Stephen Fry's Blog, page 5

December 1, 2011

Smartphones Arms Race

For some weeks now my jacket pockets have been bulging in an unsightly manner as I have gone about the world with a BlackBerry Bold 9900, two HTC Android handsets, the "Rhyme" and the "Sensation XL with Beats Audio" and the all new Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows for Mobiles 7.5 "Mango".

Nokia Lumia 800

What's the smartphone world up to at the moment? Well, mostly we have had to witness the sorry spectacle of patent suits and counter-suits between Samsung, HTC, Apple, Google, Nokia – in fact all the big players in the game, each of them shelling out huge sums in lawyers' fees for cases where they are fighting each other or those creepy companies who have invented and given the world nothing but stealthily bought up patents over the years and now hope to rake in many tens of millions. By way of retaliation and to prevent more of this, a consortium consisting of some of the biggest beasts in the jungle – Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion amongst others – paid four and half billion dollars for Nortel, while Google splashed out even more impressively, paying twelve and half billion for Motorola Mobility and its 17,000 patents. Yes, 17,000. How many patent lawyers charging how much an hour will it take to work through that portfolio? The mind boggles.

Do we remember any of this happening in the auto industry? Does whoever came up with the limited slip differential get a licence from every car that uses one? Or the inventor of fuel injection, the overhead camshaft or the wishbone chassis? Did it happen in the manufacture of radio and television sets? Maybe it did but we just didn't know about it. To the outsider the current situation resembles nothing so much the bloodiest kind of shark feeding-frenzy.

Large corporations can at least look after themselves. The problem is that smaller, ever creepier parasitic corporations, "patent trolls", have been currently making life hell for individual third-party app developers too, bombing them with Cease and Desist letters asserting that the app they have designed has used, probably in all innocence, some algorithm, routine or in-app purchasing technique that has been sneakily hoarded by the company – an algorithm, routine or technique that would certainly have been independently invented by hundreds of different app developers anyway. Earlier this year it seems that in the case of the most notorious of these companies, Lodsys, Apple stepped in on behalf of the developers

Well it's not an area I have any expertise in, but it does leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Of course original creations and inventions should be protected, but as with the case of musical copyright I would argue (as I did here at the iTunes Festival in London in July 2009, the periods of greatest creativity have been those where weak copyright has prevailed. It is, to (mis)quote, the fencing master in Scaramouche, like holding a bird. Clutch too tight and you will crush it, too loose and – pah! – she will fly away.

Anyway, while all this goes on, the multi-billion dollar business of trying to get you to buy into a smartphone continues apace. There are, I'm sure I don't need to remind you, four big players here. RIM, who make the BlackBerry that once dominated the business world almost entirely, Apple, whose iPhone utterly transformed the idea of what a smartphone could be, the Google Android Open Handset Alliance which was (cough) inspired by Apple to produce their own not strikingly dissimilar operating system and finally, last year, Microsoft, who threw their hat in the ring with Windows Mobile 7, now called just plain Windows Phone.

They all take apps, they all can play YouTube films, but only the Android devices have Adobe Flash – and most Androiders will try and avoid using it very much. Everything Apple said about it when Steve Jobs declared the iPhone would never carry it has turned out to be true and Adobe themselves have finally come to realise this and to accept the inevitability of HTML 5 constituting the proper way forward.

There is a core of must-have productivity apps these days that is beginning to dominate: every operating system has its version of Kindle and Evernote for example, or Dropbox (in the case of Windows Mobile only a free client app at the moment) – the latter two cloud-based utilities allow users to ensure that the files they create on their laptop or desktop are also available on their tablet or smartphone. And vice versa. If you get me. Plenty of security or photo utilities like 1Password or DropImage for example, are beginning to get a similar kind of traction, by being Dropbox savvy.

So in the end, what I suppose I am trying to say is that these phones I have been using are all converging somewhat. I find I am using email clients on all them that are intelligently plugged into Gmail and allow me to do anything in terms of archiving and drafting that I could do with a desktop app like Sparrow or by Gmailing on the web. I use Dropbox on all the devices, and I use Kindle and Evernote too. Each system has its official Twitter app and a variety of third-party options available through their App Store, Market, Marketplace, App World or whatever they might choose to call it.

Little arms races take place between the systems: Apple released the iPhone 4S complete with built in voice recognition for every app that uses a keyboard, as well as the much feted, mocked, loved, tolerated, abused, seduced and shown-off Siri, "your personal assistant". Just yesterday an Android equivalent Cluzee was announced (who dreams up these names? Are they paid? No, I mean in actual money. Really?).

New ways of integrating GPS, mapping and intelligent shopping, parking, sight-seeing, navigating and trekking come along all the time, but to be perfectly frank things have got to the stage where each of the four systems can be said to offer broadly the same functions and capabilities. Which leaves us, as it always did, with the question of preference. Which experience is most satisfying, most fun, most reliable and most desirable? Or to put it another way, which is the least fiddly, the least flaky and the least intuitive? I can't claim to have a definitive answer for that. It would be like telling you which breed of dog is best. Opinion, emotional attachment, aesthetics, social pressure and cost will always come into play quite as much as functionality.

We live in hard times and these gismos are not cheap. Your network operators offer upgrade paths that may seem slow to those who want the newest phone now, but it is worth either phoning up or going in to your local store and turning on the charm. One hears stories of some lucky people getting upgraded because the assistant they spoke to seemed to be in a good mood while others whose accounts were identical have been met with nothing but blank indifference.

So to the devices themselves.

BlackBerry Bold 9900

Recent news has been bad, very bad, for RIM. I have tried to like their terribly flawed Playbook tablet, but failed to find it had any part to play in my life. I have always thought their original Bold handset was as perfect in its day as a phone could be, and was pleased that after the catastrophe of the Storm and the ho-hum of the Torch they finally produced a month or two ago their Bold 9900, a phone that seamlessly blends touchscreen and keyboard capabilities in a totally satisfying way. If you are a happy BlackBerry fan this will be the phone that you want. Battery life used to be the BB's great selling point when compared to power-hungry rivals, but what with the way apps use 3G and Wi-Fi and mapping and GPS and Bluetooth, you can easily find yourself out of juice half way through the afternoon if you've been hitting the phone hard. But this is true of all the devices under consideration. Blackberry, like the HTC devices, can at least offer removable batteries. The new Bold is also one of the first to offer "Near Field Communication", a standard yet to be widely implemented that will allow the phone to activate other devices close to it, such as smartpay machines and, of course, other phones or computers.

In the wider corporate context, the world of Enterprise which has been the bedrock of BlackBerry's business success has been slowly slipping away from RIM. As a result they announced only yesterday that they will be allowing their Enterprise Management Suite to work with other platforms. A sign of weakness, but also a recognition of the inevitable, as most commentators have agreed. This move may allow them to stay in the game, even if they will never again be quite the force they once were.

The two HTC phones I've been playing with reveal the startling turn around rate that goes on in Taiwan, where HTC are based. They seem to bring out new Android and Windows phones four times a year. It is getting very hard to tell which kind of Desire or Sensation you have and what the difference between them is. The Sensation XL With Beats, is as big a phone as I've seen in a long while. For all its size, the 4.7" LCD screen doesn't excite with colour richness in quite the way that the AMOLED displays of many rivals do, I'm thinking of the Samsung Galaxy for example. There's an 8 megapixel camera, all the HTC Sense scenes and widgets and pages full of the useful free bundled software that Android users have come to expect. There's a video store called Watch which has a reasonable selection of films for downloading and, most importantly of all, there are the Beats that give the device its strange name. You will probably be aware of Dr Dre and his Beats earphones; well, a pair of these come with the Sensation XL and baked in is his personally tweaked "Beats Audio Technology". I have absolutely no interest in such things to be honest. The sound appeared to be excellent, but maybe it suits someone with a different kind of music collection. I don't suppose the hip-hop legend had Wagner and Glenn Gould in mind when tweaking the audio for HTC. With a single core 1.5GHz and 768MB or RAM such a large phone seems significantly underpowered. And when the next flavour of Android comes out (mine is running Gingerbread 2.3.5) it will be a question as to whether this behemoth will be up to the task of coping with whatever demands Honeycomb and Icecream Sandwich make of it (in case you wonder what I'm drivelling about, Android name each full new release after a cake, ice-cream or pudding. We started with Cupcake, Donut and Éclair who knows where we'll go after Honeycomb).

HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio™

So, not a bad phone, but not a great one. Its slightly smaller sister, the dual core Sensation SE seems a more sensible solution to me, a very similar device but with just a bit more oomph.

Compared to either the Rhyme seems absolutely tiny, although in truth it is about the size of an iPhone. I can't quite make the Rhyme out. It has two new hardware features; one is a docking station that turns it into a beautiful alarm clock if you locate it on your bedside table. The other is most extraordinary. It is a long string with a small white cube on one end and a mini-jack on the other. The idea is that when your phone is in your bag, you attach this "glowing purse charm" into your earphone socket and leave the white cube outside the bag. When the phone rings the cube glows and you can follow the string down into your bag and find your phone. Here's a film if you can't make sense of the way I've tried to explain it.

HTC Rhyme

This accessory and the fact that the default colour of the phone is a lush kind of purple alerts us to the distressing truth. HTC is making a phone for women. Women are always fiddling about in their bags for their phones and so they need a "glowing purse charm" to help them out. At least, this is the implication: but let's be frank, the sight of women diving into their bags trying to locate their phones is not so rare. Motorola didn't do too badly with Razr devices aimed squarely at pink-loving, fun-loving ladies, and far be it from me to decry HTC's attempt to attract a female following too. As a phone the Rhyme is not a stand-out. It is perfectly fine, it is, as are all Androids, especially those front-ended by HTC Sense, much more customisable and pimpable than rivals, so if you don't like the default screen you can easily change it. Well, fairly easily – there is a shallow but undeniable learning curve and I have seen people throw their Androids across the room because they couldn't work out how to get two clocks with two different time zones onto their home screen at once.

