Coolest use of a Wii to date.
I could never see the point before, aside from Wii Fit, which I think has the potential to be quite fun, but this is the kind of thing that could swing me in favour of a Wii.
If I had a room with no windows.
I’ve been lucky enough to live with an iPad for the last couple of weeks. It’s a truly transformative device. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t fully understand the potential of giving the iPhone a bigger screen and taking away the phone bits, but now that I’ve been playing with it, I see exactly why it’s such an important product.
Nobody I’ve shown it to, away from work, has really understood it until they’ve got their hands on it. Sit them down with it and give them a nice fast net connection, though, and you have to prise it back out of their hands.
The sad thing is, beyond the built-in Maps, YouTube and so on, the one app that seems to impress the most is the BBC News application, and the chance of getting that in the UK any time soon is slim indeed.
The interface is deceptively simple, with headlines taking up the left-half of the screen and the contents of your story taking the right. Scroll up and down to read the story and swipe it to the left or right to read the next one. The headlines scroll, too, both up and down and left and right, and there’s a live radio button at the top of the interface that tunes you in to the World Service.
Being an iPad app it also obviously works in portrait mode. Spin your iPad around and the interface redraws itself to give your story more space and strip your headlines across the top, making it much easier to read.
And if you want to watch the news rather than just read or listen to it, there’s plenty of embedded media. Tap on a video link in your story and it switches to fast, high quality, widescreen playback, even without an embedded Flash player.
It’s the iPad’s first killer application, yet even when the iPad finally ships in the UK (it’s been pushed back by a month or so because sales in the US are so strong that they’ve created a global shortage) I doubt it will launch in the UK for several months, if at all.
The BBC is simply too good, and its content too strong for its rivals to compete against. That’s led the BBC Trust to investigate whether we should ever see its smartphone and iPad apps in the UK at all. As the BBC’s iPad app pages state:
The BBC Trust has announced a review of the BBC’s plans to deliver content via dedicated smartphone apps. The BBC will therefore not be launching public service news and sports apps for smartphones in the UK pending the outcome of the Trust review.
However, the US iPad app is a commercial activity outside the UK and is not covered by the Trust review. It has been released in the Apple store in the US by BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm and wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC. BBC Worldwide’s mission is to create, acquire, develop and exploit media content and brands around the world in order to maximise the value of BBC’s assets for the benefit of the UK licence fee payer.
What the Trust will conclude at the end of its investigation is up for debate, but my prediction is that it will either rule against a UK release or recommend putting out a crippled version for the UK market that features only a subset of the US application’s content and abilities.
That’s a shame. This may be a BBC Worldwide product, but the content seems to be largely drawn from output funded by UK license payers. While I’m all for allowing competition and giving the BBC’s rivals a chance, shouldn’t we also be allowed to view, read and listen to the content we have funded by whatever medium we choose – including the iPad?
What a week for technology. And not a good one.
First, my iMac. Up pops Time Machine with a warning that it hadn’t done a backup in 11 days. It would have been nice if it had told me sooner. Anyhow, it seems the power supply on my external drive had died, so that needs replacing. Not sure if it’s still under warranty.
Then my camera couldn’t read memory cards any more. That was new – a gift – so it could be swapped out, but inconvenient nonetheless. Particularly as I’d just bought an 8GB card for it.
The printer is still out of ink, which means not only can’t we print, but we also can’t copy or even scan and send faxes, despite the fact that neither of those last two jobs actually needs ink.
And to cap it all, Mabel, my trusty MacBook quite spectacularly died on Wednesday morning. Not just a little glitch or anything: she simply lost all of her long-term memory. Just like that. One moment she was happily chugging along, the next she couldn’t see the hard drive. She wouldn’t reboot, even from a DVD, so that drive was clearly out of bounds, too.
The only solution I could think of was to install OS X on an external drive and boot from that, which worked fine… until I rebooted, at which point that drive was corrupted, too.
The upshot, then, is that I’m now writing this on Mabel the Second. A quite strokable aluminium MacBook. Refurb, but it comes with a guarantee, and spec-wise is barely short of a MacBook Pro.
Very nice.
No dents, no scratches, and by all accounts just a few weeks old. So new that the battery has only been charged three times, and one of those times was me.
