A couple of weeks ago I saw a Twitter from one of my contacts (I honestly forget who it was) that led me to discover the Matter Box. The idea is apparently that if you sign up on the website, every now and then you will get a box of marketing-type goodies. Not just any old leaflets, either – this is nice stuff.

The first box was delivered to subscribers this morning. There are already unboxing photos on Flickr, including a set from my friend Dale, who has also written about it. No photos from me, though – I did a quick video showing what is inside, instead. No prize for counting the number of times I say “cool”, either.

(the video is also on YouTube)

Quite fun. Neatly and tightly packed. My favourite item is probably the Wii armband, although considering I don’t yet own a Wii, it’s a little bit pointless so far

Update: there’s a description of the contents and some background on the Matter blog.

As I type this, I’m on the train on the way back from the September Minibar meetup at the Old Truman Brewery in Corbet Place.

Very cool to get along to a Minibar meetup again after a break of a few months. It was interesting to see the number of my Twitter contacts who wish they could have made it! I’d been hoping to meet Chris Dalby, and my colleague Shiyghan… neither of whom made it this time.

Instead, I had some very interesting conversations with, amongst others, Matt and Katherine Cashmore. Matt is from BBC Backstage and ran the BBC/Yahoo! HackDay in London. I’d seen him on stage at the event, but hadn’t had the opportunity to connect with him… so it was good to finally have an opportunity to talk to him about all the cool stuff that BBC Backstage does, and with Katherine about all kinds of social software topics. Matt also made the announcement that Backstage is about to launch a new website, which is something to look forward to. I also had a fascinating conversation with Martin Kamara from BBC World Service (who is very tall – definitely taller than Roo) about my social software evangelism, and what his organisation is up to.

Finally had a chat with Christian, the organiser, and Hannah from OpenBusiness … they are about to celebrate the first anniversary of Minibar with the next “special” meetup on October 19th in association with Seedcamp. It has been a great effort so far. Also, Hannah put me in touch with some really great people – looking forward to developing the new connections.

On to the presentations… which were a little hard to hear at times, thanks to a power blackout depriving the venue of a PA system.

Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt enable users to create their own t-shirts and other branded products… so far so standard… except that they also enable sites to embed the shop platform. It is all RSS and CSS-based, so it is highly customisable, probably more so than Cafepress (which I immediately thought of when Larry Ryan started talking about the concept). I’ve been burned by import duty on stuff from Cafepress in the past, and following a chat with Larry it sounds like Spreadshirt could be a great alternative. Turns out that these folks have been around for a number of years (they started in Germany in 2002, and expanded internationally in 2005). One to check out… plus they were handing out discount vouchers and free Minibar shirts!

School of Everything
These guys were funded by Seedcamp one of the Seedcamp finalists, and the alpha version of the site launched today. The concept is that “everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach”… you can set yourself up on the site as being able to provide training or education in a particular subject, and local users can find you. SoE will then take a small cut from helping to manage your profile and schedule. Apparently this is built on Drupal in PHP, and the presenters were talking about an API, although what form this could take was unclear. There were questions around how this would work though… at the moment, anyone can set themselves up as a trainer, and although there will be a user recommendation system to weed out bad ones, there appears to be no need for any kind of accreditation. Lots of enthusiasm from the team, an amusing presentation, and an interesting concept. Oh, and a man who needs help finding a place to buy a tank that he bought (long story, kinda).

Babyfy
Babyfy has been open for a couple month and is aimed at the ~1 million people who go through the “babification” (pregnancy and birth) process in the UK every year. The concept is that it is a social website to help new parents find products, recommend hospitals, and provide reviews and support to one another. I’m personally somewhat dubious – I see a bunch of potential holes in this, from disgruntled parents making unwelcome comments about hospitals, to companies pushing products more than having users recommend them… the main thing that sprang to my mind was a recent controversy in the UK about baby formula advertising, and whether the site would accept such advertising. It is early days though, and I’m sure the developers will have to think about these things as they go forward. I can see that it has some great potential, and who knows, I may even need to take a look at it in the future… (!)

