Warning! Awkward geekery ahead. Here’s me on the BBC website, talking about Windows 7. In short: it looks a lot like Vista, especially at this early stage - much of the stuff previewed by MS (and covered on the PC Pro blog) doesn’t appear to be in the version we had to play with. But it’s fast to install, quick to load and seems a lot less annoying, a lot snappier. So far, so good. Issue 64 went to press yesterday, maybe next week I’ll have some time to run some proper benchmarks, see how it is for gaming…
Entries categorized as ‘Tech’
Of course
October 27, 2008 · 2 Comments
In my previous post, which began as an excuse to post some pictures of autumn, and then changed to become a ramble on seasonal rigidity here in Japan, I mentioned how the large number of rules governing Japanese society - and its perception of the world, gives:
“A sureness and certainty and a sense of organisation to things.”
But ‘rules are made to be broken’ says the Western saying; they’re perecieved as bad, as limiting. Not always: the Jesteress has borrowed her brother’s keitai, but forgotten the charger and now it has run out of battery. Her mum asked me this morning if it was on the NTT DoCoMo network, like her phone.
“Yes,” I replied. She then got her phone’s charger and - even though it’s a completely different model - plugged it in to bro’s phone.
“All NTT phones have the same charger socket?” I asked, surprised. “Yes,” she replied. “Of course.”
A good example of how rigidity can create convenience. Fat chance of Orange enforcing this in the UK though.
Categories: Japanorama · Tech
On the quality of the iPhone’s camera
October 11, 2008 · No Comments
I’d been weighing up getting an iPhone for a while, ever since the new and improved 3G one launched. My existing contract with Orange featured rapacious data costs and distinctly rubbish data speeds, so the iPhone/02 combo of Exchange email, a decent mobile web browser and all-you-can-eat 3G data was tempting.
A couple of things put me off:
1. The iPhone’s camera looked rubbish, and I’m a big fan of mobile phone cameras - I remember paying to upgrade my phone back in 2002 just to get one of the first phones in the UK with a camera.
2.Several people at work told me the iPhone’s call quality was poor.
3. Crappy battery life.
Points 2 & 3 were quickly rendered null by the fact I couldn’t believe anything would be worse at these than my dreadful Samsung Windows Mobile machine…
And point 1? Well, I got the iPhone a week or so ago, and it’s all up and running now, synced with Exchange, hooked up to my number that I’ve had since the late 90s and… well the camera’s ok.
On the downside:
* There are zero controls over it (no white balance or exposure comp) which is annoying - although Apple could, presumably, add these in a software update.
* No flash.
* No video (also could possibly be fixed in software).
* It’s only 2 megapixel.
On the plus side:
* It meshes really well with the rest of the iPhone - it’s easy to email photos, for instance.
* It performs reasonable well in daylight
* And best of all, the speed at which it freezes the video into a picture when you press the photo button means you can create some nice mindbending pics like this one.
Categories: Photography · Tech
Moving pictures and sound: Yes, that’s me in the corner, on TV, on your computer
December 10, 2007 · 2 Comments
We’ve run a couple of video pieces on the Custom PC site this year, but so far, I’ve not presented any pieces myself. It’s something I was keen to try though, so when my friend Wil, ex Editor of Bit-Tech, offered me the chance to do a guest spot on one of his new Channel Flip web TV shows, I put it off for months accepted more or less straight away. I’m talking about graphics cards for the awesome Crysis on Wil’s Unwired tech show and you can see the show here.
Categories: Tech
It’s finally here: the new CustomPC.co.uk
July 12, 2007 · 2 Comments
And I am so relieved. For the past 18 months or so, helping create a new website for Custom PC has been something of an obsession for me. I’ve talked endlessly about it on flights, in bars, in many, many meetings and bored the Jesteress to tears with all my ideas and frustrations. I’ve scribbled brainwaves in notebooks and written thousands of words to try and get the ball rolling and convince people/the company that what Custom PC needed was a really, truly, good website - and that what this would entail would be a very different site, organisation and approach to the one we already had.
One of the biggest problems Dennis has had (and it’s one shared by many other publishers, I think) is that when taking its print brands online, in the rush to ‘get down with this new thing called the web’, a lot of the good ways of working that we had developed on the magazine editorial side were thrown out - although they were of course accompanied along with some ones that did need to go. Baby and the bath water etc. So the creation and maintence of the sites was made largely separate from the print editorial side, etc etc. It is easy to see why; the web is, after all, very different to print. To some extent it’s true that a magazine should not work on the web - that’s why it is a magazine. A
website should not work if you print it out or disconnect it.
