Then, from our last-but-one trip to Malvern, a triptych from watching the Grand National on TV:

Finally, from a trip into central London with Adin:

I find this useful when copying information from one page to another. Since I have my calendar in one tab, a schedule spreadsheet in another and mail in a third it’s difficult when I want to write a mail that incorporates information from the other two tabs. I want to see all the information in a single glance. With this plugin I can tear off the tabs and arrange them like tiles.

There are some weird issues, to do with pauses in rendering, and interaction with my Delicous plugin, but I can’t even begin to think where those come from. Anyway, see what you think.

You can download DetachTab.xpi from here.

Oh yes, and it needs a more accurate name. It’s more CopyTabIntoSimpleWindow, but that’s a bit clunky. Maybe TearOffTab.

This looks simple, and it is, but it took me while to find applications that are usable, sync or backup, and are generally (almost) as good a Palm Pilot, which is second to none at enabling all this, even if it’s not as sexy. I’ve been very fussy about functionality and ease of use (trans: few actions needed to achieve an end goal).

Calendar. I use SaiSuke for my calendar, and sync it with my Google Calendars. I avoid the built-in iPhone/iPod Touch calendar primarily because I want to be able to add an event on my handheld that, say, repeats every third Wednesday of the month. The built-in calendar doesn’t allow that flexibility (although it accepts such events if you’ve entered them into your desktop calendar). Also, I’m on a PC and don’t have Outlook. SaiSuke syncs directly with Google Calendar. The paid-for version, which I use, allows more flexible sync’ing with several Google Calendars and is £5.99 from the UK iTunes Music Store.

Contacts. I use the built-in Contacts database, but with the following additions:

• I sync it with Google Contacts (part of Google Mail) using a free account on NuevaSync.
• Contact Tool [link opens iTunes] by Alessandro Levi Montalcini allows better searching than the built-in app. It’s £1.19 in the UK.

A very useful additional hack is the ability to go to your Google Contacts directly in your desktop web browser, without going through mail. Use this link: http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager

To-do list. I use Remember The Milk online and its iPhone/iPod Touch application. The app is very intuitive and tends to require reasonably few actions (but not minimal) for you to do what you want. You need to be an RTM Pro member for the app: $25/year. I tried Toodledo, but found it required too many clicks and took up too much screen real estate when used online.

That’s it. And suddenly my iPod Touch is almost as useful as my old Palm Pilot. Next: how I moved from a Palm Vx.

Tags: palm, gtd, iphone, ipodtouch, gettingthingsdone, productivity

In a statement last night, the BBC said: “Mock the Week is a well-established satirical comedy series whose audience have very clear expectations of its bold and sometimes provocative humour.”

Interviewed on Newsnight, Thompson, said that millions of viewers and listeners enjoyed the “edginess” of comedy programmes, but admitted that the humour “sometimes gets close to the wind.”

To me this is not playing it straight. I’ve always interpretted “edgy” as challenging people’s preconceptions, ideally in a clever and creative way. Sarah Silverman is edgy [*] — she’s clever and challenging. Edgy is absolutely not the same as being rude and sweary. Rude and sweary can be funny, but I don’t want to hear people dressing it up as clever or creative or as challenging ideas. When people like Mark Thompson do that they’re covering up the fact that the material is really cheap humour. It may be funny, but’s it’s not imaginative, and they’re insulting us if they pretend it is.

I am reliably informed via Twitter that meeja pundit Kelvin MacKenzie was interviewed on Today and said “when comedians are edgy, sometimes they go over the edgy”. That only tells half the story.

[*] Sarah Silverman example: “People are always introducing me as ‘Sarah Silverman, Jewish comedian,’ [...] I hate that! I wish people would see me for who I really am. I’m white!”

Tags: russellbrand, markthompson, bbc, frankboyle, mocktheweek

Tags: bbc, sincerity, russellbrand

Another impressive thing is YouTube’s feature to play a series of videos in sequence. Another neat little trick from, er, Google.

Tags: android, g1, google

Mind you, for me the most insightful comment of the lot came from Michael Onfray:

Is this the end of capitalism? Absolutely not. The key feature of capitalism is that it’s malleable. It has been through antiquity, feudalism, the industrial era, it has worn the guise of fascism and now it’s wedding itself to the ecology cause. After this latest event, it will take on a new form.

And Bob and Roberta Smith had a fair take, too:

Yesterday, at the same time as Lehman Brothers went belly up and Merrill Lynch was bailed out, Damien Hirst made £70m. This tells us that capitalism is not dead. The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer – and in the evening, the rich went to an art sale and spent the small change in their pockets. This crisis is kind of like the capitalist cat shifting on its cushion.

But I’m also sceptical of the “great depression” analogies. The scenes I see on the streets in central London don’t resemble the black and white photographs I’ve seen from the early 20th century. It’s very, very bad for a lot of people who least need it, and it’s not something that needs any more drama.

