one part truth, two parts mixer

The format war

More randomness that I never got round to posting. It would be quite interesting to see what stuff other people have got hidden in the draft folder.

Mac vs. PC. Passionate advocates on both side. Me? I use a Mac. But once upon a time, I used to use a PC and I actually quite liked it. Until Windows bought out XP that is. What made Windows (3.11, 98, ME) good was the fact that you could find EVERYTHING. Your computer wasn't programmed to keep secrets from you. Windows Explorer gave me confidence with computers because it allowed you to use common sense to figure things out.

I used Vista the other day and was shocked at how Mac-like it is. Why didn't Windows stick to being Windows? Surely making it more similar to Mac makes it easier for PC users to make the switch?

The future is games

Useful presentation about gaming. The first lot of slides aren't that helpful, but there are some good examples later on. I mainly like it because it's well presented, ugly slides get no attention from me.

Video Gaming Trends
Made by Jérome Sudan, found via Future-making Serious Games

Judged by email

I'm always surprised when people have email accounts at Hotmail. I associate Hotmail with being a teenager and getting lots of spam. I still have an account with them, but I only use it in places where I think I'll get spammed.

I wonder, is the choice of email provider as conscious a choice as which trainers, or which car. Does having a .mac account say the same things about you as owning an Apple computer? By using Gmail, do you say you are forward thinking or happy to give over your data? Does having a Gmail account say less now that everyone can have it? Rather sadly, I'm glad that I got my Gmail account before it became GoogleMail, because it looks nicer written down.

Or do people use the first webmail they come into contact with and keep using it? And does no one except me look at your mail provider and form an assumption about you?

What's dried on paper?

Last week you may have seen pictures of this invite over the blogosphere:

Picture nicked from Jamie

There was a lot of curiosity as to what it might be - all we had to go on was the web address driedonpaper.org which didn't really reveal too much. On Thursday night at Shoreditch Studios all was revealed. The launch was for the new INQ1 ('ink', dried on paper, geddit?) phone available on 3. So now you know!

I didn't get a chance to have a proper play with the handset but one of the INQ1 helpers did show me what it can do. Basically the phone is set up so you can have access to social media programmes such as Twitter, last.fm and Facebook at one touch. It looks pretty sweet - a bit teenage for my tastes maybe, but I'd want to have some time alone with the phone before I passed judgement on anything else.

Is there really a need for a phone like this? Does it really do anything more than the iPhone? Anyway, the party was good and the drink was flowing, so thumbs up!

More photos here

Death to voicemail

I'm a hater of voicemail (for the reasons why, read Jamie's post on the subject). If you leave a message it is very unlikely that I will respond, I tend to call 'her' up every couple of weeks and repeatedly press 7 when the voicemail symbol begins to annoy me into action. Anywho, Jamie uses Spinvox, a clever service which turns voicemails into text messages. This is a message I left her the other day. I love how when it couldn't understand what I was rambling it about, it just puts in an underscore. In the future will underscore just stand for 'she was drunk'? Or indeed 'he was drunk'.

Doodle earth

On Tuesday I was at a onedotzero adventures in motion shindig and came across the rather lovely Doodle Earth. I managed to Doodle my house in the wrong place and I wasn't even drunk. But anyway as you can see, lovely project.

The clever people that made it: Serge Seidlitz + Squint/Opera in association with debut art

Brain control

I wrote a feature for Viewpoint about how 'we are moving from a world of 2.0 to a world of immersive media, thanks to 3D TV, holographic projection, brain-controlled gaming and entertainment caves'. The thing that I really loved researching was brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that give users the power to control computers by thought alone. NeuroSky and Emotiv Systems have already started incorporating this technology into gaming systems (control your character by thought alone! no more Nintendo thumbs!), but I was just as interested in the medical implications. For example, paralytics could control their electric wheelchair by thought alone. Those that can't speak could think the words they wanted to speak into a speech synthesiser, which would convert it for us. Great news for Stephen Hawking, who apparently is losing use of his facial muscles as time passes (he currently uses his cheek muscles to select from words on his computer), because obviously his brain hasn't slowed down one bit. 

Scouse raised the interesting point that when Mr. Hawking dies, do you think his 'voice' will have to be retired from other machines, because it has just become so synonymous with him?

One step ahead

After playing with my new phone I thought how nice it would be if, when you turned on a gadget for the first time there is the option to personalise it straight away. A bit like Apple computers. With a phone it would ask you to set the time and date, key tones, etc. You could obviously skip this if you wanted to, but I think it would be a nice touch.

Keeping secrets

Yesterday the lovely Amanda and I went down to the bloggers preview of the LG Secret to be wined and canaped. Err, and get a sneak preview of the phone. It was actually quite interesting to go.

As a brand you have to be pretty confident in your product to turn it over to bloggers and some really good questions were asked of LG. Ewan from SMS Text News asked why LG didn't open up their platform to mobile developers, which was met with a bit of discomfort, but apparently it is on the cards.

So, the phone itself. Things I like about the Secret so far:
It's a very good looking phone and it doesn't feel cheap - no coated plastics here.
It's pretty hardwearing (carbon fibre, tempered glass). Jeremy Newing from LG kept smacking it with his keys which was a little unnerving but proved the point.
It's got a motion sensor inside so you play games by shaking and tilting the handset.

Things I don't like:
That it doesn't work with Macs. I have serious issues with phones that aren't Mac-friendly (Samsung I'm looking at you too).

We also got to see the advert, which got me thinking about how mobile handset ads have traditionally looked like corporate marketing slides, while the standard of network ads has been pretty high. Obviously this is changing (Nokia and Sony Ericsson leading the charge) but the global nature of the product means that it is easier to make the powerpoint advert.

You can find out more about the phone here or have a look at their blog.

Time travel

I was just on the phone to Martin, who is some sort of commanding officer of the LifeSigns Network, and we came up with a rather good idea for Time Capsule - Mr Jobs are you listening?

Online backup is obviously the best thing ever, but is not very practical in terms of having to upload stuff (goddamit we want a fibre optic broadband system). If Time Capsule wirelessly backs up your computer, what's to stop it from backing up online? You wouldn't have to think about a thing and your data would be super safe. It would be a great addition to the .mac service.