I was interested to take a look at the new publicly-available developer preview of Windows 8 that was released today. I have a few (poorly organised and still unrefined) initial thoughts.

After an initial hiccup running the developer preview in VMware, I switched over to a machine with VirtualBox and got up and running. The installation process was impressively speedy, even under the virtualised conditions, and asked few questions. A good start.

Initially, it is a little disconcerting not to have the desktop right in front of you after logging in, but I suspect that with a little retraining, the new ‘Start’ screen might prove a more convenient starting interface. The Windows Phone-style ‘tiles’ interface is genuinely innovative (praise I rarely would find myself directing at Microsoft) and seems to work in a fairly intuitive way.

I should mention at this point that my virtual machine setup and ‘traditional’ hardware combination mean that only a mouse and keyboard were available, making it impossible for me to evaluate the touch features of the OS (and making some of the ‘Metro’ apps and UI a little difficult to use). This is, of course, a limitation of my configuration, but it also raises an important point — if this new Metro UI will be the default even for computers with no touch capabilities, the whole thing needs to be smooth, optimised and not at all frustrating for this category of users too. It doesn’t feel this way yet — having to perform awkward drag gestures with a mouse isn’t a good experience at all. The viability of having a single operating system, with shared UI concepts, on very different types of computing devices is something that is yet to be proven.

These issues aside, I find myself quite impressed at how well the combination of the new ‘Metro’ apps themselves work alongside the traditional desktop. The disparity between the two types of apps was something I thought might make the system feel clunky and ‘part-baked’, but I find myself likening it to the Mission Control view in Mac OS X Lion — the Metro apps are like your Lion apps in Full-Screen Mode, and you still have access to the traditional desktop over to the left. In short, I actually think it works.

There are certainly some minor oddities at this stage — and obviously this is far from a finished, polished product. But there is promise in this hybrid-UI design that I hadn’t expected to find. I certainly need to spend a bit more than a short hour playing with the system before I’ll really understand what I think of its potential.

The biggest challenge will be how well a single operating system will work on very different types of computing devices — and indeed whether the hardware and software on the new generation of Windows tablet devices will be up to the task.

The opening of a new Apple Store is always an interesting experience — and one that never fails to inspire enthusiasm unheard of anywhere else in retail! I actually went along three and a half years ago to the opening of the WestQuay store in Southampton, but today, there was the Grand Opening of the new store in Festival Place, Basingstoke.

It is a really convenient store for me — it is just a 20 minute train journey away, so it is now even easier to get to the Apple Store should anything need fixing, or anything new need purchasing. 😉

I have put together a short video of the Grand Opening event, which you should see embedded below.

Definitely nice to go along, share in the experience — and pick up that all-important Festival Place Apple t-shirt to add to the collection. 🙂

I’m a huge believer in having control over content that I purchase. I refused to use the iTunes Store, which otherwise provided the best online music experience, until the songs were available without the DRM restrictions hitherto demanded by the rights holders. I still prefer the humble DVD^[1] to other ways of getting video which are bound by the artificial (and ineffective^[2]) restrictions demanded by the rights holders.

I was interested to read Diane Coyle’s assessment on many of the shortcomings of e-books. I’m not a big reader myself, but books, electronic or otherwise, are an important part of society and of culture — and I too share some concerns that today’s e-books systems fail to offer important functionality that analogue books have had for generations.

Sharing, lending and borrowing of paper books is an important part of the whole book experience. Unfortunately, it’s something that is either obstructed entirely by today’s commercial e-book systems, or is an optional (and unavoidably platform-specific) feature that the publisher can refuse to offer on a whim.

Diane Coyle’s observation on this situation:

You can’t share books on a device. I can’t even get e-books I bought on one device onto another device I own, although no doubt one of my domestic IT support staff (sons) could do it for me. I certainly can’t read the e-books my husband downloaded because he’s onto his next e-book on his iPad. E-books torpedo domestic and friendly sharing.

