The BBC’s tech blog has posted a piece about the new iPhone, and, inevitably, the comments are full of people whining about how the iPhone is rubbish because it lacks some feature that competing phones have, or has inferior specs, and that people only buy it because of they are stupid fashion victims.
This comment provides [...]
Posts tagged with ‘technology’
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The iPhone, Top Trumps, and widescreen TV
10 June 2008 – 5:49 pm
What I want to see at WWDC
8 June 2008 – 7:45 am
WWDC, for those of you who don’t avidly follow Apple’s annual publicity cycle [for shame!], is the Worldwide Developer’s Conference. Which is being held next week in California.
Everyone’s expecting a new iPhone with slightly better specs, but I’m not quite geeky enough to get excited about wireless data standards. Obviously faster=better, but it’s not suddenly going [...]
All geeked out
5 October 2007 – 8:02 pm
One reason this blog has been quiet over the past week or so is that I’ve been engrossed in Puzzle Quest, perhaps the geekiest computer game of all time.
It’s an RPG with all the standard trappings thereof: orcs, trolls, giant rats, lots of character statistics, magic weapons, spells and so on. Except that when you [...]
Wii tennis
15 February 2007 – 12:24 pm
I decided yesterday to try to work out how the computer-operated characters in Wii tennis get such vicious side spin on the ball. After a lot of experimentation, I have a much better grasp of how it works, but trying to concentrate on how I was moving the remote completely hammered my timing and my [...]
Talking bollocks about technology
28 January 2007 – 2:00 am
Simon Jenkins has an article in the Guardian that is so wrong-headed that it’s a little hard to grapple with. The first couple of paras give a good idea of the flavour:
I rise each morning, shave with soap and razor, don clothes of cotton and wool, read a paper, drink a coffee heated by gas [...]
the coming of 3D video games
20 January 2007 – 2:19 am
Technological change is extraordinarily rapid, yet somehow it seems to creep up on us. The internet went from being an obscure curiosity for the geeky to part of people’s everyday lives without most of us ever having a eureka moment when the change was brought home to us.
I have had a few such moments, though. [...]
Whee!
21 November 2006 – 12:25 pm
Well, I’ve pre-ordered my Wii and a copy of the new Zelda from Amazon. Which I think is exciting, even if none of my readers do.
Jonathan Ive and the post-gadget aesthetic
16 August 2006 – 4:21 pm
Some more thoughts on design in the tech industries. This time, the slow death of what I think of as the ‘gadget aesthetic’. The gadget aesthetic was a product of the novelty and glamour of electronics; it fetishizes the look of hi-tech gizmos. Lots of buttons, lots of LEDs, curvy moulded plastic, metallic-looking silver plastic:
This [...]
form vs. function — a stupid false dichotomy.
10 August 2006 – 2:28 pm
Core77’s design blog led me to this article about form vs. function in mobile phone design. The title of the article says it all: Is the ‘dumb blonde’ phone here to stay?
In this context, a ‘dumb blonde’ phone is one which looks pretty but lacks functionality. I can understand why someone thought that was a [...]
eBooks on iPod?
24 July 2006 – 5:57 pm
There’s a rumour doing the rounds that the next iPod will be designed for reading as well as music and video. It remains to be seen whether that happens, and indeed whether the iPod is well-suited for reading (as compared, for example, to the more specialised Sony Reader).
Whether or not their time has come, I [...]
Whee!
28 April 2006 – 12:27 pm
Nintendo have announced that their new games console, referred to previously as the ‘Revolution’, is actually going to be called the ‘Wii’. Personally I think that ‘Revolution’ was a fucking awful name - or at least a leadenly literal-minded and unimaginative one. I can’t quite decide about ‘Wii’, although it does make a good logo:
I [...]
MAKE, folk art, and postpoems.com
16 March 2006 – 1:46 am
I love MAKE: Blog. Not because I actually want to make my own automated cocktail dispenser or LED tank-top that plays Conway’s Game of Life, or even an iPod Nano arcade cabinet. But I love the fact that there are people who do these things. A while ago, I went to the Folk Archive exhibition [...]
Sir Shigeru
15 March 2006 – 10:19 pm
Shigeru Miyamoto has been made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Damn straight. If the man who invented Mario and Zelda doesn’t deserve a knighthood, who does?
That doesn’t make it any less annoying that the release date of The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess has now been pushed [...]
Ajax and the common man
5 March 2006 – 3:38 pm
One of the hot new(ish) things in web design is Ajax – standing for Asynchronous Javascript And Xml. To quote Wikipedia, “The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each [...]
More Cockroachy Goodness
9 February 2006 – 10:00 pm
via MAKE: blog, the Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot.
Linkworthiness
18 January 2006 – 9:09 am
An art-type thing at Pruned, and via Interactive Architecture dot org, the Airship to Orbit program. Check out the animation, which has the cheesiest music in the world ever. Oh, and KLF’s The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way).
linkworthy weirdness
6 January 2006 – 11:37 am
… at Pruned.
And it took a while, but the future may finally be here.
Galileo satnav
28 December 2005 – 1:04 pm
The first satellite of Galileo, the EU’s competitor to GPS, was launched yesterday - initially to test out the kit, with the service planned to go online in 2010. One of the explicitly stated aims is provide independence from reliance on the US government, since GPS is a military system that is made available for [...]