Wow, it’s been really rather a long time since I wrote a proper blog post. Why? Well, frankly I’ve been a bit busy. Sorry about that. Why so busy? Let me try to briefly explain…

Since I last wrote I’ve had the world’s longest sore throat problem, I’ve moved from Manchester back to London, I’ve switched project at work, and I’ve started looking for a flat to buy. Where to start?

Two weeks ago now, I moved back to London having spent 7 months in Manchester. I’d been working on the development of BBC R&D’s new lab there, and I’ll be aiming to blog about that soon separately. But with the department moved into their new home it was time for me to return.

While I am glad to be back in London, it was sad to leave the people I’ve got to know in Manchester. My housemates and I went for a lovely meal and a few drinks, and I shall miss them all, while my colleagues and I had a goodbye lunch, some drinks, some more drinks, and then another beer. I was particularly pleased with my goodbye presents, a bottle of wine and a flat cap (see picture!). Apparently whippets can’t be bought as leaving presents.

A strategic mistake I made was arranging to have a party at my London flat on the day I returned. Packing a car, driving 200 miles, unpacking and then having to entertain made for a very long and tiring day. Truth be known, I didn’t get any of the packing done until the next day really, but the great evening we all had was worth it. It was lovely to see old friends, and I hope I’ll continue to see them more often now I’m back in the capital. The day in question was in fact halloween, and despite my protestations, Dave had decided to make the party a ‘proper’ halloween do, with cobweb decorations, conical flasks of cocktail ingredients, and costumes all round. Things took a turn for the decidedly odd however when I arrived at the flat to find a life sized cardboard cut out of Troy and Gabriella from High School Musical. HSM is a bit of a long running joke in my group of friends (a few too many of us have a secret love for it), but this was taking things further than ever! The present had been sent by our sadly absent friend Sarah, and so Dave and I sent a suitably cheesy posed photo to her…

Jonathan and I decided to protest the costumes by dressing as the scariest thing we could think of; John and Edward! If you haven’t been watching the X Factor you’ll probably still have seen these two irritating twins who can’t sing, as they’ve been all over the tabloids. Some guests understood the costume others (I’m looking at you, Kat), didn’t really get it without some explanation!

And so back to work, where I’ve been plunged headlong into a new piece of work. Thankfully I’ve had yesterday and today off, as I was starting to run out of steam what with the stress of finishing my old project, moving across the country and starting a fairly high pressured new piece of work. Hopefully next week I’ll be a bit refreshed and ready to continue my new piece of work. I’m spending my time on a project looking at internet connected set-top boxes for providing on-demand programming. I hope to be able to share more soon.

Finally, Dave and myself are looking to buy a flat. We’re a bit bored of renting, and think we can just about afford to buy. I’ll share more once we choose somewhere, but with trying to balance the requirements of somewhere we like, in a decent location, at a price we can afford, and in a building that the mortgage company like, is proving tricky. In particular the mortgage companies don’t like flats in council managed blocks, but in London and with our budget, such properties account for a huge proportion of available properties. Ah well, we’ll see…

Hope everyone’s well. More soon (maybe).

Fair disclosure right now: this is going to be a boring post about whether Apple are evil or wonderful, and many of you won’t give a rat’s backside. But it’s not very technical, it’s about business ethics, so I hope you’ll give it a punt…

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com and generally respected geek recently presented The Case Against Apple in Five Parts, explaining that he’s an Apple fan but has grown fed up with them recently. Much has been said in many places about the merits of his arguments, but the general concensus seems to be that he’s mostly talking rubbish. However, he’s talking enough sense to be worth considering, and I don’t disagree with everything he says. I had a lively discussion around this with a colleague, who urged me to blog my thoughts, so I am. I recommend reading the original post, and perhaps one or two of the other good responses. But anyway, here’s the relevant bits, along with my take on them…

1. Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices

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There is no technical reason why the iTunes ecosystem shouldn’t allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player (in fact, iTunes did support other players once upon a time), save furthering Apple’s dominance with their own over-priced players. Quickly answer the following question: who are the number two and three MP3 players in the market? Exactly. Most folks can’t name one, let alone two, brands of MP3 players.

On my trips to Japan, China and Korea over the past couple of years, I made it a point to visit the consumer electronics marketplaces like Akihabira. They are filled with not dozens, but hundreds, of MP3 players. They are cheap, feature-rich and open in nature. They have TV tuners, high-end audio recorders, radio tuners, dual-headphone jacks built-in and any number of innovations that the iPod does not. You simply will not see those here because of Apple’s inexcusable lack of openness.

Not only does Apple not build in a simple API to attach devices to iTunes, they actually fight technically and legally block people from building tools to make iTunes more compatible.

