Category Archives: Steve Jobs

Review of VisitBrighton App

Posted on 1 September 2012 | Leave a comment

Official Description

The Brighton Official Visitor City Guide is the essential visitor guide to Brighton & Hove, England.

Developed by VisitBrighton, the city’s official tourism department, the app contains all the essential information you need to make the most of a trip to the city; it’s like having a mini-guidebook in your phone.

With sections covering Things to See & Do, Food & Drink, What’s On, Where to Stay and Shopping the app contains listings for hundreds of businesses, which each include an image, full description, opening times, admission prices, location and complete contact details including email and web links where appropriate.

The Brighton Official Visitor City Guide also contains information on the “city villages” that make up Brighton & Hove and suggested itineraries covering different themes, giving you the opportunity to explore areas that most visitors don’t know about.

The app also includes a ‘Favourites’ functionality enabling you to build up your own personalised itinerary of places to visit, restaurants to dine at and things to do during your trip.

 

Useability

Pointless page on VisitBrighton app

Pointless page on VisitBrighton app

Cutting straight to the chase of how to enjoy Brighton, begs the question of how to swiftly find what’s happening, where and when, with some costings thrown in or a map of how to get to or away your home for the night. This app seeks to serve all that up in one handy tool. Commercial sponsorship of the town’s economy. Note, town, not the city Brighton & Hove now is. Opened the app presents the Android owner with a pointless tap-through screen. Thereafter, there is the basic menu: Food & Drink, What’s On, See & Do, Where To Stay, Shopping, City Villages, Essentials, Itineraries. Each one of these categories (a whole page) loads a submenu. Each submenu has type and location filters type and location to narrow searches. Each listing has detailed information about its official address, hours, prices, whatevers, including phone numbers, email and links to its website, a nice little photograph and a heart sign.

The heart sign notes your interest in some place and stores it on the last main menu item, the neatly named Itineraries. Its filter doesn’t go by place and price, but by thematic times to be had: by the name ‘Ideas’ ~ My Itinerary, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, Family, Gay & Lesbian, Green, as if they follow in sequence with your own rough ideas to start with, then the suggestion that you might spend an entire 24 hours in town. From 24, to 48 and then, wahey, make a weekend of it. It’s a sales strategy but also, perchance something more. The list continues to imply that instead of just visiting you have your family here. You live amongst us. Asylum seekers from London (a suburb of Brighton anyway, to be fair) constantly driving up houseprices or holding them up harder in hard times. Thanks for that. After living amongst us, what is the logical progression? That’s right, you will go queer. However after that you will be a committed Greenie, saving the planet and your conscience along the way.

Just a map, nothing more

Just a map, nothing more

All this is fine, assuming you need an app at all for it ~ I’ll come to this point later but it needs to be said here. It’s somewhat clunky. It’s all big pictures and extra screens to pop through, as if we read full screen pictures faster that icons and text. On my Samsung Galaxy S2, which loads every other app, instantaneously it spends a little while loading. Although everything is beautifully mapped, making use of Google’s mapping technology, you can’t switch through that to using your Google accounts directions tool or address book or whatever. The point being that it means you have to go another app in order to use this tool with the rest of your phone. In a worst case scenario you’re thrown back onto a paper map. Just imagine.

That said, I’m a fussy appreciator. Sorry about that. If your elderly rellies were coming to Brighton or you spend all day long on Facebook and don’t know how the actual internet really works or you’re an Iphone user (see below, as mentioned above) who popped down to the seaside for a day and now are getting loved up by our town, then this might be your rescue guide to the galaxy we’ve got lined up for you, most of which is, of course, not yet contained in this app anyway, I bet. Doubtless the content is kept up to date, so far as is humanely possible but it will change

Content

  • Food & Drink submenu: 75 venues
  • What’s On: 13 listings
  • See & Do, 60+ venues
  • Where to stay 60+ venues
  • Shopping: about 50 shops.

Essentials: in sequence, a variety of suggested itineraries, helpful links and numbers, parking information and the like, followed by seven podcasts. Oddly, even though I’m reviewing the Android version the podcasts can only be downloaded with Apple’s Itunes Store. Here’s an app to make Apple’s shop work on Google’s phone. Somewhere in here. I can’t be bothered to rummage for it. The whole thing is ridiculous. Why can’t we just download it from the council as a simple MP3? Frightened we’re going to nick it. Come off it.

City Villages: a neat way of summing up that Brighton & Hove (for that matter) is often called one big village but in fact it is a cluster of villages. This was, historically true as much as it is culturally now. The app calls them 13 in number.

Missing Content

Seven Dials cannot be photographed?

Seven Dials cannot be photographed?

