Windows 8: welcome back Microsoft

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Steven Sinofsky bring that beautiful, bald head over here so I can give it a kiss. I’ve just watched Microsoft’s Windows 8 reveal and I’m happier than all 15 of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lawyers.

Last week I was whinging about how Ubuntu bored me. After promising bold reinvention, Canonical did the OS equivalent of rearranging its sock drawer. Well, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted Canonical to tip the drawer out; maybe throw some boxer shorts in there – hell, go mad, put the Spiderman Y fronts on hangers. Something, anything, that would make the OS market a little more interesting.

Well blow me down if Microsoft hasn’t done just that. Windows 8 in inheriting the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI, making it suitable for even the stubbiest of stubby fingers. (Incidentally, how on Earth has Microsoft R&D never got touch right in the past? Surely, if you’ve got the monstrous paws of sausage-fingered Steve Ballmer to work with, perfecting a touch interface everybody can use is a doddle).

Dave Stevenson on why Stuart Turton’s wrong: Windows 8 can’t work on desktops, laptops and tablets

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Why Unity made me fall out of love with Ubuntu

Monday, May 16th, 2011

I’m falling out of love with Ubuntu, which is strange because it’s as good as it’s ever been. And no, this isn’t one of those blogs. I’m not going to proclaim that it’s now too mainstream, or soulless or any other such tosh. It’s not. In fact, it’s very brilliant in many of the ways that matter, just not the one that matters to me. It’s simply not the Ubuntu I’d hoped it would become.

At the root of this statement is Unity. I’ve read all sorts of complaints about the new front-end, and to my mind they veer from wildly silly to outright daft. Quite frankly if you can’t suss out a new scrollbar, then evolution’s wasted on you.

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Textbook service from Kindle tech support

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Customer service really is rubbish, isn’t it? I mean how often have you rang a support line, or stared into the glassy eyed bubble of human-shaped ignorance that is 98% of this nation’s support staff and seen nothing but the next ten minutes of your life being rolled up and thrown out of the window.

That was my attitude until last night, when I took out my Kindle to discover the top two thirds of the screen had frozen, while the lower third of the screen worked perfectly. It was the Dolly Parton of eBook readers, and I rang Amazon fully expecting to be ushered onto the usual treadmill of pointless questions and obfuscation.

Instead I got Rose and Simon. Not together. They weren’t dueting support queries or anything – though that would be awesome.

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Don’t send the developing world PCs: send them Kindles

Monday, February 21st, 2011

I was in India recently, spotting tigers in the jungle. I was about five hours north of Nagpur in Central India, which is a bit like pointing to the moon and telling somebody to take a left. There was no internet access, my mobile phone worked sporadically, and the nearest village was so poor there was a hint of Hollywood to it. You know, the kind of place where you start thinking “children in rags carrying water home from a well 3km away, I’m not falling for that.” Or “fifteen people living in a house with their cow and chickens, pull the other one.”

Nobody’s that poor, not really, because if they were that poor Bob Geldof would immediately start singing at them, and if that’s not reason enough to be upwardly mobile then nothing is – I mean, look at Ethiopia. The entire country gave up famine just to get him to bugger off.

So I’m waiting in this village for my lift to arrive, reading my Kindle to pass the time, and all of a sudden I look up to discover about 20 kids stood in a big group, just watching me: big eyes, curious expressions, ridiculously cute and all intent on the Kindle.

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Stuart Turton’s Alternative Tech Awards of 2010

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

As we usher in 2011, how better to reflect on 2010 than with some awards. To that end, I present the “Stuart Turton in association with PC Pro but not officially endorsed by them Awards”. For convenience sake, this will henceforth be abbreviated to the STIAWPPBNOEBTAs – which admittedly sounds like a gulag in Stalinist Russia, but will have to suffice.

So without further ado, it’s the first annual STIAWPPBNOEBTAs! Drum roll, please.

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Simple rules for stupid tech companies

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

I’ve decided to fix the tech industry. All of it, right now. Here’s how.

If it’s been done before, do it better

Company exec: I have an idea for an eBook reader. It’ll be like the Kindle, only rubbish and more expensive. Happily, our customers have the intelligence of drunken sparrows and are easily confused by colour. The Kindle is white, ours will be white. They’ll never know.

CEO: Sebastian, you’re a genius. The money I was going to invest in research and development I can now use to buy another yacht, from which I can sip champagne and watch as my company goes down the pan quicker than the contents of a banker’s pockets after a knock on the door from the fuzz.

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Scrivener: a word processor that makes you smile

Monday, November 8th, 2010

It’s rare software makes people smile. Rarer still that it makes them want to hug their computer and never let go. Scrivener will do this, because Scrivener will change your life. And not half-heartedly, like having a child or getting married, but properly change it. It will open your head and spoon feed happiness directly to your brain. This will naturally make you more attractive, charismatic and fun. I confidently predict that by the time you’ve read this article and downloaded Scrivener you’ll be a 67% better person.

Bombast be damned, Scrivener is brilliant.

It’s a word processor. No wait, that’s like describing a waterfall as big, wet and noisy. Scrivener is a fundamental rethink of what a word processor should be. The idea is that instead of trying to plop all your text onto one page – like word diarrhoea on an endless sheet of literary loo roll – you create a series of smaller documents within Scrivener, then arrange these how you see fit, according to how you write.

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Why Mozilla needs to pick a new fight

Monday, October 25th, 2010

One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

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Why it’s cheaper to buy iMacs in Dubai

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

It was David Bayon’s fault. You probably don’t know him. He’s our deputy reviews editor. That still wouldn’t help you, because he could be hiding behind your ear right now and you’d never know (he’s small you see, so small he rides pollen to work every morning).

Yet, when it comes to writing reviews there are few finer. The reason being that deep down, like myself, he’s a cynical and unsentimental troll of a man who would happily bench test PCs by actually dropping benches on them if editor Tim Danton would only avert his fiery, unblinking eye. It was for this reason that his review of the 27in iMac caught my attention. He liked it, he really did. Reading his words – as I suggest you do – I almost blushed, so evident was the raw emotion escaping like radiation from the containment facility of his impossibly tiny heart.

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Dubai’s dubious internet “censorship”

Monday, September 6th, 2010

It’s a funny thing censorship, our reaction to it funnier still. I live in Dubai these days, where the authorities consider the internet a big, prickly thing full of porn which is not to be trusted. This is, of course, correct.

In an effort to keep the people of Dubai from gouging themselves on the suggestively shaped thorns of this porn plant, the UAE has locked it behind a firewall. Actually, the wall metaphor is a bit strong. It’s more a pair of ratty, old curtains that have been hastily closed to keep the kids from seeing naked Nora the next-door neighbour. A firecurtain, if you will.

In theory this should prevent clean-living souls from stumbling across illicit content. Illicit content being everything you’d imagine, plus Flickr and Skype oddly. (Click here to see a full list of what the UAE considers to be off limits.) The problem with sticking up a big wall is that people always want to know what’s on the other side. Make the wall higher and sooner or later they’ll find a ladder. Make it higher still, and they’ll find dynamite.

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