Think for a moment about what your reaction would be if Microsoft made the Zune the only MP3 player compatible with Windows. There would be 4chan riots, denial of service attacks and Digg’s front page would be plastered with pundit editorials claiming Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were Borg.

Why, then, does Steve Jobs get a pass?

Steve Jobs gets a pass because we are all enabling him to be a jerk. We buy the products and we say nothing when our rights are stripped away. We’ve been seduced by Steve Jobs: he lifts another shiny object over his head with a new eco-friendly feature and we all melt like screaming schoolgirls at Shea Stadium in ‘65.

Simple solution and opportunity: An iTunes API which allows the attachment of any mass storage device,not just a short list of players that jumped through Apple’s hoops. If need be, perhaps consumers pay a simple licensing fee of $1-5 a unit to attach a non-Apple MP3 player to iTunes (i.e. pure profit for Apple).

The whole argument here is flawed. To say that by disallowing other media players from syncing with iTunes Apple is stifling competition is rubbish. Apple developed a nice piece of software in iTunes, and so that effort gets tied to their players – a cynical but accurate view might be that by not supporting other players they avoid consumers blaming them when they have problems with other players. But here’s the thing – Apple doesn’t stop anyone else making their own media software! iTunes isn’t so great that people would choose the iPod just to use iTunes, if anything, people do the opposite; use iTunes because they have an iPod. The clear example here is the Palm Pre, where Palm couldn’t be bothered to write their own software, so they wrote a hack to make the Pre work with iTunes and passed it off as a feature. Yes, Apple broke it, but they warned Palm before the Pre ever shipped that they would likely break it. It’s not stifling the competition, the Pre is a good product, all Palm had to do was make good sync software to go with it, but they didn’t bother.

2. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications

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Apple’s iPhone is a revolutionary product that has devolved almost all of the progress made in cracking–wait for it–AT&T’s monoply in the ’70s and ’80s. We broke up the Bell Phone only to have it put back together by the iPhone. Telecommunications choice is gone for Apple users. If you buy an Apple and want to have a seemless experience with your iPhone, you must get in bed with AT&T, and as we like to say in the technology space, “AT&T is the suck.”

Simple solution and opportunity: Not only let the iPhone work on any carrier, but put *two* SIM card slots on the iPhone and let users set which applications use which services. (Your phone could be Verizon and your browser Sprint!) Imagine having two SIM cards with 3G that were able to bond together to perform superfast uploads and downloads to YouTube.

I agree here to a great extent, but it’s important to note that carrier exclusivity is an old problem in the phone industry, not one invented by Apple. No-one complained about the O2 XDA or the T-Mobile sidekick. Just because the iPhone is more popular, Apple gets the heat. However, yes, it would be nice if the iPhone was available on more carriers. But note that in many countries it is, and all the indications are that the iPhone will be available on more networks once existing exclusivity agreements expire.

The article also ignores the fact that Apple has done a lot for the good of the mobile phone industry, and a lot to help handset makers break the stranglehold that carriers had on them. By vastly expanding the market for premium quality phones, they’ve allowed other manufacturers to produce more decent quality products and charge a decent price for them, rather than being forced into making “free” rubbish products because the networks want the price to look good. They’ve forced networks to innovate too – take Visual Voicemail, something tried by others before but never successfully, because getting handset makers and carriers to work together was virtually impossible.

3. Draconian App Store policies that are, frankly, insulting

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Like lemmings, we fell for your bar charts extolling the openness of the iPhone App platform and its massive array of applications. We over-paid for your phone–which you render obsolete every 13 months, like clockwork–and then signed our lives away to AT&T. The way you pay us back is by becoming the thought police, deciding what applications we can consume on the device we over-paid for!

Yes, every application on the phone has to approved by Apple, and if you were interested in something adult in nature…well…you can’t do that.

Apple’s justification for this nonsense is that they have to protect AT&T’s network. Oh really? Aren’t there dozens and dozen of open phones on everyone’s network? The network hasn’t crashed yet, and even if someone did create a malicious iPhone application, you would know EXACTLY who was running the application and be able to block and/or turn off their phone. The network was MADE to deal with these issues on a NETWORK level. To say you have to control people down to the application level defies all logic. A second year CS student understands this.

Who in their right mind feels the need to control the application-level anyway? It’s absurd.

Imagine for a moment if every application on Windows Mobile or Windows XP had to be approved by Microsoft–how would you react? Exactly. Once again we’ve enabled Steve Jobs’ insane control freak tendencies. This relationship is beyond disfunctional–we are co-dependent.

Simple solution: Apple could have a basic system setting that says “Allow Non-Approved Applications.” When you click this setting, a popup could come on warning that, if you click this setting, you are waiving your previously-understood customer service arrangement (i.e. only people with approved applications can hand over their money at the Genius bar).

