Training really does make a difference.

During the coldest part of last winter, I witnessed a road accident. I was driving behind a motorcyclist on a very icy day. He was riding carefully and was in the correct position on the road, so that he could see clearly and be seen. Fortunately we were not traveling at any great speed. As we approached a crossroads where a minor road crosses the road we were on, cars in front slowed quite suddenly, as one was turning onto the minor road. The motorcyclist touched his brakes and immediately lost control, sliding across the road, into the path of an oncoming car. I pulled over, onto the pavement, got out and ran over to the scene of the accident. The motorcyclist was stuck underneath his bike, which was wedged under the front of the car. He was not injured, though he was quite shaken. The driver of the car managed to release him quite easily, whilst I phoned the emergency services. I then waited at the scene, ensuring that everyone was okay, until the police arrived.

I was immediately struck by how quickly the police officer assessed the situation, identified what needed to be done and acted in a calm and professional manner to ensure that the road was made safe, that all information was gathered and that the needs of everyone at the scene were addressed.

Out of earshot of the people involved in the accident, he asked me to describe what I had witnessed and then allowed me to leave.

About a week later, I was asked by one of my customers to assist her in the purchase of a computer. She'd hardly ever used a computer before, but, through talking with friends, had decided that she wanted an Apple laptop.

I took her to our nearest Currys - PC World, which now has a reasonable selection of Apple hardware. I'm always wary of the staff in stores like this. Usually they have very limited product knowledge and tend to ask highly annoying and irrelevant questions like "Are you looking for something for yourself?", or the more usual "How are you today?".

Consequently, I have a tendency to zig-zag through these stores, dodging the assistants in case I end up saying something that perhaps I shouldn't.

We managed to get to the Apple laptops without being accosted and I was explaining the differences to her, in very simple terms between the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. A member of staff wandered by, asking if we needed help. I said "no, we're fine thanks" and she didn't bother us any more. Shortly afterwards we were approached by another member of the sales staff. This one was the self appointed Mac expert, keen to impart his worldly wisdom in matters Apple, to anyone who would listen and, more specifically, those who did not want to listen.

He started with the usual, "Are you looking for something for yourself", directed at me and totally ignoring the my customer. I said, politely that we were fine and just looking, and that it was not me but my customer who was interested in a new computer. Perhaps that was my first mistake.

He immediately launched into his favourite subject; what he liked to do on his computer.

"Do you take lots of photos" he asked. "No", my customer said. "I don't have a camera". He launched iPhoto and gave us his " This is so cool, look, you can remove red-eye and everything" presentation. As he occasionally glanced up from what he was doing, he always caught my eye and never once looked at my customer. She reiterated, "I don't take photographs". Unswayed, he suggested that she should buy a digital camera or use her camera phone, because iPhoto was so cool. "You can even email your photos to family and friends or make books of photos, it's just so cool - do you listen to a lot of music?".

By this time, I had stepped back, out of his line of sight. My customer turned to me briefly and asked if he was getting on my nerves - I nodded.

She turned to him and said, "Look, I'm not interested in taking photographs, I don't have a camera, I don't have a camera phone and I don't listen to much music, I just want to look at the internet and send and receive email and maybe write the occasional letter". "Cool", he said, "but you may want to, in the future".

At this point, I stepped in and told him we would continue to look, on our own and call him if we needed further help. He was about to start saying something else, but probably thought better of it and walked away. "Just give me a shout if you need anything" he called across to us as he left.

During the next few minutes I explained to my customer what she needed to know about the range. She didn't need much more than a MacBook or MacBook Air, but liked the look and feel of the 13" MacBook Pro, which she eventually bought, along with a copy of iWork. The salesman was slightly more subdued during the purchase process, though he did try to sell a range of unnecessary accessories and an extended warranty which were politely refused.

What struck me about these two completely different experiences was that the two young men, the policeman and the salesman were, in many ways, quite alike. I would suspect that they were about the same age and that they both had very similar family, social and educational backgrounds; yet the way they dealt with the public in their professional capacities was markedly different.

Is the way they interacted purely down to the way they have been trained? And if so, why did the salesman irritate me so much? Does he irritate every customer in the same way, and if that is the case, are retailers like this missing the point and losing potential business because of it.

Certainly, high street retailers are fighting for survival. With the ever increasing pressure from online retailers with significantly lower overheads it's incredibly difficult for them to compete on price, so they have to ensure that customer experience is absolutely first class, and that means the face to face contact must impress the potential customer. DSG Retail Limited, the owners of Currys - PC World have, in recent months been investing heavily in store upgrades, and, from what I have heard, staff training; yet they still continue to lose trade.

