on 8 March 2010
The Apple Store on London’s Regent Street is the perfect symbol of the company and products we’ve come to know and love: it’s gorgeous, shiny, enticing and impossible to ignore. For most people, it’s also a completely inconvenient place to buy a computer.* Luckily, there are plenty more options, because Macs are available these days from a greater variety of outlets than ever before.
So where should you shop, what should you choose, how can you buy it safely, and – perhaps the most topical issue here – is there any way to shave a few quid off that exquisitely typeset Apple Store price tag? Wonder no more, because in this article we open the doors to the world of Mac retailing and invite you to browse. Ground floor, perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and state-of-the-art consumer electronics – going up…
Read the full article in MacFormat issue 219, on sale now.
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Consumer,
Mac,
MacFormat,
Tutorials
on 26 February 2010
The trouble with being a Mac user is it lulls you into a false sense of security. It’s like what happens with snow. In most northern countries people aren’t surprised by it, and just trudge around looking resigned until it goes away again. Windows users have the same kind of relationship with stuff that fails to work, does the opposite of what they meant, or tells them to wait while the system restarts to complete installation of another essential update.
But Britain only gets heavy snow once in a while, so when more than eight flakes fall we panic and cancel everything. Similarly, Mac users faced with an unresponsive dialog box are liable to freak out, run to Starbucks and plaintively nurse a two-shot hazelnut skinny venti latte while tweeting about their terrible morning from their iPhone.
Appropriately enough, my problems with Virgin Media began a few weeks before Christmas. I should first point out that Virgin cable is probably the best broadband service in the UK, being the only one not dependent on bits of wire installed by BT before you were born. But early in December it started slowing down in the evenings, eventually falling to below dial-up speed the same week I was trying to send a magazine to press. Call me fussy, but I don’t want to have to work all night so I can publish the results in the morning. I’m not Belle de Jour.
At the time of writing my broadband still isn’t fixed, and the reason is the continuing crapness of tech support departments. Calling tech support is like playing a classic videogame: you have to shoot down several waves of cannon fodder before you get to the boss. As in Space Invaders, first-line staff repeat a preset range of moves without any intelligence, constantly shift their position, and emit nothing more meaningful than a series of bleeps. To make any progress you have to get through to the second line, which must also be defeated before you reach your real target: the third-line engineer.
(It’s not clear, incidentally, why the word ‘engineer’ was adopted in this context. I always imagine them sitting in their cubicles wearing sideburns and a stovepipe hat.)
Turns out Virgin have added a bonus level. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Business,
Internet,
Mac,
MacUser,
Virgin
on 8 February 2010
I’m posting this partly to publicise the Hedley Barrel Race and Beer Festival, if anyone’s in the area, and partly for portfolio, because I don’t often get asked to do posters. (Weird how posters are every graphic designer’s favourite show-off medium, yet most of the ones you actually see are horrible.)
The design is within the identity I created for The Feathers Inn*, a 200-year-old Northumbrian pub that’s won just about every award it’s eligible for since being taken over by my wife’s nephew a couple of years ago. Worth a trip into the wilds for.
The logo (in the background here), based on early Victorian engravings, is a knife, fork and spoon bent into the shape of the Prince of Wales feathers; it’s now the pub’s sign too. Type fans will spot Adobe’s excellent Wood Type fonts and ornaments. The other face here is Monotype Fournier, based on cuts just a little bit older than the pub. I love the way it’s elegant and awkward, conservative and quirky, all at the same time.
Tagged as:
Design,
InDesign,
Marketing,
Media,
Photoshop
on 3 February 2010
I watched the launch of the iPad (or iSlatelet, as I’d taken to calling it in the hope that someone would have explained to Steve why iPad was an even less sensible name for a consumer electronics product than Wii) with considerable scepticism, but on reflection, so many aspects of this thing are near enough right.
Who’ll buy it, people ask? I think this will become obvious when it materialises on shelves. Sitting in its optional keyboard dock, it’s a really, really cool desktop computer. You’ll have to look at, and then you’ll have to pick it up - and then (say people who have) you’ll want it. Just because it’s like nothing else. In fact, from a desirability point of view, it’s almost irrelevant that iPad is nominally a computer. It could be a hi-fi or a TV or a set of kitchen scales, you’d still want it. All you need is an excuse to buy it.
And there are plenty of excuses. You can surf the web with it, do your email, word process, all the things normal people ask if you can do with a computer. And then hundreds of thousands of apps are available to do other stuff – not for £29.95 or £99.95 but a couple of quid, or less. Without even having to shop for them.
Normal people can use it
Yes, ultimately you might wonder about what it can’t do that (other) computers can. But what really makes it unlike any other computer is that it’s not a nightmare. You’ll never install a dodgy program and wish you hadn’t, because all software is pre-vetted. The Windows registry won’t need cleaning. You won’t start having weird problems and have to figure out which apps and which settings are causing them. Your kids won’t drag vital system files to the trash. You won’t have three OS updates to install every day. You’re very unlikely ever to get a virus or have to call tech support. It just works! That’s ‘the computer for the rest of us’, isn’t it?
More than that: it’s the computer for people who didn’t even think they were the rest of us. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Design,
iPad,
iPhone,
iPod,
Mac,
Windows
on 29 January 2010
So I went to see Avatar, a satire on mankind’s acquisitiveness and obsession with technological progress. I wanted to catch it at the IMAX, but the Christmas traffic was too heavy. (If you’re hearing a funny noise in the background, it’s just the alarm on my irony meter.)