Multiple, competing proprietary standards for reading books, where users have no ability to move their content from one format to another, is a really awful idea. We are inclined to accept this kind of incompatibility in newer media forms until one format wins — Betamax and VHS, HD-DVD and Blu-ray — but there’s never been incompatibility between owning hardback and paperback books, for example!

» Read the rest of this post…

I am a of the iPhone app and web service Instagram. You can take great photos with the iPhone 4, but Instagram encourages making art from iPhone photography in a really interesting and fun way. I am by no means a professional photographer, but I do enjoy playing around with what can be achieved with the iPhone’s camera.

More recently, I have found myself using Instagram in a few unconventional ways to get some interesting results.

Using Instagram as a Post-Production Digital Zoom

While the iPhone 4 camera in many ways can be very competitive with many dedicated point and shoot cameras, one notable feature it lacks is an optical zoom. There’s a digital zoom — but I see little point in using it. Digital zoom merely degrades the quality of the photo you are taking — and you lose that quality permanently. If you want to crop the photo to have the effect of digital zoom, you can do that after taking the photo without losing any data.

And that’s what I have found myself doing quite a bit — I will take a photograph of something in the distance using the iPhone’s default Camera app, then enter Instagram, choose the new photo to bring into the app from the Camera Roll, and use the zoom and pan feature to ‘crop’ the Instagram version of the shot. I end up with the original, unfiltered photo in case I want to come back with that, and the cropped and filtered ‘arty’ version in Instagram.

Combining iPhone 4 HDR Photography with Instagram

The iPhone 4’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) feature, introduced shortly after the debut of the device, allows you to capture more of scenes with significant contrast between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. The iPhone’s HDR takes two photos in quick succession — one underexposed, one overexposed — and combines them together.

The results, frankly, are mixed, but there are many occasions where the iPhone 4᾿s HDR works really well to bring the colour of the sky out where it would otherwise be ‘blown out’.

Unfortunately, you can’t use the HDR feature within Instagram’s capture interface, so, again, I find myself using the iPhone’s default camera app to take the source photo, then importing into Instagram later. The result is that you can combine the HDR shot with the filters and other enhancements in Instagram for an even better end result.

Conclusion

These two techniques I have developed might be quite obvious to many people — and could even be described as a bit fiddly, with having to exit and enter different apps. I have found them, however, a really good way to make even more out of a fantastic free app.

If you want to follow my images on Instagram, my username there is peteru.

I was delighted to be invited by Mark from Everyday Mac Support onto Not Another Mac Podcast — and the episode has now been published.

Mark, Glenn Künzler of MacTrast.com and myself discussed several post-WWDC topics, MacDefender and the Mac security landscape, iCloud and user control, the new iTunes Match and iTunes in the cloud features, the revamped ‘Apple Store 2.0’ experience, rumours about the Apple A5 chip in the MacBook Air and more.

You can take a listen to Episode 8 on the Your Mac Network site and also subscribe to the show in iTunes.

Thanks again to Mark for inviting me on the show. Mark and Dennis are always looking for other contributors on their show, even if you are not a seasoned podcaster. Please do go over to the site or contact them via @YourMacNetwork on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible or by email if you think you might be interested.

“What? I thought you updated this yesterday?”

Well, I did. 😛

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s auto-update-capable release, is DfontSplitter for Windows 0.3.1. This version includes a single fix, introducing a new method of avoiding the dreaded ‘corrupt font file’ error. For some unknown reason, sometimes Windows simply will refuse to work with the original fondu output file, but if simply DfontSplitter makes a duplicate of the file, it will happily see it as a TrueType font! It is very odd behaviour, and this fix only works in some cases, but it should reduce the incidence of ‘corrupt font files’ being output from DfontSplitter for Windows. This means users will less frequently have to go through a secondary hoop to get Windows to play nicely with DfontSplitter’s outputs.

