marypcbuk | Entries tagged with zdnet

One of my recent blog posts for ZDNet looked at unusual designs and the inspiration of nature — Slug Slime to Hexagonal Frying Pans- and I had more to say about hexagonal frying pans than my editor felt the ZDNet audience would be interested in. So pop over and read the blog post — I'll wait — then come back and read about the pans!

Back already? OK!

For the last few weeks I've been cooking with a hexagonal pan with the catchy name of Stingray, made from aircraft grade aluminium with a high-tech non-stick polymer surface (made by ILAG, who makes UV coatings for planes as well as polymer and ceramic). The aluminium makes it a lot lighter than cast iron but it's sturdy and has the same even heat distribution you get from cast iron pans, with no hotspots. The non-stick coating is phenomenally non-stick; I've fried sliced potatoes without oil, I've put too much cheese in my omelettes and had it melt all over the pan without burning and I've made pancakes with huge chocolate chunks in and even they didn't stick. The non-stick surface also makes it the easiest pan I've ever cleaned.

( Read more... )

That's hackers as in coders and people who take joy in understanding systems; this is the book if you want to take the same joy in understanding design. This is one of the books I've enjoyed reading for review the most and learned the most from, in technical terms. I've been learning about colour space models since 1991 when I first covered Photoshop and I still learned new things; I finally understand Hue and Lightness. I've had some fantastic designers and artists explain proportion and guiding the eye through a design over the years, but this book gives you systematic examples (and makes much more sense of the impressionists for me than many art critics). And I'm a very amateur font geek so it was great to get a potted theory of type structure and why it matters. I was a bit irritated by the emphasis on Mac as the only system designers use and the only example of good hardware design; the analysis of good design in the Mac world worked better than the moments of uncritical adulation. But all in all, an excellent read.

For a book so packed with fascinating and informative details, Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty starts much too slowly. The author is so keen to tell you what he's going to tell you, what difference he hopes it will make to you and why design literacy matters that the first 40 pages are essentially an extended introduction (even if reminding people to sketch out ideas is always a good thing).

Skip to the meat of the book where Kadavy dives in and takes something many people know instinctively — Comic Sans is not the right font for serious design — and analyses why, in a way that makes immediate sense. Instead of simply declaring that something is good or, in this case, bad design, he shows you why.
Read the rest of my review on ZDNet

If I used a desktop PC, I'd probably want it to be this one (I've been laptop only for a few years, but I'd love this on a VESA wall mount with a touch screen).

HP's Z1 is a workstation built into a 27" screen, in a way IT departments and users will love.

For a home PC, an all-in-one PC is an ideal solution; a screen that's big enough for movies, often a touch screen so you don't have to pull out a keyboard to look at photos or browse the Web, and only one cable to deal with. That would be just as useful at work, especially with desk space coming under pressure as companies try to save on rent by squeezing more people into smaller spaces (hot desking and being more flexible about starting new projects quickly are also less convenient with the multiple boxes and cables of traditional desktop PCs). But consumer all-in-ones don't have powerful processors and graphics cards, because they're designed for casual gaming and multimedia, and they're hard to service and support. If the screen fails, the whole PC usually needs replacing; if you want to add more memory or a larger hard drive, cracking open an all-in-one is far harder than opening a desktop case.

HP has paid attention to all of those issues and produced the Z1. Read the rest of my first look at the Z1 on ZDNet.

An interview I did in the aftermath of the riots that turned out to reflect many of the issues of 2011 in general.

NASA consultant, scientist and writer David Brin has long concentrated on the effects technology can have on people. In 1998, he wrote The Transparent Society, an award-winning book investigating privacy, surveillance, people's rights and the state.

Famously, he considered the solution to too much surveillance by the state was even more surveillance — but by the people, guarding their rights by checking up on the activities of the watchers.

Now we have police turning to Flickr to identify rioters, Anonymous disclosing user data, Google+ pushing users to prove their names and even Swiss banks giving up some of their famous secrecy. Given this, I asked Brin: Are we living in the transparent society now?