OK, let’s start with the first paragraph. “your phone–which you render obsolete every 13 months” Err…. Hello? That’s rubbish. Apple provide new models on a roughly yearly basis, yes. They also provide software updates with major new features FREE to existing users. Let’s contrast that with HTC & Windows Mobile as an example. HTC release new models just about every month, while Microsoft don’t provide a simple updates system for their OS, and in fact say that current Windows Mobile phone won’t be able to upgrade to version 6.5 let alone 7. Apple releasing new hardware does not make the old hardware obsolete, far from it. If you’re geeky enough to want to upgrade (as I am), then that’s your choice, and is no worse with Apple than with any other handset manufacturer.

As for the App Store approvals process, over 95% of all apps are approved. Age ratings now mean adult material is allowed, contrary to the article (albeit not hardcore porn, but I can’t say that bothers me!), and often the approvals process helps users out a lot. An app I love just had an update rejected because it presented iPod touch users with an option to use “vibrate only” for notifications. Fair enough really, that would have been very annoying and confusing for iPod users whose device doesn’t have a vibrate function. I also think it’s reasonable that Apple controls what it sells on its store, and you do have to remember that Apple charges less to host, distribute, promote and provide a payment infrastructure for the App Store than Blackberry, HandAndGo (the most popular Windows Mobile store) et al, so it’s an attractive proposition for developers, not to mention the fact that they charge nothing to provide those services for free apps. However, I do agree that it would be good to have a way to download and install apps from elsewhere direct onto my device. No argument from me there.

4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone

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Opera is a fantastic browser built by a company in Oslo, Norway. In fact, a decade ago, I had a speaking gig there and got to interview the CEO of the company for Silicon Alley Reporter. (Sidebar: Man, do I miss being a journalist. I wish I could split 50% of my time being a journalist and 50% of my time being a CEO.) For over a decade, Opera has been making lighting-fast, lightweight and quirky browsers. Long before Apple launched Safari, with the goal of designing the fastest browswer on the Web, Opera was already there.

Opera’s mobile browsers are “full of WIN,” as the kids like to say these days. If you’re a Windows Mobile or Blackberry user, you’ve probably downloaded them and enjoyed their WINness. The company started an iPhone browser project but gave up when faced with Apple’s absurd and unclear mandate to developers: Don’t create services which duplicate the functionality of Apple’s own software. In other words: “Don’t compete with us or we will not let you in the game.”

The irony of this is not lost on anyone who had a computer before they had an Internet connection. Apple was more than willing to pile on after Microsoft’s disasterous inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. In fact, what Apple is doing is 100x worse than what Microsoft did. You see, Microsoft simply included their browser in Windows, still allowing other browsers to be installed. In Apple’s case, they are not only bundling their browser with the iPhone, but they are BLOCKING other browsers from being installed.

Simple solution and opportunity: Don’t be a control freak and hypocrite. Allow people to pick their browser; the competition to make a better browser will increase the overall use of iPhones and mobile data services.

Yeah, that was a bad move, but they changed their minds. C’est la vie. I don’t agree that Opera on a WinMob device is anything like as nice as Safari, but that’s beside the point. I agree that other browsers should be allowed, and they now are.

5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone

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About two weeks ago I came down with a bit of a cold. With the aid of a freshly purchased thermometer I reassured myself that I didn’t have swine flu as my temperature was normal, so I took things easy but got on with it. After a little over a week I was starting to feel a bit better and hoped I was recovered. But earlier this week a new series of symptoms started developing and by Wednesday I was off work with a rather swollen throat. With no improvement by Thursday I was fearing tonsillitis and decided a trip to the doctor was in order.

This, however, was easier said than done. I’m living for a while in Manchester due to my current project at work, but since it isn’t a permanent move, I hadn’t bothered doing things like registering with a GP here, as I’m still registered in London. OK, no problem I thought. I looked up a local GP on NHS Direct’s website and gave them a call. They said I’d have to go in and register, and could then try to book an appointment. My mind filling with thoughts of the hassle involved, I trudged to the surgery, where I was informed that I could complete a temporary registration, which would mean my files would remain at my London GP and that they would be informed of any treatment given here. OK, that’s not so bad, thought I. Until the receptionist suggested that the easier option might be to use the local NHS walk-in centre. Aha! Why did I not think of that? More to the point, why didn’t they suggest that on the phone before I walked all the way to the surgery?

No matter. My new housemate Ryan helpfully drove me to the walk in centre, where a brief bit of form-filling later I was being examined by a very friendly nurse. My pulse and temperature were fine, and my ears looked normal apparently; she was just formulating a theory about laryngitis when she took a look in my mouth before screaming “Oh My God!” – not really what you want to hear from your medical practitioner! However, after a brief explanation of the visual difference between a viral throat infection and a bacterial one (redness verses ‘goo’, in case you were wondering) she told me I needed antibiotics. Yay, drugs! The only problem was that there is no doctor at the small local walk in centre, so I had to go to Manchester Royal Infirmary, where the larger centre has doctors who can prescribe. No problem, another car ride and I was there.

