on 19 November 2009
‘I am not an investigative journalist,’ says former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, ‘and I don’t have much time for people like John Pilger and Duncan Campbell.’
If you’re a journalist, you’ll be familiar with Greenslade (now a professor at City University and a prolific media commentator). Did that quote affect your opinion of him?
I’m pondering this after reading Roy’s Guardian article ‘Good sense as judges strike out two “weak” libel actions’, in which Roy praises the recent decisions of Mrs Justice Sharp – the thinking person’s Mr Justice Eady, apparently.
One of the rejected cases was a blatant forum-shopping exercise in which a South African publication was sued in England over an article barely seen here. Fair enough. The other concerned remarks made in a Telegraph diary piece (aka gossip column) about Formula One heiress Petra Ecclestone.
Ecclestone, a fashion designer (really, not in the Coleen sense), was quoted as saying: ‘I am not a veggie and I don’t have much time for people like the McCartneys and Annie Lennox.’ Her lawyers argued that this implied she was ‘disrespectful and dismissive’ of these people ‘to the point of being willing to disparage them publicly for promoting vegetarianism’. For this reason the item was defamatory. Sharp J disagreed, finding that ‘right-thinking members of society’ would think no less of Ecclestone after reading the quote, and that whether or not she actually said it was irrelevant.
‘Heartening news,’ says Greenslade. Yet I have no doubt that he would be mortified to open a national newspaper and read the quote at the top of this post. It is, of course, made up. But that’s irrelevant, right? continue
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on 12 November 2009
If you spend your day using PCs, dealing with infuriating glitches becomes second nature. But Apple has made things so straightforward that you get used to stuff just working. When it doesn’t, it comes as a nasty shock.
Fortunately, the brick walls you may occasionally run up against will generally turn out, on closer inspection, to be mere ha-has in the garden of Mac. So next time you find yourself staring at the screen with a mounting sense of horror, take a deep breath and read this article.
Read the full article in MacFormat issue 215, on sale now.
*Probably.
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MacFormat
on 30 October 2009
Harriet Harman, reports the Observer, is to be questioned by police about failing to stop after a traffic accident. Or, as both the Sun and the Mirror had it, a ‘prang’.
The Labour deputy leader apparently clipped a parked car while driving through Dulwich, where she lives. Witnesses say the Leader of the House of Commons told them, ‘I’m Harriet Harman – you know where you can get hold of me,’ then drove off.
Ooh! She didn’t ought to have done that: ‘Under the 1988 Road Traffic Act, any driver involved in a collision with another vehicle is required by law to stop and give their name and address.’ So! See? That Harriet Harman broke the law. You can’t trust these politicians.
And yet, and yet… The point of giving your name and address to other parties in an accident is that they can contact you later. In conveying that she was Harriet Harman, the member for Camberwell and Peckham may have come over a bit imperious, but undeniably enabled herself to be got hold of. Had she intended to evade her responsibilities, she could very easily have shouted, ‘I’m Engelbert Humperdinck,’ or more credibly in the circumstances, ‘I’m Paris Hilton,’ or, were a sense of mischief among her vices, ‘I’m Sarah Brown.’continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
on 22 October 2009
I’m totally coveting the new 27-inch iMac. Whether the LED screen will be a great leap forward, I don’t know; my current 24in LCD is crystal clear, and the backlight goes up several notches beyond what I’m using, so there’s little obvious room for improvement. But bigger is better. I had the 30in Cinema Display on loan for a month a while back, and that was ideal; much beyond that you’d start having to wheel your chair around to see different parts of the screen, which could get silly, but at about this size, in the 16:9 format, you’re essentially getting what people used to achieve with twin-monitor setups, but seamlessly.
What strikes me about the new kit, though, is the shaving off of Appleness. The way the iMac’s one-piece aluminium stand now tapers toward the front? Sensible (as you’ll know if you’ve repeatedly pushed your keyboard back to make room for something on your desk and clunked it against the boxy front of the foot); elegant, even; but alien to the minimalist principles we’ve come to know and love. The cylindrical rear section of the keyboard, with the radial-polished end cap? Very Dell; not very Apple. The Magic Mouse: I’m sorry, is this a Logitech catalogue?