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2011/09/19/david-brin-state-secrecy-and-science-fiction-40093955/

Some practical book reviews on ZDNetUK

Tackling Tumblr

Tumblr might be the biggest social network you've never heard of. You might well have come across Tumblr in the wake of the London riots, as it was used for a popular blog showcasing images of rioters amusingly-photoshopped to show them clutching stuffed toys or wearing Justin Bieber T shirts. If you've seen an image like the cartoon org charts of different technology companies that suddenly seems to be everywhere, it's probably spreading on Tumblr.

Read my review of the book I used to rebuild our Web site in two hours
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-book-reviews-10015295/book-review-tackling-tumblr-10024224/

Getting Started with the Internet of Things

Never mind 20 million Google+ users. Since 2008 there have been more 'things' connected to the internet than there are people on the earth: by 2050 there will be 50 billion connected devices — from cattle with wireless sensors that report when a cow is sick or pregnant, to implanted defibrillators that upload diagnostic information and heart rate patterns, to bridges that record every time a boat sails underneath them.

There are ambitious ideas about monitoring the weather, detecting when buildings have been affected by earthquakes, predicting traffic jams and avoiding accidents by having cars tell each other where they are (something Ford and Toyota are working on together), spotting epidemics before they start — all by building up massive, real-time data sets to analyse and act on.

Want to do it yourself? Read the rest of my review of a book that shows you how
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-book-reviews-10015295/getting-started-with-the-internet-of-things-10024207/

I've been itching to write this piece since the MIX conference in the spring when I talked to Miguel de Icaza about the way Mono was developing and the headline sprung into my mind; I detoured into the chintzy little phone booths they have in the corridors in Vegas conference hotels to write it down before I could forget, Plus Miguel gives fantastic quote: "It's like when your girlfriend is in denial about her friends. Microsoft is in denial that the Mac OS exists and the iPad exists and the iPhone exists and Android exists and Chrome OS exists and all of those things." Interviews like that are a joy to write up.

And then Novell sold itself to Attachmate and the Mono team were gone and the product was in limbo and I was almost sorrier to lose my wonderful headline (I'll admit it; when we writers have a phrase that sings to us, we love it deeply) than to think that Mono was in trouble. I was delighted to have Xamarin set up and take over Mono: it plays to my native versus Web development prejudice, I'm a big fan of C# and I loathe JavaScript with a passion I once reserved only for Java itself, and while .NET is a lumpy beast, many of the lumps are powerful muscles rather than just excrescences... And I could catch up with Miguel, get the skinny on the future direction and finally get to write this piece up.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2011/08/11/mono-a-cure-for-microsoft-monotheism-40093649/

I've been writing quite a bit on Office 365 since the launch, from this interview with the MD of Microsoft UK and the executive behind Lync about why it's different from free cloud tools, to this (lengthy) comparison to the Enterprise version of Google Apps for IT Pro.

Office 365 is compelling in several ways and it wins hands down in one specific situation; where you're not putting everything into the cloud and you already have Microsoft IT in your business. I've also been thinking about the implications of this hybrid approach.

Lead on cloud - or the business will work around you: my view on why Microsoft's view of the cloud is one of the more pragmatic approaches, written to accompany my interview with Kenon Owens about System Center 2012 where we decide "IT departments can't ignore the cloud. If they fail to deliver systems that are fast and easy to set up, business teams will just sidestep them and sign up for a cloud service — whatever the consequences for security or compliance".

Talking to Microsoft execs about that view of cloud, I got a nugget about the way Microsoft runs the business that I hadn't known before. Microsoft execs: paid by results

Ergonomic keyboards tend to be the pricier models — the 4000 model in the same Microsoft range as this one costs £50. However, the new Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard will cost just £20.

A little extra convenience, a little green power-saving and a very nice sleek keyboard make Logitech's K750 fairly environmentally friendly.

Of course what I'd really like would be a combination of the two; an ergonomic shape and a solar-powered wireless connection...

What can someone find out about your tweets, and the people who retweet and respond to them? Rather a lot - including why they include extraneous characters that only get noticed when they're photographed behind Barack Obama (despite being limited to 140 characters, tweets include metadata like what kind of character encoding they use and a great deal more).

For details of what Twitter, Facebook and other social networks make public and how anyone using the APIs can work with that information, check out my review of Mining the social Web over at ZDNet UK

Xobni is this great tool for mining the information in your inbox that gives you structured information about your communications; now it can bring live Internet tools into your inbox as well, which is its best chance to compete against the Outlook social connector and Gmail's people pane. So what can it do?

