Take Google Chrome, for six years the browser of choice for your correspondent. It’s clean, fast and simple, yet increasingly it tries to second guess how I want to browse the web.

Now, fair’s fair, I may not have a typical browsing history: I spend one week a month in the UK offices of PC Pro, and the rest of the month in our French outpost.

Yet, it’s hard to see what business that is of Google. Or why it should decide to interfere and start presenting a host of content and features in French and refuse to switch back to English with the vigour of an agricultural blockade.

After a recent upgrade, Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation. It turned the URL search bar from useful feature to irritating deviation.

Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation

Instead of using the generic google.com as a default search engine, it switched to Google.fr, meaning all search results were skewed heavily towards sites from France and in French. Fine if you’re looking for information on the Cathar uprising or the perfect tarte tatin recipe, but France hasn’t made the greatest contributions to technology and the web.

After poking around in the browser’s help screen, there are options for forcing the browser bar search to revert to English results by default, but why would Google overide my original settings, when it knows, what with me being signed into Gmail, that by choice I use English?

If that’s as bewildering as a French supermarket’s opening hours, it gets worse. Chrome, apparently with no hint of irony, points out that the page delivering the results is in French and asks if I’d like to translate them into English. Genius.

Google knows I speak English. It’s there in Chrome’s language settings and over the years it’s developed a pretty good understanding of my browsing habits – how else would it know exactly which adverts to show me? — yet it insists on trying to push me into French options based on where I am browsing from. If Google knows where I buy my pants or go on holiday then it ought to know that I habitually surf UK websites.

Still, at least I speak French. Back in the UK for a week’s shift in PC Pro Towers, I performed a search at my parents’ home while signed into Gmail, and shortly after signing out realised that my parents’ edition of Chrome had now switched to French — and mother finds it hard enough to cope with technology without Google sabotaging her computer with foreign languages.

Google is by no means the only offender here, with an increasing number of companies defaulting from .com to the local suffix and language without obvious recourse  – but in a world that’s more mobile and more travelled than ever before, do we really need our technology telling us where we are?

Say hello to the BytePac. It’s a hard disk caddy made entirely out of 100% recyclable material (yes, cardboard), but before you jump to any rash, mocking conclusions – as half the office did when it arrived – let me explain how it works.

Pull off the outer sleeve and open the box, and inside there’s room for a 3.5in hard disk (or 2.5in with the included card “adapter”) to sit snugly. At the connection end the box has a flap through which you plug the combined power-and-SATA connector, the other end of which goes to both the mains and to either an eSATA or USB port on your PC. That’s all you need to get the drive running, then simply fold back a ventilation flap on the rear of the box, which doubles up as a stand to prop the drive up off the desk.

This video shows it off neatly. For a cardboard box, it’s actually rather elegant.

The question you might be asking is: why? The BytePac is billed as an alternative to external hard disks, but it’s not as robust as proper external drives, nor is it particularly thin and light. Few people will buy a disk specifically to use in a BytePac when far sleeker solutions are so common.

However, it’s best viewed as an attractive and simple archiving system. Once you’ve bought your first kit with its power box and set of cables (three empty boxes, one cable set, £34), you can simply buy more empty boxes (around £4 each) as and when you need them. Put an old disk in each, sensibly label the side of the box and stack them on a shelf as you would a collection of books. When you need some old data, just pull out the relevant BytePac and plug the cable in – the disk itself need never see the light of day.

You may already have your own archiving setup, and you may be wary of entrusting your valuable data to a cardboard box. But the BytePac is a cheap way to archive a large number of disks, it’s environmentally friendly, and it won’t look like it’s worth nicking if the burglars come round.

I’ve got one here that I’ll be playing with this week, and several people in the office have already made their minds up one way or the other, but I’m interested to hear what you think. Is the BytePac a neat archiving innovation or a piece of cheap tat?

We cannot really understand yet how much technology has changed our lives. Those of us in our forties or older have the advantage of having seen a shift from an essentially analogue world to a digital one. We have seen interpersonal communication move from a pipe dream to a daily, second-by-second reality.

Today’s yoof have grown up in a world of Facebook, instant email, IM, smartphones in their pocket. They cannot function without an IP connection. It is more important to them than food. It is the new era drug that each of us consume. They know no different.

