Journalism, radio and stuff like that
Easy joke, I know. Me on Techradar: Google Maps is back on iOS, and it’s great.
There’s a famous bit in the classic film Crocodile Dundee when a mugger pulls a knife on him. “That’s not a knife,” he chuckles, and pulls out an enormous Bowie knife. “THAT’s a knife.”
Today Google is Crocodile Dundee…
I’m a big fan of The Week, a weekly digest of the world’s key news stories, and I’ve always thought a similar publication for technology would be a really good idea. Other people clearly think the same, and here it is: Tech., a weekly iPad magazine from the nice people at Techradar. I haven’t seen the finished version yet but I’ve seen some of the content, and I think it’s going to be really good.
Update, 30 November:
Tech. is now in the app store, and while I’m a little bit biased – I’ve written some of it – I reckon it’s really, really good. It’s cheap, too.
I wrote a wee thing about tablets for Techradar, in which I suggest that for most people, buying a full-sized tablet is an unnecessary expense.
You may be thinking that I’m having a Damascene conversion: when Apple didn’t make seven-inch tablets I said small tablets were rubbish, and now Apple does make a seven-ish-inch tablet I’m saying that small tablets are ace. But I’ve changed my mind because tablets have changed.
…The biggest obstacle to seven-inch tablet adoption was that seven-inch tablets were terrible. Now that they aren’t, for most people they’re the best choice. They’re more portable than their bigger brothers. They’re lighter to hold, easier to fit into a large pocket or handbag, easier for kids to handle – and they’re much, much cheaper too.
I do hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong I’ve promised to buy and eat an iPad mini.
There’s been a big scandal in the world of videogames writing, and the short version goes something like this: comedian Robert Florence wrote a column about writers and PRs being a wee bit too close together, legal threats were made, the column was edited and Florence quit. Then it all exploded.
Stuart Campbell has a detailed post about the whole sorry saga, which is worth a read if you’re interested in journalistic ethics and that kind of thing. I thought this bit was particularly true:
games journalists are merely serving the people who pay the bills, and that isn’t the readers any more, because they demand all their journalism for free. If you’re not even prepared to pay peanuts, you’re going to get something less than monkeys.
The supposed Jimmy Saville / Paul Merton TV show transcript is doing the rounds again. Here’s some news from 2000:
Paul Merton is always a man to push the televisual boundaries of libel laws as far as they will stretch but the transcript went a lot further than anything you would have seen on the show. The trouble is – according to sources – a huge chunk of the middle section of the email is fabricated.
we decided it would be fun to stick some obviously fake stuff on the site, just to see whether or not people would actually question it. Part of the site’s remit was to get comedy fans questioning the media, refusing to accept everything at face value, etc.
Faking some HIGNFY out-takes was originally going to be part of that initial plan. We probably decided on it after watching the ‘Unbroadcastable Have I Got News…’ video (which itself features rushes material), but mainly because we enjoy the idea of rushes per se. The original idea was to stick the page on the site in Hidden Archive and see if anyone noticed/cared. Emergency Lalla Ward went off and wrote the actual page – based on a tape of the broadcast itself (if you watch the show in tandem with the fakery you’ll note that he’s specifically ‘filled in’ stuff where there was an obvious edit-point).
I reviewed Apple’s iOS 6 this week, and one of the areas I focused on was the new Maps app (the Google one is gone, allegedly because Google were being dicks about their mapping API).
It’s an important app, and I set out to see if I could break it. I used a quarter of a tank of diesel trying and failing to confuse the turn-by-turn navigation in and around Glasgow and its suburbs; I deliberately asked it for directions to places where the roads have been significantly changed in recent months; and I threw loads of randomly chosen addresses and businesses at it to see if it got them right.
With a few exceptions – businesses shown in slightly wrong places on the map, one result that was completely wrong – it performed really well. If it knew about the new roundabout they’ve just stuck between Milngavie and Clydebank, then clearly it was safe to assume that it knows where the big stuff is. As I wrote in the piece:
We half expected an app that was just great in America and utterly useless in the UK. We were wrong.
…Maps is a decent app, but we think existing, dedicated sat-nav apps have more finger-friendly UIs and more features, even if they do charge for traffic data – and if you’ve got an iPhone 3GS or 4, those apps are your only option.
Over at the Guardian, technology editor Charles Arthur took a similar approach and came to similar conclusions. Like me, he wrote:
it’s very good. Here we need to distinguish between the maps themselves, and the maps app. The maps don’t have all the highlighting of Google’s, but the amount of detail such as road names seems to me greater… [it] brings feature parity with Android – as does the introduction of turn-by-turn voice navigation, so that your satnav can now play music and make or receive phone calls.
