Simon Pearson - minor9th.com

Chocolate iPad, anyone?

posted in Computing, Food

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Kay had one for her birthday:

Read the full story at Stef’s blog

Some thoughts on the iPad

posted in Computing, Web

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Over the last few days I’ve been lucky enough to read about the hype of the UK iPad launch from my own iPad, which arrived about a month ago.

After seeing a friend’s iPad at a wedding a couple of weeks before that, and seeing him proudly draw a giant penis on it, I had my reservations – aside from having a beautiful screen there were no killer apps, no super connectivity and the keyboard was not up to serious typing.

Now I’ve had my own for a few weeks, here’s why I love it:

• It is the perfect browse the web / read feeds / reply to emails device from the sofa / bed. It is small enough to be ultra-portable but big enough to be a joy to use.
• It’s a brilliant recipe companion. There are a few recipe finder apps already (epicurious in particular is outstanding), and the relatively small footprint makes it more convenient to have an iPad in the kitchen than a laptop.
• Apps like Guardian Eyewitness are beautiful and there are doubtless many more to come.
• Generally – the screen is brilliant and the device is super responsive. The email client is light and sensible and great for catching up. When I go back to my iPhone after using the iPad it feels like someone dipped it in treacle
• Flight Control HD. I’ve written about Flight Control before, but my goodness. Playing it large is super smashing awesome good.

And the dislikes:

• Given that the screen is so good, why is there no camera?
• The array of applications out there right now isn’t too inspiring. There are a million and one piano applications for iPad. Unless you have tiny fingers or are happy with playing chopsticks in a 2-octave range don’t bother. They are universally rubbish (but I am a piano snob)
• Why are eBooks so expensive? For me reading on a screen will always be a downgrade from having a real book, so it makes no sense to me that eBooks are priced more highly than their superior print counterparts. Lots of analysis on this out there: “eBooks must not be devalued as this will depress the true value of the entire market in the future.” [Stephan Butscher, Simon-Kucher & Partners], but I wonder what will happen once Google Editions gets going.

So all in all I feel the iPad is absolutely not a necessity device – it takes tasks which are easily achieved on the iPhone and on your laptop and makes a few of them much, much easier. It is not a replacement for anything per se.

Cory Doctorow posted a few weeks ago on his frustrations with the iPad, Apple’s skewed monopoly on innovation, on what he calls the infantalisation of hardware, on closed vs open.

The points he makes are valid but I feel he quickly dismisses the vast market for whom a closed platform is perfectly fine. A large group of people out there (and I count myself as one of them, most of the time) don’t want to tinker or take their devices apart (perhaps burnt by previous failed attempts at fixing VHS machines or 90s PCs). They just want things to work really well, be beautiful and easy to use. Is that so bad?

Flight Control for iPhone is more addictive than crack

posted in Computing

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I’m just saying. You should under no circumstances play it.

That is all.

Service-oriented vegetables

posted in Computing, Design

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Being a mere lightweight in the world of development, I don’t read as deeply into application methodologies as some. However, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to service-oriented architecture recently: where I’ve used it in the past, where I’ll use it in the future.

It struck me that our staff restaurant at work is a prime example of when coarse-grained services can go wrong. Here’s a snippet of the menu:

• Monday: vegetable cottage pie
• Tuesday: vegetable lasagne
• Wednesday: moroccan tangine
• Thursday: vegetable goulash
• Friday: fish and chips day (doesn’t really fit into the point I’m making so ignore it for now, but it’s good for hangovers)

Almost without fail, Monday to Thursday’s dishes contain: celery, onion, green pepper, courgette, carrot, peas, apricot(?!), and then are put together with something else, be it potato, cheese and pasta or tomato.

In not-very-l33t speak, the canteen calls on the trusty getVegetables service which returns some incongruous pile of mush, before invoking the hastily cobbled together hideItUnderAThickLayerOfMash method (which in turn uses the dreaded smash.dll)

This sort of lazy one-size-might-fit-all approach is something that creates disappointing end products that might be cheap and quick to build, but don’t really serve anyone very well. What about environments in which both creatives and developers have high standards, short deadlines and complex requirements? Sound familiar? What if, to continue this tenuous metaphor, the onion needs to be in the mash, not in the veggie goop?

It occurs to me that harnessing the power of SOA requires a lot of planning and objectivity – which is really challenging when individuals clamour loudly and endlessly (and often with good cause) for that one feature that they need yesterday.

iSmug

posted in Computing

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Say cheese!, originally uploaded by minor9th.

This week, I’ll mostly be beaming and being cretinous with my newest gadget – a slightly shiny MacBook. Primarily I took the plunge so that I’d have a machine to use on the move ahead of an upcoming work/play break in California (more on that later), but I also caved into the sheer beauty of these little things. So staggeringly pretty. I couldn’t love it more if it were made out of white chocolate.

So far setting up all my computing must-haves has been dead easy, and though I’m a bit infuriated with how slow I am at doing simple tasks (I’m learning shortcuts by the fistful), I have a feeling this is only going to get easier.

And boy, is this thing quicker than my ancient desktop PC…

No Funciona

posted in Apple, Computing, Web

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Whilst faithfully fulfilling my geek-boy duty to download the beta of Vista (bloaty, jerky, blurry – my computer scored a lowly 2 out of 5 on performance), I accidentally signed up to a bloody Microsoft newsletter which has since gone unread for months and months.

So, armed with a comforting mug of tea, I decide to click on the unsubscribe link in the email. The resulting page is plastered with smug, nondescript IT professionals and has a somewhat hidden link to ‘Manage my subscriptions’. I’ve seen this sneaky sort of thing before: I’m not afraid. Then I have to sign in. I’ve forgotten my password, so request a new one. I get a silly screen of twisty letters. Enter them as best I can, but get it wrong. Four times. My tea’s getting cold. I give up.

Decide to think about buying a MacBook to shun Microsoft once and for all. That’ll learn them! Manage my defection, suckers! Then I remember that they keep melting, and that OSX has the world’s dumbest lock-out/log-out mechanism, and that iTunes 7 is unusable on my humble XP machine because of Quicktime’s mysterious playback engine.

Briefly consider moving to Unix for good. Decide that a life spent recompiling the kernel – if not the WHOLE WORLD – to get a basic driver to work is not the life for me.

Sometimes this whole computer malarkey is all a bit faffy and annoying, isn’t it? Goddamn it I’m going to go and live in a hut on the side of a Welsh mountain somewhere with only a kettle and a teaspoon for company.

(And maybe once a week the person from Tesco online delivery… Oh man!)