Thus it is particularly sad to see what happens when it goes wrong. And two very lovely people’s lives get turned upside down. Go over to the Vexentricity blog and read how a dependency on technology has ripped a family apart. And ask yourself this: honestly, how close are you to that reality too? And is that somewhere you want to be, or feel you ought to be? Or even should be?

It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now.

As I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash

Flash was a different matter. In the early 2000s, I moved from Adobe’s Director product to its lightweight cousin (at least, it was lightweight at the time) for e-learning development and created a series of authoring tools and online playback plugins based on it. There’s much to like about the platform, and our perception of what’s possible with rich internet applications was largely shaped, for better or worse, by the capabilities of the Flash player. So I have much expertise invested in my ActionScript knowledge and a big library of code.

And yet, as I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash. In the short term, this means extra work for me as I recreate these sophisticated applications using PHP and jQuery, but I can’t countenance investing time updating software created for a defunct platform.

The irony is that it isn’t Steve Jobs’ famous hatred of Flash that has caused this turnaround – the true villain of the piece is Adobe itself. By abandoning development of Flash for mobile, it eliminates Flash as an option for most websites. One in ten of the visitors to my sites uses a mobile device, a seven-fold increase over a year ago, so I’d be mad to develop in a form that excludes them. Had Adobe continued to improve the Flash platform for Android, I might have persevered – at least for sites that attract smartphone users rather than tablet owners. Perhaps I should thank Adobe, then, for making my decision easy. It’s now either HTML/CSS/JavaScript or app – and Flash makes for a very expensive app development platform.

In fact, the only Adobe product I use day-to-day now is Fireworks and that’s the only reason I’m keeping Web Premium on my main desktop. It’s also hard to see on what basis I would, in the medium term, be likely to upgrade even that one remaining product. Assuming that I’m not the only one re-evaluating in this way, this poses serious questions for Adobe’s future income. I think that’s sad because they’ve played an important role in shaping today’s web. Whilst it is making efforts, with Muse, Edge and updates to Dreamweaver, I can’t help feeling that the momentum is swinging away from Adobe. What I really want is a fully working browser-based versions of Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator that I can pay for on a per-use basis, and unless it has something quite remarkable up its sleeve, I can’t see myself upgrading to CS6.

The good news for me as a businessman is that I no longer need to budget for expensive licences. Adobe’s pricing policy has long been a bone of contention and, given the downward momentum placed on software costs by the advent of apps, Adobe’s looking increasingly isolated. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Web Premium costs £300 more to buy in the UK than the US (and yes, that’s comparing figures net of sales tax). Photoshop is the one remaining crown jewel – heaven help Adobe if a competitor comes along with a compatible application for a fraction of the cost.

Farewell Adobe. Delete.

Nowhere, in a world full of vacuous guff, are grown adults treated with such unbridled contempt as when it comes to “advice” for keeping your children safe online.

Exhibit A: the latest video from the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP), a staggeringly insulting four minutes of patronising, big-budget twaddle, that’s about as informative and entertaining as getting an enema from Charles Bronson. I challenge you to watch all three minutes and 59 seconds of it, without wishing to punch someone in the face, primarily yourself.

The video has been launched to coincide with Safer Internet Day, historically an opportunity for overpaid and under-qualified “child safety experts” to get five minutes on the This Morning sofa, trotting out the same bland sound bites they’ve been issuing since Netscape Navigator was de rigeur: don’t let kids sneak off to their bedroom with a laptop, talk to your kids about their internet habits, set boundaries on net access – advice any parent with a working frontal lobe will have figured out for themselves.

Yet, when it comes to actually delivering practical advice, these “experts” fall pathetically short. Take the following advice on implementing parental controls on the CEOP website (CEOP’s emphasis in bold, not mine):

Use parental controls on devices that link to the internet, such as the TV, laptops, computers, games consoles and mobile phones. Parental controls are not just about locking and blocking, they are a tool to help you set appropriate boundaries as your child grows and develops. They are not the answer to your child’s online safety, but they are a good start and they are not as difficult to install as you might think. Service providers are working hard to make them simple, effective and user friendly. Find your service provider and learn how to set your controls.

