I was pleased to find one of my photos used to headline an article on the Kraftwerk concert in Krakow last weekend. This picture was taken with my N95 8Gb as “real” cameras were strictly forbidden. Both of these things show much technology has changed, and partially that conventional approaches struggle to keep up.

There is simply no way that an article by a French journalist writing in English about an event in Poland would have existed without the internet. And further, rather than commision a press photographer to cover the event, the site simply looked through Flickr to find pictures. Even with the internet, a couple of years ago that would have been unimaginable.

And as for banning cameras, they might as well try and stop people breathing as prevent the use of mobiles for taking pictures. The mindless flashing is mildly annoying (and potentially dangerous for acrobatic events) but for a concert, it’s pretty harmless. I just with people would realise that the pictures will work better when you turn the flash off, but I suppose those extra clicks and some simple cropping are probably why my picture was used, and not someone elses.

A while back I challenged the fan boys to tell me how to set their iPod Touch or iPhone iPod software to repeat a single track. It certainly wasn’t obvious - I’d only found it after doing some web searches. Gratifying then to see that the latest release of the iPhone/iPod software puts up the volume/repeat pane by default and you have to turn it off with a click rather than the reverse.

Another very busy week - storing up lots of things to write about, but no time to write them.

I was interested this week by the lack of  buzz about the release of the Android handset. Thanks to Simon Wilcox for spotting and posting on MoMo Tony Chandler’s comment on the Register article:

“If the iPhone is the JesusPhone, isn’t this more the BrianPhone? People just so want it to be the one for them and it just turns out to be not as special as they’d hoped?”

Not just brilliantly witty, spot on. Clearly very few people have seen the actual handset, but I fear that the XDA legacy will leave it less than thrilling, and well, Android is just another operating system, and well, they are just not that exciting.

Maybe even the press are suffering from handset fatigue, or maybe is it hype fatigue?

I’m borrowing that wonderful term as I’ve just been copying some hotel details into an e-mail. By hand. Not copy/paste because the hotel site was in Flash. Without any need for it, it could have been done just as stylishly using HTML. The clipboard is as much part of the modern computing paradigm as the mouse and keyboard; there is just no excuse for not supporting it.

But the curious thing is that hardly any mobile phones offer any form of cut/copy/paste mechanism, when it would be very useful for saving, editing, reusing mobile numbers if nothing else. It seems blindingly obvious that such a fundamental facility should be part of every device, yet it is majority missing. Curious. It’s not like clipboards are that difficult to implement either.

No, not the much-feted return to command line computing being promoted by the Mozilla Foundation, I’m thinking of when something becomes so ingrained in our conciousness it’s automatic.

I’ve just been speaking to my wife who is digging out photos for our younger daughter school project. She was looking on the home network for the pictures from 2000 - “the folder’s empty!” she said. Well yes, that’s because they are on paper in a box in a cupboard…

Similarly, asking a young child to use a disposable (or “single use” as the film companies like to sa) camera, provokes an instant demand to see the results immediately.

Digital photography has become completely ubiquitous and the number of pictures being taken must have exploded.

The question for me is how can we detect these key technologies early and distinguish them from stuff like mobile video? I was amused by yet another US writer describing texting as “old hat” in favour of some video streaming technology. Yes, that’ll be right. Hope springs eternal, so how do we filter the duds from the gems?

The last couple of weeks have seen an unprecedented level of software upgrades in all directions. The ISPs must be groaning as gigabytes of Windows XP SP3, iTunes 8.0, iPod upgrades etc are pulled down over their all-you-can eat connections.

This raises two three four questions -

1) How much time is it costing us, especially those of us with multiple machines of differing types?

2) Do all the nontechy people out there, inveigled into buying computers and broadband for their kids without understanding why, actually download all this stuff?

3) We’ve spent hundreds of years with products that, even if they became obsolete, didn’t suddenly decide to stop being useful for you for a few minutes just when  you were about to use them. Do we really need to do it now?

4) This is all a sign of ubiquitous connectivity, or at least the expectation of it. Again this something that us in the tech field are delighted about, demand, and expect. Yet, as the familiar wails of “there’s no WiFi here!” show, we’re a bit away from that. Devices with both 3G and WiFi (eg laptop, N95, iPhone) overcome this, modulo cost. So the question here is, will this level of connectivity ever become appealing to the mass market?

My answers are:

1) Sys admin for all our gadgets is costing us a fortune.

2) More recent systems may well upgrade themselves to the confusion of their users, but older systems will stay unmodified until they are retired.

3) No, we don’t really need it, but the ability to dribble out new content is going to create an important new market and revenue stream. I think this is important and will write about it in another post.

4) No, most people don’t want constant connectivity. They may find it useful without knowing about it, though.

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.