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The best thing Microsoft ever did?

Will Brocklebank — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:34:31 +0000

But no knee-jerk reactions required, stick with Chrome not IE8.

First we got the erotic novel

Will Brocklebank — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:13:58 +0000

Clay Shirky makes a fine point in reply to those who hate the seeming narcissism of Facebook, photo sharing & vapid personal opinion blogs:

"Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that's been true of every medium ever launched." Guardian

BTW well done the Guardian for making a plugin that specifically makes it easier to share its journalism on the internet. Murdoch beware.

Your own newspaper every day: the best iPad news apps

Will Brocklebank — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:47:38 +0000

I used to subscribe to the Economist, Mac User, The Week, Evo & The Daily Telegraph but I have abandoned them all because the iPad is not just a replacement but a vastly superior news aggregation device. The following apps are my dream team for creating your own highly personalised but broad-scope newspaper and I highly recommend the use of them all:

The Early Edition: the key feature of this app is the fact that its layout mimics that of a classic newspaper. It puts the posts of your feeds into article spaces and makes a multi-page document that you can browse by posts only from today, or from the last collection, or all. As such you can create an "edition" of the news collected from all your feeds for a true overview of what's going on.
The early versions made this seem a bit of a gimmick but now that it has Google Reader integration this is my go-to app. Perhaps the best thing is that it mixes up and prioritises the articles and feeds using some unexplained voodoo but I find this to be very refreshing. I have long had a folder of Top feeds (10 or so) in Google Reader and I found that I often only read these and never dipped into my other 45 feeds which often carried reportage on the same subjects but from blogs/sources that I found to be less pithy much of the time. But that meant that I often missed their angles on stories or those articles that they alone wrote about which you can pick up when skimming headlines in a newspaper format.

Pulse: as advertised by Steve Jobs at his iPhone 4 keynote (which was only days after its first release) this app takes news readers to a new level because it doesn't require the operator to actually find any RSS feeds - it uses a Google style search to route out the feeds available when you simply enter "New York Times" or "Photography". You can then choose either an aggregated 'main news' feed for an overview or perhaps the output of a specialist columnnist from within the search results.
I have found that as a result I browse big news sources like Wired, Ars Technica & BBC via Pulse that would bog a normal RSS reader down with lots of stories that I can't easily skim past but which Pulse's layout makes easy to dip in and out of.

Instapaper: this is a favourite of the tech community but it is superb for anyone wishing to save longer articles for easy reading. At its most basic you navigate to a story that you are interested in and the click the Instapaper link that sits in your bookmarks/favourites bar (or which can be found as an 'open-with' option on most of these other apps). This saves the story's text to Instapaper and strips out all the ads and other guff from the original web page.
As a result 2,000 word articles are saved for hassle-free reading later and formatted beautifully. Explaining it is difficult but do give it a try because it is free.

FT: at the moment this app offers free access to the FT's content care of Hublot, the Swiss watchmaker who is spraying its marketing money around during the World Cup. However, even if the FT requires a moderate subscription I might well be tempted because the layout, the navigation, the updating widgets (market & stock price graphs, your portfolio summary on the front page) and the whole experience makes this the definitive print-brought-to-web newspaper. It is a first class reproduction that maintains the easy browsability of the print edition but embraces the advantages of dynamic content.

Osfoora HD: the quietly excellent Don Mcallister put me onto this via Twitter, appropriately enough, as this is a Twitter client. There are so many flavours of Twitter client that I will simply say that this wins for me because it offers multi-account support; a full range of retweet, draft and other composition tools; comprehensive 'open-with' options & referral so that tweets & links can be expanded or passed onto Facebook, Instapaper and more; and a clean layout that gives ample space to the content but allows quick browsing of hundreds of tweets in your timeline.

Perhaps the key reason to like Twitter is that it surfaces some of the most interesting news & opinions that I read each day: people's links are usually remarkably insightful, intelligent & often funny.

And that is really why I wrote this post: because with these apps, the genius of the editors of the 50+ news sources I can easily read as a result of them, and the passing on of information by my peers I have been able to edit my own daily newspaper. Its scope is both far wider and far deeper than any traditional newspaper could be: I can read up on major world news events or dive right into the technicalities of the newest audio-visual cabling standards. I can browse sports results or correspond in detail on the future of the newspaper pay-wall debate all with equal felicity. The breakfast table is liberated by this wealth of fascinating content - and I can get an updated edition at any time of the day, and many times a day.

Excellent background wallpaper for iPhone

Will Brocklebank — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:13:55 +0000

Use these as your Home Screen background for a sexy, pin-sharp look from the folks at Effektive Design. Find the images halfway down the blog post here.

If you are reading this on your iPhone you can open that link in Safari and tap and hold on the grid of choice and save it directly to your camera roll from which you can find it in the Wallpaper settings panel.

The best & brightest minds

Will Brocklebank — Sat, 29 May 2010 18:43:03 +0000

I have worked in the creative industries, finance, property and technology. Of these the creative industries had by far the highest proportion of mediocre minds: dull blustering make-weights who added nothing. Finance, on the other hand, was almost constantly astonishing in the frequency with which one met truly surprising, interesting & razor-sharp people.

