Privacy in the digital age: We can argue whether or not we should be concerned, but there’s no question that the amount of private data that companies collect on us should be carefully thought about. The problem is the difficulty of knowing how much is collected. Would knowing more help us change our daily habits? […]
Category: Technology
Update: I wrote this article exactly a year ago, and now MS have revealed that the next OS after Windows 8 will be… Windows 10. the madness continues. Microsoft (MS) are having a tough time of it at the moment. They built their empire on the back of the dominance of the desktop and laptop […]
In this article I’m going to introduce some of the key concepts I think should be considered when building a hypothetical ‘Perfect Computer‘. Some of these concepts are based on the techniques of Steve Jobs, who in the last post we discovered wasn’t an inventor, but had a strong Grand Vision coupled with a terrifying […]
I was about to call this post ‘Building the Perfect Operating System’ but not only would that alienate every person I want to read this, it would also be misleading, as in this case the operating system in question is purely a means to an end. The post is inspired by reading an article on […]
This post is related to The Perfect OS is Hard to Find from last year. That earlier rant, perhaps unwittingly, was about interfaces. Nnow I’ve realised how everything I though of which defines an OS is down to the colours and shapes it draws on the screen. Or to be more precise, my trouble was […]
So, Google introduce Play. I first came across this when the Android Store updated itself out of existence, to be replaced with the nonsensically-titled ‘Play’, which wanted me to agree to it, and its Terms of Use. Eventually it turned out that this was Google’s own version of the full iTunes experience: books, movies and […]
Hey look, it’s no longer the browser you hate! We know it used to be! So here we have a little hilarious video for you showing how people used to hate it. We’re, like, so honest. But of course: So, you should all use this browser now, which has definitely changed and is worth it, […]
One thing the Internet is great for is helping you find stuff that you’ll like. You can get recommendations from the likes of Amazon based on what else you’ve bought, and there are countless tools out there for curating your own little drip-feed of information from the Web. Unfortunately, this reduces the likelihood of you […]
The Problem Digital works, completely divorced from a physical medium and transferable between devices, now lack one of the key ways we’ve given value to these cultural products in the past: their physical size. Another problem: in a hypothetical future where all music and books are available solely as digital downloads (and I hope that […]
Stephen Ramsey has written a series of articles about the advantages of typed interfaces, that is those programs which you use from the command line by typing instructions rather than clicking on ‘buttons’ with a mouse. His argument is that it’s a lot more convoluted to click, click, click, click, drag, click than to simply […]