It looks like Charles and I were lucky, because as we’re discovering today the Maps app contains lots of problems. My personal favourite is that it lists Our Price branches; for younger and/or overseas readers, Our Price was a record shop chain that closed almost a decade ago. Some towns are missing altogether; other sensible queries don’t work unless they’re phrased in a specific way (eg “Paddington” doesn’t work; “London Paddington” does); and sometimes the context awareness is broken, so a UK user searching for Christchurch near Bournemouth gets directions to New Zealand.
What’s interesting is that in many cases, it’s the populous areas that have the problems: apparently Leeds is particularly poor. I came to Maps assuming that the big places, such as London, would be perfect, and that if screw-ups were to be found they’d be more likely in more northern and more rural areas – so I went looking for such screw-ups and found they were relatively rare.
It’s clear that Maps has been rushed out, that some of its data is inaccurate and/or ancient, and that it’s going to be a while before it’s as good as Google’s multi-billion dollar mapping system. Apple doesn’t screw up like this very often: the last one like this I can remember is MobileMe, whose unhappy launch led to an unhappy Steve Jobs making the relevant employees very unhappy.
Maps will get better, but the issue demonstrates something important: individual journalists and bloggers can’t cover every conceivable use case for technology products, and sometimes problems don’t emerge until a product has actually been released.
If you’re considering spending lots of money on something, or if an upgrade is replacing a feature you rely upon, it pays to wait.
I’ve written a review of iOS 6, the latest free upgrade for Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Is it good? Yes, but the newer your hardware the better it is.
the older the kit the less of iOS 6 you actually get. Some of the big features – Siri, turn-by-turn navigation, panoramic photos and FaceTime over 3G – aren’t available for the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4.
The 3GS doesn’t even get the offline reading list feature, and Siri’s not available for the iPad 2.
Is it worth the upgrade? We’ve installed iOS across multiple iOS devices: an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S, an iPad 2 and a new iPad (that latter one courtesy of Vodafone) to find out.
As we discovered, even when you don’t get all the new features, there are still enough improvements to make the jump worthwhile.
On a tangent, spending any time whatsoever with a new iPad makes older iPads feel ancient. That retina display is a thing of beauty. Weight-adding, battery-killing beauty, but beauty nevertheless. The more I use it the more I think I’ll barricade myself in when Vodafone comes to take it back again.
My friends at Techradar and Tap! have been up all night covering the iPhone 5 announcement – literally all night in the case of Tap! – so if you want to know about the latest iteration of the iPhone then have I got links for you.
First up, Tap!’s very excellent iPhone guide [iTunes link], featuring some words from me; this one is for Newsstand, so it works on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. It’s a wonderful publication, with some great design touches. The writing ain’t bad either.
Next, Techradar’s hands-on, me on the “meh” that greeted the iPhone 5 launch, and my esteemed colleague Gareth Beavis taking a very different view. There’s only one way to solve this. Fiiiiiiight!
This week, Nokia did half an Apple: it made me look at my current phone and think “hmm, it’s getting on a bit. Time for a new one”. But it didn’t do the other half, which is to actually close the sale: where Apple goes “Boom! This date! This price!” Nokia said “Hmmm! Not sure! We’ll get back to you!”
The Lumia 920 is a really impressive and attractive phone, and if it had launched this week I may well have ordered one – not least because it’s bound to work out much, much cheaper on contract than an iPhone 5. But Apple’s powers are strong, and it’s going to be hard to resist the lure of a better iPhone.
The closure of any magazine is a sad event, but I’m particularly sad to see the end of PC Plus and What Laptop, Tablet and Smartphone, and not just because they both paid me to write things. What Laptop was a great consumer champion, cutting through the bullshit to tell you what kit was worth your hard-earned cash and where you should go to get it, and PC Plus was a genuine joy to write for – not least because when I was first published in a magazine, something that as you might imagine I was absolutely overjoyed about, my extremely unimpressed and snooty colleague said “well, yeah, but it’s hardly PC Plus, is it?” Every successive PC Plus byline – and over ten years, there were quite a few – made me remember that and smirk.
Both magazines are going to the great newsagent in the sky after their next issues, and it’s a shame: they were good magazines written, edited and designed by some of the nicest people you could ever hope to work for. The teams, I’m told, will be okay, taking their talents to other fine titles, and I hope there are many happy times ahead for them all.
If you ever read my stuff in either magazine – or better still, if you ever read and enjoyed my stuff in either magazine – I’m very grateful for your attention.