I fully acknowledge that I may not be their typical customer, but if I try my best to avoid the sales staff in stores like these, I'm sure many others do too.

Something very wrong.

Yesterday on BBC News there was a story about the terrible situation in Somalia, one of four countries in the Horn of Africa, ravaged by drought and famine.

Immediately following this story was a celebration of the last flight of the Space Shuttle with incredible images of the final take off.

NASA quotes the approximate cost of a Space Shuttle at $1.7 billion. The cost of the fuel burned on take off would surely make a huge difference to the plight of so many people in these stricken regions of the world.

I know very well that First World countries contribute huge amounts to Third World relief, but it's obviously still not enough.

In the UK., donations can be made via the Disasters Emergency Committee. In other parts of the world I'm sure there are equivalent organisations.

The true cost of Mac OSX 10.7 Lion.

On July 20th 2011, Apple will launch Lion, the latest and probably most significant update to their desktop computer operating system Mac OSX.

Mac OSX 10.7 will introduce a whole host of new technologies and conventions that will be radically different to those in the previous iterations of their Unix underpinned OS.

The gradual convergence of their desktop/laptop and mobile operating systems is going to take a huge step towards being totally integrated. The launch of iCloud, which will replace their current MobileMe service, but add so much more, will be the glue that bonds the various platforms together. A service for storing and synchronizing our data seamlessly between all of our Apple devices.

There’s plenty of information and opinion about the details of these changes available online and I’m not going to go into detail about individual features and specifications. I want to look into the true cost of the upgrade for the average user of Apple computers and mobile devices.

As with all progress, some things have to fall by the wayside to allow for new developments to be implemented. Mac OSX Lion will only work on Intel processor equipped Macs; this means that the earlier generation of PowerPC Macs will not be able to run the new OS. Actually, some of the earlier Intel processors are not supported for installs of Lion.

As the transition between PowerPC and Intel processors in Macs took place, there was a need for Apple to ensure that software written to run on the PowerPC Macs continued to function. This is achieved with Rosetta, a dynamic translation function built into the Mac operating system. It effectively converts applications on the fly, compiled for PowerPC to run on Intel with surprisingly little degradation in performance.

With the launch of Lion, Rosetta is no longer a part of the OS.

Lion will be ground breaking and incredible value for money. At only £20.99 ($29.99 in the US) it’s surely a must have upgrade. But what is the true cost to the average user?

If I download and install Lion from the Mac App Store when it launches, many of the applications I use regularly will not work. Some may say that I shouldn’t still be using legacy software, some of which is almost ten years old, but these apps and utilities have worked perfectly well under OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and are the core applications used in running my business.

I’ve already started to move away from Microsoft Office and invested in iWork, which in itself isn’t a huge cost, although the time spent getting myself up to speed with the doing what I want to do in Pages and Numbers particularly, has a cost which has to be absorbed.

I also use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and even, dare I say it, GoLive. I own the original Adobe Creative Suite and have never found it necessary to upgrade. mostly I use Illustrator and Photoshop, but there is no simple upgrade path for just those two apps, because Adobe insist that the Creative Suite is a whole package and can only be upgraded as such. But the original CS, as a package has no official upgrade path either, so I have to buy the whole suite again at a cost of around £1,000, paying for Acrobat, Bridge and Device Central, which I know I will not use. The other option; buying just Illustrator and Photoshop will cost an eye watering £1,276. Even accounting for the probability of finding better deals online, it’s still a significant price to pay.

I also have an old GCC laser printer, an absolute workhorse which is still working, with its original toner cartridge. I print all of my business documents on it. GCC stopped development of drivers for it some years ago and even though there was a period when Apple dropped Appletalk with the introduction of Snow Leopard and I thought it would be rendered useless, I was, however, able to set it up as an IP printer. Hopefully it will still work under Lion, but I’m not sure whether or not the specific driver will function. I do have to consider the possibility that it may be time to buy a more current laser printer. (£150 - £200).

It also seems likely that the Apple Magic Trackpad (£59) will be essential for use with a desktop Mac using Lion. The touch and gesture interface on the iOS devices has completely changed the way we interact with our mobile devices. Lion will make this a far more fundamental part of the way we control our computers and a necessity to have some form of touch input device in addition to the now rather dated mouse. I do have a Magic Mouse which is probably perfectly adequate for touch control, but I hate it as a mouse, its just far too flat and slippery for my fairly large hands. I use a Logitech Performance MX mouse and, except for a few minor issues, I love it.

So, fantastic as Mac OSX Lion is going to be; and I really want to upgrade and experience the latest and greatest that Cupertino has to offer, I really have to weigh up whether I can justify the true cost of the upgrade.

