In 2007 we ran a mobile internet service called Fringe Knowledge, sponsored by The Times Online. You could access the full Fringe programme and reviews published by The Times. We had a street team demoing it and people’s brains exploded at the idea of accessing the internet from their phones.

What a difference two years makes. Today’s Festival goers are demanding access to  the vastly rich programme of events that forms the world’s largest arts festival. For those not familiar with our annual bash, we have six festivals running at the same time with thousands of different shows and millions of tickets. The town is mobbed, the number of venues has, incredibly for us locals, grown to 200, and something needs to make sense of this.

HedOut have created a location-based event platform, for lack of a better description, and have managed to secure the official  blessing of the festivals for their launch service. Called Edinburgh Festivals it is currently available for iPhone users.

Like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the app is a bit rough and ready, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s not a glitzy, over priced production in the west end - it costs £1.79 and it’ll save you immense amounts of  time and energy. People who don’t have not been here or been involved in ticketing will not appreciate just how amazingly good a job Gavin Dutch and his team has done. The ability to search by time and location is brilliant, out performing the edfringe.com site itself. Keyword search is very cool - I was looking for Burlesque events as in another universe I light and photograph such shows, and I was shown the complete list of related events for the next few days. Nice.

Best of all, though, is remote access to the offers running at the half-price tent. You can’t get that anywhere else, so you’ll save the price of the app many times over just on that.

Now I’m sure some clever person at Tefal thought that idea of being able to poach eggs to the same size as muffin on your toaster would be a huge boon for people in bedsits. And this strange device also heats ready meals somewhere. What more could more could someone stuck in a lonely, featureless room want for cooking?

Like all gadgets, of course, this will be bought and given to those setting out on life’s great adventure, used once, and put back in the box and stuffed away somewhere. Or it might live on as a good old plain toaster.

I think this is a good parable for many convergent systems - just because you can put them into one box, it doesn’t mean that you should. Strikes me that what the target audience here would really want is a toaster and a microwave, but of course they don’t really fit into one box.

So while the gentleman I met on a train into London recently might worry that the radiation from a phone is enough to poach an egg,  this should be a warning to those adding more and more bells and whistles to handsets.

Convenient, easy-to-use bike rental systems are popping up in quite a few enlightened, relatively flat cities now. Paris, Lyon, Barcelona and now Nice have them that I’ve seen - there are probably plenty more. I finally had the opportunity to try them out this summer in Nice.

The service is called Velo Bleu, and features 900 cycles at 90 locations across the city which is much larger than most people think. The bikes themselves are very solid, to put it politely, designed for long service in a rough environment. That translates to heavy and slow if you are used to good bicycles. However the objective of the system is not Tour de France performance, but instead convenience.

So how did it score on that? Well, signing up initially was quite straightforward - but had to be done via a voice system, not view either the stations or mobile internet. Renting a bike was not so good. Each rental station has a number of heads that can lock up to three bikes each. Each station appears to have an embedded SIM card and its own phone number - so you have to call a specific number to unlock a bike. Nice idea, I supposed, but in execution it was very clunky as you can’t put a convenient number into your address book.

However there were two big issues - one was that the error messages were hopeless, the second was that the initial station we tried was down. None of the heads were working. Walking 500m to the nearest station and it worked better. The key usability fault was the need to subscribe for the day before being able to do anything. The user interface and error messages didn’t make that clear.

It was also amusing to see that the if you selected the English user interface the error messages were still in French! Not a problem for me as I am fluent in the language, but could be problematic for others.

Once we did get a bike out of the lock, we found we could only rent one. Bit of a problem for two people, one of whom was too young to have phone, ie my younger daughter. Turned out, however, that the bike was too heavy for a child to cycle conveniently. We duly return the bike to a neighbouring station after an agreeable peddle/trot along the Promenade des Anglais.

Returning the bike was painless - the lock mechanism being able to identify the bike without the need for any further interaction.

I’d certainly use the service again, and being able to register on the move was good. Not all bike sharing networks offer that capability. If I were designing the interface I’d use a mechanism that didn’t require each station to have its own number, although I recognise that there is a good security argument for this approach. I’d prefer to have a mobile app, which I believe is the case in Barcelona. IVR plus an identifier for the station would be easier to use. I’d also try and make the station screens easier to read in bright sunlight, as it was occasionally very difficult to review the instructions.

Vodafone have very publicly cancelled roaming charges for this summer. Well done to them! Backed by a huge advertising budget, it seems that calling while abroad will have been much less painfully expensive this year. On arriving in France clear SMSes stating the cost of data (£5/day) and that roaming charges were voided for Passport customers were received.

What wasn’t clear was what the cost of receiving calls would be - or Vodafone-to-Vodafone calls while travelling, or calls within the country. So we wait and see what the phone bills bring up. There is no getting away from the fact that billing is complex, and trying to explain it succinctly does miss out a lot of detail on the many possible charging scenarios.

I’ve been on holiday for the last three weeks, mostly just outside Nice, with a quick blast to Penarth in Wales to light and photograph a show. The holidays were mainly technology free, but I’ve a couple of posts coming on where tech did fit in.

However it was the return to connectivity and the office that highlighted how heavy the load of downloading “upgrades” has become. Umpteen copies of iTunes, Vista SP2, upgrade this, upgrade that - several gigabytes of stuff later everything seems more or less as it was before.

With the exception of Safari on my office Mac - the new version crashed four of five times yesterday while doing perfectly ordinary stuff on LinkedIn. I’ve also had display driver crashes on my home laptop, Outlook doesn’t shut down properly and Android Cupcake flaked out on a number of occasions.

So I’ll bleat it again - doesn’t anybody test anything anymore? If we shipped software of this standard to our customers they would rightly complain bitterly. So why do the big suppliers get away with it? More importantly, how do we get ourselves back on the road to quality software, and by that I mean real solid consumer-grade software?