Tabbed documents: how to make Office 2010 great

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Online-overlord Barry Collins has been fiddling with the Office 2010 beta for the last couple of days, and his reaction to it has been terrifying. Barry greets technology in only two states: the apoplectic fury of a man for whom every hollow promise is the death knell of another dream, and the rapture of somebody who’s just discovered that Nirvana’s a theme park with a £35 admission price.

What terrifies me is that he’s greeted Office 2010 with an almighty ‘meh’. There’s been bafflement and a few half-hearted jokes, but not once has the office fallen still at the ominous ticking of the Barry bomb which sits at the core of his being.

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Could people learn to love Microsoft once more?

Monday, September 14th, 2009

It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft was generally considered a dirty word. Dare defend the company and the outpouring of scorn was enough to leave you wondering whose puppy you’d just shot.

To be fair, the software giant hadn’t done itself many favours. Its response to antitrust investigations stopped marginally short of certifiable paranoia, while Vista turned out to have all the charm of a broken bottle being waved at a bar fight. Office 2007 was brilliant, but conspicuously so among a product list that had come to represent the best cure for insomnia.

Microsoft seemed adrift, bereft of ideas or inspiration as its empire was systematically hacked to bits by Google, Apple and Mozilla. And yet, two years later and the company is once again the toast of the tech press. Windows 7 is good, but one product’s not enough to rescue an enormous company’s reputation. What on earth has happened? Is it really okay to like Microsoft again? (more…)

Xperia Pureness: beautifully shallow

Friday, September 4th, 2009

It’s lovely watching a company go completely mad. Case in point, Sony Ericsson which has just revealed the world’s first smartphone with a transparent screen.

Dubbed the Xperia Pureness, it’s certainly a good looking handset though quite whether it justifies the following piece of PR fluff is a matter of debate.

“The Xperia Pureness approaches the mobile phone as a work of art rather than technology. The company’s designers aimed to sculpt an object of design that reflected the purity of water and a sense of calmness when not in use.”

Eh? What’s utterly brilliant is that it’s quite literally all style and no substance, with Sony Ericsson unleashing a barrage of stylish press shots backed by absolutely no technical details whatsoever.

The company is promising to reveal more details closer to the November 2009 release date. Until then, I suggest you peruse the following pictures and bask in the phone’s reflected glory, following the secret story contained within.

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Hands on: Sony’s superb Reader Touch

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

“I want my books to be made of paper, to have a spine, and a cover. I like the feel of them in my hand”

This was the first comment I heard this morning when I returned to the office after visiting the British Library to play with Sony’s new Reader Touch. As an eBook advocate, I’ve been hearing this refrain ever since the original Sony PRS 505 dropped on my desk last year. People who like to read adore paperbacks. They’re cheap, perfect at what they do and are pleasingly tactile. We like how they feel, the way they smell; we like to run our hands over them in a book shop.

eBook readers have failed to convince because books don’t need upgrading. It’s brilliant that an eBook reader can hold 350 books, but the majority of people don’t carry around 350 books. The majority of people won’t read 350 books in their lifetime. If eBook readers are going to break out of their niche and really scar the public psyche they need to start offering useful features their paper brethren don’t. And with the curtain raised, let me usher the Sony Reader Touch to centre stage.

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Beck strokes The Velvet Underground

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I’m not writing a series of blog posts entitled “the best thing I stumbled across on the web this week”, but if I was, Beck’s Record Club, would be number four in the series.

As baffling as that opening paragraph may initially seem, it’s a mere tickle of oddness next to the backhanded slap that is Beck covering The Velvet Underground and posting the recordings on his website. They’re part of a larger experiment in which the restless musical waif works with a rotating group of musicians to “reinterpret” classic albums – beginning with The Velvet Underground and Nico. There’s two more planned for the series and if this is anything to go by, they’ll be notable for their kamikaze-like courage and utter failure.

JUDGED! But not really, because Beck has failed at an impossible task – he was trying to erect a monument of mist – which makes the fact he tried in the first place all the more impressive. At the core of this problem is the fact that Lou Reed (lead singer of the Velvet Underground) lived the sort of life that made angels fall from the sky in envy and dread.

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The Twitter freak show

Monday, August 17th, 2009

PC Pro’s online overlord Barry Collins is, as we speak, trying to be on holiday. This is something he’s not very good at, as evidenced by the fact that 12 minutes after the official start of him not being here, he emailed me about being here. The worst part of this is that he’s actually getting better.