It may be no bad thing if Jony Ive is softening a bit. Remember the screen on the 2G iPod nano, which sat inside a cutout in the metal case, with bare edges? The danger of minimalism is that it can feel cheap. The vastly more complicated design of the current nano glass, with its curved front and shaped edge to integrate smoothly into the unit, just works better, even if it isn’t so pure. That’s the kind of shift that’s going on with the iMac base. It’s partly a return to the more organic shapes that we saw in the 1998 iMac – not to mention the Clamshell iBook and of course the eMate – and said goodbye to with the iMac G4. It’s partly changing the balance between functionality dictating the design and a Big Idea dictating the design, which is interesting. But it’s also in danger of just being wrong. I don’t see what makes that cylindrical shenanigans essential. It doesn’t do anything that other ways of holding the back of the keyboard up wouldn’t do, and it doesn’t echo anything else in the design. As far as I can tell from the pictures, it doesn’t gel with the mouse at all. Hmm.
On the function side, the multi-touch mouse is something I wasn’t expecting (perhaps stupidly), and it could be great – what the Mighty Mouse was trying to do and didn’t quite manage. The more UI functions we can control with our mouse fingers, rather than pointing at screen furniture, the better. We can only hope this kicks off some deeper new thinking about the UI itself, which is long overdue.
Oh, and the SD card slot is nice.
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Apple,
Computing,
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on 4 October 2009
Incomprehensible regulations mindlessly enforced: a reliable staple of modern consumer news, represented most recently by TV Licensing’s push to get business owners signed up. Now that you can watch TV via the Internet on anything from a laptop to a Lollipop (or whatever LG’s latest handset is called), the rules are impossible to interpret, say bewildered punters. Nonsense, say the TV Licensing people, it’s all perfectly straightforward. Oh yeah?
First off, in case you were wondering, TV showrooms that play every terrestrial channel all day on a wall of screens are exempt from licensing; they don’t pay a penny. That’s not for any logical reason, it’s just an exemption that somebody stuck in when the rules were made, presumably to facilitate the marketing of this new-fangled ‘television’ thingy. But if you just have one screen sitting in the corner of a newsagent’s, you’re supposed to pay your £142.50 – even if you and all your employees already have their own TV licences. And the same applies if you ever watch telly on your work computer, or allow customers to do so.
The Beeb’s Harriet Oliver takes up the story:
[TV Licensing spokesperson] Ian Fannon told BBC News that the rules were quite simple. ‘You need a licence if you are watching programmes as they are broadcast. At a business, the same rules apply.’
He says [employees or customers watching TV on business premises] will be covered by their own licences if they are using mobiles. [Business owners need only] worry about devices like office computers which are plugged into the mains, making them ‘legally installed’.
So will businesses be left alone if they insist their staff never watch television at work? Not necessarily, Mr Fannon says.
Quite simple then.
Very few people in the UK understand how TV licensing works; chat forums are full of people confidently offering contradictory advice. Test yourself if you like. True or false:
1. You don’t need a licence if you own a TV set or other equipment capable of receiving a broadcast TV signal but never use it to watch broadcast TV
2. You only need a licence to watch BBC broadcasts
3. Your licence covers you, not your premises
4. Landlords, not tenants, are responsible for ensuring their premises have a TV licence
5. The same rules apply to watching TV on the Internet as to using a TV set with an aerial
How did you do? continue
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Business,
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Language,
Law,
Television
on 1 October 2009
Windows 7 is the most significant upgrade to Microsoft’s PC operating system since 2001. Dennis Publishing’s
MagBook on the subject is likely to be one of their best sellers this year*, and since they liked the way I designed
its predecessor (on the somewhat less inspiring Vista), they asked me back.
Clarity and authority were the essentials here, but it was also important to make the book visually engaging; reading about operating systems can get just a tad dry, after all. With care and creativity, even an annotated screenshot or a page of keyboard shortcuts can look attractive. continue
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on 16 September 2009
From the Finder to the Firewall, key shortcuts to sync tricks, we round up all the clever little wrinkles that can make life sweeter in Mac OS X. If you’ve ever thought ‘there ought to be a smarter way to do that’, there probably is, and it’s probably here.
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Computing,
Internet,
Mac,
MacFormat,
Tutorials
on 15 September 2009
Talking to a new client today about marketing copy and the importance of tone of voice: to answer your customers’ unspoken questions before they wander away, you have to talk to them, not just list information. Serendipitously, on the way back I picked up the US edition of Wired and found gatefolded within it the most gorgeous example of copywriting wrongness courtesy of Nokia, apparently via Nathan Barley.
