In a word: excellent.

Having more or less worked our way through the backlog of bought DVDs, I fancied watching a film we’d missed on theatrical release due to pregnancy (well, not mine, but you know what I mean), The Mummy. I was prompted into watching the movie by an promo interview in the easyJet flight magazine with the lead comedian John Hannah who is Scottish but does a very acceptable Hugh Laurie-style English twit. His accent only once slips noticeably.

So I thought this would make a good opportunity to try out the iTunes movie store. My wife was concerned that watching would be jerky as she thought it would be streaming, but quickly accepted that it was download and hence would play fine. Shows that such things are not necessarily obvious to the non-technical. Most people in developed world will know YouTube and will also know that YouTube can be, well, hesitatant.

Search and location experience very good. Ability to view the trailer straightaway is cool. £2.49 rental fee for 48 hours is entirely acceptable, especially if you factor in the cost of going to a BlockBuster-style rental outlet as we would have to drive.

Download time was about 45 minutes, which isn’t bad for 1.2Gb. Compares very favourably with leaving the home, driving, parking, selecting, driving and reparking.

Great viewing experience, although the 13″ screen on this PC is clearly a limiting factor.

Worth exploring with a larger  screen or projector.

This blog entry is being typed via Wordpress running in Chrome. It’s stunningly faster than Firefox; clearly the optimised VM running Javascript is doing the business. Even more impressive is the near-instant install. No 500Mb bloatware here.

On the other hand, this blog editing only sort of works, but doesn’t put in the right formatting. Paragraph tags get stripped out!

So far I’ve tried the BBC website and it snaps onto the screen faster than I’ve ever seen. iPlayer took a while to load, but I think it was downloading the plugin first. Once loaded, it ran sweetly too.

Flickr, however, doesn’t do any  of the clever Ajax stuff, and I reverted to Firefox to categorise my latest upload.

I’m sure there will be terabytes of commentary flowing out today and tomorrow!

End of an era

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

Virgin Records on Princes Street, Edinburgh has closed. It never really was a megastore, but still, happy memories of buying records ranging from Bruces then Virgin.

Was it downloading or was it the stupid rebrand that killed this zavvi store? Everyone, staff included, still called it Virgin. Oh well.

Windows alert box at Luton Airport

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

I love it when display systems show inappropriate messages. I guess whoever writes this stuff just doesn’t think it’s going to happen, in this case the idea of an alert appearing on alternate graphics card perhaps. Maybe it’s lack of a central reporting mechanism.

I discovered that one of my colleagues with an N95 8Gb didn’t know he could hold down the “menu” key and get a list of running applications and switch between them, like Alt-TAB on Windows. I’ve know that for a while, but someone had to show me originally when I first started using S60 devices. It’s just plain not obvious.

I also found out that you can use the left and right arrows to step through e-mails, automatically downloading and displaying the next message. I guess that’s obvious when you think about it - up and down scroll the text, so that’s two dimensions - but it’s not simple to find out without pressing the wrong button.

So the big question is, how can these useful functions be made easier to find on a mobile device, especially when people don’t read anything? Some ideas coming up soon.

Hugely busy week, which is great, but I managed to have some time to have a coffee and chat to Nigel Eccles of Hubdub.com today. As we were swapping notes on our companies, he commented that much as he liked his N95 he found it very hard to find the things he used regularly. I showed him my fully customised so-called ‘active’ main screen and he was amazed. So I showed him how to change the configuration.

He asked a very good question: why does Nokia hide such useful features under many, many levels of clicks? Why aren’t their no-doubt numerous and talented human factors people  allowed to fix this? Good questions, no answers.

[Off this evening to watch my friend Osman Kent of SongPhonic records narrate a show of Turkish Whirling Dervishes at the Edinburgh International Festival. Very cool. No links as the Festival ends this weekend.]

This blog has now been rehosted at our co-lo and should now be much faster. Editing articles is certainly dramatically faster. Unfortunately one comment on the Patent 2.0 item fell between the two versions. If you could repost that would be great, sorry about that.

I’ll be writing more next week now that the move has hardened.

One of my rules in business has always been to grasp problems head on and solve them, ideally turning customer frustration to delight. For deep software engagements this can lead to a much stronger relationship than a purely successful deployment. Clearly you don’t go in intending to fail, but if something does go wrong, take the time to make it better than right. While this is far from being original thought, it’s interesting to see how different companies handle failure.

I happened to post on twitter that I was having trouble streaming an AlwaysOn video via Blip.tv. Shortly afterwards I received an e-mail from someone at Blip offering to help solve the problem. Unsurprisingly the problem, which was probably in the last mile, had solved itself by then anyway and I was able to watch the suggested test video - a 7 minute eposide of Captain Blasto. The streaming was perfect, which is more than can be said for the acting, and I was happy to post back on Twitter and here about the incident.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying to book some tickets for the Edinburgh International Festival (aka the Official Festival for us locals). Two nights in a row the website declared that my cards were declined which was nonsense. I e-mailed in the problem and received a polite, somewhat-apologetic message to the effect that no one else had complained and that tickets were being sold, and that there might be an issue with the address, I could try the box office. In other words a nicely worded brush off. I tried the site again and it still was failing, so booked via the phone. The chap on the phone was very helpful, but that’s not really the point. Someone should have taken the pain of understanding what was going wrong.

So I’m delighted at Blip but reserved about the reliability of Hub Tickets.

I’ve just taken my first Ryanair flight. It was a good experience, and while the removal of the magazine pocket might make storing in-flight stuff difficult, it certainly improves leg room. Good swap in my view; shove your reading material into your pockets. Or talk to your neighbour, as I ended up doing, a very pleasant student of Physics and Philosophy heading to Dublin for a Muse concert. I had to admit to never having heard of muse; talk about feeling old.

Anyway, the thing that struck me was interesting was that the cabin crew used a sensible technique for the headcount. Rather than struggling to count up the actual number of heads, they counted the empty seats. On this flight there were only 18 open seats, a much more manageable number to hold in your head, and with the benefit that they don’t move around.

My rocket scientist friend Jean Chevallier had long ago suggested that this was a much better match to the requirement of knowing exactly how many people were on board, but this was this was the first time I’d seen it happen.

So thought for the day: look for simpler, more reliable ways of doing things.

Why do so many devices and services come with irritations. Here, for example, are but two that have annoyed me today:

When I plug my N95 into the USB port of the computer the phone asks me if I want PC Suite or Data mode. But it leaves the keyboard locked and I have to unlock the keyboard before I can make the selection. Surely the S60 asynchronous UI kit can cope with unlocking the screen on such an event?

Why does the Apple AppStore  list apps in no apparent order? I was scrolling through the Utilities category, which is definitely a misnomer, and could not see any logical reason for the ordering. inode number on the server?

How come the market puts up with these things when most of the rest of the consumer products market would reject it out of hand. One reason is that people invest quite a lot of effort in setting up their tech gadgets and don’t fancy going through the painful process again. Any other suggestions?