And so we come to the most important (in terms of corporate destinies at least) phone of all. The Nokia Lumia 800.

The story of Nokia's rise from lumber, wellington boot and lavatory paper company to world domination of the mobile phone market is the stuff of legend (and admirably told here, should you be interested. The inexorable relaxation of their grip as Apple's iPhone reshaped the world of mobile telephony has been a sad sight to behold. Their venerable Symbian operating system was a miracle of compactness, reliability and power economy and is still in use (and will continue to be) in fantastical numbers around the world. But their share price has slipped as their market share has fallen here in the west and grim prognostications were being made about the Finnish giant.

They bit the bullet last year and realised that they were going to have to play or leave the table. An alliance with Microsoft was announced. Here were two corporations who understood all too well the pain that comes when what seems like unassailable domination turns with such dizzying speed into a humiliating downward spiral. Neither had reached anything like rock bottom and they were cash rich enough to invest in their new partnership. The hope of each CEO, Stephen Elop of Nokia and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, is that Nokia's brand reputation as a reliable builder of phones and Microsoft's reach and penetration as a software provider will allow the alliance to face up to Apple and Google and carve a share in this quite unbelievably valuable market. The stakes are very very high.

I was present at the launch of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7 last year. I liked what I saw and was happy to say so. There were many similarities with the release of the iPhone in 2007. No microSD slot, a GUI precisely governed by MS, at launch no cut and paste and naturally a very small choice in third party apps… but there was much to like. The smoothness and glide, the cleverly baked-in social networking elements, the (only to be expected) quality of MS Office and Xbox Live compatibility. LG, Samsung and HTC were the two major manufacturers for the OS then and they each did a good job.

And now Nokia has stepped in with two models, the Lumia 800 and 710. I haven't had any experience of the latter, which is a more affordable version of the 800, with 8 GB of internal flash memory to the 800's 16.

Now, Microsoft's approach has been ever more "walled garden" than Apple's, and Windows Phone devices are the least pimpable of all. You can change the colour of the signature tiles that make up the GUI, you can have a black background or a white background. You can certainly introduce wallpaper, but that is about it. Ringtone customisation has arrived and the app Marketplace is filling up with well designed version of old friends like Angry Birds and IMDB as well as the essentials like Evernote that I've already discussed.

So all I can do when I describe the Nokia is tell you that it is an elegant candybar (familiar to those who remember the N9) it has a very bright and likable AMOLED screen, a rear 8 megapixel camera (no front facing one) and the obligatory three touch screen buttons at the bottom: Back, Home Screen and Search.They have decided against the removable batteries found in HTC and Samsung Windows Phone devices.

Nokia have added their own goodies, Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Nokia Music. Nokia Drive is a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system (with selectable voices) which works extremely well and is certainly enticement enough to buy the phone, given the cost of some GPS apps. Nokia maps seems an oddly redundant replication of what MS's Bing already offers, but it's there, along with something called "Local Scout" which is yet another way to see where the nearest Flat White or pizza parlour might be. Nokia Music would seem to be in direct competition with the Zune based music store that's also a de facto presence in all Windows Phone handsets. I dare say Stephen and Steve banged heads a bit over that one, but compromise seems to be the order of the day. No harm in more choice.

Mango, which is the codename for the latest version of the OS is slick, smooth and a pleasure to play with. If you are of an Android turn of mind you might find the inability to pimp frustrating, but for the minimalists of this world the cleanness, the slide, glide and flow are sumptuous and delightful. It's easy to get connected via a Windows Live or Hotmail account (indeed that's a necessity if you want to take advantage of all the social networking features) and to set up a Gmail or any other email account is straightforward too. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can all be embedded into your identity allowing seamless transitions and postings. An ever changing display of your friends faces (if like me you add pictures to your address book) will greet you every time you fire the phone up. The feature that will grow with Windows Phone is "live tiling" which will allow tiles to alter according to need or notification. A BA app tile will turn into a boarding pass QR code when you check in for example. Multitasking has arrived too, after a fashion. It seems to apply to some apps but not others and I haven't figured out how to quit an app that's running in the background. That's probably just my stupidity, and I certainly haven't found speed in the least compromised by having four or five apps running at once.

The Lumia, like the iPad and iPhone, takes a microsim card, though in the Lumia's case via a rather fiddly system of flaps that have to pressed and slid and prodded and poked. Each time you connect your USB cable the flap has to be popped and lifted and I fear that many phones will have lost theirs after just a few weeks. Nokia have rather overdone their attempt to be entirely sleek and finished here.

I should imagine the closest rival phone to the Lumia 800 is the HTC Titan, which offers very similar specs. I wish Nokia well. For them to fall by the wayside would be sad indeed. They have produced a phone here that should have great appeal to first time Smartphone buyers who are comfortable with the name Nokia and pleased by the elegant simplicity of Windows Phone.

Windows Phone Mango looks and feels great, it is simple and yet – the more you drill down and play – remarkably flexible and versatile.

It is an anxious time for the corporate chiefs in Finland and Redmond, WA. Much gnawing of nails. If the Nokia gains momentum and is a sales success this Christmas, if the number of Windows Phone users increases, then so will the variety of apps, and that critical mass will also increase the resolve of Microsoft to keep innovating with their tiles and their widgets and encourage Nokia to produce new and ever more interesting and desirable devices.

If, if, if …

Stephen

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Published on December 01, 2011 14:41

October 11, 2011

iPhone 4S

Apple's loss last week was enormous. I wrote all that I felt I could in the blog farewell on this website to a man I was lucky enough to know a little and admire a great deal. Most are probably now profoundly sick of hearing either how much he was under or overestimated as a man and as a figure of his times. I never knew of any human beings whose achievements were exactly estimated.

The word "estimate" is the clue here. I only know that if I had grandchildren and they heard me tell of my meetings with him they would feel as I might if my grandfather had told me about meeting Henry Ford, Rockefeller or Irving Thalberg. It might be, after all, that Aldous Huxley overestimated Henry Ford by making the dystopian future in his Brave New World name its calendar after him.

Some people become synecdoches, symbols or metonyms. Whether you think he was overpraised by some, underappreciated by others or whether you don't give a hoot doesn't really mean much to me. He mattered to me enormously. The standards he set, the passionate belief he had in the way that technology, the arts, design, fun, elegance and delight could all co-exist, the eternal pushing for higher standards, the refusal to accept standard paradigms in anything, either the conventional modus operandi of corporate affairs, technological matters or market practices was an example from which the world will continue to learn.

Believe me, there will be more than 500 books published in the next year which will claim to be able to teach you how to improve your business/profits/image/career by using the "Jobs example". How he would have loathed that. I have sat on judging panels that have wanted to give him extremely prestigious awards. He only ever accepted awards on behalf of the company, not on his own. Whatever your view of him, huckster, snake-oil salesman, evangelist or hero, the whole point is that copying someone who disdained copying anything would be the dumbest joke of all.

The wider legacy will be determined by that bastard son of a mongrel bitch, history, but there is a short-term one. I had put into my hand a new iPhone 4S just eight or so hours before Steve Jobs left the world. You can imagine, I hope, the ambivalence I felt as I tested and trialled this phone in the knowledge that it was the last fully operational Apple device he would ever see.

Apple has always come up with new iPhone models at regular intervals. The very first appeared in June 2007, the following year saw the Apple 3G which allowed, as the name suggested, 3G data transmission speeds and introduced the idea of the App Store with the resultant explosion of third-party apps, whose imagination, range, variation and ingenuity still continue to astonish.

In 2009 came the iPhone 3GS. "Oh," said the world, in a rather hurt, disappointed voice, "that's rather odd. Why, it looks just like the 3G. It's hardly different at all."

The "S" stood for speed and some felt that a souped-up 3G barely qualified as a new phone at all. Why the need for the already tiresome cliche photographs of queues outside the 5th Avenue store in New York and the unhealthy sight of chubby, bearded geeks brandishing their new boxes? Surely Apple was exploiting this whole hype launch cycle without any real innovation to back it up?

In fact the release of the 3GS coincided with a new operating system, 3.0, which gave us the much-needed cut and paste facility whose embarrassing absence had been a distressing nuisance, it added MMS, and a whole new suite of extras, Voice Control and tethering, for example, all of which were also possible on an "old" 3G or even original iPhone 1 if they upgraded their firmware, but which really proved themselves on the 3GS's faster Cortex A8 processor.

Despite the initial disappointment, the success of the 3GS was instantaneous, Apple sold a million units in the first weekend, and the model's continued triumph created the conditions that allowed for the Apple iOS product line that followed: the iPhone 4 and the iPad. To put it crudely, the 3GS was such an outstanding win that it made Apple cash-rich enough to be able to move forward in all kinds of ways.

The iPad, aside from its other original features, was powered by Apple's own proprietary chip, the A4. The iPad 2 by the A5. Apple was able to take more and more control over the implementation of every detail, integrating their own chips, radios and antennae in new ways that allowed for increased reliability, fluency, speed and – crucially – battery life. Indeed, the energy efficiency of the iPad remains one of its most astonishing features.

This week history repeats itself: a "new" iPhone which has the same form-factor as its predecessor but with an "S" added, again, for speed. Many might express similar disappointment, but as was the case with the 3GS – there also arrives a new operating system, iOS 5.0, which will work on previous models (but not the 3G or iPhone 1 I believe).

iOS 5.0 allows Over The Air updating and iTunes syncing, gives (AT LAST!!) a glossary so that we can make up our own text abbreviations and correct bad auto-correct habits (if ever I type "tou" it now automatically becomes "you"), offers a vast, customisable range of notification options, including a draw-down curtain familiar to Android users. iOS 5 also integrates Twitter globally so that I can go to a website, for example, and see that "Tweet" has been added to the list of sharing options available.