In other words – work it out for yourself.

Instead of paying a media agency £50,000 to knock out that appalling piece of faux-fifties codswallop, how about paying someone a tenth of that to write a set of concise instructions for Windows 7 parental controls, for example? You never know, it might actually protect some children.

But I’ve got terrible news for all those companies: there is only one Apple. Tempting as it may be to start up your own ecosystem of apps and content, you need something truly compelling to make people sign up to it in the same way that tens of millions of people have signed their lives away to Apple.

Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with.

For a start, you need trust. Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with. You also need staggering amounts of content: from apps to movies to TV shows to music, Apple has this sewn up.

You need sexiness: if I’m going to buy your phone, it needs to look damn good. Finally, you need phenomenal ease of use. If you have to spend a minute explaining what your service does, or how you connect to it using your devices, then you’ve lost three-quarters of your potential customers.

Like them or loathe them, no other company can match Apple in these areas.

So when I look back at CES, despite all the excellent technology on show, I do so with a mix of fear and despondency.

The issue is typified by the likes of Samsung and Sony. Both made big plays at CES that suggest they think they could be an all-encompassing rival to Apple, whether it’s Samsung talking about the fact you can play Angry Birds on their TVs or Sony pointing out that its customers can watch movies a month earlier on their movie-download service. Sorry Sony, sorry Samsung: but it’s not enough.

Instead, we need either open standards or a compelling play by a company that can work with different partners. Obvious examples of the latter are Microsoft and Google, but even this has hints of idealism: think how difficult Microsoft has found it to make anyone else sign up to services such as Passport.

Nevertheless, I can’t see any alternative. Sony and Samsung both produce great hardware, and Sony – through its subsidiaries such as Sony Entertainment – own some phenomenal content. But they are light years away from the position where a critical mass of consumers sign up to the Sony or Samsung ecosystem in the same way that Apple customers do.

So, please, stop trying and start working with Google, Microsoft and Amazon to ensure that the products we buy from you work with all the different content providers. Focus on what your company is good at, not what Apple is good at.

Apple’s Final Cut Pro X was received with derision in some circles when it launched last year. Ostensibly it replaced the old version – Final Cut Pro 7 – but in fact it had been rewritten from the ground up. And there were gaping holes.

Erstwhile fans of the application moaned so hard I felt moved to write about the backlash, proponents of which complained about the lack of multicam features, as well as support for previous projects, XML and broadcast monitoring.

Now, Apple says, the free 10.0.3 update has filled in those gaps, fixed what was until now broken, and generally brought the new version up to the same level as before.

In a briefing, Apple spent a long time demonstrating the swish new multicam editing system, which looked suitably impressive, with support for up to 64 simultaneous angles, the ability to mix and match codecs and resolutions within multicam edits, and multiple synchronisation options. Editors can choose to synchronise clips based on analysis of the audio wave form, by marker or by keyword.

It also announced that, finally, there was a way of importing old projects from Studio 7 to Pro X – albeit via the $10 plugin 7toX for Final Cut Pro, from third-party developer Intelligent Assistance.

Apple was also keen to highlight burgeoning third-party support elsewhere – via effects plugins from the likes of GenArts, Red Giant and Sapphire Edge.

Also on the list of upgrades and improvements is a tweaked chroma key tool that allows editors more hands-on fine-tuning; updated XML support; the ability to import and handle multi-layered Photoshop PSD files; and Media Relink, a new tool for tracking down and re-integrating media into projects that may have been moved or modified.

Finally, Apple announced hardware support for external I/O devices such as colour-calibrated broadcast monitors (a feature still in beta while performance is being tuned). It demonstrated this by outputting its preview stream via a Thunderbolt-connected AJA Io XT to a Sony broadcast monitor.

There are still some areas that haven’t been addressed (there are issues with the import from and export to tape, for instance), yet for the most part this is an update that fixes many of the complaints when the software was originally launched. The fact that Apple has acted a mere seven months after launch is commendable; whether it will bring those disgruntled professionals back into the fold remains to be seen.

On the other, we despise how it makes Outlook feel as if it’s running on a virtual machine hosted on a Commodore 64, forcing most of the team to reluctantly uninstall it.

