When I last tinkered with Linux a few years ago, it was more of an academic exercise than a realistic attempt to embrace open source or switch to a new operating system. On the old G3 I was using at the time, I couldn’t get the graphics card to output at anything higher than 1024x768, installation was courtesy of a slightly terrifying text-only interface, and Wi-Fi was more a theoretical ideal than anything that I could actually coax into operation. (I’m quite sure the res and Wi-Fi were fixable, but I ran out of patience before I fixed them.)

Fast forward to now, however, and Things Done Change. A slightly newer 500MHz Power Mac G4 in our study is now dual-booting into Mac OS X and Ubuntu, the Live CD’s installer was a joy, the screen’s at my display’s native res, and it’s connected to my WPA-protected wireless network courtesy of a Broadcom Wi-Fi card fitted in a PCI slot. I’ve even connected to my iDisk – yes, of course I am; it’s just a vanilla WebDAV volume – and am working off that in a rich text editor that puts Word to shame. And all for free.



All this is possible not just because Ubuntu is a very user-friendy distro that has come a long way, but because my knowledge of computers has increased as well. (I had to fetch the Broadcom firmware before my Wi-Fi card would work; ‘Broadcom’ and ‘firmware’ are moderately complex notions, and editing the yaboot.conf file to define the default boot OS is something many would balk at, so it’s not mass market yet.)

But – and excuse me as I saddle up my hobby horse – technology these days doesn’t have to get simpler for it to have mass-market appeal. It’s like has happened with me and Linux: where a downward-curving ‘complexity’ line meets an upward-curving ‘ability’ line lies the point at which technology and humans get along. ‘Win’, in other words. We no longer have to make technology simple enough for those who in the 80s were famously unable to programme a VCR. Sure, it’s nice to have simplicity and intuitiveness as a target – and Mac OS X gets this right better than any Windows or Linux flavour that I’ve used – but the great thing is that for people of my generation and for those coming up behind us, the language of computing is so instinctual and ingrained that a smidge of complexity doesn’t panic us.

A netbook running Windows sharing the screen over the internet of a Mac mini booted into Mac OS X 10.5, itself running a virtualised copy of a Boot Camp’d Windows XP in Parallels Desktop for Mac’s Coherence mode:



And all so I can have Stephen Fry in America ready to watch when I get home. I like to think he’d be tickled by this.

So, yes, things have been A Bit Busy recently, as pointed out by Wife, and as has been apparent from my veering-wildly-between-euphoria-and-despair status updates over there on the right. I can now exclusively (read: not exclusively at all) reveal what has been behind it all: I’ve been nurturing our latest baby, the snappily-titled MacFormat presents The Essential iPhone Handbook, into existence.

And what a pretty thing it is too. A hundred pages long, it’s packed with beautiful photography and easy-to-understand, authoritative advice, and includes independent buying information, helpful tutorials, reviews of the very best third-party applications and hardware, clear and concise troubleshooting guides, and interviews with celebrities about their iPhones.

Go! Buy a copy! Justify Future’s faith in making me its editor! (And please note that the cover image currently on My Favourite Magazines is incorrect; I’m chasing to get it changed.)







Told you it was a pretty, pretty thing. That portrait of Woz is my work, too; I must remember to mail a copy to my old (read: former) art teacher to demonstrate that I haven’t completely forgotten how to hold a paintbrush*.
* Actually, it’s a digital painting, created using the ever-excellent ArtRage, so it was not so much a paintbrush that got wielded as a stylus, but the point still, just, stands.

Some children dream of being firemen. Some of being astronauts. I dreamed of having business cards.

I didn’t, just to be clear, dream of having a business. I just wanted to have the cards. Thinking about it sensibly, I suspect this was largely because in the films of my childhood, the ultimate moment of cool was when the be-shoulder-padded gent reached into his inside pocket and flicked out a small rectangle of white card, and said, with that special intonation that’s impossible to capture in text: “my card”.

As a troubled teen, I’d design cards on my Amstrad PcW10, print them onto special pre-perforated sheets of A4, then allow them to moulder quietly on a pile. I was, after all, a teenager, and didn’t have anyone to give business cards to.

Recently, though, I’ve found myself genuinely in need of cards that have some of my details on them. Of course I have cards for MacFormat, but that’s not always what I want to give out, and in any case they don’t have my mobile number on them. And so I designed something and got them printed up properly. The idea, because I’m ostensibly someone who writes for a living and who revels in verbal wit, was to have a card that narrated a little story, telling folks a bit about me, and that, for example, they could call me on this number, but that I prefer to get email at this address. I’m happy with the way they’ve turned out, with lots of little typographic attention to detail and crisp, publication-like black-on-white text; the one thing I’d have done differently with hindsight is to have orientated the cards vertically, the more closely to mimic the magazine pages that I help produce.