Devblog

We had a stereo in the kitchen that Kirsty has had for 10 years but it’s recently started badly skipping when playing CDs so needed to be trown out. I personally don’t have many CDs since getting rid or loosing them all while at uni and since then everything has been mp3s, iTunes on my laptop and iPods so I’ve not really bought any new CDs until recently.

I’ve bought a few as they’re useful in the car – I’m not going to get an even more expensive car just so I can hook my iPod up to it so I now get CDs, rip them to my PC and iPhone, Kirsty’s iPod if she wants them and then put them in the glove box.

Thing is, now we needed a new stereo for the kitchen it brought back the iPod dock question – should I get something that we can drop an iPod into instead of routing around for CDs? I thought – “yes”. However, I definately wanted one that could play the radio as well and ideally one that would also play CDs. Combine this with the fact that there’s a Credit Crunch on and I didn’t really want to pay more than £50. Since the VAT rate is about to jump up as well I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend weeks Googling for one. Another problem is one of iPods. Kirsty has got an iPod Shuffle so it’s unlikely we’d get one that would take that but since it’s only a few gig and she wants to get a Nano or Touch at some point we just ignored that.

The last problem is my iPod – it’s got a phone built in. Not a single website can give a definate straight answer as to whether their bits of kit would accept an iPhone – they’d have lists saying they accept 3/4/5 G 30Gb etc etc blah blah but nothing on the iPhone. I eventually decided the best bet was to spend as little as possible and then see if it worked.

We got a Proline Something-Or-Other from Comet for £40 – not bad. Plus it turns out that it does accept my iPhone as well. Bargain.

I was at a party this weekend and some unfortunate person asked me what I do for a living and we then got into a half hour conversation about PCs before he managed to escape. I never even asked his name either – how unsociable of me! One thing we did talk about was how there’s more gadgets that do wonderful things. It got me to thinking – if you keep up with the advance of technology, why would you need a desktop PC?

This isn’t a new question – everyone has been asking this for years now. Microsoft has developed entire operating systems for this purpose. Hardware manufacturers have developed specific technologies for this purpose. My point is that now it’s not just an idea or only available for the very rich – you can get this without spending a fortune!

Our household income isn’t massive, not a lot more than most people, however we have various “toys” that mean our desktop PC disappeared quite a while ago when we were kitting that room out for our second born. And that’s the first nail in the coffin of the desktop PC. It’s needs it’s own space. Either a room set up as a study or at least a computer desk taking up a corner in another room. And people don’t like that – although PCs have got a lot better looking recently, they still look out of place in your living room. Why bother with all this inconvenience just to check your emails and shop online from your spare room?

If people do feel that they need a dedicated PC – maybe they also write letters or have their budget on a spreadsheet (I do) then most of the internet enabled devices might not be enough. Families might not be able to make do with a simple browsing through their TV, iPhone or Xbox – there’s photos to organise and print, kid’s homework to organise, secure banking and other websites to visit. But why have a desktop PC for all this? You can pick up a decent laptop that would do most people for 5 years for less than £400. That’s nothing compared to the amount most families spent on a desktop PC about 5 to 10 years ago. Sorted – that’s most people happy. But…

What about the gamers? Well as discussed previously here – why go with a PC for your gaming? For the cost of getting a decent gaming machine these days you could buy a PS3, Xbox, Wii and a laptop to do all the PC type stuff. So, now even the gamers are happy! Right, who does that leave? Ah – the light internet users.

If you want to browse the internet casually and you don’t have a set top box with internet access, or a smartphone, or a gaming device with internet access and you don’t want a laptop, then maybe a desktop PC is for you. Nip off and buy one before they go the way of the VCR!

After 40,000 years the iPhone has finally been released on Orange! I signed up and got mine on the day it was released and have had it for about a month now. So – what is it like? Well, boring money stuff first. To get the phone on the contract I wanted I had to pay £90 ish but that is a hell of a lot less than I’ve paid before (the last one I paid for was a Nokia 8800 when it first came out for about £200). Plus I can recycle the old Nokia 6300 so I’m only really paying £50 for it. As for the monthly contract, it’s £35 a month, less than the £40 a month I was paying. Seriously, who can complain at that?

