browse the web with, check some email, watch some videos and create some documents (which, let’s be honest, is most people) then we really are at the stage now where you could run Linux and be just fine. It’s taken a while, but the layers of polish are finally being applied, and at quite the rate. I look forward to seeing it again in another year.
As I mentioned already, I had Sky installed, re-introducing me to a world of television I left behind almost four years ago. In those proceeding years a lot of the channels have changed, some of them have just evolved, some of them are brand new. But what hasn’t really changed is the user interface, which is almost identical to the one I first used on Sky over a decade ago, let alone four years ago.
When I heard about Sky+ and season passes and all that stuff, I expected it to be similar to the TiVo that I bought about 5 or 6 years ago, especially since Sky chose to promote their own Sky+ system over the TiVo one, ending the UK support for that product. But the reality is that it doesn’t even come close. There’s no guide searching, no telling it to record programmes that much a name on a specific channel, season passes literally are just that - you have to keep renewing them every time a series starts. So even though I know that I’ll want it to record Top Gear for me whenever that starts, I can’t do that, because there’s no way to start a season pass without having it in the guide in front of you. The list of stuff you’ve recorded is as basic as it comes, and hidden behind the coloured buttons on the remote. In fact, the coloured buttons on the remote seem to do everything, as they’re mean different menu items on different screens. No easy to press button to take you to your recordings, or an easy to understand menu structure, no, it’s all pretty much just random. And if you were hoping it might suggest things you’d like based on your viewing habits, forget about it.
TiVo ran from a 50Hz processor six years ago, and did more in terms of usability and features than the Sky boxes manages to do. And when put next to a Windows Media Center PC, which is what I’ve been using for the past 18 months, it comes across as nothing but a joke. Even the simplest thing, like browsing the guide, is made much harder than it should be. If you were browsing through all the channels (and there are hundreds remember) and were perhaps 5 or 6 pages in before you saw something you might watch a few minutes of, when you bring the guide back up again the cursor isn’t where you left off, it’s right back at the start. So you have to scroll through all those pages again to get back to your browsing. It’s almost like the people that designed the software have never actually used it to watch TV.
Normally software products are designed with a list of bullet points in mind, specific things that it must do in order to compete in the marketplace. This is even more true of software that’s going to compete with something that already exists in the marketplace, because conventional wisdom holds that nobody will take you seriously unless you can at least go toe to toe with the established competitor. Whatever features you may have that are unique are less worthy if they’re not the icing on top of a pre-existing cake, rather than if they’re the cake itself.
Unfortunately this methodology leads to a development cycle of diminishing returns, as you pile more and more bullet points onto your feature list, you get further and further away from the problem the software was created to solve in the first place and in turn put off more and more potential users, not just those upgrading from a previous version who don’t see anything worthwhile, but new users as well, who see your software as far too complex for them to understand. A good example of this is Microsoft Office, which gets an upgrade release every couple of years or so, and which Microsoft finds ever harder to sell to businesses. They just don’t see enough benefit in changing. And for the new users, or those that have upgraded, there’s so many features that they don’t even know they exist. When Microsoft does studies to see what people want in the next version of Office, 99% of the time the feature already exists, it’s just so buried under everything else it’s not clear. And the funny thing about all this is that they’re stuck, because if they change the interface too much and try and solve the problems users have about not being able to find the features they want to use, like they’ve done in the latest release, business complains that it’ll cost too much to retrain the users and still won’t upgrade. Microsoft are on the upgrade merry-go-round now, and there’s no getting off.
But for new software, there’s no reason to put yourself in that position, as long as you accept that your software doesn’t need to be right for everyone. When I designed Alertbear I did so because no existing RSS reader out there did what I wanted it to do, so I designed the reader for me. It didn’t matter if it didn’t do what everyone else wanted, it did what I wanted, and that was enough. Turns out from some of the email I receive, it does what lots of other people need it to do too. But if you’ve got 500 feeds and you check them every 2 minutes, then you probably want to look elsewhere.
Like some foods, or a musical group, software isn’t for everyone. But rather than create it like a chef does for a customer who chose it themselves from a menu of many choices, we spend most of our time trying to create a dish that caters to all palates. Nobody would pick a restaurant where there was only one dish containing every possible ingredient, you’d be disgusted, in fact you’d probably be sick. So when you’re designing your next bit of software, be choosy, pick only the best ingredients, and mix them together with the care and attention of an award winning eatery. You may just find people pick your dish from the menu far more than you would think.
