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.
Thanks to work, I got myself an iPhone. I’ve been using it now for almost a couple of weeks, and I thought it worth throwing some thoughts up here on my impressions thus far.
I’ve been a Sony Ericsson user ever since I got my first mobile 7 or 8 years ago, as I’ve always just preferred their interface to what Nokia were doing. That means I’m upgrading from a k800i, but it’s not really fair to put both within the same category of mobile phone, the iPhone really is an entirely different beast. Firstly, there’s the feel of the thing, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it just feels good in your hand. There’s a solid, weighty feel to the device, and the decision to not make the back shiny like the iPod range means it feels warmer and looks cleaner. Then there’s the screen, so vivid, so clear, even in bright sunshine (tested that today), that any kind of content just looks gorgeous.
Interface wise it’s not too much of a surprise to me, since I’ve been using an iPod Touch for the past few months. It’s all laid out sensibly, and you can find your way around fairly intuitively. The camera is not anywhere near as bad as I’d read, giving nice clear images. The problem seems to be that it updates at a pretty slow rate, and holding the device steady is incredibly difficult. This tends to give you very bright, but slightly blurry, photos. The interface is always responsive, and it’s simply a surprise that it all works as well as the demos on the Apple website have always shown. And it doesn’t matter how many times you turn the device into landscape mode to look at a photo, it’s still cool to see the photo automatically rotate with you.
Text input, the bane of any portable device, actually works quite nicely. The trick is simply to ignore any mistakes you might be making and keep on typing, allowing the auto-correct to pick up any mistakes you’ve made. It really is freakishly accurate, even on words where you’ve barely hit a single key correctly, it still somehow manages to come up with the right word. It would be nice if a similar thing was available on OS X too, it would save me a lot of time. Web access is slow on the EDGE network, but not so slow that it makes it unusable, and it’s certainly just fine for email access. It’s also come in quite handy so far for looking up cinema times when we’ve been out and about, and I’m sure there will be plenty more opportunities in the future for it to shine. Would it be nice if the access was faster? Sure. Is it a deal breaker? Not by a long shot.
There are some annoying things, like notes not synching up with anything, like the Stickies I have on my Mac, or the notes I have in Mail. Or that some applications seem to understand me rotating the screen (like the browser) and others don’t (like Mail). It would be nice to use the entire interface in landscape mode because typing that way is so much easier (bigger keys). But overall, the experience is pleasurable, and simply being able to carry one device in my pocket rather than two (a phone and iPod) is a step forward for me at least.
Coolest moment so far - buying the new Supergrass album directly from the device and having it download all the tracks over the air. It’s like living in the future.
I can see why this show has been cancelled before, it’s just so… average, which is guaranteed to split the audience. It’s not that this feature-length episode is bad, it’s just that there’s nothing about it that makes it particularly great either. There’s definitely a good story at it’s heart, and there are some funny moments, there just aren’t enough of them. So much so that it actually had trouble holding my attention for the full 90 minutes, which is never a good sign. Definitely one for the fans, but it’s unlikely to win over any new converts.
Disappointing John Cusack film. Everything moves far too slowly, John Mahoney’s character seems to dislike Cusack’s without a good reason, and despite good performances all around and a bit of pace pickup towards the end, it just lacks any proper sparkle.
“Man on the Moon, The Epic Journey of Apollo 11…. Sponsored by Kellogg’s” - introduction to 1969 CBS coverage of the first moon landing.
There are no shortage of documentaries, films and television shows about the Apollo missions and the journey to the moon, and I’ve seen a lot of them. I therefore wondered what this new documentary film was going to offer, as at this point I really thought I’d seen it all. It turns out that I was very wrong, because somewhere, perhaps in the back of a cupboard at NASA, the producers of this film found footage I’d never seen before. And it’s glorious. With rich, vivid colours, and often perfect camera work, there are shots that truly bring the majesty of space exploration to life.
But more than the footage, this is the real life stories of the astronauts that actually walked on the moon. With contributions from every mission, and with beautiful cinematography, they recount their memories of the highlight of their lives. With no narrating voice, and no interviews with other NASA personnel, these men get the opportunity to speak. Noticeably absent is Neil Armstrong, still living the life of the recluse, but whose colleagues speak very highly of him.
The film does a wonderful job of piecing together the footage and interviews into a narrative, especially of the Apollo 11 mission itself, and my only complaint is that there’s not more of it. It would be nice to see a documentary that took all the mission footage here, plus anything else that’s available, and pieced it all together into a true timeline of events.
When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon for the first time, the whole world was watching. And they were watching together, united in the quest of exploration, and for that brief moment in time it didn’t matter what the colour of your skin was, or what country you were living in, or that the man up there in the space suit was American. He was human. You were human. And that meant you were the same.
This is a truly inspirational, even emotional documentary, which I would encourage everybody to see.
A well written, well directed and dare I say it, well acted, science-fiction adventure story. There’s action, there’s intrigue, there’s dialogue taken from straight from Shakespeare, I’m always disappointed it doesn’t get more recognition as one of the great Star Trek movies.
The story is perfect, having the original crew bring peace between the Federation and the Klingons is a fitting send-off, especially with them being such sworn enemies for so long. And just like it often is when attempts at peace are made, there are those that don’t want it, which is the connection with reality the best Trek stories do so well.
There are a few things that could be better, such as Iman’s shape-shifter, or Kim Cattrall’s oddly stunted vulcan portrayal (she seems to have mixed up controlled emotions with slight retardation), but it’s still wildly better than every Trek movie that followed, and holds up very well in the CG generated movie world we live in today.
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