However, in an attempt to prove that he really was going on holiday and wouldn’t be doing any of the things he’s so obviously doing, Barry handed over the keys to PC Pro’s beloved Twitter account, which he nourishes with the sort of obsessive care that even Gollum would consider a little excessive.

Before he “left” Barry instructed me to install Tweetdeck – which is essentially a window wiper allowing you to make sense of Twitter’s endless word rain. He couldn’t have done me any more damage if he’d stirred heroin into my tea. Once installed, Tweetdeck demands all of your attention and I’ve actually developed a tweet twitch from constantly flicking my glance to my second monitor looking for updates. What’s worse is that most of what flashes on my screen I don’t care about, and would live happily without ever having read.

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Flat hunting with scammers

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Q. How much fun can you have flat hunting?

A. It depends on how many people try to scam you, how bad they are at it and how long you’re willing to string them along.

Let me introduce you to Emilly aka Sylvia aka Emma aka….

I picked this lovely lady up on a popular flat-hunting website where she was advertising a single-bedroom flat in Mayfair for £500 per month, all bills included. She may as well have been offering me a villa on the Queen’s lawn with a stables in which to house my unicorns. Mayfair still won’t be that cheap when the Thames overflows and it’s six feet under water. In fact, the landlord will probably charge you extra for your scuba gear.

It was clearly a scam, but I was interested in how it panned out. After all, I understood how the Nigerian princes and beautiful women with kind hearts looking for life partners made money. How the hell does a flat scam run? A little something like this:

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Obliterating an eBook reader in one easy holiday

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Back in May I wrote a blog post outlining my plans to live with an eBook reader for a month as I ploughed through a digital copy of War and Peace. My aim, as I wrote at the time, was to put the eBook reader “through the wringer… It’s going to be flung in my bag, dropped in my pocket and keeping me company on the bus.”

As it turns out, eBook readers aren’t big fans of wringers, bags, pockets or buses.

Before I delve into my tale, I’d like to preface it with a couple of caveats. The first is that the eBook reader I chose was a production sample of a Cool-er. This means that my experiences were fairly specific to the device I was using. The second caveat has to do with the testing grounds. I took it backpacking with me around Cuba, which is hardly common usage. Given that I barely survived the trip – think caves, climbs, storms, humidity and blood – I’m not particularly surprised the Cool-er didn’t. Erm… I’ve rather given away the ending there.

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Why Chrome’s more fun without the polish

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I’ve been messing around with the developer build of Chrome just recently and it’s made my browsing life considerably more interesting – much in the way that bowling hand grenades would really spice up a Test Match.

For anybody unaware of Google’s peculiar approach to Chrome’s development it runs like this: a wild-eyed Chrome developer wakes up at 2am with an idea so cool that in Microsoft’s secret underground lair Steve Ballmer orders half-a-dozen cats to kick out of windows. He doesn’t know why, he’d just knows he’s angry and some kittens will have to pay.

Unfortunately, this idea is also so cool that it could conceivably bring about internet Armageddon. The solution: instead of inflicting the idea on the fifteen or twenty people using the stable Chrome release, our bedraggled Chrome developer sticks it into the developer build where it can wreak havoc without anybody getting hurt. He then pokes and prods the idea until it settles down, accepts its fate in Chrome’s brave new browser world and complies, or else he destroys it with his code voodoo. This is the world of Google; stern but benevolent – to borrow a line from Pinky and Brain.

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Silverlight not so Flash for Microsoft

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

When Microsoft announced it was launching an iPlayer rival I could barely hear the words over the onrushing sound of catastrophic failure. If you listen closely, you can hear it too…. Huuuluuu, Huuuluuu, Hulu.

Having used Hulu, I can testify that it’s brilliant and now its flame-filled eyes of domination are on the UK. If the whispers are true it’ll stride into the UK next month, laughing maniacally and kicking its competitors in the crotch, I’d imagine. It’s going to be a bloodbath and if I were Microsoft I’d take Windows 7 and Office 2010 and hunker down in my fortress made of £100 notes. Instead it’s tying itself to the tracks. Unfortunately, stubbornness has never derailed a freight train.

So, that’s that. What really baffles me about MSN Video Player (yes, beyond its very existence) is that Microsoft’s chosen to roll it out on Flash. That’s Adobe’s Flash. That’s Adobe, the next-door-neighbour with the bigger garden, prettier wife and stranglehold on the internet. Microsoft’s been trying to unseat Flash with Silverlight for the last couple of years, ushering developers towards the platform with big smiles and over-elaborate tech demos. And now, confronted by one of its biggest web rollouts for years, it expresses its confidence in Silverlight by sidling into its rivals garden and groping his wife. (more…)