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You will see from my screenshot that one can create a reading list too from Safari. There's tabbed browsing also. And iMessaging, which means you can "text" from an iPod touch or iPad.

Most noticeable is the all-new iCloud, which replaces the never wildly successful MobileMe. iCloud is free and allows users to store their data, photos, apps, music and whole iPhone identity, look, feel and functionality "up there" in that happy space we call the cloud. In fact this cloud is, I believe, a mountainside in North Carolina. MobileMe users can transfer their identities seamlessly and easily, others simply create a new account for free by following simple instructions. There is an option to enable Photostream, which keeps every picture you take for ever. Be warned. You cannot delete a picture once it is in Photostream. There may well be blushes within families who share devices and discover that a photo they would rather not be seen is permanently on view, but they'll have to learn the hard way. iOS 5 will make your existing iPhone so like a new one that you might even forget the iPhone 4S …

4S is the first iPhone with a proprietary dual core A5 chip, Apple is claiming it can process graphics up to seven times faster. Other increases in performance will strengthen the iPhone's position in the handheld gaming market. For users like me it is apparent that the new 8MP front-facing camera, with its five-element lens, facial recognition and image stabilisation is fabulously impressive, as are increased speeds in data browsing and general app loading in everyday use.

Apple's new cash richness also allowed them to buy a little third-party app called Siri, which billed itself as a personal assistant. I remember writing a joshing note to Jo, my PA, in February last year when Siri came out. "Hm … Jo, Siri? Siri, Jo? … Hard to tell …" And then Siri seemed to disappear. Little did we know that Apple had bought this (originally DARPA developed) technology and was due to bake it into its new phone.

Siri is the USP of the 4S, it is essentially Voice Control that really works. You talk to it, it talks back. You can ask it questions in natural English: "what is 436 times 734?" and you get an answer neatly displayed on what looks like old-fashioned punched computer paper. Wolfram Alpha is used as the database, and its elegance suits the experience perfectly.

Here are three pictures that show my experience when I asked Siri "What is the capital of Finland?" You can scroll down the final one and see a map and other details. It's fast and very very impressive. Even better, it senses when you bring your device to your ear so you can talk to it as if you're on the phone to someone, rather than having to endure the embarrassment of yelling at it at arms length. So good is the voice recognition that it is now built into all apps that use a keyboard. For the first time I've found that I can happily and accurately dictate texts and emails. Dragon Dictate are going to be very sore about it, but I have no doubt they will collude with others to bring a similar service to Android and Windows 7 phones as soon as they can. For this really works. For the moment local searches are only available for the US, but that will soon change, one assumes.

Siri, the high quality and ultra-fast camera, 30 fps 1080p HD video, globally available voice recognition and the introduction of two antennae (the phone seamlessly switches between whichever is getting the strongest signal) are features that make the 4S irresistible; what is more, the unchanged form means that a whole new range of covers and accessories won't be required.

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If you are tired of the upgrade race or feel you can't justify the expense, you at least have the knowledge that iOS 5 will transform your existing iPhone enthrallingly.

In a sad, sad week for Apple, come a new phone and a new operating system that between them show the company still at the top of its game, still innovating, still implementing new technologies at a level of perfection and fluency that is only possible when you make, design and control it all: device, chip architecture and operating system.

Once again Apple is taking a lead and asking a lot of its competitors. I wish those competitors luck, for the better all smartphones are, the happier I am. If Steve Jobs's true legacy is that the devices every other company makes are so, so much better than they otherwise would have been, I don't think he would mind one bit.

Stephen x

Also published in The Guardian on the 12th October 2011

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Published on October 11, 2011 18:00

October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs

I last saw Steve Jobs a year and half ago. I spent an hour alone in his company while he showed me the latest piece of magical hardware to have come from the company he had founded in 1976, the yet to be released Apple iPad. Naturally I was flattered to have been approved by him to be the one to write a profile for Time Magazine and to be given a personal demonstration of the device of which he was so clearly proud and for which he had such high hopes. The excitement of him then handing me an iPad (after I had duly signed severe NDAs prohibiting my flaunting it in public until the embargo date had passed) and being able to play with it before the rest of the world had even seen one tickled my vanity and I would be dishonest if I did not confess to the childlike excitement, the pounding thrill, the absurd pride and the rippling pleasure I always feel on such occasions – emotions that have long been pointed out as pathological symptoms of the wilder shores of unreason that Apple idolatry induce in people like me and as a part of Steve Jobs's almost Svengali like powers of persuasion, and Barnum-like huckstering.

Of course, you might point out that he asked for me specifically because he knew that I admired him and that I would write a positive piece, that I was more or less a patsy who would deliver what he wanted. I would not deny that for a minute. I like to believe that if I had been disappointed with the iPad I would have said so and written it clearly and boldly, but fortunately that issue and the inner turmoil it would have caused never arose for the iPad and I fell in love instantly. A month or so after that meeting with Steve, the "magical tablet" launched and was received with the inevitable mixture of admiration, contemptuous dismissal and bored incomprehension that had greeted so many of Apple's previous products.

Like the original Apple computers, the Lisa, the Macintosh, the LaserWriter, the OS X operating system, the iMac, the iPod, the MacBooks and the iPhone before it, the iPad went on to reshape the landscape into which it had been born and to exceed the most optimistic sales forecasts and once again to make the Apple haters, doubters and resenters look like sullen fools. The contrast between those awful prophets and Apple's awesome profits was (and is) something to behold.

Using my white iPhone

It is a very dismal business when a great personality dies and the world scrabbles about for comment, appraisal and judgment. I have been asked in the last 24 hours to appear and to write and to call in to join in the chorus of voices assessing the life and career of this remarkable man. But what was Steve Jobs? He wasn't a brilliant and innovative electronics engineer like his partner and fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak. Nor was he an acute businessman and aggressively talented opportunist like Bill Gates. He wasn't a designer of original genius like Jonathan Ive whose achievements were so integral to Apple's success from 1997 onwards. He wasn't a software engineer, a mathematician, a nerd, a financier, an artist or an inventor. Most of the recent obituaries have decided that words like "visionary" suit him best and perhaps they are right.

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like "salesman", "showman" or the giveaway blunder "triumph of style over substance". The use of that last phrase, "style over substance" has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said "le style c'est l'homme – the style is the man" but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and "experts" who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

It would be vulgar to say that the proof of the correctness of Jobs's vision is reflected in the gigantic capitalisation value of the Apple Corporation, the almost fantastically unbelievable margins and the eye-popping cash richness which has transformed a company that was on the brink of collapse when Jobs arrived back in 1997 into the greatest of them all. All this despite low market share and an almost fanatical attention to detail and finish which would have 99% of CFO's weeping into their spreadsheets.

"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." Steve Jobs in an Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000

Which is not to say that abject worship is the only allowable viewpoint when it comes to the life and career of this magnificently complicated man. I am very glad that I did not work for him. I cannot claim he was a friend but over thirty year or so years I bumped into him from time to time and he was always warm, charming, funny and easy to talk to, yet I know, and the world has already been told enough times over the past few days and weeks, that he was a fearsome boss, often a tempestuous mixture of martinet, tyrant, bully and sulky child. His perfectionism, the absolute conviction and certainty in the rightness of his opinions and – I am afraid it is true, as it is of so many leaders, Churchill and other great figures not excluded – his propensity apparently to have originated an idea that he had previously dismissed but now suddenly owned and championed, these traits must have maddened his colleagues. But the charisma, passion, delight in detail, excitement and belief in the creation of a new future – the sheer magnetic force of the man made his many faults a forgivable and almost loveable part of his mystique and greatness.

The quality I especially revered in him was his refusal to show contempt for his customers by fobbing them off with something that was "good enough". Whether it was the packaging, the cabling, the use of screen space, the human interfaces, the colours, the flow, the feel, the graphical or textural features, everything had to be improved upon and improved upon until it was, to use the favourite phrase of the early Mac pioneers "insanely great". It had to be so cool that you gasped. It had to feel good in the hand, look good to the eye and it had to change things. It changed things because it made users want to use the devices as they had never been used before. As I used to say of the Mac in the early days, "it makes me jump out of bed early to start work". People may not think so but I'm as lazy as can be, and the creative, human-based implementation of technology in such a way as to encourage labour and thereby invigorate innovation and change is a remarkable achievement in so potentially dull a sector as computing.

Jobs said, when he presented the iPad to the world in 2010 that he regarded Apple as standing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. I pointed out that it might have been more accurate to say that Apple stood at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce. There is no doubt that as Disney's biggest shareholder, as the boss of Pixar, the company that virtually invented computer animated cinematography, Jobs was in a unique position to bang heads together when it came to getting studio and record label bosses to consent to copyright agreements for what was to become the iTunes store, just one of the massive "game-changing" contributions he made to technology and the arts.