However, good magazines do tend to be produed by relatively small, dedicated teams who are passionate about both their subject and the medium in which they are working. In any good publication, there’s an awareness of how style, form and content can be blended together. The same is true for good websites. Make the teams too large and too dispersed, go for an approach that’s too generic, too rule-based and disconnected with what the content relates to and you get a site - or a magazine - that lacks any sense of life. So what you want is a magazine and the website to have shared DNA -
shared editorial values, perhaps some shared content
(depending on the project) and the same overall quality - but, crucially, this all needs to find a different form of expression in print and on the web. The DNA needs to create two seperate, independent, unique characters. Brother and sister, rather than two clones.
We work hard to produce a magazine that makes best use of the printed format (for instance, see this post),
and it became obvious to me that we needed to take a similar approach
online, and make a site that really, genuinely worked as a website. Not just a repository of text and picture content,
but a resource for PC hardware and news, a place for people to discuss
their computers, mods, tips and tricks: a flexible tool that could be
the hub of a techy community.
With our new site, I think we’re starting to get towards this nirvana: it’s all written by the same team as the magazine, it has both articles from the mag plus web-specific stuff (particularly the news, which my colleague Ben is doing a great job with), lots of RSS feeds, sensible URLs for ease-of-use, plus WordPress-powered blogs for both staff and readers, complete with file space, so you can chuck up your pictures, benchmarks, CPU-Z screenies and mod shots and not worry about hosting.
The next big upgrade will come when we start writing our copy using a database and then we’ll be able to do very smart things with benchmark data and tech specs. This is just one of the improvements scheduled to be added - we tinker with the magazine every issue, trying new things, improving it, honing it, and now that we’ve rebalanced the editorial team so that we all work across print and web, this should also be the case with the website.
In terms of inspirations, personally, this post by Information Architects Japan was what convinced me of the need for ‘big, clear text’ (although IA probably wouldn’t like the bright colours of the rest of our design), while the excellent Journerdism provided a constant stream of challenging, thought provoking discussions on the way print media was working (or not) online. Wordblog, Modern Life, Publishing 2.0 and MagCulture have all given me great ideas, too.
The editorial team and the project team at Dennis Interactive (DI) has worked really hard on making the site happen. The project has been a huge learning curve, because not only has it involved a lot of technical engineering for the coders and designers of DI, it’s also required a re-engineering and re-balancing of how editorial and interactive work together, and a reassessment of many, many aspects of the company’s old approach to the web. There is still a long way to go, but the new site is a good first step.
And, so without further ado, here it is. www.custompc.co.uk. I now have a work blog, www.custompc.co.uk/blogs/alexwatson, and if you want to subscribe to it the RSS feed is here.
Also, the Media Guardian has written up the site launch.
Categories: In My Life · On Journalism and Media · Tech · Web
The nicest piece of technology I have used all week
July 6, 2007 · 1 Comment
I have a lovely Macbook Pro laptop, a decent camera, dual-core work PC and an iPod, but the nicest piece of technology I have used all week is this: a drinks bottle.
I picked it up on the way to work this morning (mostly because I’m getting over a cold and wanted something healthy, and I chose this in particular because it proudly describes itself as a “thickie”, nicely reclaiming a playground insult as a positive word!), and it turns out the whole bottle isn’t plastic, but corn. And it’s 100% corn - there is no plastic used whatsoever, amazingly.
According to the Innocent website, the bottle will decompose in about six weeks in the right composting conditions, and they even have the pictures to prove it.
All in all, a lovely piece of design and technology. And the drink was top too. Although I maintain it’s not breakfast in a bottle unless bacon is involved.
Categories: Tech · Thought For The Day
Most Hated Words
June 22, 2007 · No Comments
“Teh internetz” are not always the best friend of the English language. Not that I subscribe to the idea that all this chatting on forums is ruining the kids’ ability to use language - after all, a language is a living thing, and should be, needs to be, remoulded, reworked, and re-engergised on a daily basis - but the IT world throws up some really ugly words, just plain minging arrangements of letters that should never be displayed on screen, let alone spoken out loud.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a brief post up about a YouGov survey of the most annoying words spawned by the web. These include folksonomy, vlog and webinar. Nate adds a few of his own linguistic nails-on-a-blackboard moments - including the terrible ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘AJAXify’ (although I’d disagree with his inclusion of ‘podcast’.