A short wait later and I was checked out again by a doctor. She was slightly more dubious about the need for antibiotics (there is some – probably justifiable – paranoia about unnecessary use of them these days) but on balance decided that some penicillin and a couple more days in bed would sort me out. Here’s the killer though… On deciding I should have some penicillin, she simply went to a cupboard, unlocked it, grabbed a box, wrote my name on it and handed it to me. No messing about with printing and signing forms, no separate trip to a pharmacist, and no prescription charge. Result!

So despite having visited 3 separate medical facilities in one day just to get a brief diagnosis and some pretty standard medicine, I was pretty impressed with the experience. We’ll discount the GP as if they’d been helpful on the phone I would never have had to go there in the first place. The local walk in centre was great – although they couldn’t give me the antibiotics, they were friendly, helpful and I didn’t have to wait at all. No appointment, no messing. And I suspect that in a lot of cases they can provide all the care you need for minor problems. At the Royal Infirmary I did have to wait a while, but here’s the thing – no longer than I usually have to wait at my normal GP when I have an appointment! And all I did was turn up. Better still, the staff were friendly and helpful, and the process of getting prescription drugs was much easier than at my GP.

It really begs the question, what’s the point of GPs?

In this day and age of big national databases, why on earth should I have to register with a local GP? Why should I have to book an appointment in advance? In some cases (notably when I was at university) I couldn’t even get same day appointments. Wouldn’t it be better if all GP surgeries were operated like walk-in centres? Wander in to any surgery anywhere in the country, tell them your name and date of birth so they can call up your medical records, and see a medical professional as soon as one is available. Seems like bliss to me. I’ll be looking up my local walk in centre when I get back to London, that’s for sure…

The headlines are:

• My main blog has moved to blog.depomerai.com
• rowan.depomerai.com is now a sort of launch pad to my content in various places
• My ‘posted items’ don’t appear in my blog any more, they’re separate, at posterous.depomerai.com
• That leaves the blog as just a blog, much simpler It’s also easier to switch between viewing my personal blog posts, those related to my work at the BBC or everything.
• You can now customise what content appears in your feed if you suscribe by RSS. Just visit feeds.depomerai.com

I hope that all makes some sort of sense. The techies amoung you might be interested in some of the detail of how and – more importantly – why I’ve set things up like I have.

One big infrastructure change was that I’m using Posterous for my stuff stream/share stream/posted items. Basically, when I want to share a link, photo, video or other content, I stick it on Posterous, where you can read it directly, or you can view in the sidebar of this website or in my RSS feeds. I spent a lot of time coming to a decision about using Posterous, because I wasn’t happy with my previous solution, which was Facebook’s posted items. The first problem with that was that you had to be friends with me on Facebook to read them, so I set up importing them into my blog a few months back. But the mixing of my blog posts with 3rd party content never felt very satisfactory, and it wasn’t aesthetically very good either. I very nearly went with Tumblr as a solution, but I found some things off-putting like the lack of ability to add titles to some types of content. Tumblr is a bit of a one-way process too; post something there and that’s it. The beauty of Posterous is its ability to post content onwards to services like Facebook and Twitter. So wherever you follow me, you should be able to see the content I post. Another problem with Facebook for posting links was that I always found Twitter easier, so I started just using that instead. But then there’s no easy way to archive, embed or search the content. Posterous is lovely because you can easily post just about any content by email, or use their excellent bookmarklet. It’s clever too – link a YouTube page and it automatically embeds the video itself, select some text on a page before clicking the bookmarklet and that text is used as the summary, and so on.

Then I overhauled my RSS feeds. You’ll now find that feeds.depomerai.com asks you to choose what content to subscribe to, from my personal blog, work blog, Posterous and Twitter. You even get a nice URL which looks like http://feeds.depomerai.com/blog+work for example. At feeds.depomerai.com is a custom script I wrote (with a little help from my friend) that works out what content you’ve requested and aggregates it into one feed. A couple of Wordpress plugins allow me to change the list of feeds presented by your browser when you visit blog.depomerai.com to include some of the most common combinations. Finally, rowan.depomerai.com now utilises this new feeds infrastructure to provide all of my content in one place.

The last big thing was a bit of clever error handling. Since I moved to a new Wordpress install at blog.depomerai.com, I wanted people who click a link to rowan.depomerai.com to be presented with something helpful. If you look for a post (e.g. http://rowan.depomerai.com/2009/07/all-change/) you’ll get a helpful page asking you to head to the new website, whereas if your feed reader requests an RSS feed, it is automatically redirected in a process which ought to be invisible to you the user.