I’m absolutely sure I’m not alone.

I suspect that I will do it anyway.

For fake's sake.

A few days ago I lost my basic earphones, a pair of Sennheiser CX 300's that I'd had for about three years.

To be honest, I was surprised that they had lasted so long, though I never thought that I would lose them. I always assumed that they would simply fail; most likely as the result of a broken or cut cable.

I think when I bought them, I paid about £35, so I was expecting to pay a little more to replace them with the same model.

I called in to a couple of electrical retailers and, sure enough, they were just under £40. I also checked Amazon and was amazed to see the same model for less than a third of the high street price. My immediate thought was to look at a slightly higher model in the range, the CX 300 II. Again, these were very inexpensive. I read a few online reviews and decided to order a pair of CX 500's. The price, including the rather exorbitant Amazon, standard postage and packaging fee was still less than £20.

My order was placed on Saturday, I was notified that they had been shipped on Sunday and they arrived at my home on Tuesday morning. Or course, I wasn’t at home, and the package required a signature, so the postman left a note through the letterbox telling me that I would have to collect them from the local sorting office and that I would have to wait a further 24 hours before they would be available from the customer collection office.

I picked them up this morning and everything seemed fine. I used them for a couple of hours during the morning, listening to both music and podcasts and they were comfortable and the sound quality was perfectly acceptable.

During my lunch break I decided to check a few more reviews to see what other people thought of them. I noticed a large proportion of Google hits for the CX 500’s were offering details about how to spot fakes. Of course, I couldn’t help myself, I started to look through them, comparing pictures of counterfeit earphones with details on my new 500’s and the included accessories.

They are certainly well made, there are no rough edges or badly moulded components. All the Sennheiser logos are sharp and printed squarely. The packaging is of a very high standard, both from a print and board/plastic engineering perspective.

There are just one or two niggling suspicions in my mind that suggest that they may still be a good quality fake; but how can I know for certain, and, more importantly, does it matter? 

I bought a pair of Sennheiser earphones from a third party seller, through Amazon. They arrived quickly, they appear to be what they are advertised to be, they sound okay. At £13.68 plus shipping and handling, it really doesn’t matter if I only get a year of regular use out of them.

So why do I still feel just a little uneasy?

Update on Saturday, July 9, 2011 at 2:02PM by disjointedreality

Yesterday, (Friday, July 8th) my Sennheiser CX 300 earphones were found at the premises of one of my customers.

iA Writer for iPad. Mini review.

Following a recommendation on Twitter from a contact in Texas, I downloaded iA Writer and am typing my first document into its clean and elegant interface. The application is, at its very basic level, exactly that - a basic level text application.
No preferences to set, no margins, typeface style and size options, no indents, justification, paragraphs, page breaks, picture insertion... The list goes on.
What it does is simple. It allows you to concentrate totally on one thing - writing.
The standard iPad keyboard has been slightly augmented with some simple keys along the top, to allow quick insertion of the more common punctuation characters and the ability to jump backwards and forwards through your text by word or character. In addition there is a "focus mode" button that enables highlighting of only the last three lines of typing. The rest fades to about 50% grey.
Documents can be saved for further editing in other applications should you wish, and there is also the ability to synchronise documents using Dropbox.
Many users of the more full featured and commonly used word processors find their interfaces overly intrusive and so many features totally unnecessary. For pure writing and getting your text onto a page iA Writer is unbeatable.
iA Writer can be found in the Apple iOS app store and further information on the developer's website.
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/
http://www.iawriter.com/ipad

iPad 2. The UK Launch.

It seems only right that, after having owned an iPad 2 for just over a week (since it's UK launch, on Friday 25th March 2011), I should post a short piece to my site from it.

Wednesday and Thursday of the launch week were very warm for mid March in North West England. Temperatures were in the high teens, Celsius. So, I set off to Liverpool on the train, probably a little under dressed for the cold afternoon of standing in line at the Apple Store in Liverpool One that was to follow. Although it was a sunny afternoon, I hadn't considered the cold wind blowing off the River Mersey and funnelling through the streets close to the docks.

I arrived in good time and joined the line at about 12:15pm. I estimated that I was about 50th. in line. As it turned out, I was 38th. Considering the fact that a few people had already been waiting for almost twenty four hours, I didn't think it was too bad.

Staff from the Apple Store spent the whole afternoon amongst the queuing fans, handing out complimentary water, tea and coffee. The warm drinks were certainly very welcome, though as a person on my own, I was a little concerned about taking in too much liquid with at least a five hour wait ahead of me. The line behind me grew pretty quickly and at the time the store reopened for the official 5pm launch, there were probably about 400 people there. A small team of staff also worked their way through the queue from the front, identifying which model of iPad everyone required and handing out reservation tickets.