Here are the official release notes:

New Features and Bugfixes

• Uses a new method to decrease the incidence of ‘invalid font file’ errors on Windows. More fonts should now convert correctly without requiring further intervention.

Known Issues

• Some fonts still require further conversion after DfontSplitter has created the TrueType font file. FontForge is one option for this.

As always, you can always get the latest and greatest version of DfontSplitter by downloading it from the the DfontSplitter project page.

I have just released a new version of DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.3. The main change here is a brand new automatic update notification system. Like the Mac version, which uses the excellent Sparkle Framework, users of DfontSplitter for Windows can now keep the application up-to-date without having to manually check the website. This makes my development of the software easier, as I can release smaller feature releases more frequently, rather than large releases that must have a longer lifespan.

Unfortunately, because the automatic update feature is new, previous users of DfontSplitter 0.2 are not going to be notified automatically about this new release. 🙁

If you know any other users of DfontSplitter for Windows, please let them know this update is available so they might have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with this new feature too.

Here are the official release notes for this version:

New Features and Bugfixes

• New automatic update facility, similar to that of DfontSplitter for Mac. Users can now be notified of new releases in the future, which may include new features.

Known Issues

• Some versions of Windows report the TTF files that DfontSplitter creates as ‘corrupt’. Please see this workaround — https://peter.upfold.org.uk/blog/2009/08/23/dfontsplitter-solution-to-windows-corrupt-font-error/

As always, you can always get the latest and greatest version of DfontSplitter by downloading it from the the DfontSplitter project page.

Just yesterday, the 14th major release of the Ubuntu operating system was released into the world. One of the biggest new things in the Natty Narwhal release is the new Unity interface — which will be the default interface for the OS. I wanted to take a moment to record my initial thoughts on this new interface direction. This is not, then, a particularly in-depth or scientific analysis, but just a few thoughts on the new interface design that I wanted to share.

» Read the rest of this post…

I just came across an interesting post on the ESET Threat Blog (ESET being the antivirus vendor who are responsible for NOD32) about smartphone apps and the risk they potentially pose in a world when we install all sorts of applications, including those that deal with important and sensitive information, on the same device.

In particular, General Hayden remarks that ‘In the popular culture, the availability of 10,000 applications for my smart phone is viewed as an unalloyed good. It is not — since each represents a potential vulnerability. But if we want to shift the popular culture, we need a broader flow of information to corporations and individuals to educate them on the threat. To do that we need to recalibrate what is truly secret.’

Yes, each app that you install on your smartphone is a potential vulnerability. It is precisely for that reason you should be making decisions about what you installed based upon rational thought processes. There are some things that the reward is not great enough to warrant the amount of risk taken. For example, you might choose not to drive 120 MPH (193 KPH) because the cost of potentially getting isn’t worth the benefit of arriving sooner, or perhaps even the benefit of the fun of driving so fast. If you do choose to drive that fast where it is not permitted, and you do get caught, you may discover that the consequences are so extreme you wish you hadn’t have taken the chance.

When it comes to installing software on your smartphone, take a good look at what you may be risking. Do you do online banking or shopping with your smartphone? Do you have business contacts? Contact for friends? How about access to an email account with private emails? All of the information may be compromised if the wrong app is installed. After you identify what assets you have and their value, then consider the app you are installing. What is the benefit it poses to you? Is it worth potentially risking your information for a funny picture or a game you might play a couple of times a year and can probably play online, rather than installing it on your smartphone?

It’s an interesting read — and should remind everyone using an app-capable mobile device that it is a powerful computer, and with that comes a certain degree of risk. While the major smartphone software platforms have a higher level of technical separation between apps running on the same device than you typically get with a desktop PC, we should still be thinking about what apps are sharing ‘the floor’ with others, especially those which deal with more sensitive information, like mobile banking.

And this is why whatever browser you use to access this site, you will always be given exactly the same page.

Comic is XKCD — Server Attention Span. The comic is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5.