Not sure what to do with Mabel the First yet. Perhaps take out the drive just to be sure and then sell her for spares and repair.
iPhoto 09 has a neat little facial recognition feature, which helps it file all your photos for you. Look, here it is in action:
Pretty clever, isn’t it. Personally I’m hoping that if we’re putting all our hopes for national security in the hands of smart CCTV and facial recognition it works something like that.
And not something like this:
Have you got an iPhone? Then buy The Independent Guide to the iPhone. It’s the first time I’ve actually had my name on Amazon. The last book I wrote made it onto the site (and it’s still there today – see the grab below), but the publisher went bankrupt before they got it to print.
I wouldn’t have minded so much had it not been such a painful thing to write. Endless proofs, amendments and meetings with publishers, all for it to end up being left on a shelf. The iPhone one, on the other hand, was far easier, and the model of what doing books really should be.
Technorati Tags:
iphone, activology, books, publishing
I had a somewhat romantic notion that when I move I’d be as green as I could with my energy consumption. Central to that idea was solar panels, photovoltaic cells and a small wind turbine strapped to the chimney. They’d provide at least some of the electricity I’d need.
Proper logs in the grate would heat the lounge, and a thermal sink out back would warm my water using the heat locked up in the ground all around us.
Most of those ideas are still viable, but the wind turbine, it would appear, probably isn’t.
The Guardian has been chatting to Donnacadh McCarthy, who satisfies most of his energy requirements using photovoltaic and solar panels, but has found wind turbines to be close to useless where he lives.
“I’ve had my second one for three months now – the first one was vibrating the house too much – and so far it’s powered one energy-saving bulb for around three hours a day,” he says.” It’s created a total of 1.6 kilowatts, which isn’t even 20p worth of electricity.” It’s a far cry from the 30 per cent cut in your electricity bill that B&Q, which started selling home wind turbines in October (“only £1,498″), suggests you could save from its model.
So, an outlay of close to £1,500, for a 20p return in three months. At that rate it’ll take him until June 3879 (or 1872 years) to recoup the initial outlay. Or, to put it another way, if he was to finish paying off the cost of his turbine today at a rate of 20p every quarter, then he must have first incurred the debt during the time of Hadrian’s reign as Emperor of the Roman Empire, in the year 135.
I like press releases full of stats lists. Yesterday’s came from Hotmail, which is celebrating its 10th birthday by sending is an iced cookie the size of a manhole cover, and the news that:
In 1996, 56,041 people signed up for the first Hotmail accounts, roughly the size of Taunton in Somerset.
1 billion emails are delivered to Hotmail inboxes daily – that’s over 11,000 emails per second.
80 million emails are sent by Hotmail users daily, 20 times more than the number of flowers delivered by Interflora in the UK each year.
On average, Hotmail users keep 137 emails in their inbox at any one time, 15 times more than the average number of SMS messages we have stored in our mobile phones.
Hotmail is used in nearly every country in the World and is available in 17 languages.
After weeks of backwards and forwards letter-writing with Sky, we turned to the web and the ‘Instant Answers Online’ tool. Simple question – how do we look at our bill online? Sky wasn’t so sure:
We tried several variations, but it was no more helpful than the telephone support centres, the letters we’ve sent or received or the ‘active’ stuff on the Sky+ box. So, we decided to see whether it was any more enlightening on any other subjects. Turns out it is. In fact, when you stop asking it about Sky it’s actually quite clever.
London Grid for Learning is, according to its own site,
‘…a consortium of the 33 Local Authorities which provides a filtered broadband connection, network services, a common learning platform, online content and support communities for all schools across London.’
So, basically, schools across our nation’s capital trust it to mediate on their behalf, blocking out nasty sites, and letting the good ones through to save our precious childrens’ delicate sensibilities.
In theory, a great idea. Or it would be if it was accurate. Seems my site is blocked, though, as according to London Grid for Learning nik.co.uk is officially a ‘Gambling Site’, and anyone trying to access it is blocked, instead seeing this rude block page.
Gambling site, eh? Could that be because I mentioned Casino Royale a couple of days ago?
I’m glad our future generation of leaders and industry magnates is being protected by such an accurate, reliable and worthy filter system that can tell the difference between a work of literature and a betting house. Aren’t you?
