Android App of the Week: OpenTable

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Finding the right restaurant in a busy city can often be a nightmare. If you regularly find yourself missing out on your favourite eateries, then download our Android App of the Week, OpenTable.

This ingenious free tool accesses the firm’s database of 14,000 restaurants, allowing you to book a table in under a minute.

Getting started is easy. The app uses your phone’s GPS to pinpoint your location and asks what time you’d like to dine and how many people are in your party.

OpenTable goes to work and seconds later serves up a list of local restaurants organised by how far away you are. Alongside a picture of the venue, you’re presented with three available timeslots, the type of food served and a rough guide to the amount of cash you’ll have to fork out at each. (more…)

Tweeted a stupid update? Time for a name change

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Kids today post so much embarrassing personal content online that one day they’re going to have to change their names to escape the mess. That’s what Google’s Eric Schmidt believes, anyway.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t quote Schmidt directly, but reports that: “He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

Let’s assume he is indeed serious. Most Facebookers and Twitterers have posted impetuous comments only to later delete them in embarrassment, or lived to regret their friends tagging them in a goofy, drunken photo, so it’s no wonder years down the line it may seem time to hit reset.

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3D TV: in the home, on a budget and… on the news?

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

This is the final part in a series of blogs based on a seminar by Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California.

It’s the most important consideration when it comes to filming in 3D: what types of production does the technology really suit? The huge vistas of Avatar used the 3D effect better than any film we’ve seen so far, but can shots still look good when scaled down to less epic proportions? Buzz Hays believes it may be something far smaller scale than cinema that eventually shows what 3D can achieve.

Filming on a hand-held budget

If we move way down the scale from Avatar towards smaller productions, one technique crops up more and more. (more…)

A graphic illustration of music industry madness

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Earlier this week, Pure unveiled a new music download service, letting anyone with a Flow-branded radio buy music directly from the device.

Alongside systems such as Spotify and Last.FM, FlowMusic is hoping to encourage listeners to keep it legal by making it as easy as possible to buy tracks – which I’d say is the right tactic to discouraging music piracy. Make it easy, keep it cheap.

However, there’s one area constantly throwing a wrench in the works: sorting out the rights.

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Google Street View: Privacy, Transparency and Trust

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Google HQ has announced that its Street View cars are back out on the road so, if your house hasn’t been covered already, and you don’t want to suffer the same embarrassment as me (see screenshot), I strongly recommend that you go and cut your hedge.

On a related but rather more serious note, (more…)

iPhone App of the Week: Instapaper

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

If, like me, you often end the working day with a dozen open browser tabs full of articles you meant to read later, Instapaper could be just the ticket.

This delightfully clever service installs a “Read Later” button in your PC browser’s bookmarks bar. Click this when you stumble across an interesting read that you haven’t got time to plough through, and you can read it on the way home from work on your iPhone/iPad.

Instapaper doesn’t just save a copy of the page. It strips out the page furniture and advertising, and pops the text and images into an easily digestible page that doesn’t require any zooming. Occasionally that formatting goes a little awry – pages are sometimes stuffed with links or HTML gubbins, or articles are sporadically chopped off before the end – but by and large it does a fine job of discriminating between wheat and chaff.

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Windows Updates freezing PCs?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

This week’s Windows Updates appear to be causing more than their fair share of problems, including here in the PC Pro office.

News editor Nicole Kobie spent the best part of an hour swearing at her PC this morning, when it got stuck in a reboot cycle after installing the latest updates. She had to restore her PC to the last known working configuration to coax her system out of its coma.

It seems she’s not the only one. A quick survey of PC Pro’s followers on Twitter shows that several readers are experiencing similar issues.

“The updates appear to install, then during the restart, the laptop freezes during the power down phase and locks up,” reports one.

“A friend of mine’s computer is hanging during the updates. Happens after a reboot too,” reports another.

The Microsoft press office is checking to see whether there are any known issues, and we’ll update you as soon as we can.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already installed the updates, you might want to hold fire.

Android App of the Week: Cycle Hire Widget

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Londoners won’t have failed to notice the thousands of heavy-duty grey and blue bikes that have sprung up around the capital as part of the Barclays Cycle Hire project. The scheme, dreamt up by London major Boris Johnson, has its fair share of fans and critics, but there’s little to complain about with our Android App of the Week.

Cycle Hire Widget is free, developed by the oddly-named Little Fluffy Toys Ltd, and has everything you need to get the most out of the so-called Boris Bikes.

The unobtrusive widget takes up only one icon on your home screen, and a tap sets your GPS to work finding the three nearest cycle banks. The icon expands, displaying their distance away and direction, which is constantly updated by your phone’s GPS unit. (more…)

Photographic evidence that 3D glasses are too dark

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

I went to see Toy Story 3 this week. It was wonderful. A joyous, pixel-perfect celebration of story-telling and animation that does Disney’s amazing history proud. It was a tour-de-force of perfectionism: every animation, line of script, colour and setting has been designed with the kind of love and care you only get when you have a team of dedicated, incredibly talented individuals working with conviction on a project that they intuitively know is going to produce something really special.

Yet, Toy Story 3 is categorically the last film I will ever pay extra money for to watch in 3D. My local Odeon was showing a 3D print of Toy Story at half-past six and the 2D version two hours later: I’ve concluded I’d have gladly waited.

Why? Aside from the 3D surcharge imposed by the cinemas and the ear-chaffing discomfort of the 3D glasses, there’s another problem: I can’t see my popcorn.

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What next for HP?

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

The IT industry and Wall Street were both rocked this week by the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd after he was caught fiddling his expenses and concealing a relationship with a female contractor.

The criticisms levelled at Hurd over his tenure as CEO include that of stifling innovation in favour of making money. However, since he took the reins in 2005, HP’s market value has more than doubled to roughly $100bn, so those are some big shoes to fill. To quote Motley Fool analyst Rick Munarriz: “Outside of Steve Jobs at Apple, it’s hard to imagine a CEO that is more important to his company than Mark Hurd to Hewlett Packard. He did a massive turnaround job.”

Like me, you’ve probably read the coverage with interest. However, the real talking point now is where does HP go from here?

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