So there we are. A whole lot of technical changes to simplify and yet extend the experience. Let me know what you think!

On Saturday night, myself and my flatmate Dave had a joint birthday party at a bar in Battersea. The night started well, with a good turn out of friends and a few drinks. However it ended for me at about 6am with a taxi ride home from hospital. So many people have asked for the story that I thought I ought to share it…

The night went wrong when some of my friends (mostly my work colleagues!) decided to buy me a dirty pint. For anyone not farmilliar with the concept, it’s a pint glass filled with a concoction of whatever the purchasers feel like, usually a large number of spirits with a splash of mixer. I have no idea what was in it, but the fact that it apparently cost £26 ought to give some idea of how alcoholic it was. When the idea was first mentioned, I was adamant that they shouldn’t bother buying such a pint, as I would simply refuse to drink it. Unfortunately, a little beer later and with about 30 people watching and literally chanting, I caved, and drank it. This was a very bad idea! Very quickly I headed for the toilet and started throwing up – pretty much deliberately at first, but uncontrollably shortly after. At this point my memory stops, so I’m simply relaying what I’ve been told…

I vaguely recall some time in the pub’s toilet – screaming obscenities about those that bought the pint and generally being pretty unpleasant to those around me, though I’m told I was very polite indeed when asking for help (like flushing the vomit away for me as I couldn’t work the flush mechanism). The very last hazy recollection I have involves being upside down; I’m told that this was Nik carrying me out of the bar in a fireman’s lift. I was put into a cab, then quickly removed again when it was decided that I couldn’t make it home without throwing up in the car. I was sat on the pavement, where I lay down and passed out.

At this point I’ll explain that my alcohol tolerance isn’t that high (obviously) but that my natural reaction is pretty strong. Usually I will start feeling ill as soon as I’ve had too much to drink, and so I stop drinking. I’ve therefore never had a chance to get anything close to this drunk. I’ve never passed out before, I’ve never had a serious blank in my memory. So finding out that all this had happened without me remembering it scared the living daylight out of me. Having so much alcohol in one pint and downing it so quickly meant I got far more alcohol into my system than I ever have had before, or ever want to again.

So anyway, back to the pavement. I was lying on the corner of a road junction, and a van came speeding around the corner and clipped the pavement and ran over my foot. I’m told he didn’t stop, and police and an ambulance were brought to the scene. I awoke in St George’s hospital a couple of hours later, with Dave and my friend Nik by my side. One shoe was off, laces cut by the paramedics, and the foot was in a little pain. I couldn’t feel much though, but had no idea to what extent my senses were merely numbed by the alcohol. My shirt had some hideous vomit stains, too.

A short while later, I was seen by the doctors. I was remarkably alert at that point, and had no problem at all relaying my details to the staff and explaining how I was feeling. I was sent for an X-Ray, and a short while later I was back talking to doctors. The initial diagnosis was a dislocated toe, though subsequently a different doctor decided that it wasn’t dislocated at all, and merely bruised. They strapped up the worst affected toe to the adjacent one, and I stumbled home, supported by my friends.

So in the end, no lasting damage done. My right foot is currently very sensitive to pressure and the bruising will no doubt last for a few days. The less said about the way I felt yesterday the better – hangover doesn’t really describe it. But today I’m a little better, and hopefully after another good night’s sleep tonight I’ll hopefully be back to normal.

Phew. What a weekend.

BBC iPlayer is a great service, and its recent expansion in the mobile space is impressive, but the line-up has a gaping hole – the iPhone. The iPhone and iPod touch have been able to stream iPlayer content over WiFi for over a year now, and were in fact the first mobile devices to support iPlayer at all. But you can’t download programmes to your iPhone, and so you can’t watch them offline, which is a very large caveat. The issue has been addressed in blogs by people like Anthony Rose, saying:

Unfortunately, Apple keeps its DRM technology close to its chest and has so far not licensed that technology to third parties. This means that as of today, it’s not technically possible for us to make rights-protected BBC iPlayer programmes available for download from the bbc.co.uk/iplayer website in a format compatible with Apple devices.

He promised that the issue has the team’s full attention, which was reassuring. But here’s the problem – I think there’s an obvious solution, and I’ve not heard any progress to making it work. So consider this an open letter to the iPlayer team – here’s my ideas, please take them and run with them if you can, or if not, please engage with users as you’ve done in the past, and point out the flaws you find in my argument.

I ought to point out right now that I’m a member of BBC staff, I work for Future Media & Technology, but I don’t work for the iPlayer team. So to all intents and purposes, I am just an iPlayer consumer the same as any user. I’m certainly not representing any BBC views here.