The misbegotten bound-in is promoting the Ovi Maps app on the N97, so it’s presumably been designed by at least two committees. ‘Life’s Destinations at Your Fingertips’, it begins, asyntactically, adding helpfully: ‘GOING PLACES WITH NOKIA N97 AND OVI MAPS’. Below is a picture of a disembodied hand holding up an N97 in front of a mug of coffee and a doughnut on a plate (a very large doughnut, relative to the mug, on – wait – an even larger plate. Which is sort of tilted. Maybe the mug is actually very small? Or maybe somebody cut all this stuff up in Photoshop and put it back together with no attention to proportion? Fortunately they’ve done that thick-outlined fake-hand-drawn posterised effect on it, like in A Scanner Darkly, so nobody will notice. Except not on the handset, because one of the committees decided they weren’t allowed to mess with the product).
Anyway, these culturally signifying artefacts belong to Alex Harding, director of business development at a growing tech company. We know this because it says underneath: ‘Alex Harding, director of business development at a growing tech company, travels frequently to meet investors and cultivate clients.’ Umm… does he? And we care because? ‘As a person who’s always in the know about the latest technology products, he’s been following reports that the N97 is the ultimate mobile phone and personal navigation device – designed to connect its users with life’s destinations.’
Following reports? Ultimate what? Hang on a cotton-pickin’ minute, you Nokia rascals. There is no Alex Harding, is there? You’re just describing some halfwit’s conception of the kind of imaginary person that a Wired reader would identify with, if that Wired reader wasn’t busy blogging about your half-wittedness. And this isn’t copy, is it? What you’ve done is written a brief for the copy – or, in fact, a pitch for the meeting where you might have decided to commission the brief – and then you’ve gone and printed it in the ad, like it was copy.
It gets worse. continue
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Media
on 11 September 2009
It says something about the value for money of today’s coffee-table books that 35 quid looks relatively expensive. For this, though, you get a volume – the first in a set of two, divided chronologically – that, with the addition of four legs, could actually
be a coffee table. It’s not quite as huge as
Taschen’s famous limited editions, but as thick and heavy as a 1990s laptop, mercifully slipcoverless and bound in a hardwearing varnished canvas with the cover design stamped into it. Inside, the heavy, creamy paper is the kind you don’t get any more.
Rather than a book about type, this is a book of type, showcasing hundreds of specimens produced between 1628 and 1900: that is, from before Caslon through to the pinnacle of 19th Century exuberance. Most are roman, but Arabic, Fraktur, Greek and Hebrew make guest appearances. The reproductions are from letterpress originals, not litho runs, and key pieces are enlarged so you can get your nose right up to them and make appreciative noises like Louis Balfour in The Fast Show’s Jazz Club. ‘A 1799 cursive missal face by the Muestras de los Punzones y Matrices de la Letra que se funde en el Obrador – nice’. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
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on 9 September 2009
Microsoft has weighed in to the Google Books debate, filing a brief in its capacity as a publisher (of books, not software) in the class action suit that seeks to give Google the right to digitise every book in America. It wants the case thrown out, and it’s right.
The ultimate reason why Microsoft is objecting, of course, is that it’s a competitor of Google’s, most directly with its new Bing search engine; and a fundamental principle of modern corporate practice, as they do teach you at Harvard Business School, is that your lawyers have to wreck or indefinitely obstruct anything your competitors want to do. The proximate reason is that, should the deal between Google and (parts of) the US publishing industry be approved, Google will have the right to create and distribute unlimited digital copies of any book, without obtaining permission or negotiating terms with its publisher or writer. For publishers, including Microsoft Press, and authors who would prefer to retain the control over their work that copyright law has given them for the past century (in its present form, and two centuries before that in various other forms), it’s an astonishing attempt to use a private business arrangement to overturn rights that have long been regarded as inalienable.
Much as it pains me to agree with Microsoft about something, I can’t improve on its summary of the objections:
A class action settlement is the wrong mechanism, this court is the wrong venue and monopolisation is the wrong means to carry out the worthy goal of digitising and increasing the accessibility of books.
As Google would no doubt respond, publishers and authors will have the ability to opt out. But why should they have to opt out of a deal in which they were never involved? continue
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Copyright,
Google,
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Law,
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Microsoft
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