If you haven’t used Windows Vista yet, then you may be unaware of the major interface change that has taken place. Behind all that fancy transparency is the decision that you can no longer be trusted with your own computer.
Computer security is a tricky thing, especially on a home PC where users like to download and install new software. But I honestly can’t believe that the best way to solve the problem of malicious software installs is to treat the user like a baby, and constantly ask them if they are sure what they are doing is what they want to do. Called User Account Control, it feels like such the wrong approach to the problem, like making the user confirm every left and right turn they make on their car steering wheel in case they’ve taken a wrong turn. It seems like a good idea at first, but before you know it you’ve just caused an accident.
It’s almost like Microsoft are throwing in the towel, that they’re resigned to the fact that the underlying operating system is insecure. So rather than fix the holes that allow the programs to do nasty things, they’re going to make you agree to the program doing them before it does. So when that new virus comes along and wants to chop away at all your files, at least now you’ll get a friendly dialog asking if you’re sure you want to allow it. Shouldn’t they just stop the virus from having that kind of power in the first place? And even if they have (and the better handling of users and permissions is certainly their attempt to do so) isn’t this still like an admission of guilt, that they don’t believe they’ve done a good enough job of securing the vulnerable parts of the system?
This is cool, Microsoft Surface. Basically it’s a big touch-screen interface, installed on a table. There are cameras mounted underneath the table which look up and can then sense all the things that you, or somebody else, is doing. It’s multi-touch, so lots of people can be using it at the same time. The simplest comparison is Minority Report, flicking through photographs and documents on a screen using nothing but your hands.
The best demo is when they pick up a camera, take a photograph with it, and then just sit it somewhere on the table. The photographs are then automatically downloaded from the camera and appear to spill out of the bottom of it onto the table. They can then be manipulated, moved around, zoomed, even videos play. Then a PDA is placed down on the other side of the table and the photographs are dragged across and virtually pushed into the device, which then downloads them. Really, you have to see this for yourself, describing it just isn’t the same.
$10,000 at the moment, mostly aimed at businesses like casinos, but in five years time this could be something that lots of people have in their home. Rarely does Microsoft come up with something that feels so futuristic.
I’ve just switched to a new phone contract and therefore got the opportunity to pick a new phone. Unfortunately I had to pick it within 30 seconds, looking at them on a computer screen upside down with no opportunity to really look into what each one was going to give me. I would normally spend ages looking through all the available options to see what the best fit was for me, comparing once against the other, thinking what I would be able to do with whatever selection I decided to go for. But I had none of that here, just a quick look at a few pictures on a website. So I went with Sony Ericsson again, this time a k800i. It wasn’t the highest spec phone I could have got, but it was the only one on the website that still looked like a phone. Desperate to make each phone look different from the last, it seems that all the mobile companies have decided it’s time to get more and more outlandish with their designs, to the point where they all just start to degenerate into an ugly mess.
On the surface, it seems like it’s just the same as my last model, the k750i, but it has a 3.2 megapixel camera, a step up from the 2 megapixel in the previous model. Unfortunately they ruin this with the choice of lense covering, a silly, flimsy bit of plastic with little to no weight to it, which has the terrible habit of sliding back as soon as you put the phone in your pocket. Or breath on it the wrong way. I am starting to wonder whether or not anybody actually uses these phones before they’re released to the wild, it would seem that anybody using it for 5 minutes would have noticed that as a fairly serious design flaw.
In a rare joint appearance, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appeared together at the All Things Digital conference today, which was interesting to see. Despite people thinking that an appearance like this is going to end up being a cat fight, they were both the consumate professionals, even when given the opportunity by Walt Mossberg (The Wall Street Journal interviewer) to do so. The interview with them both was reasonably interesting, as was the one with Steve Jobs alone which took place earlier in the conference. But I’d love the opportunity to sit down with them and find out what they’re really like. All that money, all that power, and Bill especially, just a geek who made some good choices when he was younger. I want to know how they managed to adapt, whether they can boil an egg, is there a person there behind the businessman. That’s far more interesting than what they think the next big thing in technology is going to be (either they really know, but they’re not going to tell you because they want to be the one to release it, or they have no idea so why bother asking).
So, Coda then. The new integrated web development environment for the Mac from Panic. It’s a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor, terminal and a set of teaching books all within one application. Which in theory sounds great, and the UI is full of excellent touches, but the problem with the kitchen sink approach is that nothing really gets the spit and polish it really deserves.