A control freak? Well, since "freak" is always the word used in such a context, then yes. But it was that control that won the war, freakish or not. The so-called "walled-garden" approach whereby Apple make the hardware, the software and control third party access to the APIs and architecture of each device may madden many but they are precisely what allows the devices to work so well, so cleanly, so fluently out of the box. They allow longer battery-life, less heat, more stable operating and dozens of other enormous advantages. If different companies are making the firmware, software, chips, screens, operating system, radios and cases the results will always be far less coherent and usable devices. I have nothing against Android and admire the idea of an Open Handset Alliance. I don't want to be characterised as an incurable unthinking Apple "fanboi" – but I cannot fight the instinct that makes my hand always reach for the pocket with the iPhone in it when I have a Windows 7, a Blackberry and an Android just as available in other pockets. I have in the past set myself the task of using only an Android for two weeks, or only a Windows 7 phone or only a Blackberry and while it can be done (obviously) I am less content, more frustrated and crucially as far as I am concerned, less productive as a result. And the fact remains that it is so much easier to survive on an Android, a Windows 7 phone or a Blackberry nowadays precisely because they have all fundamentally modelled themselves on Apple criteria. They want to be smooth, graphically pleasing, they want the user to love and enjoy them. The frustratingly silly patent wars that are raging around the world between Google, Samsung, Apple and dozens of other companies would be a sad obsequy to Jobs's colossal achievements, but with such gigantic sums of money in so huge a market at stake it is little wonder that others will do all they can to "crack" Apple. Well that is fine, I have no shares in the company. So long as the way they crack Apple is to learn from Steve Jobs that style matters, that beauty matters, that joy, simplicity, elegance, harmony, charm, wit and quality matter – well, I don't care which company has the best stock market capitalisation.

Henry Ford didn't invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn't discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn't invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn't invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn't invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn't invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn't invent computers and he didn't invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish.

I once heard George Melly, on a programme about Louis Armstrong, do that dangerous thing and give his own definition of a genius. "A genius," he said, "is someone who enters a field and works in it and when they leave it, it is different. By that token, Satchmo was a genius." I don't think any reasonable person could deny that Steve Jobs, by that same token, was a genius too.

I will end with a story few people know. What you probably do know is that Jobs wooed Pepsi Cola boss John Sculley to Apple in 1985. He wanted him to do to IBM the unthinkable thing that he had done to Coca Cola: beaten the brand leader into second place. He won Sculley with the famous phrase, "do you want to sell fizzy sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?" Sculley came and a few months later, astoundingly, their disagreements came to such a head that Jobs found himself fired from the company he had founded.

You probably knew that. You probably knew he went on to found his own computer company NeXt – a black cube computer that ran a UNIX operating system, revealing Jobs's already growing conviction that the professionally popular UNIX, so suited to networking, should be the future kernel (if you'll forgive the geeky pun) of any sensible consumer oriented operating system.

It was on a NeXt machine that the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols, procedures and languages that added up to the World Wide Web, http, HTML, browsers, hyperlinks … in other words the way forward for the internet, the most significant computer program ever written was done on a NeXt computer. That is a feather in Steve Jobs's cap that is not often celebrated and indeed one that he himself signally failed to know about for some time.

After having written www, Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXt developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.

It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXt boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of the row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he'd be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.

Their work met however and it is through it that you are reading this. I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely. As the great writer, wit and sage John @Hodgman (who played the pasty-faced PC in the old Apple TV commercials) wrote a few hours after Steve's death "Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac".

"…and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, "this was a man!"

x Stephen

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Published on October 06, 2011 10:50

September 21, 2011

Mind Out

Don't Bragg

It was a great surprise to receive a letter some months ago from Lord Bragg (he of unimpeachable Melvynous South Banksy fame) asking if I might consider taking over from him as President of the charity MIND. Only a few years ago MIND had paid me the great compliment of appointing me their 2007 mental health "Champion" so I was fully aware of the organisation and the fine work they did.

MIND, as you may or may not know is, in its (I should now say "our") own words: "the leading mental health charity in England and Wales." This is not to take away from SANE and the indefatigable Marjorie Wallace, or the work done by dozens, indeed hundreds, of smaller more locally based mental health charities up and down the country. I cannot bear it when charities, of all institutions, regard each other as rivals or even enemies. The superb Time to Change for example, is a result of cooperation across the sector. It also gave me great pleasure when this coalition government, for all that it is not my idea of the political dream team of the century (but which government ever was?) made good strides towards placing the issue of stigma front and centre with their initiative Shift.

The Secret Life…

So, why me? Well, as some of you may know, five years ago I made two one hour films for the BBC called "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive," in which I told the story of my own history of cyclothymia, Bipolar Disorder, manic depression – call it what you will. Some of those I met in the course of making the films told harrowing and extraordinary stories of their struggles living with this common, and commonly misunderstood, mood disorder.

Those films certainly did seem to have quite an effect. I can quite truthfully say nothing I had ever done before or have done since, has resulted in such a mailbag. It sometimes seemed that as many doctors as lay people were writing to thank me or to take issue with or expand upon some point made in the programmes. Ross Wilson, the producer/director and I were very gratified when we were awarded an International Emmy. I had the honour too of being made a Fellow of Cardiff University: Professor Nick Craddock there had undertaken what was then I think the world's largest genetic study of bipolar disorder (warning, v scholarly!) and I was proud to accept the Fellowship as a way of showing my admiration for his team's work and his university's unstinting support of it. The Royal College of Psychiatrists got me all flustered and proud too by appointing me an honorary fellow. The College's campaign to encourage more talented medical students to choose psychiatry as a specialist study as they advance through their courses is immensely important. It seems that today's medical student regards mental health as a less "sexy" branch of medicine in which to specialise than cardiology, say or oncology. I can only hope that this soon changes, for the advances being made in neurology, genetics, pharmacology and endocrinology show that, in fact, studying the physiology of the brain and the nature of the mind is just about the most exciting field there is in all medicine.

Polar Opposites

As with all mental illnesses, the problems posed for the person afflicted with bipolar disorder are often matched by the suffering, embarrassment, distress and indignity endured by those who live with and love them. On top of this, worst and most pernicious off all, is the stigma that goes with mental illness. It is bad enough to be afflicted by a condition that destroys the ability to find savour, pleasure, joy, energy, purpose or hope in life without being stared at, mocked or dismissed as some kind of freak, weirdo, social misfit or fraudulent hypochondriac.

The awful black feelings, it should be pointed out at once, are only half of bipolar disorder, a condition which deals its blows by swinging between a depressed mood of hopelessness and its polar opposite (hence the name) – an elevated mood of euphoric grandiosity, energy, self-belief and sometimes an embarrassing loss of social or sexual inhibition. It is is easy to think that these upswings are a kind of compensatory bonus that allow manic depressives to be more creative and artistic than other people. While it may be true that certain celebrated writers, painters, composers, statesmen, warriors and inventors have appeared (inasmuch as such retrospective diagnosis can safely be believed) to have been manic depressives, anyone who lives with a seriously bipolar person can tell you that the manic elevated mood is in fact harder to cope with than the black depressed one and that "creative" is not a word one would often use of it. This is not even to mention the "mixed" or "transitional" states that often combine the worst aspects of both extremes.

Let no one be under any illusions. At its most serious, bipolar disorder can be a very very serious condition. Its morbidity rate is high, often because it can typically trace a descent from social norms and supportive structures into homelessness, friendlessness and all the disastrous effects on physical health that poverty, addiction, social rejection and loneliness bring in their train.

Those who think manic depression is a "celebrity disorder" made up by tabloid cuties to excuse their excesses, addictions and descents into bad behaviour, should look at mental health's most serious victims: the marginalised, the poor, the ethnically isolated, the lonely. They have no voice, save the jeers of stone and insult throwing louts, it is they who form the silent majority of sufferers.

Self Medication

It can be no surprise that so many with bipolar disorder, a condition over which they have no control, reach for something that can predictably lift or lower their mood at their bidding in their own time and under their own terms. Drugs and alcohol appear to offer at least that kind of relief. This is known in the trade as "self-medication" or amongst those without sympathy, imagination, sense or decency as "a feeble excuse for weakness" or "self-indulgent nonsense". But just imagine how tempting it is to reach for a bottle or narcotic powder: the intensity and misery can be numbed and life can seem more bearable. At a cost, naturally: a financial cost, a social cost, a physiological cost, a cost that can lead to ruin. As with all addictions progressively more of the stuff is needed to produce the same effect until inevitably the substance abuse becomes the problem, masking the mood disorder beneath.

Which is not to say that all alcoholics or drug addicts are bipolar or that all with bipolar disorder succumb to substance abuse. The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn't even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, "I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It's the only thing that works." For her. Lord knows, I'm not a doctor, and I don't understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

I'm lucky, but…

If I am to use my "name" such as it is, to bang the drum for the cause of increasing society's understanding and awareness of mental health and its issues, it is important for me to make sure that it is understood that I do know how lucky I am. Lucky to have friends, money and a light enough version of manic depression to make it less likely for me to suffer from the worst excesses of the condition.

I won't lie, however, and when asked as I occasionally am, I cannot pretend. There truly are days when what is known as "suicidal ideation" has consumed me and it has taken all the effort I have to keep me from choosing the exit door from which there is no return. When I have mentioned this in print or interview it has, quite naturally, distressed those close to me or those, knowing me or not, who care about my well-being. I realise this and also understand why people think it would be better for me to shut up about all that rubbish rather than appear to welter in the fancy exotic luxury of having an "interesting" condition. It is important for me, as much as for anybody else, to understand that while my particular mood disorder might be what Americans sometimes call "Bipolar Lite", it is still enough of a potential threat to my very existence for me to be wary about dismissing my version of this chronic condition out of respect for those who have it much worse.

Chronicling the chronic…

For some reason the word "chronic" often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, "chronic" means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps. Many in the psychiatric profession would suggest that neither talking nor drug therapies are as good on their own as they can be when used together. Some talk therapies might involve long term analysis, others utilise the quicker and more practical fix offered by methodologies like Cognitive Behavourial Therapy, which does not presume to understand root causes, but instead can offer tools and strategies for coping.

