Tag: computers

Other

Ah, the first stirrings of young love…

Post author By Harry
Post date 8 March 2006
5 Comments on Ah, the first stirrings of young love…

You know what they say: Once you go Mac, you never go back.

I don’t want to come over *too* Apple-fanboy. I know they’re just a more expensive way of doing all the same things you can do on a PC. What I find quite interesting, though, is how much people seem to miss the point. Whenever Apple discussions start on the net, you get frustrated geeks tearing their hair out at the irrationality of buying a Mac/iPod when you can get a rival product with the same specs for less money, and the accusation is that people are just buying into the stylish marketing, that it’s all design and therefore superficial. But when Apple are at their best, and most Apple-y, it’s not superficial – it’s design all the way down. The marketing is stylish, the online shop is attractive and easy to use, the box it comes in looks cool, the actual machine is even cooler-looking; but really what matters is that the software is uncluttered and easy to use. I have no idea whether the underlying system architecture and the hardware are well-designed, but they seem to work pretty consistently. The cosmetic stuff is a reflection of a design philosophy that makes the user experience a priority instead of an afterthought. Which isn’t to say that Apple have never made any stupid decisions or bad products, but at least they understand that design actually matters and they try to make a good job of it.

We should be able to take good design for granted. It shouldn’t be a luxury.

Tags computers, Mac

Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, again

Julie, in the comments a couple of posts down the page, said:

Harry,

I’ve gotten emails from people who’ve checked out the wiki and think it’s a neat idea, though none of them are playing. Yet? I hope so.

I think one reason that The Poetry Wiki didn’t take off in its previous incarnation is that, psychologically, it’s quite intimidating. It’s not quite like anything you’d normally do with poetry, and it’s hard to know how to approach it or where to start. Are you rewriting the poem drastically? Tweaking it? Trying to respect the original intention? Bouncing off it in some other way? Cutting? Adding?

Julie’s idea of posting one of Spenser’s poems as a starting point gets rid of one psychological block, because you don’t have to worry about how the original writer will react.

I might post a similarly unthreatening piece to play with later, although the best thing to do would just be to dive in and edit.

Tags computers, Heraclitean Fire, poetry, The Poetry Wiki, wiki

Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, back by popular demand

Post author By Harry
Post date 4 January 2006
9 Comments on The Poetry Wiki, back by popular demand

Or, to be more accurate, back in the face of overwhelming public apathy except from Julie.

Since I’ve got the spare bandwidth and everything, I’ve started a new wiki to replace The Poetry Wiki. I’ve called it ‘The Poetry Wiki‘. Original, I know. It just makes more sense to have everything in the same place.

I’ve used the Mediawiki software – i.e. the same used for Wikipedia – both because I know lots of people are somewhat familiar with it, and because Wikipedia has a lot of helpful stuff about how to use the software. You could start with the Wikipedia Help Page, for example.

At the moment it’s a blank canvas, so get in at the beginning. Have a go. Tell your friends. Jump in and make suggestions about how the site should work. Try out the editing syntax. Post some poetry.

Tags computers, Heraclitean Fire, poetry, The Poetry Wiki, wiki, Wikipedia

Culture Nature Other

Flickr field guide

There’s a group on Flickr called Field Guide: Birds of the World. Pretty self-explanatory, really – they’re trying to form a collection of photos that can be used to help identify birds. It’s a great idea and they’ve already got a lot entries, though it’s weighted towards European and N American birds, not surprisingly. But it quickly exposes the failings of Flickr as a content-management system. Although it’s possible to search within the group pool for photos tagged with a particular name, it’s not obvious how to do it. More crucially for a field guide, it’s not easy enough to add information to a photo in an organised way – for example, to provide a link from a species to any confusion possibilities. Or to give distribution info.

In some ways, like most reference works, it’s a good candidate for a wiki; there’s a network of people who are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject, it’s naturally modular and so on. The internet would allow for many pictures attached to each species, as well as audio and even video. You could easily establish a standard template for an entry, to encourage people to include all the useful information – distribution, easily confused species, call, and so on. I suppose I could set it up – the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia runs on is open-source and I think I could set it up on my server space, although I suspect there would be a bit of a learning curve to cope with. More seriously, if it ever really caught on, especially with a lot of audio and video, it would be quite bandwidth-heavy.

With mobile broadband on the verge of becoming widespread, people might even start using it in the field to complement traditional field-guides.

Tags birds, books, computers, Flickr, internet, open source, wiki, Wikipedia

Culture Other

he just doesn’t get it

Creative have launched a competitor to the video-capable iPod. It looks rather like the iPod except clumsier and uglier. But this is the bit I thought was extraordinary:

Creative are touting the Zen as a far more powerful player than Apple’s offering, with additional functions such as FM radio and a built-in mic.

“We are focused on the technology,” he said. “This is still a technology marketplace.”

“This is the key difference between a technology company and a branding company,” he said, taking a side-swipe at Apple’s successful marketing campaign for its iPod.

Firstly – the iPod does what it does very well. What makes Mr Sim think people want additional functions? But more to the point – how many millions of units do Apple have to ship, and what proportion of the market do they have to win, before their competitors come to terms with the fact that all consumer products are brand items, and bought as much because people like them as for what they can do? We’re not talking about coal-fired power stations or aircraft carriers here, we’re talking about something that people are buying for entertainment, that they carry around every day in their pocket. Car companies get it – that people want cars that look nice, have the right associations (yes, Mr Sim, that’s branding) and that they enjoy owning. If that’s true for a £20,000 car, it’s certainly true for a £200 mp3 player. That’s not much more than a pair of trainers. If the chairman of Nike suggested that branding was unimportant, we’d all assume he’d lost his marbles.