Life is grand

TwitKu is a flag waving in the face of the haphazard and wild directions “Web 2.0″ is taking. Twitter was made to be simple and direct. Jaiku cloned it and added back a bunch of complexity. People joined both and instead of making a choice they decided to continue using both. And so TwitKu was born.

Fellows, this is crazy.

In the interests of constructive criticism; TwitKu should be as simple as Twitter and post to all services it supports. All messages should be aggregated into one stream, not multiple lists on the same screen.

I just saw an iPhone working on the O2 Ireland network. Voice calls, GPRS and all that. From what I was told it was done using a TurboSIM. The TurboSIM is sandwiched between the iPhone and the O2 SIM.

Cowabunga! I’m in The Simpsons. You can be too.

(Thanks to Mícheál Ó Foghlú.)

Am I missing something obvious or is a shipped-box the only way you can get iLife ‘08? I’ve made my way through to the very last step in the checkout procedure but it looks very much like I am buying a cardboard box with a CD in it and not a license key and a download link.

I’m pretty sure this is the year 2007. Not being able to download iLife ‘08 though has me checking the calendar in case I’m back in 1990. Come on Apple, get with the times. Don’t you want me to blow $79 on a bunch of apps. I’ll probably not even use?

One simple thing that VMWare Fusion does that makes my day is to properly map the Apple key when in Unity mode. With Parallels I had to remember to hit ctrl-r in Internet Explorer to refresh the page and not Apple-key-r. VMWare Fusion though lets me hit Apple-key-r. It sounds minor but it makes a big difference as I do hundreds of refreshes a day testing our systems in Windows.

Most multi-story multimedia projects leave me unimpressed. They have thousands of hours of work behind them with a hundred different little stories in their multifaceted interfaces. They attempt to build a whole through many sub-pieces but usually I simply get annoyed and ask; what is this, what are you trying to say and most importantly; why not just give me a linear story. The web is great but there are times I want the the linear story telling of a TV show or film.

HBO’s Voyeur though succeeds on so many levels that my desire for faith in multi-story multimedia has finally been realised. Right from the start it feels immersive. The audio is the key to this, it is subtle and natural. Too often multimedia is contrived and harsh, it attempts to hit you with an opening scene that is dramatic but more often than not is simply painful.

The visuals are impressive too, professionally produced but not dehumanized. It reminds me of The West Wing, walking that fine line between processed and enchanced and soulless.

Another intersting part of Voyeur is the lack of dialouge. You never hear the characters speaking, you simply watch as the sounds of the city surround you. You then make up the dialogue, invent the story in your head and as we all know that is the surest way of pleasing everyone.

Give it a go or if none of that made sense read this explanation.

p.s. Don’t stress about the name of it. It isn’t a voyeuristic show really, there is nothing creepy or Yet Another Reality Show about it. It is just really well produced bit of interactive multimedia.

There is a bit of fun being had at the expense of Rob Enderle someone Bob Keefe over a “Why don’t you put Intel Inside stickers on your computers?” question at the recent Apple event.

(Audio recording of the question and Job’s answer with some good laughter thrown in.)

Now just last night I was helping a neighbour setup his brand-new HP TouchSmart PC. It is a fine looking computer, quite different and by in large a successful design. It has this nice shiny black finish with silver touches that somehow doesn’t look cheap. But it is ruined, ruined I tell you, by at least 7 stickers of various sorts stuck all over it. There is the video card sticker, the AMD “Inside” sticker, three stickers proclaiming “This is an HP TouchSmart PC, touch the screen” and a bunch of others. One sticker is meant to be peeled off once you have figured out that the power button is a power button. Apple would say “the power button shouldn’t need a sticker telling you it is a power button, make the power button better” but HP says “put a sticker on it.” Crazy.

Looking at my laptop in front of me I see not a single sticker and just one embossed label saying “MacBook Pro.” Man do I love not having my wrist chafe on those awful metallic Intel Inside and NVidia Powered stickers that I had on an HP laptop.

Funnily enough whenever you buy an Apple product you get two Apple stickers. I’ve seen these stuck on many a PC laptop and desktop computer.

Can someone please explain the fascination with .Mac?

I am a MacBook Pro user and their hardware pleases me. I think Mac OS X is a fine operating system and that iWork beats Microsoft Office for 90% of your word processing, spreadsheet and presentation needs. iTunes is my daily media player and the iTunes Music Store is the best out there.

But iLife and .Mac leave me cold. I will leave the deficiencies of iLife for another day but .Mac perplexes me. I know Khoi Vinh and many others, including a very good friend who converted me to the Mac Way, want .Mac to Just Work. To be as wholly pleasing as using other Apple products.

Yet .Mac has never even shown a glimmer of wholeness. It seems to mainly only work with Apple produced software, you get some online space, a .Mac email address (because you need yet another email address folks) and some of the iLife products can publish to it in some rather random and inconsistent way (iPhoto seems to lead the charge there.) And you get some kind of backup tool.

Apparently I can get a nice seamless online address book sync. with my iPhone but since I don’t use my MacBook Pro to store my address book it doesn’t work. I have to run software on my MacBook Pro to get my iPhone to sync. with an online address book? 1995 flashback!

I don’t use Mail.app or iPhoto either so there goes half of the worth of .Mac.

And it costs $99.95 every year.

Does it have an API or even RSS? Does it work with Flickr, Delicious, Facebook or any other site at all? I see it reinvents a Group system which doesn’t seem to do much at all.

For normal folk does it backup everything on my Mac without me having to worry? The answer to that would be no because 10GB isn’t going to cut it for even average computer users with their documents, email, photos, videos and music. Can I buy more than 10GB?

This is typical Apple though and it isn’t their specialty. They aren’t an online company, yet. Even the iTunes Music Store is a bit of a bastardised offshoot of the web.

I wouldn’t look to Apple to provide a complete online service just yet. They are working on consumer products and doing a very good job with that. They haven’t yet got a handle on this world wide web thing. When Jobs does wake up one morning and decide it is time to start focusing on it, then, and only then, will I start hoping for more from .Mac.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is as old as I am (1979) and yet, watching it now on Sky, I am struck by how good it still is. The FX in particular are still solid which some of the later Star Trek movies cannot say. TMP has very little of that fakey-fakey feel, knowing when to push it and when to keep it simple. And I still love the moment you see Voyager and it all connects in your brain. Brilliant.

So it seems I am not the only one who nips out of the disco at 2am, stands around like a muppet for 5 seconds and then pulls out a mobile to do a drive-by-texting of some poor friend on the other side of the world.

I don’t smoke but when I need a break from downing pints, dancing like a drunk tornado or yelling at some stranger I can be found out in the fresh air texting someone. It beats standing there watching some 16 year old throw up behind the wheelie bins. Trying not to make eye contact with all the other loafers is much easier with a mobile phone too.

(BTW the link claims the recent UK smoking ban resulted in a 7.5 million increase in SMS usage.)