Other forms of mental ill-health…

I have gone on at some length about bipolar disorder because it is the condition I have most attempted to grapple with and comprehend. But there are all instances of mental health which eat away at the happiness and prosperity of our country. Issues of self-image, like the kinds of body dysmorphia that can lead to life-threatening eating disorders for example; then there is the rising incidence amongst the young of self-mutilation and other forms of self-harm, there are unipolar depression, schizophrenia, learning disabilities, ADHD, Tourette's, obsessive compulsive disorders of various kinds; there is autism and Asperger's and there are all manner of phobias, syndromes and conditions that society often finds it hard to separate from the personality and even the moral worth of the sufferer. It is not for me here to say that all behaviours, moods, reactions and attitudes are attributes of brain and nothing to do with character, personality and what we are used to thinking of as "goodness" and "wickedness" – but I think any reasonable person can accept that the brain, as an organ and the neural networks within it are quite as likely to suffer dysfunction as the back, the heart or the kidneys.

Of course the less merciful will say, " how convenient that makes it for every criminal to be able to plead this syndrome or that condition as an excuse for crime and anti-social behaviour." I am not pretending that this is not a real problem facing courts, but it is one that has been thought about hard for many many years and forensic criteria are constantly being established, declassified or refined. The best known collection of these definitions is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM, currently in its revised 4th edition, though soon to be reissued as the all new DSM 5. An unavoidably controversial publication, it seeks to distil current understanding of what is and what is not a "true" condition that passes empirical, rational testing in ways that everyone from a jury to an insurance company can agree upon or at least come close to understanding. In the forthcoming 5th edition, or so it is rumoured, the word "spectrum" will no longer be used to describe various sorts of autism, but rather each kind will be given its own individual ascription. In the its early editions, homosexuality was characterised as a disease, so it can be seen that the DSM is very much a work in progress and a reflection as much of public mores as eternal medical verities.

Why me…?

If you are in the public eye there are often many calls upon your time and name. It is, quite literally, impossible to accede to every demand that comes ones way, just in terms of patronage of societies or positions on their boards and committees, let alone agreeing to the numerous requests for public appearances, tweets, retweets and bloggings.

So I have to make choices. Many years ago I decided to devote time to the Terrence Higgins Trust, Europe's largest HIV/AIDS charity and busier now than it has ever been. I had reason enough, with friends dying in the 1980s, to align myself there. I have had experiences on my travels with wildlife conservation that have made it natural to accept a position as Vice President of Fauna and Flora International. There are other causes close to my heart because of their connections to the part of the country I grew up in or the passions that I pursue. To that end I've already written about the pleasure I derive from being a trustee of the Royal Academy and a director of Norwich City Football Club and I felt no less pride when asked to take over from Lord Attenborough last year as Chairman of the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly.

Just when I thought I had committed myself enough in all directions, along came the letter from Melvyn. He gave fifteen years of his life in service to MIND and they could have had no more passionate, purposeful or persuasive advocate. I was happy to accept therefore, giving only the warning that my life takes me all over the place and that I cannot ever pledge to be present at every board meeting or gathering that so busy and far-reaching an organisation as MIND is likely to want me at. They seem, thank goodness to understand that.

Not a poster child….

I hope too, that it is understood by others, that while I appreciate and recognise entirely why so many people email and tweet me about their own mental health issues it is a little difficult sometimes being considered the public face of an affliction like bipolar disorder. I felt proud to be able to make those programme about it, and I will continue when and where I can to try and address as much as anything the stigma and the lack of diagnosis that can make a hard condition harder, but it is not easy receiving so much mail, so much twitter traffic and having so many souls asking for advice, wondering how I am, seeking guidance on coping mechanisms for themselves or even requesting long distance diagnosis for themselves or others.

I sincerely do understand why people might want to, but in the end it's a disorder that at its worst is very serious and which, when I am lucky enough to be stable, I'd rather not constantly be reminded about, quizzed about, nudged about. I know it's foolish and ungracious to complain and I do understand why I am so commonly asked questions on the subject, even though it is a little like having lemon-juice dropped on a fresh cut.

Mental health is one of the last great taboos. I will do my best with MIND as they, along with others in the sector, fight hard against the injustice, ignorance, stigma and indifference which still threaten society's own good mental health. Where I can use the example of my own experiences I naturally will, but not at the risk of driving myself to the brink…

For those with a problem …

I can only end with this plea. If you think you have a mental health problem, see a doctor. Don't write to me, I really am not qualified! There are plenty of sites out there filled with advice and links to sites where you might find people with similar issues, MIND's own site is as good a place to start as I know.

If you do see a doctor and feel they are fobbing you off, do not allow stand for it. Insist upon your right to see another physician. Explain your symptoms as clearly and as honestly as you can – in terms of yourself and how you feel, not in terms of how you think others see you or how the world may or may not view you. A doctor who does not listen, counsel and suggest an approach to treatment is not worthy of their licence. But I'm afraid to have to tell you that such is current state of medical science, a lot of the work will have to be done by you. There are no magic bullets, either in drug or any other form, and it is a long journey that may involve mood diaries, changes in diet, exercise and sleep patterns and all kinds of solutions that are harder than a pill, a powder or a pint.

Best of luck. It may not seem it, but there are millions out there like you and there are thousands who want to help you feel better about life and yourself. MIND is one such and as its new president, I welcome you.

No problem…?

If you are lucky enough to be in sound mental health, it is almost certain that you know someone who is not or that you are a concerned or caring person. No one else would have bothered to read this far. MIND could use your help in all kinds of ways. Don't be shy…

With thanks for your forbearance

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Published on September 21, 2011 08:39

August 24, 2011

Palmed Away

100 Greatest Gadgets

On Bank Holiday Monday Channel 4 are screening one of those "100 top" programmes they like to make and this year I had the pleasure of being allowed to choose my 100 favourite gadgets. I don't think you'll guess which comes first. Besides, I didn't really approach it as a beauty pageant. The winner might as easily be a kitchen essential as a digital doodad. The fact is I have always had a quite inexplicable love of gadgets and feel myself blessed to have been born into an age in which they seem to have come thicker, faster, newer, sleeker and more miraculous than ever before. In the programme we didn't want to get all ontological on your arse and never made an attempt to define or limit the meaning of the word. A gadget, for our purposes, was more or less what I decided it was, and in the end it doesn't really matter who wins the Palm D'Or. Though naturally your burning curiosity will keep you watching all the way to the finish because …. well, you'll never guess. You'll just never guess…

But it's talk of palms, d'or or otherwise, which brings me to the sad story of the week. Of the year. Of the decade.

The early days…

I've always been a lucky sod when it comes to my love affair with all things tech. It is a passion that coincided with my having a career that allowed me to be able to indulge in the kinds of insane spending spree that the speedy inbuilt obsolescence of gadgetry has always necessitated. At some time in 1985 I astonished my friends by brandishing before them professionally printed material. I remember the late and blessed Ned Sherrin goggling in disbelief when I came into a radio studio with a piece of A4 on which my script had been perfectly printed.

"You send your scripts to a printer?" he shrieked.

I nodded gravely. "These are fine scripts," I said. "They deserve memorialisation."

It was only after being harangued for insanity, hubris and dementia that I finally confessed that I had invested in a new kind of printer. You must remember (or be told because you are far too young to remember) that in 1984 printers were dot matrix machines that produced only a faint simulacrum of what a printing press could manage. In 1985 Apple brought out the LaserPrinter, Aldus produced a programme called PageMaker and I had splashed out £7,000 for one and about £40 for the other. A ridiculous sum, but I was now a Desk Top Publisher. The PostScript language, kerning, leading and justification were all I could think about.

Less than ten years later I ambled into a film studio and started taking photographs of the set with a QuickTake camera, much to the astonishment of the cinematographer and his crew.

"What's more," I said, "I could upload the photographs to my computer and email them to a friend."

"What's email?" they all wanted to know.

That digital cameras, perfectly printed pages and email are now all as platitudinous, quotidian and meretricious as takeaway coffee is easy to take for granted and I certainly don't expect credit for being an early adopter or some kind of wise prophet. I was also an early adopter of many disastrous failures. The Newton, the Microwriter AgendA, early, bulky and dreadful Sony electronic books, iRex iLiads weird tone-dialling devices – any number of freakish gadgets that were either before their time and technology or simply deluded and hopelessly hopeful were all grist to my crazy mill.

iRex

The Mac, the LaserWriter and QuickTake camera were (niche and generally unprofitable) Apple products and it's hard now to believe that there was so long a period when friends and the entire tech press gleefully crowed that my aging Mac peripherals and spare parts would in future have be bought at specialist hobbyist shops because Apple as a company was doomed. Well in 1997 Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded and that had fired him 12 years earlier and everything changed, but enough of that.

A tiny sector of the gadget market…

My real passion in those days was not for things Apple but for a small and for a long time unnoticed sector of the market – one that Apple did have an early brave stab at, as had many others with equally doomed results, but which was truly ruled for what seemed an age by Psion and then Palm and Nokia. I am talking about those little objects that started out as PDAs and morphed, almost without anyone noticing, into smartphones.

If you (are masochistic enough to) go back five years or so and consult the earlier tech blogs section of this site you can find examples of me banging on about my love of those early devices. The world has moved on hugely since then, but this week has laid a final wreath on the grave of a much loved (by me) innovator.

British to the core…

It is not meant as a patriotic boast, but it is certainly remarkable that the ARM processors behind almost all modern mobile phones, the Symbian OS that reigned supreme for so long, the design of iMacs, iPods, iBooks, iPhones and iPads and indeed the world wide web itself have all been largely the work of Britons. Of course, good science and technology depends upon shared resources and Berkeley's RISC was the foundation of ARM; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of WWW, always maintains that his work was part of an ongoing process, Jony Ive never fails to mention his fellow designers at Apple while Symbian … well, poor old Symbian is all but forgotten these days, indeed Nokia's stubborn clinging to it is regarded as one reason for the Finnish giant's less than impressive performance of late – despite the billions of Nokia badged phones that are still used around the world.

