Journalism, radio and stuff like that
Photoshop is 20. Happy Birthday, Photoshop!
From whitening teeth in billboard ads to foisting yet more lolcats on the world, its influence is enormous.
Inevitably that influence has been bad as well as good. In the right hands, image manipulation can be undetectable, but all too often Photoshop falls into the hands of the overworked, the shoddy and the idiotic.
Hopefully this is part of a bigger trend. For years, technology has become more and more complicated, often for no good reason. I do a monthly radio surgery where listeners phone in with their technology troubles, and more often than not they’re being driven daft by something that should be simple, but isn’t. Far from being an enabler, something that helps us get things done, technology can become a barrier, a binary bouncer that stops us doing the things we want to do.
A year ago today, I said that Facebook had jumped the shark. Now, I’m eating humble pie. Sort of.
So, Facebook is brilliant, I’m a great big numpty and everything in social networking land is groovy.
Not so fast.
Facebook isn’t popular because it’s good. It’s popular because it’s popular.
Facebook is the budget airline of tech.
Hi! How are you? Also: up yours! Screw you! Get stuffed!
Welcome to the wonderful world of web comments, where telling somebody to get bent is an acceptable way to say hello.
A wee piece by me over at Techradar about Engadget switching off its comments system due to “trolls and spammers”.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by the iPad until Steve Jobs announced the price: at $499, it’s a pretty amazing bit of kit. That’s netbook money, and that means it could be a pretty big deal. I’m quite excited about it, because I can think of three people who’d like it a lot: me, Mrs Bigmouth and my mum.
Me and Mrs Bigmouth first. I’ve already got a computer for work, so I’m not greatly bothered by the iPad form factor. What I do need, though, is a replacement for the old Windows laptop I keep downstairs. It’s used for web browsing, Twitter, the odd bit of Facebook, the odd bit of video and the odd bit of typing. The iPad with a dock can do all of that, and it can also do iPlayer (or at least, I can’t think of any reason why it can’t – iPlayer works on iPhone using streaming H.264 video).
Don’t underestimate the power of iPlayer, by the way. It brings Shaun The Sheep to angry toddlers.
I also have a £702/year newspaper habit. Imagine if I could come downstairs in the morning, grab the iPad, and use it as a newspaper. It’s big enough so there’s still the serendipity of seeing articles you might otherwise miss, and it’s digital enough that I can get my news for free (or nearly free, depending on what the Guardian, Sunday Times etc do about online content). When I’m done it becomes a photo frame until Mrs Bigmouth fancies a bit of Facebooking, emailing or newspaper reading.
So: it replaces the laptop, it saves me money. It’s an easy sell. It doesn’t have e-ink, but I wouldn’t be using it long enough for that to be an issue.
Then there’s my mum. She doesn’t really need a computer, but she has one. She uses it for email, for viewing Flickr, and for booking flights. If the iPad can print wirelessly – and I hope it can, because it renders iWork pretty useless if you have to sync with a desktop just to print a letter – then again, replacing her laptop with an iPad is an easy sell.
I’ve written a few other things over at Techradar. First, why I think the iPad is more revolutionary than it appears, and why some of the criticisms so far don’t make sense:
No, it doesn’t have a camera. Why on earth would you want to take photos with something the size of a large paperback book? It doesn’t make phone calls because it’s not a phone. It doesn’t have hooves because it’s not a horse.
Then, whether the iPad is a Kindle killer and a netbook nuker.
The problem is that netbooks are essentially cheap laptops, which is both their strength and their weakness: the price is right but they’re slow, they’ve got small screens and they’re still PCs – with all the complexity, malware and hassle that entails. The iPad, on the other hand, has a much bigger screen, is much simpler, is a proper media device, gets ten hours out of a battery and doubles as an eBook. We wouldn’t want to type on it all day, but then we wouldn’t want to type on the average netbook all day either. We’ve got proper computers for that.
Andy Ihnatko is one of my favourite tech writers, and this Chicago Sun-Times piece is a doozy. It’s about tablets, and hype, and fun.
I like Apple for any number of reasons but at the top of the list is the fact that they’re capable of raising people’s expectations and restoring a sense of joy and delight in technology. Good technology is a creative expression that inspires excitement and awe. It’s no different from the movie trailer that burns the release date in your memory for months, or the song you hear played by a guest on a late-night talk show that makes you pull your notebook into the bed and start buying music downloads before the show even goes into commercial.
This, on the other hand… WARNING! SCOBLE!
Ahh, it seems so long ago when my son and I waited in line to fork over more than $600 each to buy an iPhone. The image above is from the front page of the San Jose Mercury News (I was cheering to many thousands of people who were waiting to get into the store to buy their iPhones and who had waited for up to 38 hours to do so — my son and I were first in line, which was a lot of fun).
I will do it again for WHATEVER Steve Jobs introduces on Wednesday.
Yes, I am a fanboi.
Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes?
One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had it in X format, but the only legal versions were in Y format.
Publishers are keen to avoid the same thing in books.
Ten things you should be sued for doing online, by me at Techradar.
An interesting post by David Hepworth of The Word magazine:
experience has taught me that if I say I like the demo people will then expect me to do something to make them successful; if I say I don’t like it then I am an unfeeling, heartless bastard.
As you may have heard, The Guardian has created an iPhone app. It’s very good. But is it as good as ink printed on dead trees?
One of the side-effects of the current cold snap is that my papers aren’t delivered until fairly late in the day, if at all. I’m a creature of habit, so that buggers up my day quite considerably: the natural order of things is coffee, paper, toast, work. Hurrah, then, for the Guardian iPhone app.
Well, not quite. As an app it’s brilliant. As a newspaper replacement, it isn’t.
The single most important problem isn’t the app’s fault, but the iPhone’s. Reading from a screen isn’t fun, especially when you’re up too early and it’s still pitch black outside. No matter how much you tweak it, reading from a brightly lit screen simply isn’t as easy on the eyes as reading from paper.
The second problem is also the iPhone’s fault: the screen’s too small. Maybe it’s just me and my RSI, but holding the phone in one position for any period of time starts to hurt my hands, and because it’s such a small screen you spend more time scrolling than you do reading. I know it’s possible to read entire books on the iPhone, but I think anybody who does is nuts.
The third problem is that there’s a lack of serendipity. Again, this may just be me, but I find I tend to read much more of a printed paper or magazine than I do with a screen-based one. In print I’ll read most things; on a screen I only tend to click on the things I know I’m interested in.
Maybe things will change with the forthcoming Apple Tablet That Will Do Everything Including Raising Elvis From The Dead, or with e-ink based ebook readers (although I’m not convinced they have a long term future) – or more likely, maybe we’ll see new kinds of publication with embedded video and other goodies. But for those of us who need a daily print fix, I’m not sure technology has a decent alternative just yet.