Miomi
This very nice-looking website is apparently built entirely in HTML and Javascript at the moment, which is impressive. The idea is that you can browse a timeline of history. Memories – both public (culled from Microsoft and Wikipedia) and private (your own audio, video, image and text feeds) – can be stored and browsed. This really reminded me of Rememble which I heard about at a previous Minibar (and which, incidentally, is due to launch publically soon). Apparently these guys will allow companies to sponsor events and timelines or years, and also allow users to embed the timelines on their own sites. A Microsoft influence is evident – the map is based on Virtual Earth, and the developers mentioned that a Silverlight version might follow soon. The idea kind of appeals to me, but a) in common with my reservations about Rememble I’m not sure how this differs from other lifelogging solutions like Tumblr or, increasingly, Facebook and an aggregation of Twitter, blogs and Flickr (apart from the timeline); and b) more scary than Rememble, there was discussion of automatically sucking data from the web, which bothers me as I’d rather explicitly authorise what content of mine becomes part of “world history”, in a way… maybe I misunderstood.

A lot to think about, new stuff to check out, and some great company and conversations. Well worth the time.

Technorati Tags: Cafepress, minibar, miomi, Babyfy, rememble, School of Everything, Spreadshirt

Thanks to Paul Johnston, the video footage of the SLUK event featuring Slorpedo is now available on YouTube!

It looks awesome. Well done to everyone involved.

Technorati tags: SLorpedo, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, gaming, HackDay, hackdaylondon, Jim Purbrick, Nigel Crawley, Paul Johnston, James Taylor, mixed reality

The East Midlands Conference Centre has possibly the best feature in the world. In this clip, Roo demonstrates my discovery

Last night I went up to Exmouth Market in London for the launch of the new StickerBooks by Moo.

An excellent party. I think it was Suw who commented that they promised us a “hot and sticky” party, and given the weather yesterday, that’s what we got.

The venue was adorned with various Moo products. I like the look of my own Moo cards, but I’m continually astounded by the quality of the cards that other people come up with.

It was also a great opportunity to pursue my efforts to meet people in my social network. I finally managed to catch up in person with Suw, Kevin and Leisa (although the latter took some finding!). It was also good to reconnect with Myk, Al, Kim, Hugh and others. I managed to share a fair number of Moo Minicards, but fewer than I’d expected to hand out. Maybe I’m not so good at this whole networking thing

There were enough people there that they ran out of name stickers, and for the crowd to spill out into the street and nearly block Exmouth Market. I hadn’t been to that particular part of London before – it seems like a nice area.

Incidentally, if you were there and are reading this blog entry, and wondering whether you saw me – I was the person whose superpower is “reckless enthusiasm”. Ola found that rather ironic. That sticker is now on our fridge, as a reminder that I’m supposed to be enthusiastic…

As for the Moo Stickers themselves – very nice. I’d already ordered my own first set before the party, but I hadn’t seen the finished product. I picked up a free book last night. They are the usual high quality product that we’ve come to expect from Moo, although a bit fiddly to peel out of the book. The books themselves contain space for stickers from your friends, and have some lovely touches (all I’m going to say here is: you ain’t seen me, right?). I think they are going to be great for general decoration, sharing my photos with others, and giving to my nieces and nephews. The size of the stickers is also likely to encourage me to take more close-up shots. I’ve been adorning my own items with a few stickers already.

LaughingSquid also has a review of the StickerBooks.

On a related note – the first real signs of possible competition to Moo have appeared with the new PhotoBox MyCard. These are normal size / standard form factor business cards, but the trick they do have is that they can be double-sided, with a collage of photos on one side. On the negative side, the range of designs is a bit limited, their site is not hugely usable, and they do not pull images from Flickr or other websites… given the quality of the product, ease-of-use of the site and niceness of the people, I have to say that that my loyalty to Moo is strong, especially after events like last night, so I think PhotoBox may have an uphill struggle.

Check out the set of shots I took last night over on Flickr. And then go and order your stickers. You’ll be their new best friend.

Here’s the official write-up on the Moo blog. They used one of my photos. Yay!

A much-reduced Team Supernova was at SLUK 07 this weekend and managed to get SLorpedo finished off - complete with torpedos, explosions, and sinking subs.

Check out the YouTube video.

Well done to Jim, Nigel, Paul and James. 

“Have some of these, Andy”, said Roo, passing me a silvery packet of cards. And thus began my current frustration – Perplex City.

Roo, you see, is secretly evil.

Perplex City is essentially a series of collectable puzzle cards of increasing difficulty, all tied in with a website where you can register and enter the answers, scoring points for each card you solve.

There’s also much more to it than that. Perplex City is – or rather, has been until very recent cancellation – also an Alternate Reality Game, where the puzzles and the stories told on the backs of the cards, combine with real-world clues and other media to act as an interactive game. Fellow eightbar writers Ian, Roo and Nick have all blogged about it before.

