Me, on Techradar, writing about OEM software:

Imagine. You’ve saved up for years, and at last you can afford the car of your dreams.

You’ve done your homework, chosen the best specs, picked the best colour combinations and haggled for the best deal.

It’s tasteful. Subtle. Classy. And when you turn up to collect it there are plastic eyelashes on the headlights, green fur covers on the seat and LOOK AT ME I AMS FAST down the side in luminous green letters.

An excellent post about apps, but it’s really about any kind of digital content.

Making any digital product is actually about making two products:

1.         The product itself.
2.         The reason anyone should care about (1).

Because no-one cares. Of course, no-one cares. There’s too much stuff, so no-one cares just because you’ve made something new.

I love it when a daft idea turns into something good: with two Steve Jobs biopics in production, I wondered what sort of films other directors would make about the late Mr Jobs. After some spirited discussions we came up with a shortlist – Michael Bay, David Fincher, John Lasseter, the Coen Brothers and Norah Ephron – and I got to have some fun with the pitches. The result is Steve Jobs: The Movie, in the new issue of MacFormat. I love the illustrations, although it’s a shame my ending for Steve-E has been tweaked a bit: inevitably, that was the bit of the article I liked the best.

That’s today’s top writing tip: don’t get too precious about your work, because the bits you like best are always cut first.

One of my MacFormat columns has made its way online:

The problem with kids is that the very things that make them so sweet – their complete trust in grown-ups, their utter lack of cynicism and their lack of impulse control – make them very easy to exploit. And that’s exactly what many app developers are trying to do.

…the App Store is packed with apps whose entire purpose is to trigger in-app purchases, whether that’s paid-for apps or expensive in-app fripperies.

I have a particular hatred of Outfit7’s talking characters, whose apps’ screens are minefields of “buy things!” buttons, but the nadir is probably Beeline Interactive’s Smurfs’ Village, a free app that includes in-app purchases such as a “wagon of smurfberries” for just £69.99.

How do they sleep?

It’s not a problem for me today, mind you: an accident involving a leaky water pistol has killed my iPhone. You don’t realise how much you use your smartphone until you can’t.

Digg, the social news site formerly valued at around $200 million, was sold this week for a paltry $500,000. It’s been a long time coming, as I wrote in .net last year:

There’s an old saying about websites: if you can’t work out what product the site is selling, then the product is probably you. It’s something website users often forget, which perhaps explains how people can get so angry when you slightly change a logo or layout. “This site, for which I pay nothing, has changed very slightly! I’m angry and demand compensation!”

It can be a pain dealing with such complaints, but it turns out that the alternative is even worse. If you make it too obvious that the punters are your product, that they’re the computerised cows in your online abattoir, they tend to stop mooing and start moving. If enough of them escape, they can bring your entire business crashing down.

Just ask Digg.

Me, at Techradar, on why IMAX is better than 3D.

When you consider all the cons of 3D – the price, the stupid specs, the hurty-eyes bit when you look at the background and it’s all blurry – against the single pro, which is that at some point you’ll be able to go “OOH OOH POINTY THING POINTING AT ME OUT OF THE SCREEN”, because nobody’s ever seen that in a cinema before… it’s proof that Hollywood thinks you’re an idiot.

I can make my point in just three words.

Top Cat 3D.

The iPhone is five today.

Tech journalists like me are paid to be the Waldorf and Statler of technology, the grumpy old men in the Muppet Theatre’s balcony pouring scorn on everything they see, but even at my most jaded and cynical I can’t help being excited about where we are now.

Me, on Techradar, writing about Microsoft’s Surface and Google’s Nexus 7:

By getting Asus to make millions of exceptionally cheap Nexuses, Google isn’t saying “Hey, guys! Make these!” to the other OEMs.
It’s throwing a tablet party, and the other OEMs aren’t invited.