Symbian began life in Britain as EPOC, an operating system created for Psion handheld devices. The Psion Organiser 2 was the first really impressive, in my opinion, Personal Digital Assistant. I was a loyal user, indeed had the honour to help with the launch of the Revo in 1999. EPOC's transformation into Symbian was taken up and run by Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola in an attempt to create some sort of standard Operating System for reasonably low-powered, ARM processor toting mobile phones. It was never entirely standard of course, nothing ever is, all kinds of flavours soon developed, UIQ, S60, Anna and the lord knows what else, but with the Nokia Communicator in 1996 Symbian really managed to strut its stuff as a proto-smartphone OS. You could send emails, browse the web, store contact numbers and calendar entries and even add what we would now call apps – all in monochrome with navigation and control achieved by cursor buttons rather than touchscreen, but for those of us lucky enough to own one it was about as exciting as could be. Val Kilmer used one as Simon Templar in The Saint, I recall, that's how cool it was.

Shirt pockets…

Across the Atlantic things were moving in a different direction. I became fascinated by the US challenge to the Psion and Communicator, the Palm Pilot, a device which answered a peculiar American imperative in that in could fit into an office worker's shirt pocket. Corporate Americans wear (usually white) shirts which always have a pocket round about where the left nipple might be on a human being and woe betide any hardware manufacturer who even thinks about producing an object that exceeds this unalterably insistent form factor. The size limitations required Palm to think hard and, like a poet forced into the sonnet form, they came up with marvellous solutions.

The Palm Pilot had a touch sensitive screen, not the capacitative type we now all know and love in the modern smartphone or pad, but the resistive kind which required the use of a stylus, or when lost (as it inevitably was) a finger nail, empty biro or the tip of the arm of a pair of spectacles. Handwriting of a kind could be achieved by forming characters from a cut down, shorthand version of the alphabet known as Graffiti (sideways on but a nostalgic reminder). Graffiti could very easily be mastered and allowed immensely speedy input. I adored it and used it when it reappeared for a while on the Newton, on Sony P900s and even, bless them, early WinMob devices where they called it "block" or something similar. Now it's available (of course) as a retro app for Android and iOS.

Handpsring…

Palm was acquired by the 3M company and its original creators and founding geniuses moved away to found Handspring which came up with first the Visor and then, joy of joys, the Treo. The Treo 180 (or 180 g for Graffiti lovers ) was a Palm Pilot into which you could slip a GSM SIM. It had a stubby little aerial, a beautiful flip screen, guess-ahead contact dialling and many of the features we now regard as standard but which were then little short of revolutionary. It could be synced with one's computer, and (as it iterated all the way into the Treo 600) it allowed full colour web browsing. It was a real smartphone, its battery lasted all day, you could swap SIM cards at will, Matt Damon used one in the first of the Jason Bourne movies, for heaven's sake. Matt Damon. That's how recent and yet how far distant the PalmOne (as Handspring became) and its PalmOS were and are.

Throughout the greater part of the first decade of the twenty-first century nothing came close. Microsoft produced the hideous, cumbersome ugly and all but unusable WinMob OS in various numbers. Nokia continued with Communicators before, sadly (for me anyway) abandoning them. Sony never quite got the P900 series right. So perfect but so flawed and so-o-o liable to crash.

But…

Palm was IT. They made arses of themselves by producing a Treo that ran Windows. This alienated everyone who liked the simplicity and ease of the Palm OS and was the first indication that they might be losing the plot.

Then in 2007 two things happened that changed the landscape for ever. Palm produced the Foleo , a dumb terminal netbook and a month later Apple produced the iPhone. The Foleo lasted little more than three months. Apple had changed everything.

How to respond…

Palm scratched their heads and saw that multi-touch, app-rich full laden smartphones were now here to stay. They realised that WinMob was no way forward and that Apple was not about to licence anyone else to use its iPhone OS. Rumours abounded of an Open Handset Alliance, led by Google who would come up with something to answer Apple's transformation of the market. Palm decided to devise their own challenge and it was to be in the form of devices powered by a Web based OS, in other words an operating system for smartphones whose apps were written in the same language/s that runs the world wide web. Many Google services default to web app version when you browse to them on a mobile. Amazon have just produced a web app version of their Kindle reader to get round Apple's prohibitive policy of denying the iOS version direct click access to the Amazon store. Web apps, in other words, are far from a dead duck and an WebOS struck most commentators at the time of Palm's announcement as an excellent and exciting idea. I certainly salivated at the thought.

The rest is history…

The Palm Pre arrived. Too late. Too small. Underpowered. You could fit two into an American office worker's shirt pocket, for heaven's sake. I owned a couple of Pre devices, an American CDMA and a European GSM version. I so wanted them to work. I liked a lot of what they did and how they did it. Blackberry has incorporated some of the original WebOS gestures into its Playbook, a frustrating but in some ways (to a contrarian like me) rather appealing tablet about which I might write another time.

In short, the Pre failed to catch on. It was a disaster for Palm. Their owndership of the American businessman's shirt-pocket, which once seemed so assured, was over. More than that, the company itself was done for. Hewlett Packard bought them for $1.2 billion last year. HP announced they would integrate Palm's WebOS into a series of hand held and tablet style devices and go at this huge and growing market with all guns blazing. They introduced the WebOS powered TouchPad less than three months ago.

HP Sauce…

Then, last week, HP announced it was withdrawing completely from the hardware business, whether in terms of laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets.

So now only Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's vastly improved mobile OS, Android and Apple's iOS remain to fight over the world's smartphone customer base. Nokia has more or less given up on Symbian and will concentrate on producing Windows 7 devices as a hardware manufacturer. HTC will carry on producing cute and serviceable candy-bars for both Android and Windows 7 while Apple will continue to do, presumably, what Apple does. RIM meanwhile have a foot in each corner. They have retreated to their proven customer base with the introduction of a restyle up-to-date version their best BlackBerry, the Bold, while refusing quite to let go of the Playbook or the hybrid Torch, a BlackBerry that thinks it's a multitouch but isn't too sure.

I have that new Blackberry Bold 9900, a Playbook, an HTC HD7 Windows phone running "Mango" and an Android HTC Sensation as well as an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 (both running iOS 5 and the iCloud with Lion OS X 7.2 beta because I'm a sad nerd who forks out for a developer's account) – I have run, and always, will I suspect, run as many devices alongside each other as I can for the foreseeable future.

But then, as AOL and Psion and Nokia and Palm will tell you, the future is not very foreseeable at all. And I can see that it never will be. Er … I think.

I do shed a tear however for the demise of Palm and their WebOS. Any turn of events that reduces biodiversity in the smartphone sector saddens me, and I mourn and memorialise the ingenuity, imagination and innovative genius of Palm and its original founders.

x Stephen

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Published on August 24, 2011 02:06

August 13, 2011

OTBC: An open letter to all who despise sport and most especially football

Welcome to Norwich: A Fine City

An open letter to all who despise sport and most especially football

My love of all kinds of sport surprises nobody more than myself. I do not think there has ever been a schoolboy with such overmastering contempt, fear, dread, loathing, and hatred for "games" – for sport, exercise, gymnastics and physical exertions of all or any kinds. Every day I would wake up with a sick jolt wondering just how I might get out of that day's compulsory rugby, cricket, hockey, swimming or whatever foul healthy horror was due to be posted on the notice-board that morning. The catalogue of multiple lies, evasions, self-imposed asthma attacks and other examples at what Edwardian school fiction characterised as "lead-swinging", malingering and "cutting". All the acts of a cad, a swine, a rotter, an outsider and a beast.

This hatred, as is so often the way with extremism, was to be replaced with an almost equal and opposite love. But before I came round to sport, largely through watching cricket, I had always, even through my most indolent, fey, camp, furious and posturing anti-athletic phases, avidly scanned the back pages of newspapers to follow the fortunes of Norwich City Football Club.

I don't know why this is. I came from a household that showed as much knowledge or interest in sport as hedgehogs show in embroidery. True, my mother had kept goal for England schoolgirls at hockey and my brother had shot for the school at Bisley, but beyond that the Fry household had as much interest or understanding of sport as a potato has of Riemann's zeta function. There was no contempt, just absolute indifference and incomprehension. But…

I have always had, to a frankly stupid degree, a deep sense of loyalty and connection. I came from East Anglia, therefore East Anglia was the best part of Britain. It was natural to me then that my heart would leap when it heard or saw the word "Norwich" on the national news. And the only time that could ever happen (this being a lifetime before Alan Partridge) was when the football scores were read or printed.

Welcome to Norwich...

The years passed and I found myself, much to my amazement, falling in love with all sports: most especially, it is true the sports that rude unthinking people will call "boring" in a crass way that is perhaps excusable in a 14 year old, but which is boorish and repellant coming from adults who should know better.

Golf. I could watch golf for ever. I adore it as a television spectacle, as a social pageant, as an art and a nail-chewing suspense drama.

Darts. There is no way adequately to describe my fascination with this game and its proponents, heritage, atmosphere and thrill. The heroes of darts from Bristow to Barneveld, from Jocky to the Power, are as totemic and heroic as the myrmidons of Achilles. Go on, laugh. It's true.

Snooker. Merciful heavens, I love this game so much that I seriously considered giving up a year of my life to follow it, video camera in hand, to make a film called "A Year In Snooker". Sadly, all my other commitments held me back, but it remains true that I would be infinitely more heart-flutteringly discombobulated at the prospect of meeting Ronnie O'Sullivan or even, bless him, Graeme Dott, than I would a compound of Mick Jagger, Eminem, Clint Eastwood and Neil Armstrong. CJ from "The Eggheads" could certainly marmalise me in a head to head quiz on the subject but he could never claim to love the game more.