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-first-take-10013312/xobni-gadgets-10022452/

What Mango means for business - Paul Bryan tells me how the Office hub grows up and gets useful...
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-working/2011/05/24/will-windows-phone-blossom-with-mango-40092868/

I'm fascinated by the reactions to Google's Chromebooks: lots of people who would scream blue murder if you put a thin client on their desk are delighted at the idea of an even thinner client as long as it looks like a laptop and lets them browse the Web (wait till their IT team locks down the sites they can browse with the usual firewall controls to see if they're still keen). I've already said that Chromebooks are a wakeup call to the Windows team to remove complexity, and my interview with Google's Rajen Sheth is up on ZDNet now and getting lots of comments. I've blogged some extra details on Chromebooks for business there too (like - can I cancel after six months?).

I'm not going to reprise my thoughts that the cheaper TCO Google claims also applies to Windows when you do the same desktop management or that adding another platform with no third-party integrated management tools doesn't necessarily reduce management costs overall (now you have users in both Chrome config and Active Directory to deal with separately). Instead I'll speculate wildly about why the Chromebooks are Atom and not ARM processors. Obviously Intel loves it - it emboldened Renee James to make some wildly inaccurate attacks on Windows 8 on ARM that Microsoft shot out of the sky - and I suspect you need the Intel processors to get Flash running at a decent speed along with the rest of Chrome. But mainly it means Samsung and Acer don't have to eat the cost of tooling to set up a new line to make boxes that may or not sell; they can just bang out a standard PC motherboard and laptop chassis and let Google worry about drivers and making a true netbook not look like a chocolate teapot when you don't have the bandwidth or battery to be online (on ARM tablets it's the screen that uses the majority of power, on a PC the Wi-Fi is a bigger consumer - I've yet to discover what uses most power on a Chromebook). Until every Web app I want to use works offline, Chromebooks won't be useful disconnected, so everyone should finally get offline Gmail.

I don't often get to write one of those stories that gets picked up everywhere because I don't often break news, but sometimes it happens and this is one of them: at Teched, Joe Marini of the IE on Windows Phone team told me IE9 for WP7 is code complete and I covered the details for TechRadar: It's faster and it's almost finished - but it still won't have Flash. I've been under the weather with a cold and back problems (I coughed so hard I put my back out; it's almost funny except it hurts) and Maker Faire meetings, so it was a surprise when @sbisson mentioned that my story was getting referenced on lots of sites. Scoop! ;-)

Several of them use it as evidence to speculate that whatever gets announced at the Mango press conference tomorrow, it won't be shipping finished code. I completely agree; not only did Marini tell me they're working on debug and performance. but in an interview I did with Paul Bryan about the business features in Mango that will be on ZDNet UK soon he mentioned that both the Lync features and the UI for conversation view were still under development last week. The Windows Phone team code fast - but not that fast. My opinion? Mango is feature locked and we'll get details of everything in it, dates for the rollout of updates to operators and a beta SDK for dvelopers with an emulator that gets updated once the code is more finished.

Hands on with the BlackBerry Bold 9900 - the nicest, thinnest Bold yet
http://www.itpro.co.uk/633181/blackberry-bold-9900-review-first-look/3

Why Bing and BlackBerry make sense together: it's not just that my enemy's enemy is my friend...
http://www.itpro.co.uk/633256/why-bing-and-blackberry-make-sense-together

How BlackBerry will bring mobile payments to the UK
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/how-blackberry-will-bring-mobile-payments-to-the-uk-952530

How RIM is steering BlackBerry toward QNX. David Yach explains the BlackBerry appeal: communication, context, commitment http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-devices/2011/05/14/how-rim-is-steering-blackberry-toward-qnx-40092712/

Why Mobile Firefox hides the user interface: Mozilla design principles
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/mozilla-talks-firefox-4-for-android-design-principles-939425

Hotmail makes your mail more active: new active views for comments and deal
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/microsoft-brings-new-active-views-to-hotmail-939071

Google's view of shopping is personal and digital (and contactless and tracked and possibly now sub judice)

http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-nfc-will-bridge-gap-between-online-and-offline-shopping-939661

What will you get in Windows 7 Service Pack 2? And will you need it?
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-7-service-pack-2-what-to-expect-941957