It still looked pretty impressive in the local multiplex. Nobody combines exploding CGI mayhem with weepy sentimentality like James Cameron, and Avatar delivers both in even larger bucketloads than Titanic. Challenging? Only in the sense that you’re required to overproduce adrenaline every time the virtual camera swoops through another vertiginous hail of laser-guided missiles, while simultaneously tutting disapproval, which is a tricky form of doublethink. But as entertainment, it works.
Although there’s an obvious and refreshingly un-American message, steering clear of real-world politics allows the film to moralise without theorising. Or maybe to theorise without moralising, I couldn’t quite decide. There’s no doubt that the human expeditionary force invading the remote moon Pandora is up to no good, so we don’t have to question the ethics of the indigenous population choosing to fight fire with fire. Well, not actual fire, which they don’t appear to have discovered (and we’ll come back to that), but spears and such.
Indeed, we can feel relieved that the Na’vi aren’t depicted as Social Science Model innocents, free from constructs like property, war and sex. That would have been dull. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Architecture,
Art,
Film,
Internet,
MacUser,
Media,
Science
on 11 January 2010
Tired? Sluggish? Lost your get-up-and-go? Yes, Mac, we’re talking to you. You use to be so fresh and sprightly. But you’ve been working long hours and not looking after yourself, and now you can’t seem to do things as quickly or reliably as you used to.
Like the liver in journalists, one organ in the Apple corpus is particularly susceptible to deterioration. The hard disk is in many ways unique. While just about everything else inside a computer is an immobile sliver of semiconductor, the hard disk is a big box of spinning plates with the mechanical sophistication of a 1985 Austin Maestro.
And it has, like Peter Mandelson, more jobs than it probably ought to. Most of its time is spent picking up after RAM, catching whatever falls out as we flick between apps and documents and throwing it back when commanded. Exhausting as it is, this is a mere hobby. Its primary function is to store all your stuff, forever. At this it excels, providing the kind of wide open digital spaces that, however long you lived, however many episodes of Lost you downloaded, however many RAW images you shot with your DSLR, would… hang on, it says here it’s full.
In this article, we’ll find out why Macs grind to a halt and what you can do about it. What’s filling up your hard disk and RAM, and distracting the attention of your CPU? How do you find the culprits, and is it safe to remove them? Can you make more room? And which is healthier, a Burger King or a Subway? All right, not that one.
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Mac,
MacFormat,
Tutorials
on 1 January 2010
I never fully believed the Apple Tablet was real until I heard these words on my iPhone: ‘It’s [name withheld], I work for Apple and I can confirm that, yes… I’ve read the rumour websites too. We’re all really excited and just waiting for Steve to tell us to start making it.’
Some commentators believe the tablet is the natural successor to the Newton MessagePad. So it’ll arrive five years late, do less than everyone thought and cost a fortune, and the only thing it’ll be remembered for is that Doonesbury took the piss out of it.
Publisher Condé Nast has already announced it’s developing digital magazines for the device, despite not knowing what it is. The company is also said to be looking at a machine created by a woman in Oregon that harnesses the power of crystals… continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Design,
iPhone,
Mac,
MacUser,
Media
on 18 December 2009
Computer Shopper magazine asked me to produce a special Christmas issue on Windows 7. Which was great, except the time frame was less than four weeks, start to finish.
Together with Shopper’s Jim Martin, I collated and commissioned the copy (with contributions from Jim and the excellent Craig Grannell) and organised a kit shoot for the necessary hardware, helpfully supplied by sponsors Mesh. Fortunately my first draft of the layout template was accepted, incorporating a few selected Shopper branding cues into a clean and legible new grid.
The cover went through considerably more development, partly due to the problem of making the brand logo prominent without causing confusion with the current issue of the magazine itself, but in collaboration with Dennis Publishing’s deputy MD of technology titles, John Garewal, I solved it in the end.
I flatplanned, designed and subedited the 96-page edition in Newcastle, and with the indispensable assistance of production wizard Steve Haines in London it went to press on time. It’s on newsstands now, and at £2 a bit of a bargain.
Tagged as:
Computer Shopper,
Computing,
Design,
Microsoft,
Windows
on 20 November 2009
Nobody was shocked when the Secretary of State for Business announced three strikes. There could be a lot more than that by the end of the winter. As it turned out, though, he wasn’t talking about industrial action: Lord Mandelson was resurrecting the proposal to cut off your access to the Internet if you’re accused of infringing copyright. Like privatising the Royal Mail, he probably doesn’t see why this is controversial.
As befits his multi-portfolio portfolio, the First Secretary was speaking at a conference organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the ministry set up to strengthen the bond between the conceptual art and yngling industries. The DCMS project that hosted the event is called – brace yourself for some post-modern Media Studies typographic shenanigans here – ‘c&binet’. See what they did there? Yes, they made up something that sounded cool in a meeting.
It’s supposed to stand for creativity, business and, er, the interwebs or something. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Computing,
Copyright,
Design,
Internet,
Law,
MacUser,
Media
on 19 November 2009
adambanksdotcom They might as well call this Abu Dhabi thing The Festival Of Just Not Getting It 