Tags: business, creditcrunch, capitalism, anticapitalism

It makes sense from a design and development perspective

I think the point here is that open (source) development does not lead to good product design, so Google shouldn’t worry about Android being open source and just go ahead and produce their own proprietary systems and well-designed hardware.

Actually, I think this is a fair point. But the phone hardware manufacturers are doing just that. Google could do it, too. The open source nature of the software is neither here nor there; the point is that the hardware is proprietary. HTC, Samsung, etc are already producing this. Google could too, if it wanted to, but if it did it wouldn’t change anything.

There are too many self-interests

The argument is that there bringing companies together in a so-called alliance is pointlessly hopeful, because the manufacturers are rivals at heart. But I think this is exactly the point. By providing a common software stack the playing field is levelled, and the phone makers will compete on that level playing field to produce the best hardware.

What about the carriers?

I think the argument here is that the Open Handset Alliance perpetuates the status quo, in which the carriers exert too much influence, so they will just try to create so many incompatible flavours and distributions of Android that the market will become fragmented. This is indeed a real risk of an open source stack, and it would be counteracted by Google insisting on a single software stack. Maybe it’s feasible that they could exert such influence over the carriers, but I don’t think it’s obvious. It’s not obvious to me that, standing alone, they’d have that much leverage with them.

And don’t forget Google

Yes, Google isn’t a charity; they do want to make money out of this. But that’s their choice. If they see their current role in the OHA as paving the way for that, then fine. There is a more obvious route to money if they kept all the IP and direct sales to themselves, but I suspect they’ve already evaluated that option and judged their current position to be preferable. That’s their choice, made with their market data and their strategy. I think we should respect that, and not consider ourselves to be better informed than their own staff.

Daniel then goes on to consider the counterarguments. Here they are…

OK, but Google has never developed a phone much less a physical product

To which he says “Hey, companies evolve”. True. Maybe they could do it, but it’s an absolutely huge deal to get phone hardware right first time. Remember Apple’s first iPhone? No, not the one with the multitouch interface, the one they produced with Motorola in 2005. If Apple — a hardware company — felt the need to only dip their toe gingerly into the handset market, then Google would surely be foolhardy to dive straight in and expect first-time success.

Suppose Google did this: It would cost a fortune

Yes, this really is a non-issue. Google surely doesn’t have any money worries.

Daniel then goes on to propose how Google might actually have done it. But by now — sorry — it’s wishful thinking, though I’d love him to be right — goodness knows I’d like to get my hands on an Android phone. Hell, just this week I lost the stylus from my 8-year-old Palm Vx, and if that doesn’t create a pressing need to buy a whole new handset gadget thingy, I don’t know what is. But no amount of wishful thinking is going to change reality, and part of that reality is that a Google Android phone isn’t realistic this year or next. Maybe in 3-4 years they’ll have evolved enough to get there, but not before Samsung and co get their products out there first.

For the record, here are my predictions…

1. The first Android phones will come out this year, and there will only be two of them. This is because “phones this year” has been promised, the Alliance will lose some face if it fails to meet this, and two phones is the minimum needed to make it true (since “phones” is plural).
2. However, the first few such handsets will be very disappointing, partly because the first versions of anything so radical are disappointing, and partly because the hardware requirements will be slightly ahead of what’s comfortably possible. (Not “possible”, just “comfortably possible”.) So you’ll get things like poor battery life, sluggish touch screen response, etc. The hardware will all technically work, but it won’t be really satisfying.
3. I reckon late Q1/early Q2 2009 will see the first decent Android phones — that’s just enough time for the second-wave manufacturers to have learned from those in the first wave.
4. There will be some damaging confusion about what apps can run on what hardware. That’s because different hardware manufacturers will have different hardware supporting different services (some will have compasses, some not, some will be phones, others will be MIDs, etc).

And then following on from 4 one of two things will happen. Either the whole thing will splinter, with some core applications running on most or all hardware, and other applications only running on specific hardware. Or everyone will realise that the only way to exploit the market will be to produce hardware which reliably runs a single standard Android stack, and to compete on the hardware implementation. Personally, I hope the latter happens, but the pessimist in me suspects the former will.

Ho hum. Those are my predictions for the future. What ever you do, don’t hold me to them.

Tags: android, gphone, google

Why do I think this is a smart move? Because she doesn’t appear to be over-estimating her skills and experience. Flickr became an incredible success, and that is undoutedly due to Caterina and Stewart’s uncommon vision, leadership and so on. But a quick glance at the market shows that Flickr’s success must also have been due to a very large dose of good luck.

So Caterina has a very great deal of skill and (now) experience, but she doesn’t have magic powers. And so rather than pretending that she can pull off another Flickr by herself, she’s instead moving into a team position in an existing company. She’s not trying to kid herself or anyone else about her abilities, but rather making an honest contribution. That feels like a rare act of self-understanding from a web pioneer.

Tags: caterinafake, hunch, flickr, startups