What IE10 means for Microsoft and Windows 8: Microsoft backs Web standards, especially the ones it plans to use for Windows tablets

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/what-ie10-tells-us-about-windows-8-942732

Hands on with IE10 platform preview: improvements don’t stop with IE9

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/hands-on-ie10-review-platform-preview--942710

Microsoft’s stealth move on TV - Why Microsoft TV isn't making the same mistakes as Google… or Apple

(Note; I know that some of the folks on the Google TV team take a different view; we had a long discussion where I said ‘yes, but’.)

http://www.techradar.com/news/television/microsoft-s-stealth-move-onto-your-tv-943213

Windows Phone Mango: what you need to know and what you get

http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/windows-phone-7-mango-what-you-need-to-know-943040

Interview with Microsoft’s Matt Bencke: what does Nokia mean for Mango? Cameras and international maps and mainstream users…

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-working/2011/04/22/how-microsoft-nokia-pact-ripens-in-mango-40092542/

ZDNet First take: Sony's new laptops have style
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-first-take-10013312/sony-stylish-new-laptops-and-an-all-round-touchscreen-pc-10021807/

ZDNet First take: Toshiba NB550D in a netbook with a difference (and it's not just the process)
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-first-take-10013312/toshiba-nb550d-mini-a-netbook-with-something-different-10021829/

TechRadar Hands on with the Asus Eee Pad Transformer
http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/hands-on-asus-eee-pad-transformer-review-932987

Are the extras in LibreOffice 3.3 enough to win users from Microsoft or just OpenOffice?
http://t.co/xhfbPFc

If we're drowning in email and past the point of keeping up with everyone we've reconnected with on Facebook, why are we flocking to Twitter? If we can't settle down to work because instant messages keep popping up on top of the document, why are we adding to the load by uploading videos to YouTube and answering questions on Quora?

Texture is a really interesting book that's full of facts and thoughts and ideas and references and I might still not be sure what I think of it. It's academic in approach (Baudrillard and Derrida by page 10, footnotes and references for every chapter), but very real world in what it says. It verges close to pseudery on occasion (click through to the full review on ZDNet for my favourite example as well as a lot more detail about what's in the book) but it lectures the scaremongers right back. I've not yet interviewed Richard Harper - I'd like to - but I have spoken twice to his research partner Abigail Sellen and I've been following their team's work for years, so I loved getting an inside view on projects like the Harry Potter clock (really that should be the Weasley clock). He's remarkably honest about whether some of the more ambitious MSR projects for dealing with information overload will ever come to fruition (including one I covered for the FT three years ago and and occasionally wonder about; it was delightful to sit in a meeting with Eric Horvitz and know that the only people who could interrupt us were his wife and Bill Gates, both of whom I'm happy to defer to). More than anything, Texture is thought provoking - and that's always a good thing in a book.

The disappointing thing about the OpenOffice.org suite (to give it its correct and non-trademark-infringing name) is how small its ambitions have been. Subsequent releases have done nothing but emulate Microsoft Office features and interfaces; there's been no vision to say 'what could an office suite be that Office doesn't deliver already?' - it's just been a very sincere form of flattery. Love the ribbon or hate it, at least Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 have taken a radical new approach to presenting features (although, please for the love of Murphy, could we have Excel spreadsheets opening in their own windows again? please? pretty please, with sprinkles on?)

Now OpenOffice 3.3 is out (missing its planned release date of 2010 after 10 release candidates and being pipped at the post by the newly-formed LibreOffice); should you be using it? See my review on ZDNet UK for all the details, but if you want to skip to the punchline...

This is a welcome update, but it's definitely a point release: unless you're looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office on financial or philosophical grounds, 3.3 may not be the version to make you switch.

Microsoft is fed up of being told it's dead, dying, uncool, undead or whatever other insult you have in mind. I'm pretty tired of reading stories that tell Microsoft it's dead/dying/uncool/whatever. When I read a braindead comment from "a professional financial modeling person" who says Office is toast because they only use eight or nine buttons in Excel (I think I missed the 'Monte Carlo analysis' button last time I was making a chart), I want to deliver a few well-aimed strokes with a wet fish. But when the next piece I read is rather more balanced and includes the line 'Microsoft declined requests for comment' I tend to go and write long rants about how Microsoft has to be part of even the difficult conversations...