There are a few words that are regularly used to pepper press releases for hardware products, and have the same effects as seasoning your chile con carne with horse manure. Here are the terms that deserve to be publicly shamed like a first-round failure on X-Factor:
1. Solutions.
As in… “AMD continues to deliver technology solutions that improve the way we live, work and play.”
No. Solutions don’t improve things, they solve problems. ‘4′ is the solution to 2+2. Ordering a pizza when you’ve got no food in the house and everyone is starving. These are solutions, because they address direct, easily quantifiable problems.
2. Platform.
As in… “Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like its highly acclaimed ZEN™ portable audio and media players.”
Nope. A platform is a place which trains arrive late to. Why even use the word ‘platform’ here?
3. Extreme.
As in… “NVIDIA’s GigaThread Technology, which, through the use of a massively multi-threaded architecture, is able to create thousands of independent, simultaneous threads, providing extreme processing efficiency for advanced, next generation shader programs.”
Nein. Forty degrees below zero. Fans of Adolf Hitler. Stoning people to death for stealing. These are extreme.
But the worst offender has to be…
4. Functionality.
As in… “Consumers today are demanding higher standards of digital entertainment experiences that enhance the very personal environments of their home,” said Satjiv S. Chahil, senior vice president, global marketing, Personal Systems Group, HP. “HP designers have achieved a much needed balance of form and functionality that enriches the experience and ease of use of today’s personal technology.”
What’s wrong with ‘function(s)’? If adding -ality to a word automatically added 30% more professionalism and excitment to something, I’d work for a publication called Custom PCality. You’d be searching the web with Googleality and enthusing about your iPod and its iTunesality. But it’s not, and you don’t. People, let’s end the -ality now.
Categories: Creativity · Tech
The iPhone: Apple’s best defence
June 22, 2007 · No Comments
A friend of mine works as a news journalist for PA out in New York, and as Apple’s iPhone is due for launch very soon, he’s writing a story and asked me for some thoughts on it.
It’s always interesting to help out with someone’s research, as it gives you an opportunity to give some order to your own thoughts.
I think that Apple seems to be in a very strong position at the moment - but the interesting thing is that it’s not necessarily a secure one, and this is where the iPhone comes in. More and more people are listening to digital music on their mobile phones, and as the phones get better in terms of functions and storage, this will happen in greater numbers, and it will erode the market for an iPod. Sony Ericsson has been very aggressive with this, using the Sony Walkman brand for its phones. The mobile phone networks also now offer music downloads straight to the phone, which the iPod, forever tethered to a PC or Mac’s iTunes, doesn’t currently offer. The simplicity of just having one device to carry, rather than both a phone and an iPod also appeals to people. The iPhone has full iPod features, so it’s a good way to counter this trend.
Secondly, it’s now a lot easier to do a lot more online, and the web doesn’t care what computer - PC or Mac - that it’s running on, which threaten Apple’s computer business, as does the fact that more and more people are using their phones to access the web. So, naturally, the iPhone is being pushed as being great for mobile internet, and again, it’s making sure that Apple is keeping abreast of changes in the way people use technology, the way it fits into their lives, and also, has a product to offer them.
While Apple is pushing the iPhone as a revolutionary device, it’s actually a typical Apple product in that it’s being launched into an existing, but fairly obscure/geeky market, and it will try and make it more popular. Microsoft, after all, has been releasing versions of its Windows Mobile software since the year 2000.
In order for the iPhone to be a good iPod, and a good mobile web device, Apple will have made trade offs, just as they did with the iPod, and the screen is the biggest area where you can see this. The iPhone’s touchscreen is going to be great for scrolling through songs, images and web pages, and of course it frees up space to have a massive display. It’s probably not going to be so good for entering text or numbers though, but I think Apple has decided these aren’t of primary importance - after all, most people store all their numbers in the address book, and with the iPod and internet functions being so important, the control system has to be perfect for them.
The question of whether the iPhone is a success for the Apple as a company isn’t going to be answered for a while - but regardless of how well it actually does, I think the iPhone will end up being a transitional product: if it flops, Apple will stick to computers and iPods and home media stuff. If it succeeds then you can bet there will be a lot more ultra mini computers on the way. The iPhone is just a test.