So, the phone? Well I’ve not had a smartphone before and any “advanced” phone features on the ones I’ve had have been underwhelming. I have seen other peoples smartphones before and even comparable touch screen ones don’t come close to the iPhone. It’s the same as with iPods – everything else is just an MP3 player. The design, the software, the whole package is a combination of what they can do using iPod and Mac technologies and some clever innovations to bring together many technologies and software to provide amazing solutions. An example of this is the Maps App. By using either wireless or 3G connection, existing mapping technologies, your current location and bearing, these are all rolled together to provide something that can simply but effectively provide you with a walk back to the car park when you’ve been out and got lost in the big old city.

It’s not just the fact that you can have “real” web browsing (or email) when you’re out and about as well as when you’re near your own wireless (or open ones), but the way in which it’s closer to being a PC replacement with it’s own operating system and applications (they’re now called Apps apparently). This thing is just so useful that I now rarely use my laptop at home, I do it all on my phone.

Top all this off with the way in which it looks – it’s just like everything else Apple does – it looks absolutely amazing, both in the software it’s running and the device itself – everything else just looks crumby in comparison. Unless someone releases an actual iPhone Killer or Apple manage to screw it up, I’m never going back or going elsewhere!

My company is a fairly small one that has a very simplistic network, a few broadband connections and PCs with mainly Windows Home based machines because they do everything we need them to. This means that we just upgrade the OS when a PC is at the end of it’s useful life or when we get new staff. As a result of our expansion over the last year nearly all of our staff are on Windows Vista. The only exceptions are me (Head of IT) and Mike (Graphic design). Due to our jobs you’d think that we’d be at the top of the list for an upgrade but due to us having much faster PCs to begin with and having a better level of computer knowledge so we can keep them running better for longer, so we’ve stuck with our now aging XP machine. Until about 3 months ago that is.

At that point my Windows XP laptop was starting to suffer from various hardware problems – fans starting to seize and cause shutdowns, network failures for no reason, nasty wirring from the harddrive on occassions. This led my boss to give me a shinny new Vaio (VGN-FW48E if you’re interested) with Shiiny Vista. I would have been happy to stick with XP as that bit everything I wanted and had become stable and reliable to the point where it just ran and ran, day in day out. Unfortunately everyone in the office is on Vista and keep asking “how do i…” and the reply “how should I know – I haven’t got a new PC” apparently doesn’t count as quality IT support, plus XP is quite old now and although I was happy with Windows 98 at the time, things change and you eventually have to get up to date.

So – Windows Vista – what’s it like. Well…. everything has moved around to make it simpler for novices, making it annoying for me since I knew where everything was, plus now I can’t have access to all the advanced settings we used to have. UAC is a bit annoying – it’s like Health & Safety – just because some people are idiots who can’t but one foot in front of the other without having an accident, we all have to suffer.

What else? Ah yes – it’s looks have been overhauled and it does look very good. Gone are the playgroup colours and images, it’s now a lot sleaker looking and modern. But…. if you’re after something that looks good – why Windows? A Mac or even most Linux distros look well better than Windows, can perform the same tasks and in the Linux case – are free. But hey-ho, it’ll do for now.

Anyway, after a month or two of playing with Vista it became time to receive my free upgrade to Windows 7 that came with my laptop when I bought it. The actual upgrade was smooth enough – uninstall this, run that, re-install that. Then it was time to go – so what’s it like. Well, there is yet another facelift but as mentioned before – it’s not all about looks, personality counts too. So what else has changed?

I like the taskbar and quicklaunch changes – that’s a very nice improvement. However, as I have Firefox pined to the taskbar, it took me ages to find out how to pin it back to the start menu and as a massive fan of keyboard shortcuts (Win + down + enter to get Firefox up) this was really annoying.

So, what are my overall thoughts after my swift upgrades from XP through Vista and onto 7? Well, Microsoft – listen up! You’re not a government – you don’t have to force your “Health & Safety” policies on us all! After digging around you can turn all this crap of and find the advanced tab we were looking for, but don’t make it so hard! Turn on the security by default for the novices but have an Experienced user account for the computer professionals that easily lets us use our PCs the way we want.