Indoor Bowls. I still yearn for the days when BBC2 showed the world championships of this wholly entrancing game. My hero was Ian Schuback, who – I am distressed to note – does not even merit a proper Wikipedia entry. Long afternoons of bliss would pass as Tony Allcock and Rochard Corsie battled it out before the cameras at Potter's Leisure Centre. If the phone rang on such afternoons I would pick it up and hear without introduction, "Hughie Duff is drawing well to the head today…" and know that I was not alone. The great Peter Cook shared my passion.

Rugby. Never quite got into the northern code, although Colin Welland once kindly took me to a match. But Rugby Union can cause a spectator to stand and rip his vocal cords to shreds like no other game. Its peaks of excitement are higher and more intense than you will find in any other. The offsides, infringements, rulings and strategies are all but incomprehensible, but the blend of brute force, balance, speed, wit and stamina that the game demands cannot be matched in any other than I know.

Cricket. The greatest love of all. With love so great one is robbed of speech. That cricket is manifestly the greatest game that humankind ever devised is, for those who understand the game, too obvious to mention but we are all too wearily used to others dismissing it as boring, incomprehensible – elitist even. Nothing worth the pursuit was ever easy or obvious. But all this is bringing me on to …

Football. Our national game. The beautiful game. And so on. There's so much wrong with it. The corporations and holding companies who own the clubs. Their obsession with European silverware. The stinkingly vast sums paid out by broadcasters. The vast gap between the oligarchic haves and the deprived have-nots. I cannot imagine how distressing it must be if you are a Manchester United or Arsenal fan – the need to win, the expectation, the disappointment, the humiliation if you do not.

If you have always found yourself immune to the national obsession with Association Football, I can quite understand it. But all I would say is that, for all that is wrong with it, there can be no keener pleasure than belonging, adhering, following and obsessing with one club: scrabbling for the latest news, checking with terror the tables to see how far they are from relegation and despair. The club can be Chelsea if you have reason for it to be. It can also be Gillingham or Port Vale, York City or Newcastle. If you already have a club that you support, then you don't need read any further. But let's suppose that you don't support any club, or that you have one great allegiance and are interested in the possibility of having a deuxième cru, a second house. Well, if you have a spare sense of loyalty going, an impulse to follow without a special connection, then let me suggest that you find a delightful underdog to cheer on…

Let me, in short, argue that you simply could not choose a more loveable and worthy club than Norwich City. They represent a whole region, one great medieval city lost in the rural vastness of Norfolk. Once among the two or three greatest towns of England, Norwich has almost comically lost itself in provincial isolation while the industrial cities of the North and MIdlands, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, Stoke and Wolverhampton, and the powerful metropolitan districts, Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, Queen's Park and Fulham have overtaken the game with their colossal financial and media reach.

Norwich is a pigmy compared to these enormous, illustrious and opulent institutions. That is what makes being a fan such a pleasure. We don't expect to win every match – when we do we jump up and down with joy and when we lose we smile ruefully as we expected nothing more.

The Canaries have had their moments of glory, what we would call glory at least, but it is a long time since 1992-93, the premiership's inaugural season for the majority of which City led the table and achieved that unbelievable 1993 victory over Bayern Munich ("this is fantasy football," John Motson said) There has never been much grand silverware on display in the club's cabinet but what of that? Jeremy Goss's immortal goal, Delia Smith and her husband's extraordinary financial and personal commitment to the club (and yes, that 'Let's Be Having You' moment) and last year's thrilling last minute promotion are enough if you are a Norwich fan. Should we survive the EPL this season that will be a triumph. If Arsenal or Chelsea fail to snaffle one of the great trophies it will be a disaster for them. What a difference.

More than anything else, Norwich represents one of the few local community clubs left in football: for all that it only rarely has a chance to dine at the top table this is reason enough to celebrate its small victories. When Norwich does get elevated, it is managed through close links with its region and the passion and commitment of its players and fans. Our achievement of second place in the Championship last year sparked a grand celebration, bus-top processions, banners, bunting and civic pride everywhere. There was hardly a shop in Norwich that didn't brandish the green and yellow. I happened to visit BBC TV centre around that time, just a few hundred yards from Loftus Road, the HQ of the Championship Champions. To take nothing away from QPR fans, there was nowhere for them to process, no bursting out of pride, no reason for locals to stop and hug each other as they did in Norwich.

Paul Lambert, our astonishingly gifted manager (one of how many premiership Glaswegians is it now?) has overseen only the second double promotion – from first to championship, from championship to top flight – in history, yet everyone is predicting that it will inevitably be Norwich who do the fateful yoyo and find themselves kicked out at season's end. Well, we shall see.

There was no prouder moment for me than when I was asked to join Norwich's board of directors. I can bring neither football nor financial expertise to the table, but I can bring that element of loyalty, devotion and local passion that I hope and believe is a great part of what makes football the most popular game on earth.

Should you, I repeat, have a spare shred of unattached allegiance in you, then why not affix it to the club that has the oldest song in footballing history?

On the ball, City, never mind the danger,

Steady on, now's your chance,

Hurrah! We've scored a goal.

x Stephen

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Published on August 13, 2011 03:38

May 27, 2011

When Stephen Fry met Lady Gaga

Exclusively in the FT Weekend: Stephen Fry interviews Lady Gaga. The UK writer, actor and broadcaster and the US popstar met at a hotel in London and discussed fame, Madonna, Oscar Wilde and that meat dress.

Buy the FT Weekend Magazine in the UK on Saturday 28th May 2011.

Read the full story this weekend at FT.com/gaga, along with a picture gallery, a transcript of the interview, and full audio version

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Published on May 27, 2011 06:47

April 3, 2011

Showgirl Fry

After a gap of twenty years I have rediscovered my love of stage musicals.

I owe a lot to the form. It was the almost unbelievably fortunate circumstance of being asked while still in my 20s to update the book of Me and My Girl that gave me financial independence. "Book", incidentally, is the jargon term for the written bits of a show that aren't music or lyrics: the story and dialogue, in other words.

There are plenty who seem to feel that musicals are a low art form, something for the ignorant masses not to be uttered in the same breath as legitimate theatre, opera or ballet. Nor indeed, the same people would have us believe, are songs from the shows comparable in quality, authenticity or artistry to rock and roll, jazz, blues, hip hop and other popular modes. The songbooks of Porter, Berlin, Gershwin, Kern and early Richard Rodgers might be excluded from this anathema because their connection to staged musical comedy is all but forgotten and their songs can be accorded the status of swing and jazz standards.

Many still wrinkle their noses when they consider how much of the West End is given over to cheap, tinselly shows whose appeal is chiefly to either the matronly less-educated end of the coach-party theatregoing populace or to hysterically camp aficionados for whom Sondheim and Fosse are immortals and Judy and Liza and Barbra divinities.

Well, I won't say I ever reacted against musicals quite so strongly as that, but I must confess that I have spent a large part of my life thinking that perhaps they just weren't my kind of thing. Ingratitude, given how much Me and My Girl did for me, but – as I say – all that has changed.

Over the past few months I have been enchanted by Legally Blonde and Avenue Q, as well as by smaller shows like Departure Lounge and Ordinary Days. The other week I attended a cabaret of songs written by the brilliant young Scottish composer/lyricist Michael Bruce, whose Portrait of a Princess has been such a YouTube hit lately and the week before last I found myself simply blown away by Betty Blue Eyes at the Novello Theatre, a brilliant adaptation of Alan Bennett's multi-BAFTA winning 1984 film A Private Function. Building on the best of Bennett but with the addition of dazzling lyrics by Anthony Drewe and fabulously hummable tunes from George Stiles, Betty Blue Eyes delivers as deliciously happy an evening as anyone could dream of. Continuing the tradition of great theatre directors collaborating on modern British musicals, BBE is directed by Sir Richard Eyre, who should be knighted all over again for best-ever-use-of-a-pig on stage. That radiant Betty is certainly worth the ticket price alone, but if you add Sarah Lancashire, Reece Shearsmith, Adrian Scarborough, David Bamber, Anne Emery… well.

So excited have I become by my new found enthusiasm for musicals that I'm even hosting an evening on Sunday 10th April at the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly called "The Great British Musical", a celebration of past, present and future shows. Some of the very finest of our country's performers will be there, from Alfie Boe to Julie Atherton. You will be happy to know that I have agreed not to sing a note or dance a step. The evening is in aid of Perfect Pitch whose whose raison d'être is the encouragement, fostering, development and production of new British musicals. Tickets may or may not be available by following this link.

So what is it about musicals that has recently lit my fire, floated my boat and wowsered my trousers? We imagine that musicals are all about escape, fantasy, romance and comedy. Well, it would be absurd to deny that they don't deliver those much needed and highly prized rewards and that this surely would be reason enough to thank them. But for me as much as anything an evening at the musical theatre is a celebration of talent. It simply astonishes me, indeed often moves me to tears, how many men and women we have in this country who devote themselves body and soul to our entertainment. Eight times a week for months on end there are boys and girls out there doing things that I could never do. They earn a living wage, but really not much more. Only the known stars (often television stars lately translated to the stage) earn big money. The choreographers, musical directors, dance captains, musicians, company managers, administrators, directors and producers are devoted and dedicated practitioners of an art that matters. I love opera with a huge passion, but sometimes my soul yearns more for that easy transition from natural speech to song, that contemporaneity, the wit, the pizazz and the glamorous hoopla that only a great musical can provide. I know that teachers, nurses, soldiers, bus-drivers and millions of others also throw themselves into their work with skill and devotion and that the singling out of a profession that many will think of as quite self-regarding enough already might annoy, but there we are.

Gay people supposedly love musicals more than others because they offer a glittering and colourful Emerald City that contrasts with the grim black and white reality of gay life. Well, that was once true, of course it was, but now it is no more true of a gay experience than of a straight one. We are all as likely to want to leap over the rainbow and follow the yellow brick road as each other.