I’m late into it, and I’ve never played ARGs before… so I can’t claim to really “get it”. Unfortunately, on the very day that Roo handed me those cards, Mind Candy (the makers) announced that the current “Season 2” of the Perpex City ARG had been cancelled, although the cards will continue to come out. Still, I’m left with a stack of, well, far too many cryptic Perplex City Season 2 cards, to tease my poor brain. Maybe the ARG part would have blown my mind completely.

I’m really not sure I can solve them all…

Technorati Tags: arg, mind candy, perplex city, virtual worlds

One of the things I love about using social networking technologies is the ability to extend my real life, physical networks. That’s what it is all about.

Some examples:

• Thanks to the magic of Dopplr, I found out that Richard Brown was due to be in Edinburgh last night, and we had a long-overdue chat over dinner (but I think I failed to interest him in Twitter). Not only that, looks like Leisa might be in town next week – so far only an online acquaintance.
• Through an earlier blog entry, Marten Gustafson got in touch to arrange a meeting, so I spent much of this evening in a bar with about 90 Swedes, several of whom apparently read my blog. Very cool. I’m in awe of these guys – all of them with perfect English, polite, good-looking and big fans of WebSphere Message Broker. What more could I ask for? hi guys! check out Twitter, please…
• Luis pinged me on Google Talk to ask if I had a Dopplr invite to share with a contact of Euan Semple’s. I know Roo knows Euan, and I know of Euan, but he probably doesn’t know me. Anyway, as a result, Geoff Jones is now on Dopplr… and he was just asking for an invite over on Steph’s blog, too. I don’t know Steph personally, but I listen to her podcast with Suw, and I read her blog (and I read Suw’s blog… she doesn’t know me, but knows Roo… and I twittered her something via Jeff Barr recently – twitterchains?)
• James asked me to pass on a Dopplr invite to Werner Ramaeker. Turns out that Werner was amongst a group of people I presented to in Hursley last year.
• Going further back, before the last Minibar, I learned that mattb was going full-time at Dopplr (via Twitter), and then met him at the event a couple of hours later.

There are lots of other examples, these are the recent ones. I love this stuff!

Technorati Tags: blogs, dopplr, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, twitter, WMB

The awesome MOO have moved on from their wildly successful Minicards to produce Notecards – 10cm square cards which you can post, and which stand up with a little folding flap to one side.

I just ordered my first pack, and at the same time ordered my 3rd box of Minicards – not quite in time for my trip to Las Vegas next week, which is a shame – think I’ll run out during the week, I only have about 20 left from the current batch.

The very easy-to-use interface has seen some interesting tweaks, too.

You can now choose your buddy icon, no icon, or a range of icons with flashes like “invitation”, “new baby”, the Creative Commons logo etc., on both the Notecards and the Minicards. You can also have MOO fill in photo details from Flickr (title, date etc.) instead of just putting freeform text on the cards, and they have a tiny URL system so that people can find your images online with minimal fuss.

I like it. They know how to win my continuing custom.

I’ve been quiet and I’ve been on the road (although like many people, I’m twittering wildly).

• Last week I was in Sheffield.
• This week I am staying in Edinburgh, working with a customer in Scotland. My first time stopping in the city, and it is lovely – I only wish I had a camera with me.
• On Friday night I’ll be at Minibar in London. Hope to meet some of my blog and Twitter contacts there.
• From Saturday I will be in dazzling Las Vegas, attending and speaking at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference[1], an internal IBM event. I’ll be speaking on File Handling Choices in WebSphere Message Broker v6 on Wednesday afternoon, and generally enjoying the huge opportunities to learn from my peers for the rest of the week. I had a great time at the event last year, and this will be a good chance to get together with colleagues again, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll try to blog the event, and suggest a tag of wstc2007 for other attendees who might want to follow suit.
• On my return, I’ll be back here in Edinburgh for most of May.

Thanks to Roo, I’m now also starting to play with Dopplr. It’s a remarkably simple idea – mark the dates when you’ll be in a particular place and work out when contacts might be in that same location. In true Web 2.0 style it has the usual feeds, tagging, Google Maps mashup, etc.. Looks very useful. The information is limited to you and the group of trusted other travellers, and it is invite-only (and I’m currently out of invites), but I think this “trusted circle” idea is probably a sound one. Looking forward to seeing how the service develops.

[1] aka “webspherepalooza”… that is, if you are Kelly…

A few weeks ago I had a play with Tumblr. My “scrapbook” is still there, and getting automatically generated by my adding links to del.icio.us or finding new Plazes… but I haven’t done a great deal more with it.

Today I was reading Tara Hunt’s excellent HorsePigCow marketing uncommon blog and learned about Scrapblog, a new startup with yet more interactive web candy for us to play with. Except… this time, it’s really about building scrapbooks. It’s a very rich Flash-based application (possibly soon to run on Apollo) which allows you to build galleries and screenshows in a scrapbook style. You can upload photos directly or pull them from Flickr, Yahoo, Photobucket or Webshots; you can add “stickers” (logos and patterns), change backgrounds, add frames and text. Once you’ve done all that, you can publish your Flash-based Scrapblog on their site, or share the static images on Flickr, where you could create a photoset and run a slideshow in a similar way.

I liked it – very easy to use, with an “iLife” feel to it, and of course it just runs out of the browser. I don’t generally build these kind of slideshows, but this was fun to play with. You can take a look at the results.

Once you’ve uploaded the scrapblog, the site offers tagging, profiles, comments, and feeds – everything that we’d expect these days.

I’m not keen on the name, simply because I’m wary of all of the attempts to brand things as blogs when they are not. Other than that, a very cool site to play around with.

Scrapblog hasn’t formally launched yet, but if you read to the end of Tara’s post, you’ll discover a way in to try out the preview version.

Technorati Tags: apollo, flash, photos, scrapblog

It has been over a month since I got my MacBook Pro. I’d never really used OS X before, and apart from a lightning introduction in the store (backed up by some sound and invaluable advice from Adrian) I’ve been essentially on my own since day one. Roo suggested that I pick up the Missing Manual, and I will do that, but I’m going to wait for Leopard to appear first.
I’ve been promising to write about my experiences, and it is about time. Long post on the ins-and-outs of Mac OS 10.4 follows.

The biggest adjustment has been getting the hang of the keyboard layout. I’m pretty much acclimatised now – to the point where I hit Alt on Windows expecting it to be the Command key! I know that I need to hold down Ctrl for my right-click menu; I know that Alt-3 is the hash symbol; I try to remember that Shift-Cmd-4 lets me grab a screenshot. I find it weird that there’s no Delete key, but I can live with it. I still forget to hit Fn when I want to use Expose, and end up turning the brightness down. I’m getting there. I’ve never been a fan of touchpads, and yet here I am using one like a pro.

From day one, I knew I’d be wanting to install a whole bunch of software, despite the excellent suite that comes with OS X (this led to the Mac beating a PC in last night’s Gadget Show face-off between the two systems). Here’s a summary of what I’ve installed.

Essentials

Firefox is a known quantity to me, I’ve been using it for years, and I trust it. I did start out playing with Safari, but it doesn’t have the range of extensions offered by Firefox (although I’ll post on an interesting FF limitation I’ve discovered shortly). I do think it has some memory management issues, but that could be due to my habit of running with ~50 active tabs. I’ve downloaded Camino too, but that doesn’t support extensions either, so it hasn’t seen much use.

Thunderbird was another obvious choice. I’ve not tried OS X Mail.

Beyond surfing and reading mail, a good blogging client and a good RSS feedreader were essential. I’ve gone with Vienna for reading feeds, and ecto for blogging. Both seem to work well, with some reservations. Vienna doesn’t let me follow track comments, while GreatNews on Windows does. ecto has some annoying limitations when compared to the elegance of Windows Live Writer… limited ability to format my posts; inability to post images to WP.com at the moment; no way of grabbing my Flickr photos without installing 1001, which I didn’t like; and the multiple windows get on my nerves since they don’t all come to the front when I click on one of them or on the program icon. ecto is the only piece of software I’ve had to pay for so far.

For photo work I’ve got Lightroom, and I upload to Flickr using jUploadr, which just works brilliantly – exactly as on Windows, and looking entirely OS X-native. I love it. Gimp solves my image editing requirements.

I’ve already posted about office applications: NeoOffice over OpenOffice.

For media, so far I’ve basically only needed to installed Realplayer, Flip4Mac and VLC and I’m good. Oh, and for grabbing / transcoding audio streams I have CocoaJT and ffmpegX. I’ve also dropped the current version of Songbird on the system.

Social networking

For IM, I’ve configured iChat to use Jabber for my Google Talk account. I downloaded Adium too, but it doesn’t support voice or video, and I rarely use the other networks I’ve got accounts on. I’ve also installed Skype, although I’m frustrated that the Mac version appears to lag behind the Windows one (2.5.x instead of 3.1.x currently.

I’m using the Twitterlex widget for the Dashboard to post and view updates on Twitter, although I also use the web interface a lot.

For Last.fm, I’ve got the full client installed. I have also found a nice tool called Amua, but it doesn’t scrobble tracks from iTunes, so it isn’t quite as useful as I’d hoped (the official client won’t start silently, which is annoying).

Plazer works fine on OS X.

Development

I’ve installed Eclipse, but not really played with it in depth. I’ve also been over to the Apple developer site, and installed Xcode and Dashcode. I installed the Subversion client today as well.

For editing, I started out using Smultron, which seemed to be a nice text editor. More recently I’ve discovered TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit, which seems even better.

Tools

The uber-tool on my machine is Quicksilver. I’m far from being a ninja with this software, but I can basically launch any app with a few keypresses, and don’t have to open the Applications folder very often. Check out the various tutorials on the subject.

I’ve replaced Terminal with iTerm, which is far nicer and more reminiscent of the terminal program I used under GNOME on Linux.

I had a lot of trouble opening archives until I discovered that Tiger doesn’t include StuffIt Expander by default. I installed it, then found something even better – The Unarchiver – it handles pretty much any archive file format I might throw at it.

Google Earth is a must these days, on any machine I use.

I sometimes use VNC for connecting to other machines. I’ve installed Chicken of the VNC, but I’m disappointed to find that UltraVNC on Windows is incompatible with it. I’ve also installed the Microsoft Remote Desktop client for OS X, which is handy for controlling machines on my local network.

I installed a bunch of other little utilities to help me get my head around OS X – Growl, Bonjour Browser, GeekTool, Lingon, coconutBattery…

Games

I’m no longer a big games player, but for fun I’ve installed Frozen Bubble, krank, Battle for Wesnoth, Second Life (of course!!), and I await EVE Online.

That about does it. Right now I’m fairly comfortable with the system. If anyone has any suggestions as to important things I’ve missed, I’m willing to listen, since I’m still a total beginner

Technorati Tags: Mac, OS X, software

When you organise your photos online, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to arrange them in nested galleries? I used to do that on the old Mig installation I ran on my home Linux server – photos arranged by year / event. Nice and easy to navigate.

Flickr has let you create Sets for ages, but until now they have had to be a flat structure with no nesting. Yesterday, Flickr launched the much-anticipated “sets within sets” feature… they call it Collections.

Since I started using sets, I’ve actually been naming them with prefixes as a way of separating, for example, travel photos (prefixed “Places”) from event photos (which I’ve been labelling “Events”). So, I hurried across to Flickr to try out the Collections feature. The obvious thing to do would be to fold up my ~30 sets into a couple of collections which grouped the Events and Places, with the rest remaining separate sets at the top level.

This is where I began to hit issues. Although Flickr will let you build Collections in a nested way, there are some really irritating limitations:

1. A collection can contain sets, or collections, but not both. In my case this isn’t too much of an issue, since I only want to group one level of sets together, but I will have to rethink this if my structure gets more complicated – say I decide to have UK locations and international locations separated under the Places collection I just made, I would have to make them both as collections, move all the sets into them, and then regroup the two collections into another collection. Clunky.
2. You can now customise your main photos page to alter the way in which the photos and the sets / collections are displayed. You can display the Sets or Collections in the sidebar – but not a mixture of both. This is really nasty, as I only have two collections so far, and I’d like them at the top of the sidebar followed by the remaining ~10 standalone sets

Saying that, I’m still really happy that Flickr has finally introduced the feature… I have some complaints about the way they’ve added this extra level of complication, but it is nice to be able to start getting my photos more organised.

Oh, and keep and eye on Zooomr, which is about to go live with Zooomr v3 – among other new features they are moving into stock photography, which could be a killer feature.

After watching Ian’s twitterings and Roo’s blog postings, I’ve set myself up a tumblelog on Tumblr.

Over a year ago I tried a new service called Suprglu, which had a similar promise of aggregating feeds from different sources (Flickr, blogs etc.) into a single site. It doesn’t really call for any maintenance at all – it just sits there and pulls together my photos and posts. Unfortunately though, it has a bit of a lag on updates (usually taking a good day or so before new entries appear).