They all have some justification as being worth visiting in themselves but one of them is impossible to photograph prettily. Regular readers will recall my video tutorial on how to walk directly across the quirky roundabout at the heart of Seven Dials. Truth is its a great area but impossible to photograph diplomatically without considerable effort. I’d have pitched for an aerial shot. The City Council’s app solved the problem by simply not bothering with a picture at all, leaving us with an ugly white space and the words “No Images Available”. Makes the app look unfinished. Perhaps these spaces (there are others) will be updated soon?

Challenged Areas

Size of listings. What’s On certainly underpopulated, as is Where To Stay and Shopping. In the legendary North Laine, there are over 300 shops. That’s just one part of town. Most unconventionally, See & Do advertises places away from Brighton. The very first item in the list is the Ashdown Forest Llama Park, well over 20 miles away.

Concept re Iphone & Android

Skip this paragraph if you can’t stand learning about phones and the internet. Basically, Apple make its customers use an app for all sorts of things which could just be mobile web pages. The problem began with the late Steve Jobs deciding that Flash, which was used to encode much of the video on the web, could not appear on iphones because it was a security risk. The perceived risk was that using Flash, which is capable of interactive programming as well as making graphics move, someone else could set up an alternative itunes shop and sell apps to you, instead of Apple. Mr Jobs couldn’t have that, which proves he was a control freak, a ruthless businessman and a coward of competition. Google’s Android phones have taken the opposite approach, by allowing Flash and allowing their users to accept apps which do not appear in their app shop, now confusingly called Play. Add to the mix the fact that Android was late to the party and the upshot is that people have become accustomed to use an app. This entire app, which simply must have introduced an extra layer of updating, could be binned in favour of surfing Brighton online.

Summary

Notwithstanding the fact that they should be sold in the Early Learning Centre rather than to adults as useful tools, Iphones are used by their owners in such a way that an app like this is necessary. The insistence that the podcasts are downloaded from an itunes account, reinforces this notion on Androiders. Weather app? Met office online. Rail times app? Rail times online. Find a hotel app? Any search engine, online. I could go on and on but that’s the point. Only one app is needed for hundreds of the most commonly uses for phones. A browser to surf the net properly. This is really an app for owners of Apple’s iphone. It’s best suited to our elderly relatives or friends who you don’t want to spend that with. You could recommend it to them and fuck off for the weekend.

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Posted in Android, Apple, phones, Steve Jobs, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

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Apple is the rich man’s McDonald’s

Posted on 25 August 2012 | 1 Comment
Apple: litigious and asking for trouble

See what I did here?

After weeks of twitchy excitement from techie lawyers like myself, fervent curiosity from geeks and total indifference from Joe Public, an American civil court case between Apple & Samsung has now ended. Both companies were suing each other for infringements of patents and cash (Of course!), in relation to so-called smart phones. The US jury had 33 issues to decide and was expected to spend some time in deliberation before pronouncing its verdicts. Instead, a couple hours later it returned to say that it rejected every one of Samsung’s claims and agreed with almost all of Apple’s case and none of Samsung’s. Then it awarded Apple more than $1Bn in damages (it had asked for $2.5Bn). The money won’t matter to Samsung. The reputational damage might.

The real reason the late Steve Jobs launched this litigation against Samsung was because of the success of another company altogether – Google. Google’s mobile platform, Android, has been a runaway success. It directly competes with the Iphone in clever ways: it is free to use and open source, which allows the phone manufacturers to concentrate on what they do best – make phones – safe in the knowledge that they need not spend a penny on their firmware. Google updates each generation of the source code but independent coders dramatically improve it (Cyanogen is the best all rounder, though some specialistroms are better for certain devices), with the result that all the groovy tech people use Android with some customised firmware. The Iphone increasingly looks like the phone that you buy if you’re scared of learning. There’s lots of people in that boat but Jobs wanted everyone to get on board. By suing Samsung for the look and feel of some of its mobile products, Jobs sought to warn it and other firms away from Android.

The look and feel of any Android phone has got very little to do with Android. Android is an operating system and can be dressed up any which way you want. Android isn’t going to collapse as a rival to the Iphone because of this case. It is far too commercially useful to far too many companies for that to happen. In that sense, Jobs’ case was misconceived. Some of the US jury’s decisions in the case are as amusing as they reveal how far patent law has been allowed to develop.

Clearly it has gone far too far. Now we are told, by this verdict, that Apple owns rectangles with rounded corners on mobile devices. This is absurd. It is also a red rag not just to the hacker community but also to anyone who cares about the free internet. Apple have taken the concept of a locked down universe to the nth degree. You can choose any colour so long as they approve it. You can have any shape so long as Apple get paid for it. The internet and all its attendant freedom could not have come into being had Apple been a big player in the project early on. Luckily for us, they couldn’t run their own business properly back then. Apple stands against other companies or people playing around with ideas, concepts or technologies. If you have an Apple in your pocket, perhaps now is the time you might want to think about which company you support with your cash. Even back in the day when we all complained about Microsoft attempting to dominate the internet, they didn’t go this far.