 

At about 3pm the store closed for business and the staff began erecting a large black curtain across the front of the store, just inside the doors. Outside, there were photographers, journalists and film crews recording the event and interviewing willing fans, happy to share their passion for all things Apple. One of the photographers from the store tried to initiate a Mexican wave, but failed rather miserably as everyone was too concerned with just keeping warm.

Following a 10 second countdown, at exactly 5pm, the large curtain dropped to the floor and the doors opened to a loud cheer.

Each customer was assigned a personal shopper, who lead them through the store, helping with the selection of any accessories, before arriving at an area on the first floor of the store, where the iPads were being issued. They were then taken downstairs again, where payments were taken.

The whole process took less than ten minutes. Considering the volume of customers, the store didn't feel crowded and I certainly didn't feel rushed to purchase and get out.

This was my first experience of a product launch at an Apple Store. The atmosphere, anticipation and sense of community were more than compensation for the cold conditions.

When the next iPhone is launched, I will be upgrading.

Will I be getting it on launch day from an Apple Store? Almost certainly.

Update on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 8:26AM by disjointedreality

I've had my iPad for over a month now and, apart from playing for all of a couple of minutes with Photo Booth, I've not used either of the cameras.

I am very pleased with the iPad though. A little frustrated that some of the apps I use regularly on the iPhone do not have iPad versions. In particular, Calvetica, Paypal Tweetbot and Instagram could really do with full screen optimised versions.

Scary descent.

Hang on tight!

iPad 2 ad spoof.

An amusing spoof on the new Apple iPad 2 ad, from Conan O'Brien.

Slightly less amusing is the fact that the clip doesn't play on an iPad, because it's a Flash video. :-/

Sorry about the advertising in this clip. I do not support or endorse any products or services shown in these advertisements.

iPad 2. Justification.

On Wednesday, March 2nd. Apple will unveil the second incarnation of it's tablet computer, the iPad. Although I went through a period of irrational lust for the first one, I resisted the temptation to buy one, even though I had all the justification I needed. Well, almost.
There were actually several things holding me back. I was concerned that the duplication of many functions I already used heavily on my iPhone would mean that an iPad wouldn't be used enough. I also didn't want to commit to another 3G contract - I felt that £35 a month for the iPhone was enough.
So, why do I feel that I can justify buying an iPad now? What's changed?

Recently, I upgraded my copies of Pages and Numbers (the Apple word processing and spreadsheet applications) on my Mac. I had been reluctant to buy the whole iWork suite because I never had the need to use Keynote (the presentation generation application). However, since the individual apps became available from the Mac App Store at reasonable prices, it made the decision much easier. I've begun the process of learning how to use both Pages and Numbers with the intention of transferring all of my business documents out of Microsoft Office.

With Pages and Numbers also available on the iPad, I should be able to centralise my documents "in the cloud", on either Dropbox or Mobile Me, so that they remain synchronised whichever device I'm working on. I spend a lot of time working away from my office, so the ability to work on documents wherever I am would be a huge plus.

I also rely heavily on calendar, address book and several other time management applications on my iPhone, but, to be honest they are not great. Particularly the calendar. The screen is just too small, and when I'm arranging a job with a customer I find it awkward to set up an event and see where I have gaps in my schedule. I've been using Calvetica from Mysterious Trousers LLC, for a while. It's a much cleaner and more functional calendar application than the Apple equivalent, but it's still awkward on the small screen. (Not helped by my ageing eyes).

As far as the need for a second 3G contract, because there simply isn't enough free Wi-Fi in the area where I live and work; there should be an acceptable solution to this, with the new personal Wi-Fi hotspot functionality due to ship with the next iOS release. This would enable me to use my iPhone as a mini base station connected via 3G and to connect an iPad to this personal network. Based on my current usage, I shouldn't have any problems with exceeding my data limit. I would, however, buy a 3G ready iPad, should my needs change in the future.

I'm due to buy a new iPhone when the next version is released in the summer, and that decision won't change. I will have kept my 3GS going for two years and it's time for a replacement.
I think I've enough reason to buy an iPad purely from a business point of view. It will also make typing blog posts so much easier and quicker, not to mention the occasional game of Angry Birds.

This is where we live.

A really nicely designed and produced, stop-motion, short film.

"Welcome to our city - to our world - of books. This is where we live.

A film for 4th Estate Publishers' 25th Anniversary. Produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

The film was produced in stop-motion over 3 weeks in Autumn 2008. Each scene was shot on a home-made dolly by an insane bunch of animators".

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.