John McLaughlin, Web Designer, Lanarkshire, Scotland

So Microsoft has been copying Google’s search results. Should we be surprised? After all they’ve been trying to copy everything Apple’s been doing for the last 20 or so years.

What makes it interesting this time though is that rather than copying Apple, they’ve trained their photocopiers onto Google and have been using Google’s search results to improve  their own competing search engine, Bing. Now Google, which never tires of proclaiming the goodness of all that is ‘open’, is going mental. Really.

Google has done nothing but steal other companies ideas since it started, that’s old news (Overture, Yahoo! etc…) and recently has been attempting to clone Apple’s iPhone to make it’s own competing platform, Android, the codebase of which it basically stole from Sun and rewrote just enough to avoid a lawsuit (which hasn’t worked and it is currently being taken through the courts by Sun’s new owners).

Google constantly harps on about ‘openness’ while criticising Apple for being ‘closed’ all the while stealing almost every good idea the company has. It would appear that Google wants it both ways, when it suits it to be open, it’s open. When it suits it to be closed, as is the situation with its own prized search algorithm, it’s very, very closed.

Why is this hypocrisy never highlighted in media? I read in the press today that Microsoft has being caught stealing, but never the other way around. Google’s plan for a smartphone before Apple unveiled the iPhone was exactly like the Blackberry and Windows phones of the day. No touchscreen and a million buttons. As soon as they saw the iPhone they copied it almost exactly, even down to most of the icon designs. Hardly a word of criticism just lots of crap about how good ‘openness’ is.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops and if Google is finally going to be called out for its ‘closed is evil except when is suits us’ stance. I can see the wheels slowly coming off the Android bandwagon. Fragmentation is causing a lot of problems and its success, if you can call it that, is really down to the coalition of the losers. Namely, the handset manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, LG etc… who don’t have an operating system of their own but still need to sell smartphones as you can’t make money on cheap feature phones anymore.

Sure, Google makes money from searches made on Android phones but as they are, ahem, open, there’s nothing to stop manufacturers changing the default search engine away from Google as some have already started to do. In that case Google does not make a single penny on that phone sale (Microsoft and maybe Yahoo will though…) but it still paid to develop the operating system. In contrast Apple makes over $400 on every iPhone sale. This story has a long way to go.

Absolute nonsense piece in The Guardian asking if the iPhone is about to lose its mojo. I’m surprised how many people still read newspapers when they serve up piles of tosh like this. The Guardian is actually my favourite paper but this is one of the laziest and most one-sided pieces of journalism I’ve seen for a while.

There’s ample evidence available which shows that Verizon was desperate to get hold of the iPhone as its been struggling to attract new subscribers, something that AT&T has been doing at a much faster rate thanks to iPhone (and despite its much talked about inferior network quality).

The real story here should be whether Android can keep its momentum going now that the iPhone is available on both big networks, but the author prefers to say that the Verizon launch is too late to make a difference, despite the fact that smartphones only count for about a quarter of current US phone sales, leaving three quarters of the market still to play for.

You often just take what you read in the papers as being true, yet whenever they cover something that you have some knowledge of yourself you often see errors everywhere and this piece is no different. Poorly researched sensationalist rubbish that should have no place in a serious newspaper.

Blackberry maker RIM is set to manufacture 1 million of its new Playbook tablets this quarter alone. The Playbook looks to be the first proper competitor to the iPad in what looks set to be a busy year on the tablet front.

Although the Sumsung Galaxy Tab has been out for a couple of months, it’s running version 2.2 of Android which makes it effectively little more than a 7″ Android phone. The Playbook by contrast runs the QNX operating system which RIM purchased last year to run its next generation devices as the current Blackberry OS is at the end of the road, completely outclassed by Android and iOS.

Early reports about the Playbook are very complimentary, its powerful dual core Tegra 2 processor appears to offer plenty of performance, quick web browsing and impressive multitasking. The main concern would appear to be question marks over battery life with some reports claiming 3 – 5 hours compared to the iPad’s 10+.

Google has just thrown a huge spanner into the issue of web standards support with the news that it’s going to remove support for H.264 video in it’s popular Chrome browser, a major blow to the proposed HTML5 standard.

The company intends to replace H.264 support with the multimedia container format WebM, which is unsupported by most current browsers as well as offering inferior video quality.

Another major stumbling block is that unlike H.264, WebM does not offer hardware support, meaning that all decoding of video will have to be done in software. This is extremely costly in terms of efficiency and is the main reason why Flash video, which also lacks hardware support, uses so much device computing power and runs so poorly on mobile devices.

It certainly seems like a crazy move from Google and it will certainly be interesting to see if Google will remove H.264 support from Chrome within Android, and whether H.264 support will be removed from the Google owned YouTube.

Really. Jaguar has just announced the stunning C-X75 supercar concept that deserves to be called the world’s most beautiful and exciting hybrid vehicle.

Designed to celebrate their 75th birthday and to herald a new design direction for the company, the C-X75′s beauty is more than skin deep.

Powered by four 195bhp electric motors, one at each wheel, the C-X75 will hit 205mph and has a range of 68 miles. Now for the exciting bit. When the electricity runs out it gets topped up by two gas turbine engines made by UK specialist Bladon Jets, running on either diesel or renewable biofuels. The turbines don’t drive the wheels, they charge the battery pack with the car continuing to be propelled by the powerful electric motors.

The design is inspired by Jaguar’s iconic mid-60′s racing prototype, the XJ13. Only one of these amazing machines was ever built and it’s considered by many to be the most beautiful Jaguar ever. The C-X75 successfully updates the XJ13 shape and shows that Jaguar can produce cars that are modern, sharp and interesting without resorting to the ultra-aggressive design language of its German rivals. Now if only they would actually make it…

Apple today announced the brand new Apple TV. So far this device has been given ‘hobby’ status from Apple as it’s not matched the sales figures achieved by the likes of the iPhone and iPod.

The latest version of Apple TV is less than a quarter the size of the outgoing model and does away with storage completely, relying on streaming from either the iTunes Store or any other computers in the vicinity which have the latest version of iTunes installed.

It looks slick, but like the previous version is compromised by mostly relying on iTunes rental content for TV viewing capability. One interesting feature is that any iOS device can now stream directly to it, so pictures and video taken on your iPhone can be viewed easily on your TV.

Apple announced a huge and very welcome reduction in price to only $99 which sounded great until I seen that UK customers are being asked to stump up £99. Not fair.

Great post from Neven Mrgan on the subject of the new iMac compared to its two main all-in-one competitors. He’s not comparing the machines themselves but their websites.

This is one area where Apple continuously excels and the competition is beyond hopeless. Check out the URL’s for each product page. The iMac is just www.apple.com/imac. Simple, compact and memorable (just like the site itself). You won’t believe the mess of the HP page and it’s 4 line URL.

The simplicity Apple brings to the naming of its products actually says a lot about them. Mac’s tend to be quite elegant, uncluttered and easy to use. Would you prefer an Apple MacBook or an HP Pavilion Dv6-2113sa Entertainment? Or maybe an Acer Aspire Timeline 4810TZG-414G32MN. How about a Packard Bell Easynote Butterfly XS-EV-001UK? Thought not…

Here’s a question for you, how do you spend £105 million building a website?

The answer it seems is to get some UK Government civil servants involved. The Central Office of Information have published a report on the costs and quality of selected UK Government websites in 2009-10 and it makes eye-watering reading.

The staid www.businesslink.gov.uk site cost a stunning £35 million per year over 3 years to build.

As someone who has experience in designing websites I simply cannot fathom how you can spend, in one year, £6.2 million on strategy and planning, £4.4 million on design and build and £4.4 million on testing. They also managed to spend £4.7 million in a year on hosting for a site which only gets a million visits per month (it works out that each visit to the site cost an incredible £11.78).

Apple today announced some major new products, with long overdue updates to the iMac, Mac Pro, Cinema Display and an innovative new multi-touch trackpad for desktop systems they’re calling the Magic Trackpad.

Only a couple of years ago these products would have been launched with some fanfare, but now only the iMac even makes it onto the Apple homepage (and then only very small at the bottom of the page along with the iPhone case program and the iOS 4.01 software update). The big story is still that the “iPhone 4 is here”, old news now surely.

It really does show where Apple is heading though. The external Mac Pro case design hasn’t seen a major update for over 7 years (over 4 generations in computer time) and before today the Mac Pro hadn’t received any updates at all for over a year and a half. The iMac, once the biggest thing in Apple land, had gone over a year before this update.

Apple certainly does seem to be relegating it’s OS X machines to second class citizen status as it concentrates on the iPhone and iPad which now account for more revenue than desktop and laptop Mac divisions added together.

Sweet Jesus, according to Slashdot the British Royal Navy submarines are now running Microsoft Windows. Hardly a week goes by without huge security scares involving Microsoft products so surely it’s crazy to see that our fleet of NUCLEAR submarines will now be running Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations.

I understand that they are trumpeting a huge cost saving (which will come almost entirely from the use of commodity hardware replacing the specialist and extremely expensive custom hardware of old) but surely a Linux/Unix based system would have been cheaper and much, much more secure. I mean, Windows 2000 and XP are a hackers dream and a security nightmare, surely Vista/Windows 7 with their much heralded improvements in security should have been the OS of choice if it absolutely HAD to involve Microsoft.

My God, we’re talking of nuclear submarines here, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking of what could go wrong…