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Me on Techradar: 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… [more]
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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… [more]
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Me, going on about the evils of the internet again… A big scandal’s kicked off in the world of books: big-name authors RJ Ellory and Stephen Leather have been writing fake reviews on the internet, bigging up their own titles and damning their rivals’ books. They’re not the only ones – John Locke appears to have forgotten… [more]
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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… [more]
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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. [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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I loved Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, and this wonderful MetaFilter post collates all the FF goodness you could possibly want from the internet. Meanwhile, this hilarious Tumblr collates many of the ways choose-your-own-adventures could end. [more]
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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.… [more]
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A nice piece in The Atlantic on the demise of the much-loved Word magazine: But the recently announced demise of The Word, a nine-year-old British rock monthly, hurts more than most. The Word did something that seems beyond most of its competitors now: It breathed. Even at its most list-tacular, there was nothing assembly-line about it. When it… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