We’ve long expected the innovation of the early part of the digital revolution to give way to litigation. The same commercial curve happened with the industrial revolution. To begin with the various inventors and their companies were running around inventing new stuff. When the pace of creation began to slow, they set about suing each other for cheating. In other words, there’s always more money to be made in making the world a better place but if you can’t do that, you can make more money by stopping someone else from doing it either, possibly.

This is just the beginning. There’s a wave of big cases coming between the giant firms involved in mobile technology. Then there’ll be bigger waves behind that. Most of this litigation will be settled out of court. Most of it will be pointless.

The point is that we have long proved to ourselves that people will do what they want, regardless of what big companies tell us. When electricity was first invented, it was used to power light bulbs. Electrical supply companies created sockets for light bulbs. Other companies came along and created other devices which plugged into these sockets and, well, there were fires… … and governments introduced Wiring Regulations. A British inventor created the pocket calculator but a Japanese company improved it. What someone makes, someone else will better. We just can’t help ourselves. Apple’s shortsighted action will now provoke us to make jokes at its expense everywhere. It will become the bogeyman of the internet age. (Microsoft executives are reportedly having a late breakfast this morning.)

Like McDonald’s, every product from Apple is the same. Everything does what it says on the tin but none of them are wholesome, nutritious or helpful to the wider community. Like McDonald’s it will now find itself at the centre of a last shit storm of popular activism. This will not happen overnight. Muggles will continue to buy Apple products, just as McDonald’s ‘restaurants’ are often full. Yet, the trouble will come and it won’t go away. The world’s love affair with the shiny products that Jobs made has already waned a little. Now we’ll see it descend into a slow terminal decline. There were two reasons for Apple’s extraordinary success: beautiful products which worked straight out of the box and a devotional customer base. Loads of products from all sorts of companies pass the first test now. Apple’s benchmark has been bettered. The devotional customer base cannot survive when the base includes everyone. We can’t all get into the same boat.

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Posted in Android, Apple, phones, Steve Jobs, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave, Technological Change

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Jobs: a dirty word made splendid

Posted on 11 October 2011 | 3 Comments

Nowadays it’s the name of a recently ascended deity. I’m surprised that we were not given a public holiday to celebrate Steve Jobs life, so great was the eulogising. The praise was universally gushing, the fervour religious in tone and the fact checking none existent. Let’s look at the facts.

People who invent stuff benefit us all. As the Guardian pointed out, Jobs could at least claim to have invented himself. Beyond that he didn’t actually create anything much. What he did was make dirty things shiny. He was a polisher and a salesman. It also isn’t really true that he made us use computers in our own homes. Bill Gates did that with Windows 95. Jobs was, by all accounts, a complete control freak and a very persuasive man. He got what he wanted. He wanted lots of money. The wealth he amassed sits with his executors right now. If he gave money to charity, it must have been in secret. Compare that to the much maligned Bill Gates who isn’t just spending his wealth on charity, he’s managing the spend and publicising it, thereby encouraging others to do likewise.

What then is Jobs’ legacy? We’ve a generation of people who have been obfuscated from learning anything much about how stuff works, who have lost the use of the other fingers on their hands because only one can be used and who expect everything to be massively overpriced. He fed our collective obsession with status. I was a Mac user for a while. There was a time when it did some stuff much better than other personal computers. Those times are long gone. The Mac is basically an overpriced machine, the ipod an mp3 player and the iphone an exercise in accesorisation. What’s the point of thousands of apps to do stuff when only one browser plugin was required instead? Obviously, I’m talking about Flash here. He didn’t give the consumer what they wanted, he told them what they wanted, he persuaded them what they wanted. Jobs’ real legacy is producing an anti-mugging device. No-one will ever mug me for my phone because it doesn’t come from Shiny Shiny Land.

The computer revolution has had many many players involved and has been a long time coming. It was not dependent on any one individual. Animated films were not going to stay stuck at the pre-War cartoon level forever but for Jobs. Whilst one should not speak ill of the dead, obituaries should include critical analysis. All those Apple employees who now worship at the church of St Jobs are actually just preserving their career portfolios. Here was a man who came along, sold other people’s products, amassed a vast fortune, didn’t appear to care about his factories’ conditions (child labour, environmental poisonings and unusually high suicide rates) and actively dumbed down an industry which should be liberating us all.

Macs are used by two types of people. There are those who have been in the habit of using them ever since the period when they outshone other work tools in certain industries, notably graphics and film. Fair enough. Most users those buy them because of what economists call ostentatious purchasing. Look at me, I’ve got an Apple product, I’m special. Iphones are used because a massive advertising campaign persuades an ignorant public that it is the only tool in town.

Many are now debating whether Apple will continue to flourish or whether it will wilt and die. The more interesting question is whether consumers will allow themselves to continue to be treated as meaningless cash till fillers or whether people will start to learn how stuff works.

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Posted in Steve Jobs, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave