baby steps

Published on 14/03/2011 in everything. 0 Comments

News today that Time Warner cable are soon to launch an iPad app that will let subscribers watch live TV… so long as they have wifi, and are using a Time Warner  internet connection. Money quote:

“For all intents and purposes … this enables you to convert any room in a house into a TV room”

Talk about aiming for the stars.

I have to admit it’s a pretty good first step, but a terribly cautious one. Why not let me take my iPad to a friend’s house and show him the channels he’s missing out on? Or, even simpler, why not let me watch the channels I’m paying for wherever I have a working data connection?

Restrictions like this are rife among these first-attempt moves to a digital delivery system; I can only imagine that when the dust settles they’re something we’ll look back on as a transient and ill-advised fad, like DRM.

source: AP News (via MacRumors)

Tales from a strange world

Published on 22/08/2010 in everything. 0 Comments

I want to tell you about a world that is very much like ours, except for one key difference: movies.

In this world, you can only buy movies in the movie shop. Most large cities have a movie shop, though smaller cities often don’t and towns are right out. Live in a village? It’s off to the big city to get your stories, kiddo.

And no, you can’t buy movies online either. OK, you can, but there’s only like three websites that sell them and they don’t carry a lot of stuff and they look really sketchy. You wouldn’t trust them with your credit card.

Anyway, back to the movie shop. In the movie shop there are all sorts of movie-related products for you to browse: toys and games, clothing, promotional posters and soundtracks… and even a few DVDs containing actual movies. These discs themselves occupy at most a third of such stores.

Also found in the movie shop are movie geeks. These social outcasts love nothing more than to talk about their favourite movies with each other, the weary employees, and if you’re particularly unlucky, other customers.

You see, gentle reader, on this world watching films is considered a terribly expensive and anti-social past-time. Most movie-watchers are actually embarrassed to talk about their hobby outside of the safety of their local shop or an internet community. Sometimes a radio drama or a play will be made based on a movie’s plot or characters (though not often both), and it might even do quite well, but mass cultural acceptance of the medium is forever fleeting.

Does this world seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me, nor will it to anyone else who reads comics. Yes, that’s the Shamylan-esque reveal that nobody saw coming – Bruce Willis I was in the present talking about comic books the whole time!

Comic books are, after all, just a story-telling medium like movies. They don’t just tell stories about people who wear capes and fight crime, just as not all movies are about spies who wear dinner suits, and not all books are detective stories wherein the butler did it. Very often these days the butler didn’t even do it!

Then again, the really good ones are about people who can fly, the rest is just pretentious nonsense about Nazi mice and whatnot. And the butler generally did it.

Comics: 1, Pirates: 0 (finally!)

Published on 23/06/2010 in everything. 0 Comments

It always surprised me that comics were so readily pirated. CDs are one thing, even DVDs: you put the disc in the drive, fire up your favourite application and most of them just handle it. It might take a couple of hours for a whole movie but that’s your computer’s time, you can go do something productive while your PC undermines copyright law and come back to a pristine digital file, bagged and tagged automatically with metadata and artwork.

The comic scanner, on the other hand, must first carefully remove the staples, then spread the pages on a flat-bed scanner. Then they fire up their favourite image editing program and, one by one, scan each page before slicing each image in half then tuning the colour balance so that each page looks right sat next to its opposite number scanned from a different sheet. Finally the images must be ordered and named before archiving them into a rar or zip file. It’s labour-intensive stuff, but these guys do it tirelessly, every Wednesday, slaving through the day and night so that a legion of people can get their comics fix.

Getting comics onto an iPad is no picnic either. The most reliable way is to make PDFs for Apple’s free iBooks app. Including the initial download it works out as a four-step process for getting your free comic fix.

Well today DC made their first same-day digital release through their brand-new iPad app: Issue #4 of Justice League: Generation Lost (which just happens to be fun comicking). At £1.79 it’s a modest saving of 41p versus a “real” store that’s likely due to an exchange rate wobble (the US price of $2.99 matches the comic’s American RRP), but the real drive here is the simplicity. I tap buy, confirm my iTunes password, and before my torrent client could have built up steam the issue is ready to read, right there in my hands. It’s the same process that Apple used to turn buying music and software into an effortless way to part customers from money.

It’s just one comic for now, with DC quiet about future plans, but it’s a good comic and it was stupidly easy to buy and enjoy. Hopefully the experiment works well and it’s not long before I can buy a new week’s Batman or Spider-man on my shiny Apple-toy. Until then, it’s an easy choice between driving half an hour to Nottingham or firing up Demonoid.

Let’s not kid ourselves (sorry, I’m talking about Flash)

Published on 07/05/2010 in everything. 0 Comments

Imagine if there were competing flash runtimes. What if Adobe made “Adobe Flash”, Microsoft made MS Flash* and Google had it very own GFlash plugin. Three runtimes that all played .swf files in your browser, each competing with each other to be the fastest, the most secure, or the most efficient.

I’m pretty sure nobody would mind about Flash so much then.

Let’s not kid ourselves, nobody outside the FSF has an ideological problem with flash being “closed” software, and it’s not like Flash is the only way you can make annoying ads (you may have seen people mention BusinessWeek’s animated header-covering HTML5 animated ad). Nope, the performance is all John Q. Web User** cares about.

Meanwhile, browser makers are deadlocked in an arms race towards faster, more efficient and more stable HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering so that they can compete for your business (that would be the fractions-of-a-penny that search engines pay them every time you use that built-in search field).

Earnest competition in an open market leading to a better product? Somebody call Maggie Thatcher!

* Silverlight is not the same as MS Flash for the purposes of this discussion, since it can’t play the same .swf files.
** Not that John Q. Web User cares nearly so much as John Q. Web Pundit, of course.

four pilots walk into a bar

Published on 13/12/2009 in everything. 1 Comment

I want to write a tv show that’s a totally normal show, like a bland sit-com or a by the numbers cop show, only
it’s set in an alternate reality.

I’m thinking a detective show with a poorly-matched pair of partners who solve overly-dramatic crimes, only in this world Hitler was deposed early in World War 2 and the Japanese moved to the forefront of the Axis and won. It’s set in 2009 and Europe is enjoying it’s 68th year as an annex of Japan and these guys solve clichéd crimes.

A bit too Man In The High Castle? OK, how about a flatmates sitcom in a world with reversed traditional gender roles. It’s still 2009 though, and it’s a progressive society in which gender is, while not fully, increasingly a non-issue. The guys obsess over planning a wedding, even though one of them’s always trying to act more like a girl and never commit to a serious relationship -inside he’s just as manly as any other.

Hold on, I’ve got more. How about a legal drama on an Earth where communism somehow triumphed and spread during the 20th century. England’s not been communist very long, and people are still adjusting – it’s changed a lot about how the country works, the laws in particular.

Last one – a medical show that’s basically about doctors sleeping with doctors, but in a world where a lot of people have superpowers. ER with victims of super-villains, heroes who fell prey to their one secret weakness on a golfing weekend, and occasional fallout from cosmic-scale crisis.

Nuggets of gold here, people. Pure gold.

Google Calendar isn’t very smart

Published on 20/11/2009 in everything. 0 Comments

In trying to arrange stuff I suggested that the parties involved stuff their calendars into google. We all have google accounts and google lets you share information about when you’re busy so you can see about finding some time when you’re all not. Great!

Sharing calendars though, that’s done in a really stupid way.

Unless you actually call your calendar “Bob’s calendar”, in your prefs, nobody can tell it’s you. And that’s not made clear. So I have no reason to suspect I should call my calendar anything other than “personal” or “gcal” or “calendar”, because it’s mine, but in my friends’ lists it just has the same obtuse name I gave it. Google knows exactly who that calendar belongs to, but it won’t tell you. You can at least re-name the shares you see, once you work out whose is whose.

Another thing: I have work and I have play, and I am busy for reasons that fall into each of these; calendar entries are divided accordingly. Why then, when sharing busy/free-level information, does it still show my friends both of these calendars? All I want them to know is if I’m busy, not why I’m busy (since I might be busy giving their mum a good seeing to).

And don’t even get me started on how iCal sees all this, though the wacky distorto-lens that is Google’s own special idea of how calDAV delegation should work.