However, I’ve taken rather a shine to the company’s new iPhone app, Smartr Contacts. I should explain that the last time I actually saved someone’s contact details into Outlook was circa 1997. I’m appalling at maintaining a contacts book, normally relying on finding the relevant details by searching through my enormously bloated inbox.

Smartr Contacts uses all the data it’s scraped from previous Xobni installations in Outlook and Gmail, plus contacts harvested from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and presents all that data in one gigantic searchable contacts book.

Across all of my accounts it’s managed to find almost 1,600 contacts, 90% of which I’ll probably never voluntarily contact again, yet comprehensive enough to ensure it has captured the email and telephone details of most of the people I’ve had previous contact with.

Wisely, it doesn’t flood all of this data into the default iPhone contacts app, keeping it in its own separate app container. Nevertheless, you can still call, text or email contacts directly, simply by pressing on the relevant number/address in the app.

Contacts can be searched by name, company or title. Better still, each contact has a list of related contacts, so if you can’t get hold of someone at a particular company, chances are you’ll find one of their colleagues in your address book.

It’s not perfect: Smartr Contacts often lists two or three phone numbers/email addresses for the same person, and is clearly unable to tell when someone has moved jobs or changed their mobile number. There doesn’t appear to be any way to even delete outdated entries manually.   The social networking profiles on the home screen are also erratic, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.

Nevertheless, for a disorganised lummox like me, this app does a decent job.

As part of an IT roll-out in the office the entire PC Pro team was moved over to Office 365 last week. For the most part it meant no change at all. After a quick call to IT the morning after the transition to get some some account details adjusted (I’d had no email since 9pm the previous day), I was able to carry on working, using my standard desktop installation of Office 2010, including Outlook, just as normal.

That’s no surprise. After all, Office 365 principally represents a change in the way businesses purchase and manage licenses for Microsoft Office software. From a user perspective, the desktop software – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – stays the same.

However, we have received one major upgrade – from our old, clunky webmail service to the swanky new Outlook Web App – and it could be about to change the way I work.

Now, when I log into the Dennis Publishing webmail address, I’m faced with an interface that actually looks like a proper email client, not the abomination of an interface that adorned the webmail before.

The layout is modern and fresh, but most importantly the web interface is quick – blindingly so – with keyword searches completed in a blink of an eye, faster even than my desktop Outlook client can manage.

Now I realise this may have as much to do with the way our Exchange servers were set up (and possibly because my desktop PC is running on steam) as the native speed of the Web App, but it’s been a revelation, and has persuaded me to carry out an experiment.

I’m going to try and use the Outlook Web App – and only the Outlook Web App – to see if it’s a workable alternative in a busy office environment.

The first few days

So far, I’ve been using it exclusively since Friday and I’m glad to report I have few complaints. I no longer have to wait an age as Outlook slowly rouses itself out of its morning stupor. Once Chrome is launched, the Web App takes less than three seconds to appear, so I can get to work straight away.

And I’ve come across very little that I can’t do in this version of Outlook. I can see all my folders, set up meetings and see others’ free time while doing so. I can set up tasks and assign them to members of my team. I can filter search results by category and attachment.

I’m also a real fan of the way the Outlook Web App displays conversations as an expandable list in both the message list and reading pane. This can be switched off, and doing so reveals another plus: the Outlook Web App’s settings and features feel much more accessible and easier to find than on the complex and intimidating desktop app.

Flies in the ointment

There are some annoyances, though, and the main one is a lack of pop-up notifications, although since I have the interface displayed permanently on my second monitor, that’s not the issue it could be.

Another is that I can’t display all I want on the screen. I normally have a to-do list displayed in a narrow pane on the right hand side; the Outlook Web App is restricted to email or calendar or contacts or tasks, not a combination of two or more. I’m not a huge fan of the way some keyboard shortcuts I’m used to work – CTRL-R – while others do not – CTRL-N.

However, these for me are minor irritations, and I say that because I haven’t yet been tempted back to the desktop client. Time may change my opinion, of course – what seem now like quirks may turn into full-blown pet hates – but for now I’m happy with this brave new world.