Tumblr is different, both because I can customise the way that the feeds are displayed, and because I can post snippets directly to the tumblelog itself, making it more of a flexible scrapbook. One thing I don’t know is whether I can use my normal blogging clients (ecto and Windows Live Writer) to add content. I’ve no idea how much I will use it… I already Twitter my discoveries, add them to del.icio.us, or write longer pieces on the blog. We’ll see.

Note to my detractors: I’ll get some WebSphere-related posts lined up for you shortly, to avoid further accusations of lack of interest in blogging the day job.

One of my favourite (but entirely trivial) apps for Windows is Slickr, an OpenGL screensaver that takes photos from my Flickr photostream.

Since getting the MacBook I’ve been looking for something equivalent to Slickr, but until yesterday I hadn’t been able to find anything (nothing that worked, anyway).

It turns out that one of the features of iPhoto is the ability to subscribe to “photocasts”. Point it at an RSS feed containing photos, and it will treat it as an album. One of the features of the inbuilt OS X screensaver is the ability to use iPhoto albums as a source for pictures for the screensaver. Mashup city!

My first effort was to try pointing iPhoto directly at the RSS feed of my photostream. That worked fine. However, when I then tried to use the resulting iPhoto album as a source for the screensaver, the images looked awful, as they were low-res thumbnail / small versions that were being scaled up to 1440×900 (the resolution of my screen).

I then tried a neat tool which provides the full-size images from Flickr in a feed formatted for iPhoto. You pass it the feed of the photostream you want, and it drops in the higher-res versions for you and serves you an alternate feed.

That works, but it still isn’t quite as configurable as I might have liked. Ideally I want a random selection, and probably to have more than the most recent 20 photos I’ve taken. The answer to the problem is an app called photocastr, which provides much more control over the feeds that are generated. It doesn’t cope with the requirement for a random selection, so I’ve gone for having 200 of my most popular photos sorted by Interestingness. It’s neat because it should mean that the stream changes as people choose to view different shots I’ve taken (kind of a vox pop thing).

For the sake of full disclosure here, something I’ve discovered whilst playing with this stuff is that the RSS feeds that iPhoto uses / generates are broken. Not so good. Black mark.

Stay tuned for more on my Mac move. I intend to post about the applications I’ve been using, shortly.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, iPhoto, Mac, mashup, OS X, photography, photocastr, RSS, screensaver, Slickr

A number of decisions were involved in choosing my new laptop. I’d pretty much known I’d go for the Core Duo option (i.e. the Pro). However, it wasn’t until I was in the store and asked Adrian where the white and black ones were that he explained the Pro only comes in brushed metal. No matter.

The first choice was screen size. Pretty straightforward – 13″ too small, 17″ too expensive. 15″ is nice. I spent my test drive in the store using a 17″ model, but that would have been even bigger.

I did struggle to make a choice over the type of screen… glossy or matt. I tried both: played movies, viewed photos. The contrast and saturation on the glossy one was really good. Both are very sharp. There was a bit of reflection on the glossy screen though, and when I got to the point of ordering, the sales assistant asked what I’d be using it for and recommended matt for photo processing. Ironically, I think the Apple website recommends glossy for photo processing, I’ll have to go back and check

I wanted the upper spec in terms of memory and CPU, since I knew I’d be working on photos later.

So that was that. Now that I’ve used it a bit, my impressions of the hardware are (mostly) extremely positive.

The power adapter is a work of art, for starters. Magnetic attachment to the laptop. Clip to keep the wire in order when coiled away.  The plug or cable slides sideways onto a little lug which prevents the cable being kicked out of the power brick – very thoughtful.

The machine itself is weighty, and obviously longer than any Thinkpad I’ve ever handled due to the widescreen, but very very slim.

I do find the catch on the case to be a bit fiddly to press in, since it is very narrow (clearly I have fat fingers), but I like the way the sleep light comes on when the machine is in standby.

Keyboard excellent, although the narrowness of some of the keys bothers me a bit, I’ve missed the enter key a few times and switched caps lock on accidentally. I’ll adapt. I like the way it lights up according to ambient light levels.

I’m still getting used to a single mouse button. I love the Trackpoint on the Thinkpads, and have never used the trackpad even on the ones that have it. In the shop, I kept on tapping the trackpad to click. I know you can turn that on, but having used the MacBook for a bit now, I think I’m adapting to the button. I did actually try the tap-to-click function, but found it easier to use the button in the end.

The MacBook Pro comes equipped with Bluetooth. I checked for nearby devices and it immediately found my old Sony phone, generated a random pairing key, and then offered to sync with the phone book – nice – no need for additional software. 

