A web log, a test of my web design software, stories about the absurd, the dumb & interesting stuff.
Google - the evil empire. Google’s - ‘Don’t be evil’ motto is B.S. according to Steve Jobs. He’s not wrong. Google are not only becoming ‘the evil empire’ abusing of their monopolistic dominant position (hey, everything they hated about Microsoft, Google are now being accused of, by someone or other), but they are hypocrites as well. Here’s why My lawn mower broke and so, in no time at all, my lawn has become a flower meadow. Very pretty it is too. Perhaps, like my princely namesake, I should leave it to become a wild flower meadow. Click to enlarge iPad I’ve owned an iPad since April 2010. I was one of the first owners in the UK, and had mine shipped from the US a couple of days after it was released. I believe this is a revolutionary device. It will change the computing landscape. It’s also fundamentally flawed, as many Apple devices are. Read here what I think is wrong with it and why you’re probably better of waiting for the clones. More... (OK, more than a year after I wrote this you’d still be waiting for any decent clones. I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and a Motorola Xoom. Bottom line: they are still not competitive.) Now 10 years later - the iPad did change the landscape - practically everyone has one, hundreds of millions have been shipped. But we are still waiting for realistic competitive alternatives 10 years later. That I did not expect. I use an iPad Pro with keyboard as a laptop replacement, and it’s better than any laptop I’ve ever used. But it still has some crazy, artificial limitations like not working with a mouse as an option - this is one area Android and ChromeOS tablets got right. Apparently the next iOS 13 will fix that. (Unfortunately it didn’t - they cocked it up.) Samsung meanwhile has a great, great DEX system which means you can plug your tablet into a screen and use it just like a desktop computer. (Why oh why didn’t Apple do this?) I want one Awesome looking electric car. Source: autoblog.com Read More... Copy / Paste pictures into Gmail Cloud computing is the future. I’ve believed this for a very long time - even started a company doing cloud-based software more than 10 years ago. I’ve been surprised how long it’s taken to become established, but cloud-computing is now becoming mainstream. And there’s almost no type of software that can’t be done better in the cloud. The highest profile examples are web-based email, such as Hotmail and the current king Gmail (from Google). But one problem of using a web browser to operate software such as Gmail or Google Docs (web-based Office applications) is a pretty basic one - you can’t copy pictures from desktop applications into web-based ones. If you do a lot with graphics and photos, as I do, this is a real pain. The only way to copy a graphic from Word, say, into Gmail, is first save it from Word then in your email program select Upload, browse to the image and upload it to the server. And some email systems don’t even provide image upload. Well here’s a utility that solves the problem. It’s called PicturePaste. It’s great. (I would say that though.) 10 years later my prediction that cloud computing was the future proved to be prescient. It should be obvious (well it should be to any company starting out now) that desktop software has had its day, web-based software is now the only option that matters. The Web Browser is the operating system. Going forward Windows doesn’t matter, nor OSX, nor Linux or any desktop OS for that matter. Only the browser matters. The browser is the OS. My PicturePaste utility had a limited life - solving a flaw in web-based editors that should never had existed in the first place. The browser makers eventually solved the problem (supporting copy / paste from external apps), so PicturePaste became redundant. I sold more than 10,000 copies so it’s was great fun while it lasted. Thanks to everyone that purchased and used the program. Let’s screw the bankers - tax them 98% I'm no lover of banks, but when I see the witch hunt going on in the media regarding the bankers bonuses and bankers in general I despair. This is a McCarthy-style witch hunt, lead by the media (as always), whipping up anger, hatred and jealousy. I never thought I'd live to see 98% taxes imposed on anyone in this country, but that’s what is now imposed on bankers. No it’s not the 50% ‘bonus tax’ you thought it was. It’s a lot, lot more than that. Of say a £200,000 bonus, 98% of it goes as tax. Unreal, but true. Check this out. Android is going to be huge For those that don’t know Android, it’s a mobile phone operating system created by Google. And Android is going to be larger than the iPhone, by far, for exactly the same reasons Microsoft Windows beat Apple the last time a new platform emerged. I can’t stress how significant Android will be to the future of computing. Read more Bad Robot Android is actually crap. It’s a broken robot. ‘Hang on, you just said it is going to be BIG, in capitals no less’ I hear you say. Ah yes, but big doesn’t mean good. Just look at Windows. In the early days the Mac was better, and Windows merely adequate. But ‘adequate’ was all that was needed when it was a cheap as peanuts and everyone wanted to get on the PC bandwagon. Apple was not interested in licensing the Mac OS. So Microsoft cleaned up. Eventually Windows got a lot better and after a while it was actually better than the Mac (back when Steve Jobs was no longer there and Apple was run by a bunch of corporate types who had no clue). Over this period of relatively few critical years, Microsoft gained the world. (See above.) So why is Android bad? There are some major technical drawbacks to Android. Read More... Google Chrome Google Chrome is a fine web browser. You should really try it. The best things about it are; It’s fast It combines the address bar with Google search. Just type a web address or a search string. It's just smart. Obvious, nice. It has a clean and simple GUI. And this is really where they deserve credit, a super- clean, simple user-interface with almost no window clutter. OK they break one of the basic GUI tenets that you really should not break (no standard File, Edit...menus). You can get away with this on a browser because so few menus are needed. (Note, break this rule in mainstream apps like Word Processors at your own cost - are you listening Microsoft?) Small points like the status line that pop-ups up only when you need it (e.g. when hovering over a link. It slides into view at the bottom and then slides away, maximizing document viewing area). Nicely done. And then they go spoil it all by some unforgivable screw-ups. It doesn’t handle pop-up blocking properly. It’s hard to believe, but you can only block all pop-ups or none. You can't make exceptions on a site-wide basis. So websites that rely on pop-ups are unusable (and a lot of perfectly legitimate, commercial websites use pop-ups). Yes you can choose to see any individual blocked pop-up, but you can't say ‘allow pop-ups for this website’. So Chrome simply can’t be used for all practical purposes for some mainstream websites (like my banking website actually). Extraordinary. So all in all - you’re probably better off with Firefox still until Google fix this. I gave up on I.E. a long time ago, and by all account (from colleagues that use it), I’m better off staying away. I wrote this more than ten years ago. In that time Chrome came to dominate the browser space. It became so dominant that Microsoft gave up trying to compete with their own browser. Eventually they decided to build a brand new version, called Microsoft Edge, based on Chrome. Ten years ago it would have been unbelievable to consider Microsoft would adopt their rival’s product (they can do this because the heart of Google Chrome is open source. Nowadays I do not use Chrome. Microsoft Edge is clearly better (less bloat - more speed - you know I like that.) Another browser called Brave, is even rapidly gaining market share by eliminating most ads on web pages - less tracking your activity - more speed. Both are based on Chrome source code. One must not forget Firefox that remains a great browser also - in some way better than any other (fast, very smooth scrolling).
10 th Aug 2010
June 2010
Feb 2010
May 2010
+
+
Jan 2010
December 2009
September 2009
September 2009
28 th August 2009
More More
More More