Categories: Tech
An old school journalist does new media
June 21, 2007 · 1 Comment
As I mentioned in my previous post about heading off to Computex with a bag weighed down with AV kit, at work, we’re really pushing on with expanding what we, technically a bunch of magazine journalists, do. When I joined, close to four years ago, I wrote articles for a magazine. In the past year, this has been expanded to include podcasting, shooting photos for web and magazine stories, and now, shooting video! Footage from the Computex trade show of some overclocking with liquid nitrogen is very neatly embedded in this news story here.
There are many decent blogs on the web that deal with the way journalism is changing: I’ve got RSS subscriptions to the fabulous Journerdism, Invisible Inkling, Publishing 2.0 and Wordblog to name just a few. It helps me keep up with what’s going on, and gives me a lot of valuable stuff to think about in terms of how my career field is changing. These sites are great and tend to avoid the position about journalism that is extremely common around the web: the assumption that pretty much anyone who writes for a print product doesn’t get the web, and doesn’t want to.
Now, this is probably true for some journalists, but most of the journalists I know can’t wait to get their hands on video recorders, cameras and decent CMS systems. I think the reason the opinion that journos hate the web is so widely held is that it appears to be true on a much wider scale, because so few major print brands have good websites. It’s a quick judgement, but an easy one to simply say - bad website = people who don’t care about the web.
However, it’s usually not the journalists - the writers - who make these websites. And being a blogger, when you want to change something, you just log in, and apply a different theme, or add a widget, or write a post. It’s great. I know, I love TypePad for that.
Can’t do it at work so easily, though - print brands (like Custom PC) are owned by large companies, large, multi-department companies that devolve control of stuff to many different teams, and when it comes to something new like the web, the structure is not all that well defined, especially in terms of who does what.
Dennis, where I work, has spent the last year trying to improve how the existing teams on the print and web side can mesh together. We are getting there, I think. For instance, my job title has just changed, so that I now have a role description that budgets 50% of my time for print stuff, and 50% for web stuff - before, if I wanted to work on web projects (like, say, the podcast), I had to find the time while doing a job that had no time allocated for non-magazine work. I still did it though, becuase I really thought it would be fun and great for us to do a podcast. Rex Sorgatz puts it perfectly in this interview:
“Big Media Is Hard. Epitaph or bumper sticker? I’m not sure, but it’s so true. Building
small little sites is so rewarding because you can build an entire new
universe in a month. But getting a big media company to change
directions is ridiculously frustrating. Big media is hard! But big
media is also influential, interesting, powerful, gargantuan,
mysterious — in a word, exciting. So my little dream right now is to
create a “small media mentality” within “big media company.”
I’m with him on both sides; that it’s hard to change, but when it does change, the opportunities are massive. The truly new CPC site is coming and it will be great, I think. I hope.
Categories: On Journalism and Media · Tech
Joost invites all gone - I wonder why?
April 16, 2007 · No Comments
The post title says it all - took a little over 24 hours, but my latest Joost invites are now all gone. The lucky recipients were:
* McGuyver
* Tony Jones of Compelling Content
* Alan Hussey
* Perry Taylor
When Joost next dole out some more invites, I’ll put a post up, same as before, so stay tuned.
I learned two things from this experiment:
1. Joost has phenomenal brand power; people are hugely interested in it, which is hardly surprising given the track record of the company’s founders. It’s interesting that it’s these previous projects and the rigmarole of the invites process which are being used to generate momentum/PR for Joost; it’s a start contrast to the way TV networks normally sell themselves, which is of course, on the basis of their content.
The main reason for this is that, as everyone who has received an invite from me finds out about 15 minutes after loading Joost up, there really isn’t a lot of content on there - certainly not that’s any good. Only the White Stripes and QOTSA interviews from Canadian TV have really held my interest.
I don’t think this is the only reason Joost is opting for a drip-drip-drip of info and invites; PR wise, the most successful company in the world right now is Apple, a company which generates huge media interest by opting for secrecy. It does make you wonder if Wired’s current cover story, ‘Get Naked And Rule the World‘ is a little off target. Given Apple and Joost’s approach, and of course the secrecy notoriously favoured by Google, do you really believe the following, from the article’s intro, is true?
“Smart companies are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about
products in their pipeline, even admitting to their failures. The name
of this new game is RADICAL TRANSPARENCY, and it’s sweeping boardrooms
across the nation.”
2. The second fact I learned is that Google blog search is fantastic; I had comments responding to my post within 30 minutes - and I think, from the stats, that pretty much everyone found the post via Google (or via an existing bookmark) - not Technorati. Something for Technorati to be very worried about, I think.