The text editor has promise (it has tabs!) but lacks something as simple as proper auto-indenting (which means, as I’ve said before, that a new line after an opening brace indents the next line and a closing brace on a line on it’s own automatically has it’s indent decreased). This alone makes it difficult for me to use. The books seem pointless, they’re online and I can’t add my own. The terminal is like the normal Mac terminal, pretty basic. The CSS editor is confusing and doesn’t seem to display according to the preferences I set. The FTP part does pretty much what you’d expect, but still forces me to treat everything like a project.
If the text editor did the basics, or it didn’t quite lock me into the site/project method of working, then this would be more than a neat idea with a clean interface. But as it stands, it’s no more usable than Editplus via Parallels. Maybe after another 6 months of updates and upgrades.
I downloaded the demo of Coda (more about that tomorrow) and loaded up one of the sites from my local hard disk into it. It wasn’t quite setup the way I wanted, so I moved things around on my hard disk to put files into a better place for Coda to deal with. In Coda however, the view didn’t seem to update. Or something. It’s a bit fuzzy. Anyway, I decided to delete some of the files from the folder thinking that then maybe Coda would pick up the change, so I did Command+A to select all and moved them to the Trash. Which made no difference at all. So then I decided to empty the trash, in case it was actually somehow connected to the node of the file rather than it’s path. It was then I realised that rather than just delete the contents of a folder within my websites directory, I’d actually deleted the websites directory itself. And then emptied the Trash.
20,000 files. Gone. In an instant.
Backups? That would have been nice.
The website Twitter is beginning to gain serious traction, it’s almost got a constant presence now on every technology blog out there, so it would be disrespectful not to mention it here too.
To sum it up briefly, Twitter is like the status message from your IM client logged and stored on the web for anyone to see. Alternatively, you could think of it as one sentence blogging. You make 140 character updates saying what you’re up to right now, from either the web-client, your mobile phone or an application connected to their API. Your friends can then subscribe to your updates and the website keeps a history of all the ones you’ve made.
Remarkably, this has really taken off, although I’ve not quite worked out why yet. It’s from the same person that started Blogger and Odeo, which I’m sure has a lot to do with it. If I was to create a service like this (and let’s be honest, it would probably only take a couple of afternoons) it would go nowhere, because I don’t have the people watching what I’m going to do like he does. But beyond that, it seems to have something that the techno-bloggers really love, simplicity. It doesn’t do much, but what it does, it does very well. The same reason they love Apple. There’s a worry therefore that it’ll ultimately collapse under the weight of it’s own features once everybody keeps pushing them in every direction.
What this isn’t, is a mainstream success. And I don’t see that changing any time soon. Your man in the street hasn’t heard of this, and I think you’d find it hard to describe to them why they might want to use it. So while it’ll continue to grow in popularity, and the geek love will continue, I don’t think we’ll see this even getting to myspace level.
Of course what I’d like to do is create something that gets to email level.
What is selling Apple laptops to a lot of people nowadays is the ability to install Windows as well as OS X on there. Not via Parallels either, I mean actually natively installing the operating system and using the drivers for the hardware that Apple provide. But if you do have Parallels, you can then boot into your Windows partition from within OS X, allowing you the best of both worlds. It’s there as a full reboot option when you want to play some games, but it’s there without a restart if you need to just do something quickly.
So I bought a legitimate OEM copy of Windows along with my laptop so I could do just that. I went through the Boot Camp process, got it all installed and activated my copy. It’s a little odd seeing the XP boot screen appearing on a Mac Book, but once it’s started up it’s everything you expect from Windows. Viruses and all.
So then I went into OS X and told Parallels to boot into it, which it did, but then Windows popped up the activation window again. Since it now thinks it’s running on the fake Parallels hardware, it thinks I’m a filthy pirate who has just installed it on a second machine. And in a few days, if I don’t activate it (which I can’t, because it thinks it’s already been) it’ll not let me start it anymore. I can still restart and boot into it properly, but it refuses to work under Parallels because of Microsoft’s retarded activation scheme.
This is the problem with DRM schemes. If I really wanted to, I could get around the activation issue with a hack, there are no shortage of pirated copies of XP out there for download. But as a legitimate customer I’m being stopped from running my own copy of XP on my own hardware (and the same physical machine remember). DRM doesn’t stop the real pirate, it just makes it harder for the customer who is just trying to use what they paid for.