It took me a week before I picked up the remote. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It looks like the old type of iPod shuffle. Press the menu button, and the MacBook immediately switches to Media Player mode, with a choice of playing a DVD; going through your iTunes library; browsing photos (although I’ve yet to work out how to stop it from playing annoying music when it puts on a slideshow); and looking at movies. The movies option also has a pretty trailers option which connects to the QuickTime trailers on the Apple website – advertising yes, but a handy touch when I didn’t have any actual movies to watch in the iTunes library.

I’ve not plugged it in to an external display yet – a moment of potential joy for the future. I like the range of ports on the machine, and the arrangement along both sides… The only thing I’m not so keen on is the lack of PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot – USB or FireWire peripherals all the way.

The only actual, physical concern I have is that the SuperDrive is unbelievably noisy. Is this normal? It makes a really nasty clicky clunky noise when a disc is inserted. It seems fairly quiet after that, though, and reads discs without any issues.

Currently I’m using an old Thinkpad backpack to carry it – I need to look around for a suitable case or shoulder bag.

We were watching an episode of Sex and the City the other night, and I noted that the Apple logo on the top of the iBook that Carrie was using was the other way up to the one on my MacBook Pro. That one was facing the user when the lid was closed. Mine faces away from me, so that it’s the “right way up” to an observer when the lid is open.

And with that statement… I’m going to be one of those Mac fanboys, aren’t I? You can tell already.

Should I or shouldn’t I?

Originally uploaded by Aidy Spender.

I was at the opening of the new Apple store in West Quay, Southampton yesterday. I met up with Adrian in the queue. Quite an excited crowd even at 8.15 in the morning… it was a new world to me, overhearing people asking their friends whether they were using iMovie HD or not, were they going to get a Mighty Mouse, etc.

As Adrian noted, the opening itself was slightly embarrassing as it was filled with the staff whooping and cheering, probably induced by beatings

So I’m now the owner of a 15″ MacBook Pro.

The abuse has started already – one of my friends says I’ve “really sold out now”.

Why did I do it? Partly peer pressure, I must admit – Kelly, Roo and Adrian have all said great things about Macs. Partly love of shiny things. Partly a desire to learn something new, and I’ve always loved the look of OS X and the knowledge that it is based on a UNIX shell. But, mostly the fact that our Thinkpad R40 frankly isn’t going to run Vista after all, and it still has a tiny hard disc which isn’t going to withstand my photographic ambitions…

No time to blog in more detail right now, as I’m busily installing various bits of software to make myself more productive. I’m switching strictly for home use – I’ll still be on Windows on a Thinkpad at work, and I will still have a Linux server and workstation at home too. So I’m going to be nicely multiplatform

Lots to comment on as a new Mac user, so watch out for more from me over the coming days.

This is an interesting new take on the major pedestrian routes in London.

Hands up who isn’t reminded of the Tube map?

 According to the Space Syntax site:

The first aim of the London Pedestrian Routemap is to encourage walking in London. It does this by providing a simple, memorable picture of key walking routes in the Capital. At present there is no such map. The Routemap shows how key places connect by straightforward routes of varying character.

I like the look of this. I don’t think it is likely to replace the A-Z, but the approach is very cool. The only thing I’m slightly unsure about is the choice of names for some of the routes. I don’t associate the central/eastern end of what is labelled the “Shopping route” as being anything to do with shopping, I start to think of that (combined with the “Northern route”) as the City.

I don’t get lost in London half as much as I used to, but I still get disoriented quite easily. I can never shake off the mistaken idea that White City lies east of Shepherds Bush, for a start. Confusing.

(originally via diamond geezer)

My turn at the unofficial meme sweeping around the IBM bloggers.

According to Rob’s amazing English/Arabic transliteration tool, my name is اندي بيبير when transliterated to Arabic.

And neither Firefox nor Windows Live Writer have broken into a sweat

Technorati tags: Rob Smart, Arabic, translation, transliteration

I know Kelly has previously talked excitedly about the Mac ads.

Last week, I noticed that there were some new ones on Apple’s US site.

This morning, there was a full-spread advert in Metro. It has the same style, but features UK comedians Mitchell and Webb. There are video versions on the Apple UK site. Cool

Hanging out in the live blogging channels at Lotusphere Live. It’s kind of like being there, but only textually.

