Author Archives: qsf

Alas, poor PC… I knew him, Bill…

An IDC press release, out today, reports that PC sales have fallen again. That’s expected now, but they’ve fallen noticeably faster than predicted: the last quarter was a surprising 14% down on the same time last year.

“At this point, unfortunately”, says an IDC staff member, “it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market…” And it’s not just Windows – Apple’s desktop/laptop sales are down, too.

A big contributor, I’m sure, is that we’ve finally reached the point where operating system manufacturers and other software developers can no longer convince users that it’s worth buying a new machine just to run their latest offerings. I’m currently a software developer, for heaven’s sake, and even I am feeling no particular desire to replace my four-year-old iMac in the near future.

But a lot of it also comes from the fact that fewer people need to do, on a regular basis, what PCs were designed to be good at doing.

Phones and tablets don’t replace a PC, but if you drew a Venn diagram of

  • What PCs do
  • What mobile devices do
  • What people do

over the last few years, it would resemble a lapsed-time animation of plate tectonics. And my point is that ‘What PCs do’ would be largely stationary, while the others moved around it in ever-more-overlapping zones…

I write quite a lot, but I use a word-processor about once a month. I manage my company accounts, but much more of that is done on a web service than on a spreadsheet. I give talks, but the days when PowerPoint was the only game in town are long gone. And I read emails… while I’m walking the dog.

So, if I’m at all typical, where does that leave Microsoft Office, the core of most PCs’ raison d’être? And remember, I’m an old guy. For most people under the age of 25, it probably never was that important. The office suite is dead, and has been for a long time. Long live the browser. On whatever device.

On which note, I should shut down the browser on this iPad and go to sleep…

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the IDC link

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Further TextExpander thoughts

TextExpander is one of the most useful utilities on my Mac — I’ve used it since it was called Textpander, many years ago — and it’s becoming more and more important on my iOS devices too, since almost every app I use, with the notable exception of the Apple ones, now supports it. And the configuration synchronises across all my devices automatically, making things even easier.

It’s arguably more useful on iOS, where it can help overcome some of the limitations of the keyboard. Typing email addresses can be tedious, for example, so I have three-letter abbreviations for most of mine. (Simple expansions like this can also be done using the built-in keyboard shortcuts available in Settings, which will work anywhere, but they don’t have the power of the TextExpander ones.)

A current favourite example, since I’m writing more and more in Markdown, is my .mdl abbreviation. It inserts a Markdown link, taking the contents of the clipboard as the URL (which I’ve typically just copied using the little ‘share’ button in Safari), and positions the cursor at the right place to type the link text. A link in Markdown, for the uninitiated, looks like this:

[Status-Q](http://statusq.org)

If you work out how many key presses are needed on a standard IOS keyboard just to do the brackets, you’ll realise that, though this is already a lot better than writing HTML, to do the equivalent with just .mdl and have it position the cursor in the right place, is a great help if you do it regularly. Which I do!

All very clever, and a great timesaver. But today I added a very simple abbreviation, vvv, which also makes use of the ‘insert the clipboard here’ capability. In fact, that’s all it does: as soon as you type the third v, all three are replaced by the contents of the clipboard, a bit like typing Cmd-V on a regular keyboard. I find this rather easier, particularly in small text boxes on a phone screen: to have a keyboard-based paste function, instead of having to move from the keyboard and tap carefully in the right place, with the right precision and timing not to select anything.

It really is too bad the Apple apps don’t support it, but I hope it may be useful for others anyway.

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Now that’s a car I haven’t seen in a long time…

20130330-15313012.jpg

Spotted in Ilfracombe last week. I used to think Bond Bugs were so cool when I was young.

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Foreshore

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At Baggy Point, near Croyde, Devon

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Accentuate the negative

On the way home from Devon, to avoid a nasty M4 traffic build-up near Swindon, we stopped off at Lacock, a small Wiltshire village owned almost entirely (and beautifully preserved) by the National Trust.

Lacock, Wiltshire

On the sunny afternoon after a bank holiday, it was a very peaceful spot, and a delightful antidote to the M4. (Or to Swindon).

Lacock is used as a location for many films – we recognised several bits of Meryton from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, for example. But it also has an important place in photographic history, because a window at Lacock Abbey was the image Henry Fox Talbot captured in the first known photographic negative.

As we drove home, I couldn’t help wondering what Henry F T would have made of Glenn Morse’s very cool project to build a photographic enlarger. This is no ordinary enlarger, though – the negatives are their own light source, because they’re displayed on his iPad screen.

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The call of the wild

East Anglia seems rather tame today. This was the view, a few yards outside our door, last weekend.

View from Bull Point

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Pavlovian Titillation

One of the reasons I am sometimes envious of design/media companies is that they can get away with names that, in other sectors, would cause people at least to snigger, if not positively guffaw.

Can you imagine a law firm, or a steel manufacturing plant, deciding to name itself The Marmalade? Even in the technology world that I tend to inhabit, where many companies, let’s face it, have some pretty silly names, I’m still impressed.

But you can get away with such names if you have other ways to make people take you seriously. And Seb Wills pointed me at this Fast Company post which suggests that The Marmalade may not find that too hard. The embedded video clip, showcasing some of their work, contains some very impressive sequences.

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Break, break, break…

Rockham Beach

…on thy cold, grey stones, O sea!

Just back from a wonderful few days in Devon, staying in a former lighthouse-keeper’s cottage. It was very windy, very cold, but also very sunny and very beautiful. And the cottage was warm and cosy.

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Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads…

image

A rather fun kind of all-terrain bike, from Aerofex.

More info here.

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LinkedOut?

Yesterday evening, I accidentally tapped a button on my iPad screen. At least, I guess I must have done, because emails started coming back from all those who had accepted my LinkedIn invitation. Eh?

Yes, it turns out that I had accidentally spammed a couple of hundred people asking for a connection. I think it was everyone in my Gmail contacts who was on LinkedIn but not already connected to me. I know you can do such things, but I would never dream of performing so crass an operation deliberately.

And this is all very embarrassing. There are some I know well and would be delighted to connect to: I just hadn’t got around to it yet. But there are many more whom I scarcely know at all, and I can just imagine them scratching their heads and making the same sort of face that I make when complete strangers ask me for a connection. And then there are those I know in a completely different social context: the wife of a casual acquaintance who is probably wondering why on earth I connected to her and not her husband…

All of which makes me ponder: have I ever actually had any benefit from my LinkedIn account (which I’ve had almost since the service started)? I can’t think of any. There have been one or two people who have sent me useful messages, but I’m not hard to find elsewhere on the net, and frankly would much prefer to receive such communications by email. And then there was all that endorsement craziness a little while back.

No, the only positive thing I can really say about LinkedIn is that it doesn’t annoy me as much as Facebook. But then, I do occasionally get some benefit from Facebook.

So I suspect that the right thing to do is to close my account. And yet, as I come to that conclusion, I think of all those distant acquaintances who, having received my annoying message, sigh and say, “Oh well, I suppose I’d better link to him”, and click the button, only to be told that my account is no longer there, so I’d pestered them in vain. Argh!

You see, I can’t win. Social gaffes threaten at every turn… Help! I’m LockedIn…

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An English Spring

Near Wimpole Hall

Oh, to be in England, now that April’s (almost) here…

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The iPad will be my undoing

Gosh, it’s easy to miss this one:

Finding the Undo and Redo keys on the iPad

I’ve been using the vigorous-shake-to-undo feature when I’m working in apps which don’t have an Undo button, but it isn’t always convenient. Especially late at night when I’m trying not to wake Rose…

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