My laptop has shipped already, meaning that I should get it on Monday. I ordered it via Dabs because they offer 9 months interest free credit, and I’m definitely impressed by their turnaround. It wasn’t that fast the last time.
I like 9 months interest free credit deals, you pay a little up front and then don’t need to worry about it all until the balance is due. And it’s easily enough time to save up whatever is necessary to pay it off. You get the goods now, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra. Unless of course you don’t pay it off within the 9 months, in which case it’ll cost you a fortune in interest charges.
So I’ve written before about how I’ve been able to use the iMac exclusively since around Christmas time thanks to the wonder of Parallels. At the time I mentioned how that put me in a position of having just a few too many computers. So having already sold off my PC laptop, I ordered a Macbook Pro today with the plan of selling off my iMac as soon as possible. This means that I’ll be going from a desktop PC, desktop Mac and PC laptop to just a desktop PC and Mac laptop, which is definitely a step in the right direction.
As for what I’m going to do with the PC, I’m just not sure. There’s certainly no harm in having an XP machine around the house for the situations that demand it (like some PC only game that I really want to play), but that’s got a lot to do with the fact that they’re not an easy thing to sell on eBay. While a Mac seems to keep a certain intrinsic value, PC’s are such a commodity that they completely lose their value in just a couple of months.
I’m a big podcast listener, and on the Mac I’ve always used iTunes, which does the job excellently. At work however, it just never seemed to play ball. Initially things seemed OK, but as time went on it just seemed to have a really negative effect on the speed of the machine. Every time it was running in the background everything else just seemed to run sluggishly. So I switched over to using Juice and Winamp instead. And I’m not happy.
Winamp is fine for playing MP3’s, but it’s no use at all when it comes to podcasts. This is mainly because it doesn’t remember where you left off. Shows can be almost a couple of hours long sometimes, so I can find it difficult to listen to one all in one go. In iTunes that doesn’t matter though, because it always remembers where you’re up to in an episode, even if you go listen to or watch some other things in the interim. Not so with Winamp, which if I close it I’m going to have to remember where I left off.
Juice isn’t much better, the interface feels clunky, with buttons that I don’t even understand the reason for. It doesn’t easily display my list of downloads organised by show and episode and also has a habit of downloading the same show multiple times. I’ve had particular problems with Major Nelson’s 360 podcast where I end up with 4 copies of the same episode or worse, 20 or 30 older episodes all of a sudden being downloaded out of nowhere.
Is there a good Windows podcasting solution? Democracy is equally bad, with a horrible UI which feels slow and unintuitive, and my Google searches haven’t really turned up anything that’s easy enough for your mum to use (which is really the kind of software I like). Am I missing something obvious?
I bought myself a pair of Sennheiser wireless headphones, RS140’s to be exact. I tried out wireless headphones a few years ago without great success, they just never seemed to tune into the base-station correctly, as if I was always getting some sort of interference. But again I find myself in a position where I’m using headphones more regularly and don’t want to be tethered by wires. Nor do I want to continue using earbuds which end up hurting my ears with prolonged use, I wanted giant, over the head, noise reducing ones.
And that’s how I ended up with the Sennheiser’s. At first I had problems getting them to charge, they sat on the base station and never seemed to power up at all. When I put standard AAA batteries in there however, they sprung to life right away. So after replacing the rechargable set that came with them with a new pair I was good to go, the light was green and we were off to the races.
The sound quality is pretty good, although it still doesn’t compare with wired headphones, even in these which are hardly entry level. When listening to music it’s fine, but in podcasts, which is what I’m listening to most of the time, there’s always that underlying level of radio static as if they’re not quite tuned in as well as they should be, or the base-station isn’t as powerful as it should be. Still, on balance, they’re nice and comfy, easy to use and allow me to move freely around the flat without being cut off from my audio source. So on those terms, they fit the bill nicely.
I’ve been disappointed with the uptake of the new Chatbear features. Despite all the people that requested it over the years it seems that very few people have taken advantage of now being able to correctly categorise your community so that it can be found on the search engine the main site now offers. Much like the Friends & Enemies feature it seems like this is another one of those things that look good on paper and seem like they’re going to make a difference, but end up being used by just the elite few.
I’m not sure I know anymore what it is to make a site successful, it seems like it doesn’t matter what I do, nothing ever seems to take off. Of course I’m willing to bet you right now that in the next couple of years somebody will launch a similar site which will turn into the internet’s next big thing.
Or does that only happen on the ideas I have but never execute on?
All content is (c) Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Smith. This is where it ends.
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