(Obviously there are some stellar talents in the creative space and they tend to rise fast and make serious headway - equally there are some shocking dullards in banking & investment. I make no claim for my own prowess other than to say I don't think I'm with some of the wannabe star-f*ckers of media and equally I'm no Goldman Sachs hotshot.)

But for a long time I have thought that it was a shame that the brightest minds our entire world produces all gravitate towards finance. Back in the 50's, at least in the US, the summa cum laude crowd were pushing the boundaries of space exploration. In the 60's & 70's chemicals and multi-national industrials pulled in the greats. But it's been pretty much all finance's way since the early 90's and perhaps before.

It doesn't much matter what country you were born in: if you have a first-class intellect the odds are that you will fetch up in an investment banking/management role pulling in millions per year. And so it seems that at least one popular VC, Fred Wilson, is of the same opinion:

"We have witnessed financial services (think asset management, hedge funds, buyout funds, private equity, and venture capital) grow as a percentage of GNP for the past thirty years. The best and brightest don't go into engineering, science, manufacturing, general management, or entrepreneurship, they go to wall street where they will get paid more."

This is an excerpt from a post where he suggests that his own crowd, VC's & private equity stars, should pay more tax on their "carry" - the investments that they are allocated in their funds which, as the funds mature, can become very valuable and therefore represent a significant & often majority stake of their overall career compensation.

When I left investment management I packed 4 years worth of papers into a bin liner, company reports, 10K filings, accounts - all carefully scribbled on with my (not very) perceptive comments gleaned from management. As each company's announcements have to be re-analysed with each quarter's results there wasn't a lot of value to these old snapshots. I was sad that I knew I'd never be able to drive past an edifice, a 'thing' of some sort that I had helped build - I had only helped push other people's money into one bucket or other and I wasn't really sure that I had made any difference at all to anyone's life. Fred Wilson points it more succinctly:

"If we force hedge funds and the like to compete for talent on a more level playing field, then maybe we'll see our best and brightest minds go to more productive activities than moving money around and taking a cut of the action."

I agree with Fred not because I don't like bankers or some other fashionable witch-hunt but because it would be great to see that awesome accumulated grey-matter actually creating something that would improve all our lives. [Before my brother complains about this post I do believe that private equity can create companies of benefit - and I would be sad to see his tax bill rise even further but my point remains!]

Help Desk Humour

Will Brocklebank — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:08:05 +0000

Posting the flowchart below on the company blog reminded me of an old but excellent Norsk help-desk video.

Between the 2 of them they do just about sum up the issues that arise in most IT support of home users!

Simply wonderful on current mess in UK politics

Will Brocklebank — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:20:38 +0000

MarsEdit makes blogging easier

Will Brocklebank — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:15:50 +0000

The best blogging platforms usually come with the best blog-writing tools and Squarespace is no exception. However, even the best online blog editing WYSIWYG tools can fall short of what you really want... and if you are publishing to 2 or more blogs at once then falling back on HTML is the only way to guarantee good results within the different formats of each blog. But the recently released v3 of Red Sweater Software's MarsEdit may ease your pain because it combines the best of offline blog editing (local drafts that can be tinkered with until one's really happy) with full & flexible styling, image additions, movie embedding etc.

Handy iPhone keyboard tips

Will Brocklebank — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:12:21 +0000

Quick Friday post: from the easy creation of accented letters to the ability to change currencies symbols by pressing & holding, here are 10 things to speed up your iPhone keyboard results:

http://www.labnol.org/software/keyboard-typing-shortcuts-for-iphone-ipad/13564/

Posted via email from willbank's posterous

Facebook Privacy Settings: how to check your exposure

Will Brocklebank — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 07:43:42 +0000

After all the recent brouhaha about Facebook's privacy issues I decided to double-check my settings.

Background: Facebook recently changed the way people's information is made available beyond their circle of friends and then they added a new data-sharing feature which is turned on by default. As I keep up with these things I reckoned I had sorted my settings out already but to my horror they had added further "functionality" that made all of my content pretty much wide open again.

Of course Facebook is a useful service in so many ways but let's not forget they have to make money and they aren't charging you for your account. So they're going to sell, and sell hard, to advertisers to generate this income - and what have they got to sell? Your data, and that's it. Don't underestimate how much of it they need to sell to justify their vast valuation, rumoured at around $11.5 billion. With Facebook your data is intrinsically NOT SAFE unless you really keep tabs on it.

So what to do: go to this Facebook settings page for your profile and go into the options highlighted here:

There are two things to be aware of -

1. What info from your profile can be spread about by friends under the heading "What your friends can share about you". This can be a backdoor route for others to expose you inadvertently.

2. Also their new "instant personalization" initiative which essentially allows certain external websites to automatically 'mine' your profile, your updates etc for info which helps them "personalize" their offerings to you. In essence this means that Facebook has simply handed over all your most private information to a third party. That they have invoked this with people opted-in by default is very sneaky.

(At the time of writing the only sites that work on this feature are the newly announced docs.com, Yelp and Pandora.)

Finally, it might be worth reviewing the most central settings pane as well, under "What you share", as this is of course the first line of defence.