Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Last week we got to spend a night at The Grove, a hotel near Watford that is apparently one of the hippest venues in the south of England. We were there for a day of press conferences, so we didn't see much more than the hotel's conference centre (though one of our colleagues did see Daniel Radcliffe, apparently staying there during the filming of the current Harry Potter movie).

In a brief sunny gap between snow showers and briefing sessions, I took a little walk outside, with, of course, my camera. It was hard to remember we were just outside Watford, with a rolling golf course and a manicured English landscape.



The Grove, Hertfordshire
February 2010

We're still blogging away over at ZDnet. In fact, some of our posts over there are getting quite long. Some are also more than a little silly. Here are three more recent entries, on odd naming choices, on unusual places to find multi-touch technologies, and on the Apple/Adobe HTML5/Flash wars. There's a lot of fun stuff happening in the world of technology at the moment, and we're really enjoying finding out about it and sharing it with the world.

So, without further ado, the first couple of paragraphs of each piece, along with a link to the rest.

When product naming clashes with H.P. Lovecraft

H.P Lovecraft's dark, weird fantastic fiction has become the first open source literature, where other writers have taken his mythos and his nihilistic view of human life in a dark and hostile universe and run with it.

Perhaps it is a vision of a dark and hostile mobile future, dominated by uncaring monstrosities that has driven Intel and Nokia to give their new mobile OS joint venture a name that comes straight from the pages of Lovecraft (or near enough for most purposes). It's just that the name they've chosen, MeeGo, is far too close to that of an animated, intelligent, malevolent fungus, the Mi-Go.

Read more.

Touch me somewhere else for a change

Multi-touch isn’t just for tablets. It’s soon going to be everywhere, as the underlying technologies (whether resistive, capacitive or optical) solve many complex user interface problems. Take the humble keyboard for example.

You’d think it was a simple piece of work, and something that couldn’t be made any better. However gamers and CAD users will tell you something quite different. It turns out that there’s a problem with the matrix of connections that connect each keyswitch together. Press too many at once and the keyboard controller can’t detect which keys are pressed. That’s why there’s anti-ghosting controls in your keyboard, tools that block certain key combinations from occurring. That complex combination of keys you need to finish a CAD model or to take down a gang of zombies? Sorry. It’s impossible. And what’s more annoying, different keyboards have different matrix layouts, and different key combinations locked out by anti-ghosting – even the wonderful classic IBM microswitch keyboards.

Read more.

Flash Fried?

The biggest problem with the Adobe/Apple Flash spat is that it’s being fought on the wrong ground.

Flash isn’t just about video on web pages, or animated adverts, or even about plugins versus HTML 5. As soon as you get into talking about those things, Adobe is bound to come off worst. After all, we all love open standards, and above all, we all love the open web. We don’t want to load extra applications to watch video, and we don’t want to have garish adverts thrust at us while we trying to read the news.

If you look at it in those terms, then Apple’s right to not put Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Why burden users with code they don’t need? Web standards do everything the iPhone’s users want, and if they don’t, well, there’s an app for that.

The trouble is: that’s Flash nearly five years ago.

Read more.

Feel free to comment over at ZDnet!