Blogitech from Chris Maddern

So, Steve’s taken the stage and done his bit. Now it’s up to us to spend the next 3-5 days marveling at the design brilliance of Apple and how they’ve changed our lives before settling back down in to the (not unimpressive) reality that they’ve just re-engineered an existing solution to be intuitive and look very nice.

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

Read it all..

Error messages have gotten a lot of flack over the years for unintuitive wording or programatic creation (causing odd succesions of phrases to the effect of ‘there was an error’) to which all you can reply is ‘okay’ implying that somehow it is acceptable for the computer to erase all your data. Today, however, a new level of brilliance was achieved by a success message; a friend of mine is building a download manager that reports:

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris

Like many students, I got given free hosting by Microsoft under their ‘dreamspark’ initiative. It’s a great idea, but the service is unfortunately so crippled that all it did was encourage me to go and hire a linux server and a domain! :s.

It will only execute ASP.NET code from the main folder, getting a CMS to run on it (ASP.NET CMSs are already fairly rare and delicate) is next to impossible and database configuration & any statistics monitoring is impossible.

I will continue to use it to test out ASP.NET development and Silverlight, but if you actually want anyone but you to see any of it then you’re almost certainly going to have to shell out for some professional hosting. Anyhow, this is the road that has led me to Wordpress, and glad I am of that too! In just a few short hours this is all up and running and ready to splurge my thoughts out upon the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the free hosting and the idea is great; Microsoft’s recent attention to students is fantastic however in this particular case, don’t expect to actually use the page for anything but testing!

Chris

*transferred from old site* 

This Wednesday Hulu’s set to launch; Hulu for those of you in Britain who don’t know is a service created by NBC and News Corporation. It is an online service that allows you to watch any NBC content (with more coming), on any device, for free. All content is free.

This is just the latest in a long string of reminders that we live in Britain and not the US. Our lack of iTunes Music Store access in Starbucks, or free Wi-Fi almost anywhere?! An Edge network for those of us without 3G devices; iPhone anybody?

Huge quantities of licensed content is available on US online services that just isn’t available in Britain; both paid for and free. So, in this day and age when we’re moving more and more towards a global village; why do these companies not welcome the extended market of Europe. The answer to this one strikes me as DWM and licensing although I can’t quite figure out where the bottleneck lies. 

- Ask a copyright holder if they can market it in Britain and the answer would doubtlessly be yes with a hand extended, gesturing shamelessly while they ordered their new Porsche to celebrate the occasion.

-Ask any executive if they’d like to open their products to new markets and revenue opertunities, I would have to imagine the answer would be yes?!

So why does this huge devide exist; I know for one that I like American TV and would be more than happy to purchase it on a legal service such as iTunes, as I’m sure, would many others.

You know what…. I think I may start a company one day targetted at getting the Hi-tech stuff that’s available and implimented in America over here. I shall call it ‘Hi Tech Britain’.

Send your CVs to chris@blogitech.co.uk!

Chris
(n.b. If anyone actually knows the answer to the licensing issues, I would love to know)