Anthony’s point about Apple not licensing their DRM is absolutely true, there’s no denying that. What the iPlayer team have been able to do with other devices is license their DRM (e.g. Windows Media) and make files available to download, wrapped in that DRM. Those files can then be transferred to the mobile device for viewing in a process known as “sideloading”. So far, so problematic – without the ability to license Apple’s FairPlay DRM, this process isn’t possible on the iPhone and iPod touch. So a different approach is needed…

Let’s step over to the existing iPhone interface, where I can log on to the iPlayer website in the Safari web browser and stream programmes over WiFi. This uses no DRM at all – the programmes are simply H.264 streams which are unencrypted and freely accessible, and that was quickly taken advantage of by hackers.  However the team implemented some sort of system which verifies that the user is browsing from an iPhone or iPod touch, not a PC or other device, and since the iPhone doesn’t allow saving of a video stream, the video files can be watched but not saved and thus the agreement with rights holders is protected.

So here’s the simple question – why can’t we use this same method to allow downloads?  I suspect that the iPlayer team have been fixated on the sideloading model, and have correctly surmised that it can’t be done. But what I say is, so what? Take the PC out of the equation! Instead of letting me download a file to my computer and then transfer it to the iPhone, simply let me download the file direct to the iPhone over WiFi. The plan works a little like this – the BBC write an iPhone application which displays a list of programmes available in a nice interface. Then when you choose to download a programme, it does the same authentication checks with the servers as the streaming service does – whatever they might be. Safe in the knowledge that you’re browsing on an iPhone using the acredited iPlayer application, the servers give you an unencrypted, DRM-free  H.264 file to download, the same as they would provide to a streaming user. The application itself enforces the tiome restrictions on watching programmes by keeping a note of the date and time of the download, and when the programme should expire. Each time you start the application, it checks for expired programmes and deletes them if necessary. Simple! There’s no way that a user can keep the file forever, or watch it beyond the allowed time limits.The user is only able to play the programmes from within the iPlayer application, so no other application can access or save the files at all. And because the session is authenticated before the download begins, you can’t download these unencrypted files to any other device that would allow you to circumvent the time limits. You could even encrypt the file download if you like using HTTPS.

The only remaining concern would be if you could transfer the files off the iPhone somehow. However Apple are on the BBC’s side here. There’s no way to copy files from an iPhone to a computer as there is with some devices. You connect to a computer and sync using iTunes, and the session is encrypted, so there’s no way to get at the unencrypted video files and copy them off. Once again, the agreement with the rights holders is protected. When you’re working in a sandboxed, encrypted environment, there’s simply no need to add an extra layer of encryption (DRM) to the videos themselves. So why bother?

Now sure, a jailbroken iPhone would probably be able to circumvent the protection. But then there are plenty of ways to crack Windows Media DRM files and circumvent the protection there. The simple fact is that no media protection mechanisms are perfect, and if the iPhone can offer a solution which is at least as secure as other plarforms – and I believe it can – then there’s no reason to be more worried than we are with other platforms.

I honestly don’t see the flaw in this plan. I’m perfectly willing to admit that there may be one and I just haven’t seen it; if that’s the case then I’d love to hear it. But if not, I’d be so delighted to see the iPlayer team bring this kind of solution to market – after all, iPhone users consume far more media and data than most phone users, so it’s a market crying out to be served.

What the day also got me thinking about however was the quality of presentations. Every presenter I saw today used some sort of computer presentation, all run on the venue’s Macs running Apple’s Keynote software. However it was clear to see which presenters had written their presentations in Keynote and which had put them together using Microsoft Powerpoint. Reason 1 was that Keynote’s ability to import Powerpoint files isn’t quite perfect, making for some slightly oddly aligned fonts. Reason 2 was that I recognise some of the templates provided by both pieces of software. But reason 3 was that the presentations run on Keynote were – without exception – quite simply better than the Powerpoint ones. I couldn’t help but wonder why – both pieces of software offer similar functionality, so why would users of one program produce better presentations than users of the other?

What do I mean by “better”, for a start? I tweeted my thoughts that Keynote presentations were better than Powerpoint ones, and one of my colleagues replied, “Keynote gives you better starting points, (having used it), which helps people learn how to do better”. He’s probably right, I would certainly agree that the backgrounds, fonts and layouts in Keynote’s presentations are on the whole more stylish than those provided by Powerpoint. Keynote’s font rendering, gradients, shadows and other effects are also generally smoother. But I think there’s more to it than that…

Powerpoint has got something of a bad reputation in recent years, but it’s not that using a Powerpoint presentation is necessarily a bad thing, it’s that you need to use them appropriately. Slides should include graphics, photos and other visual elements, plus possibly some quotes, numbers, or short pieces of salient information. They should not include large blocks of text, they should rarely include bullet points, and they should never contain a transcript of what the presenter intends to say. They are an aide to the speaker, a way to enhance the presentation, not the core of it. They should rarely include background images and should always place legibility ahead of fanciness. And pointless elements like large headers/footers or random coloured sidebars or irrelevant graphical elements just get in the way of your content. At Futuresonic, the Keynote presenters stuck to these sorts of rules, whereas the Powerpoint guys didn’t. Why would that be? Perhaps the slide templates in Keynote have less elements on them and shorter blocks of larger text, but I’m not sure whether that’s particularly the case. And certainly either software will enable you to create both great and horrific presentations. I rather like the cartoon to the left, which tells us a lot.