More cool stuff than I can take in… Lotus Connections (Ventura), Lotus Quickr, Google Gadgets running in WebSphere Portal, composite applications…

I’m going to watch the replay of the opening session in Second Life tomorrow…

Some of my favourite comments from the live blog, reporting the announcements live from the conference floor:

Julian Robichaux

Notes 8 supports SmartSuite docs as well as Office and OpenOffice

Ed Brill

integrated RSS feeds in Notes 8 sidebar

Julian Robichaux

(Lotus Connections) has integration with profiles, internal blogs, sametime, dogear, tags, communities, activities

Ed Brill

(…) showing blogs in Connections — blogs becoming a commodity capability in all IBM Lotus products

Chris Byrne

(on Connections) This demo reminds me more of LinkedIn thatn MySpace or FaceBook, which is very good
(…) MySpace and FaceBook, being discussed now, are not good for corporate use, but many corporations scan them for content posted by potential employees, and have retracted job offers based on what they have see.

See Ed’s Flickr set for some screenshots

Technorati tags: Lotus, IBM, Lotusphere2007, Orlando, Quickr, Ventura, Lotus Connections, blogging, Second Life, Lotusphere_07

… and on the day I can’t make use of my normal connectivity, comes the news I’ve been waiting to talk about!

Ed Brill is the first blogger I’ve found who mentions one of the major Lotusphere 2007 announcements: Lotus Connections. This is a culmination of a lot of the work we’ve been doing internally around collaborative “Web 2.0″ tools such as blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks (I talked about it briefly before, in a post about Ventura).

The International Herald Tribune likens the release to MySpace for corporations. Some people might feel that MySpace is a bit frivolous, and I’d agree – in my opinion, it is largely aimed at teens. However, the technology and trends that it (and other social networking sites) represents are enormously important to business, and several of us have been evangelising this message for some time now. When I’ve talked about it with colleagues, I’ve sometimes encountered the reaction “where’s the value?” or “surely this is all going to eat into my time…” – both perfectly valid points, but I think they are answered quite straightforwardly.

A recent BBC News report mentioned that over half of American teenagers were familiar with social networking sites. The next generation of workers are already beginning to absorb these technologies into their lifestyles. Businesses can now start to build these kinds of networks internally, and there is real value in doing so.

If you’re not sure about the power of these kinds of tools within a company, witness my own blogging network. To pick individuals from my blogroll at random, without having an internal blogging platform, I simply would never have communicated with people such as Ed, Per, Cesar or Dan… or worked with Hannah, Andrew, Chris, Kelly or the eightbar crowd. These tools have transformed the way that we work, and the way in which I see the world.

More links:

• IBM Validates Social Networking for the Office
• IBM to introduce workers’ networking software

Incidentally, there’s a Lotusphere location in Second Life, too… again, I’m unable to go and check it out for myself right now due to connectivity issues. See Per’s post for more. I’ll be online later.

Technorati tags: Lotus, IBM, Lotusphere2007, Orlando, Ventura, Lotus Connections, blogging, Second Life, Lotusphere_07

Following the discussion about managing digital music, I signed up for the free version of last.fm during the week, to see what the fuss was about.

So far: interesting! A little app on the desktop “scrobbles” (tells the last.fm server) what you are listening to, and the information is used to let your friends know. You can also get streams of similar / recommended music based on what you are listening to. If you take out a paid subscription, you can create your own radio streams to share with your friends.

It doesn’t have the immediate fun of “quipping” that Mugshot provides, but it looks like it could be quite interesting. It attempts to work out your musical compatibility with others, based on the similarity of your interests.

I’ve found a few of my contacts from the blogosphere on last.fm already, but if you use it (or feel like trying it out) and I haven’t friended you yet, feel free to friend me instead – check out my profile. I haven’t listened to a huge amount of music yet, but obviously that will grow over time…

Well, reading the transcript of the MacWorld keynote, all I can say is: a jaw-dropped WOW!

They really, really get it. None of this “let’s join gadgets together with different protocols and string and stuff”… the iPhone just does the lot.

I don’t have an iPod. I’ve always thought that if I got one, I’d really want one of the models with lots and lots of Gb of space. The iPhone is only 4Gb or 8Gb… but runs OS X (which I salivate over whenever I pass an Apple store)… and it looks sooo nice, it hurts. What self-respecting gadget fan isn’t going to fall over him/herself to have one of these?

On a cynical note, I’ll be interested to see how much it sells for in the UK; what the various mobile operators do about letting UK users get hold of it; and how well the screen holds up to the use of the finger as a pointing device (scratched iPod nanos, anyone?).

I have to say that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is striking though. This thing is convergence.