10 Types Of People

Nothing really can be said…

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube

No Comments »Filed under: Misc Tech · Mobile Tech · The Media · Themes · Video of the week |

Last night I went to the UX bookclub, Glasgow, with a bunch of people from Geeksoc. We used the book “The Design of Everyday things”, by , and we discussed a whole number of things (sometimes going very off topic) from the iphone user interface to having different coloured links for visited links.

One of the things we discussed was about how simple user interfaces should be. For example, not having a filesystem that you can browse on the iphone. Or having a simple browser-only interface like ChromeOS. The discussion led to me thinking a lot about how user interfaces should be. Bad examples of user interfaces, and how we could fall into a dangerous trap when trying to be simple. Read More »

No Comments »Filed under: Tech |

Theres not much to say about this video. 1 sentence:

best…promo…video…ever

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube

2 Comments »Filed under: Applications · Misc Tech · Tech · Video of the week |

I do like the muppets new videos. Very well made, and also they have full 1080 on their videos (which looks beautiful on my screen btw). So, enjoy this new one from them. (ps, you’ll have to go to the youtube page if you wanna watch it in hd).

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube

1 Comment »Filed under: Misc · Video of the week |

Thought I would do another blog post with lots of exciting tech news. So, here is what I’ve been seeing over the past few days.

• Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
• Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
• JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
• With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
• Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
• Apple yet again show how pathetic they are, by turning down an app because it is “not interesting enough”.

So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!

No Comments »Filed under: Applications · Linux · Mac · Misc Tech · Mobile Tech · Tech · The Internet · The Media · Windows |

What is there to say about this video? Except – roll on summer!!! If this isn’t a reason to finally get a PS3, I don’t know what it.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube

No Comments »Filed under: Tech · Video of the week |

Now, you may be thinking “Man alive…no posts for days, and now a post about that iPad thing.”. Well, yeah, I know, it is shocking. Sadly, there hasn’t been much for me to blog about. I’ve been trying to think of something else, and my mind has been mulling over whether or not to blog about this “iPad thing” constantly for the past week. So…I decided that I would hurry up and post about it so I can free my mind to think about other things. So, I’m just going to talk about random things about the iPad.

What the iPad is not:

• E-book reader

The iPad is not an e-book reader. At all. Why would you buy an e-book reader rather than a laptop/netbook? The e-ink screen. It is nice to read, and it is very low power. Weeks of battery life and no strain on the eyes are the main reasons why you would buy an e-book reader. Now lets look at the iPad. No e-ink screen, wouldn’t be good in sunlight (I’d imagine) and would cause strain after reading lots. And battery life – 10 hours. That is not even a full day. It has less battery life than my phone, but it has a similar processor. Therefore, the iPad is not a replacement for an e-book reader. Don’t buy it to read books.

Read More »

7 Comments »Filed under: Mac · Tech · The Media |

No, this is nothing about the iPad. Take a look at this link.

What do you think? Pretty nice in my opinion. Not a huge amount of information about it yet, and I’m assuming it’ll take longer to actually get over here to britain. But it shows that my perfect e-book reader is getting closer and closer.

Looks beautiful doesn’t it. The screen looks amazing. I’d have to see it in real life, but it looks like it could be as good as OLED. And in that case, it would be much better because OLED is rubbish in sunlight, e-ink is nicer on the eyes, and e-ink lasts much much longer.

It also is a really nice size. 13.1 inches is amazing for an ebook reader (about the size of an A4 piece of paper), and look at the size of that border, it is tiny! None of this 7″ screen with 2″ either side of border. Well played. It also has wifi and 3G connectivity, although no details on what networks you can use with it.

A couple of things I want to know about this:

• Battery life. How does colour change the battery life? Is it much shorter?
• Refresh rate. How fast is it? Fast enough for video?
• Video. Related to the last one, can it play video?
• Content. Are there any content providers with this? What can I view on it? Can I view pdfs and epuds?
• UK availability. It only says that it will be available in “Q2″, which I assume is just in US.
• Price. There are no details on price at all.

So, all in all, this looks like a really really nice device that I would love to get my hands on. It has note-taking abilities, so it includes almost everything I want in an ereader. Maybe this is the device I will finally buy. Or maybe not…

2 Comments »Filed under: Tech · The Media |

Just thought I would put a wee blog post out to let people know that I am now officially engaged to Faye (@framemybear on twitter). I will post picture and explain how it happened another time, but I’m kinda busy just now

**EDIT** Spelling mistake – “not” changed to “now”

6 Comments »Filed under: Applications · God · Linux · Mac · Misc · Misc Tech · Mobile Tech · Mobile Tech · Science · Space · Tech · The Internet · The Media · Ubuntu · Windows |

Or: “Re-fueling the mono debate.” Or: “I’m bored so I want to see people flame.”

No, but seriously, I did have a few thoughts about the usefulness of mono, and also the openness of it. So, I’ll take some points that have cropped up in the origional mono debate, and tell you what I think about them.

• “Mono isn’t open”

Yes it is. What is open??? Seriously, if implementing something closed in an open way is not open, then we are in a sad sad way. Does that mean that samba isn’t open-source? What about wine? Noone ever says they are closed source. As far as I know, mono is a completely open source language that is compatable with .net. Don’t tell me that mono is not open.

• “Mono is patent encumbered.”

DISCLAIMER: None of this is total facts. I am not a lawyer, and some of this is just my opinion and not fact. It is what I believe to be correct, but there may be something that isn’t.

Do you care about mp3s because of patents? If so, thats fine feel free to moan about mono. If not, then what is the difference? In many countries patents aren’t valid anyway. For example, as far as I know, in Europe, software patents do not count. So, if you aren’t in a country that has software patents then this is a non-argument.

If you are in the US, however, then you might be worried about this. Well, first of all, as far as I know the patents have never been proved. It is one of these patents that Microsoft say they have, but noone outside the company has seen them to prove they exist. Also, Microsoft have said that they won’t sue anyone that does anything with mono. Granted, this is not a legal agreement, but if they then go and sue someone, it won’t exactly look good in court. “So, you say that Microsoft said it was ok that you could use it? But now they are sueing you? How odd.” Patents are all about use. If you don’t work correctly with them they are unlikely to work.

• “Mono is very bulky.”

True. Mono is very large in the sense that it takes a lot of disk space. But, it doesn’t use much ram as far as I can tell. It is not a lightweight programming language, but noone is telling you that you must use it. Most computers nowadays can handle bulky things anyway. Your computer can run firefox, openoffice and compiz but you don’t want to run mono on it? That is a bit silly. What is the difference? The applications themselves don’t take up much space, it is just the language that takes up all the space.

• “There are no good applications built on mono.”

Gnome-do. Thats all I need to say to be honest.

• “Mono is useful for porting applications to linux.”

Tell me 1 application that has been ported to mono. Oh wait, you can’t? I can’t either. Now, I think it would be a fantastic thing to get people to port their applications to mono, for example mathcad would be great on linux, evernote would be fantastic. But, as far as I know nothing big has been ported. Its all very well and good saying that it is really easy to port applications to mono, but until someone big does it, it is not a reason to use mono.

In the end, I would love mono to be the go-to thing to port your .net application over to linux. I would love to have evernote on linux (don’t tell me it runs in wine, the new version doesn’t) and it would really put linux on the map.

Windows user: “I would love to use Linux but I can’t run ‘application x’ on it, it is written in .net”    Linux user: “Yes you can, it has been ported to mono.”     Windows user: “Ok, I’ll use Linux then.”

7 Comments »Filed under: Applications · Linux · Mac · Misc Tech · Tech · Windows |