So perhaps it’s down to experience and influence. Would it be churlish of me to suggest that His Steveness might have something to do with it? Perhaps… just perhaps, the Keynote users (as Mac users by definition) have watched one or more of Steve Jobs’ presentations at Macworld or other events. He is, after all, a superb presenter. And just look at some examples of his slides: (Photos from TechShowNetwork)

So who knows. But personally, I’ll be sticking with Keynote, and doing my best to write good presentations.

(6) First up today is Apple’s original Think Different advert. This campaign arguably started the re-birth of Apple, the transformation from beleagured company on the brink of bankruptcy to the powerhouse of cool technology we know today. But ignore that. I’m not showing you this because it’s an Apple ad, but because it’s a wonderful piece of video; short and sweet, thought provoking and – dare I say it – moving. Enjoy.

(7) Next up is a music video by The Get Out Clause. It just so happens that I work with the band’s guitarist, and the man behind this video. The reason I share this is the genius idea behind how they made the video – it’s all clips of CCTV. They went around Manchester, playing in front of cameras, and then used the Freedom of Information Act to reclaim the footage and edit it into this video.

(8) Back over at the TED conference, Bjorn Lomborg has some interesting things to say about the future of our planet and our civilisation, and what our priorities for the future really should be. Slightly shocking and very interesting.

(9) One last TED video, and one more thing from David Pogue. I saved his best for last, as he examines the hypothesis that simplicity sells. This should be absolutely required viewing for anyone designing user interfaces.

(10) And finally… In my final year at university, I co-produced and -presented a light entertainment show called Limited Edition on York Student Television. One of our very silly features was called Star In A Remote Controlled Car, in which campus ‘celebrities’ would record a lap time driving a remote controlled car around our track. Come the end of the series, we had a car left and not much to do with it, so we thought we’d destroy it, with amusing results…

[If you liked that, there's lots more great stuff from 40 years of YSTV on my Facebook profile]

So that’s it. What do you think? What did you like? What didn’t you like? What did I miss out? Please feel free to comment!

Since my life is dull, I look to the world at large for something interesting to share with you. And boy, there’s some interesting things out there. So please, come on a journey around some of my favourite web videos, from the funny to the inspiring to the downright odd.

(1) First up, a trip to TED, the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. There’s all sorts of fascinating videos over at ted.com, and a few of them will feature in this set. The first is short, sweet and very very funny. Poet Rives shares his thoughts on the Internet…

[If you liked that, try this: Rives - A Story of Mixed Emoticons]

(2) Australian comedy outfit The Chaser are pretty funny across the board, but one sketch of theirs which reall made me laugh was this examination of American news network Fox News. Here it is in two parts.

(3) Fancy something a little more inspiring and thoughtful? Why not head back to TED where, as long as you’ve got 20 minutes to spare, Benjamin Zander’s thoughts on classical music are guaranteed to inspire. I love this video.

[If you liked that, try this: Ken Robinson - Creativity In Education]

(4) Blogger Ze Frank decided that he’d make a video blog every day for one year from March 2006 to March 2007. Many of the videos are incredibly funny, some are thought provoking, some are just weird. You should probably know that a Sports Racer is a viewer of the show (no idea why!) and the slogan for the show is Thinking So You Don’t Have To, which he adjusts based on the content of each episode. Here’s two of my favourites, starting with Ze’s opinions on College. This one’s pretty funny, though please don’t give up because the beginning is so weird! Wait for him to start talking about college degrees, that’s where it gets good…

(5) And finally for today, Ze’s comment on terror. This one’s kinda moving.

[If you liked those, try more Ze: Elections (clever), 911 (moving), and video blogging (funny).]

Part 2 has videos 6 to 10…

Work is going fairly well, not 100% smooth at all times, but I’ve been enjoying having an input into the development of BBC Research & Development’s plans for our space in the new MediaCity:UK development in Salford. That’s been the kind of work I love; a fairly nebulous problem whose solution lies in both understanding technical requirements and pulling together the input of a diverse set of people. Being given a task like that and being left to my own devices to achieve is one of my favourite ways of working, and the fact that I’ve been doing it all with friend and 2008 trainee Tony has made it a bit of a laugh too. Work on the interim lab (what we do before we move to Salford, which involves setting up an R&D lab on the current BBC Manchester site) has been less exciting to be honest, but steady progress is satisfying nonetheless. Meanwhile my work on BBC HD won’t leave me behind just yet and I keep getting problems thrown my way on top of the documentation I have to finish, but that’s all fine by me as it’s a piece of work I loved.

Back at home I’m well and truly settled into my house, exchanging daily insults with my housemates in the light hearted way that can only exist between people who get on well, as well as sharing copious amounts of alcohol. We’ve been to Chester zoo together (good animals, terrible food) and I’ve explored Manchester centre a bit (and bought some clothes which I didn’t really need, obviously!) and lots of other mundane things. My housemate Lauren even dragged me with her to her work’s gym the other day, where I completed 1km of running, 3km of rowing and 10km of cycling on various machines. Yes, me! I went to a gym! Scary, I know… However given that I spent the entire rest of the day starving hungry and eating, I suspect it didn’t help my waistline much. But I guess I’ll have to try to go back more frequently…

See, I told you it wasn’t interesting, didn’t I? I think if I’ve learned one thing abut blogging it’s that if you’re going to write factual updates on your life, you should look for an interesting story to tell. Like nearly dying on a Mediterranean island, or some babble about sweet and sour. But sometimes these opportunities don’t present themselves and I am left floundering, grappling for a story to tell and a blog to write. So you’ll have to forgive me, dear reader, and continue to wait in anticipation of the next post which might actually be interesting. (You never know.)

I’m settling in pretty well, getting on with the housemates and generally it’s starting to feel like home. I promise a proper update soon, but in the mean time you’ll just have to imagine me slowly learning to cope with the Manchester drizzle…

However, what was really different to last year was the crowd. Clearly it was a much larger group of people, but it was also much more diverse; younger and older, chavvier and posher. I certainly don’t begrudge Jason becoming more popular, god knows I think he deserves it. But I have to confess to just a little musical snobbery… some of the people at the gig will have been about 6 when Mraz’s first album was released, and I just couldn’t quite help wondering whether people who’ve only got into his music since the relative popularity of I’m Yours really count as fans.

I am – of course – being utterly rediculous. I would be furious if anyone questioned my love of a particular artist just because I didn’t happen to hear about them when they were languishing in the realms of obscurity. But yet, I couldn’t help myself. Every time I looked around the audience during one of the songs from Jason’s first commercial studio album Waiting For My Rocket To Come or even his second, Mr. A-Z, I found myself judging people based on whether they knew the words or whether they had that “this isn’t on his current album” confused look.

I’m judging people based on my own standards here, naturally. I love the sense of completeness of owning musical artists’ full collections (at least the studio albums), so I would be unlikely to take the comparatively expensive step of attending a concert if I haven’t been engaged enough by the artist’s music to buy all their CDs. I myself got into Jason Mraz through his second album, so although I quickly bought his first as well I’m certainly not saying you have to have been there from the start. I just can’t imagine going to a gig without already knowing at least most of a singer’s music.

So am I a snob? Clearly, yes. Is that a bad thing? Probably. But most importantly, did I have a good time on Sunday? Definately. And did the 16 year olds who first heard him on Radio 1? I daresay they did. So good luck to them, and here’s to Jason Mraz, may his popularity continue its well deserved rise.

Cook was an absolute bastard, to his friends and everyone around him. He was rude, divisive and unpleasant. Yet so was Tony. So why is it that I always disliked Cook, whereas Tony somehow remained likeable as a character despite his unpleasantness? I think, having watched episode 1 again, that much of the difference lies in intelligence. Tony would scheme, manipulate and control his friends, but he’d do it by devising a clever plan. I had a respect for his intelligence, even if I disliked his behaviour. Cook, on the other hand, would shout and punch his way through life, using brute force to get what he wanted. Tony would get his mate into big trouble with a drug dealer, but he’d throw in literary quotes along the way. He’s join the girls scool choir to meet girls, but he’d do it by auditioning properly and singing well. Cook on the other hand would run away from his friends, pausing only to throw in a few choice swear words.

The writing too just seems a little more clever in the early Skins. Little details like the man on the bus who looks over Sid’s shoulder as he scrolls through pictures of Michelle on his phone. The dirty old man is there to be laughed at, but it’s subtle. It’s well known that the programme involves drug use, but somehow in the original Skins it seemed part of the story, whereas in series 3 it was almost thrown in just to shock. In fact that’s a theme which runs through series 3 – I get the impression that they were just trying to out-do the original on shock value. Drugs, swearing and sex don’t necessarily make for entertainment!

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed new Skins, and I will look forward to series 4. But where I bought the DVDs of series 1 and 2, I don’t think I’ll bother with series 3.