I think it is time to take the snobbery out of theatre. I am convinced that as I write the West End is in a wonderful, an almost unprecendently wonderful, condition. The balance of important new plays, classic revivals and high quality musical shows old and new is just about perfect at the moment, but it would be less of a world class theatre district, less of a significant cultural phenomenon were it not for the health and vitality of the stage musical. With figures like Michael Bruce and Stiles and Drewe writing from within the tradition and geniuses like Tim Minchin breathing new life from outside it, I can only be confident about the future. If you haven't recently, then – wherever you live – try and find time to "take in a show" as they used to say – I know it isn't cheap, but I think you'll find it worth every penny.

Gay Marriage

Something for George Osborne to consider

"Charlie Sheen can make a 'porn family', Kelsey Grammer can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce No. 9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James & Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EV…ERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really?" Don't know who wrote that originally, but it's on the web passim …

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Published on April 03, 2011 14:11

January 17, 2011

Pushnote

Some of you may have spotted that I recently tweeted the existence of a new service called Pushnote. In the interest of transparency, openness and the general calming down of doubting Thomases and cynical Susans everywhere, I shall declare right away that I do have shares in this new venture. It may be in my interest for you to use Pushnote, but I am not lying when I say that the only real interest for me is the personal one of watching an idea take flight (or not). The service is entirely free, we have no IPO plans, no ambition to get a quick valuation and sell out, nor will we host advertisements or track your comings and goings and sell those on. I have no expectations of making money from this. For me it's a little like gardening. I don't do the real thing, but I can see the pleasure in planning out, digging, drilling, seeding, watering, tending and watching the first sproutings of new growth. Not everything takes root and sometimes one misjudges the soil, the climate or the situation, but the process is fascinating and rewarding in and of itself.

That's probably enough metaphor. Here is a link to the Pushnote FAQ which we hope will address the most obvious questions you might have.

Do remember that we're in Beta, which means Pushnote is a work in progress. There's lots to add, lots to polish and lots to improve. Being in Beta means that we're also reliant on the comments and suggestions of users. So do plunge in and try it out. I think you'll find that there's real pleasure in happening upon a site that's wearing the little pushnote icon in green or red, the sign that a fellow user has been there and has something to say about it.

Above all, please be assured that the issues we take most seriously are your privacy and security.

Do feel free to follow @pushnote on Twitter or to befriend our Facebook page.

Enjoy…

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Published on January 17, 2011 02:33

November 30, 2010

Two Million Reasons To Be Cheerful

Tweet, Drink and Be Merry

An open letter to @mobijack

Dear @mobijack

"Eat shit, a hundred billion flies can't be wrong," the old graffito used to say. "Follow Stephen, two million tweeters can't be wrong," I say.

Now, it so falls out that you are the two millionth person to follow me on Twitter. I do not know, cannot guess and have no business asking your reasons for doing so. It may be that you know who I am as a writer, broadcaster, actor and so on, it may be you have followed me on someone else's recommendation or indeed it could simply be because you wanted to be the two millionth and timed it perfectly. I know that your name is Jonathan, that you live in Dundee (a city I love and of which I retain the fondest possible memories after six happy years of occupying the Rector's chair at the University) and that you like BI, whatever that might be. Business Informatics, Wikipedia suggests.

It's as possible that you are someone with a dozen Twitter IDs as it is that you are an absolute newcomer. Nonetheless I am going to assume that you are a relative newbie and use this occasion, ultimately adventitious and meaningless as it is, as an opportunity to tell you about Twitter, my relationship to it and feelings for and against it, after three years of stormy marriage to this extraordinary creature.

I first heard about Twitter a month or so after it had been launched on the world and with my usual perspicacity mentally consigned it to the dustbin of history. 'What a simultaneously hysterical, banal, footling and useless idea,' I remember thinking. Be honest Jonathan, you almost certainly thought the same when you first heard of it. Everyone does. Those with long memories will remember when people said exactly the same about email. "Don't get it. What's the point? Strictly for the geeks." I remember trying to convince everyone I knew that email was a brilliant thing: my agent, my accountant, friends, the director general of the BBC – they all thought I was mad. I say this not to boast about my powers of prophecy and insight, for they are truly feeble as my original contempt for Twitter shows, but to remind us all that when technological breakthroughs and social game-changers come through, almost no one recognises them. The messiah gets just one John the Baptist for every hundred thousand stoners, jeerers and nay-sayers.

I have always been an early adopter, and many of the services to which I have ardently subscribed have come to nothing or are yet to take off, Buzz, Orkut, FourSquare, Diaspora and Maphook spring to mind … one moribund, the other mostly Brazilian, the rest reasonably hot, but like bubbling under and waiting to erupt.

Facebook I joined enthusiastically in 2007, but soon realised that it wasn't for me. Etiquette demands that messages be answered, that friend requests be attended to and the whole thing cultivated and cared for: I soon received too many requests for me to handle and disappeared into a secret squirrel FB identity that only my friends know and that, even if it were guessed at, is plugged too tight to penetrated, like a … well, provide your own simile, Jonathan.

The early days

Anyway, along came Twitter. It and I got along pretty happily for a while. I signed up in 2007 but didn't use it for a year. On the 10th of September 2008 I sent this earth-shattering communiqué:

Hello Twitterers. I'm About to fly to Africa for a new project and will be tweeting whilst I'm filming. By the time I landed in Nairobi I was astonished to find that I had gone from about 5,000 followers to 11,000. The more I tweeted the more I got. I returned to England for Christmas by now captivated by this extraordinarily simple and yet intriguingly subtle new toy. Twitpic had arrived and allowed the sharing of photos and Audioboo was around the corner but client apps were primitive by today's standards. Nonetheless I was rapidly becoming addicted, fascinated and bewildered in turns.

Dear Stephen, now there are so many of us, could we invade somewhere?

About a week after I arrived I was at a party at the Paramount, a new club that had opened on the top three floors of Centre Point at the junction of Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road and the Charing Cross Road – more or less on the site of the old St Giles rookery, eighteenth century London's most notorious slum, whose gin houses were I suppose the equivalent of today's crack kitchens. I digress. Been doing QI too long. Anyway, I get into the lift with my web and online partner Andrew Sampson: demigod, @sampsonian, and what should happen but the lift gets stuck. It was, as the cliché has it, but the work of a moment for me to whip out my iPhone, photograph the five or six of us in the lift and tweet our predicament to my followers. Page after page of instant replies filled the screen of my phone and astonished my fellow captives.

For some unknowable reason that episode was a kind of tipping point for Twitter in the UK. Up until then the press had been either wary, contemptuous or ignorant of it, but the lift incident and the amazingly instant response of my followers provided just the kind of easily assimilable narrative that the press thrives on and brought Twitter to life in the minds of many readers.

A month or so after that I was a guest on the Jonathan Ross show, helping him off the naughty step after his twelve week suspension for his part in the Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs brouhaha. At the interview @wossy, by then a keen twitterer himself, asked me about "this here Twitter" and I explained it as best I could. The lift incident and the Jonathan Ross appearance caused a flurry of signings up in Britain and forever indelibly associated my name with Twitter's in the minds of some members of the press and public. This was amusing to begin with but soon became a thundering bore for all concerned. Every interviewer or journalist I met for months asked me about Twitter and then every newspaper, quite understandably, wondered why I wouldn't shut up about it.

Twiiter has hardened my heart

With a great following comes great responsibility. It is not hard to see why so many people with goods and services to sell, charities and deserving causes to promote and ideas to disseminate want to piggy-back on the shoulders of those who can guarantee them eyeballs, web traffic and mouseclicks.

For the last two and half years, as the number of my followers has increased, so has the number of messages and emails I daily receive begging me to tweet or retweet on behalf of something or other. I occasionally comply. I wish I always could, but I do not think my two million would be very entertained by my filling their twitterspace with endless charitable messages, no matter how deserving. If my presence on twitter were to become no more than a kind of worthy parish noticeboard, I would be deserted in droves.

Ah, and you fear being deserted, do you? Well, I try hard not to make Twitter a contest. I am not in it for bragging rights and kudos (honest), but I am human and I would be odd if I didn't get a glow from having so many followers. On the other hand…

Twitter is a social service, but it has hardened my heart. I have to be deaf to so many hundreds of entreaties a day, I have to bite my tongue and stay my hand when goaded, I have to attempt gently to dissuade the more needy amongst my followers to stand off a little and let me have air.

The secret of twitter, or at least the secret for me, lies in coping with the trade-off between the need for the sensible management of twitter and the need to try as hard as possible to be me, actually me, not a public image, not an image-massaged celebrity, not an on-display simulacrum, but the "real" me, warts and all.

Sometimes those warts show horribly. I can be in a bad mood – I have surely bored the nation enough on the subject of my mood disorder – and I become absurdly oversensitive and vulnerable to slight, insult and offence in low moods. When cheerful I can take the whoppingest and meanest abuse in my happily loping stride. But when I'm down it's like a kind of photosensitivity, the hurt is horrible.

These are the moments when I get myself into trouble by instantly firing back at any negative tweet I happen to see aimed in my direction. I miss 99% of them (do the maths, the chances of my seeing any given tweet are very, very small) but some do get through. Naturally it makes me look like the worst kind of pillock when I respond angrily. "All he wants is adoration and praise, he can't take criticism" is the perfect reasonable conclusion that might be arrived at. They do not know how many times I have seen incredibly rude insults and not bothered to reply, or have done so in joshing merry fashion.

I learn, but have learned slowly. I was like a puppy running endlessly into a mirror in the early days, now I'm more like a suspiciously growling hound. A pity, perhaps, but inevitable.

I'm an optimist and tend to believe the best in people, but there are unquestionably some grotesque and vile figures out there. If ever you have the misfortune to meet one, Jonathan, never ever be afraid to use Twitter's block option. You won't see their tweets and they won't see yours. There's nothing they can do about it and you will be happier as a result, infinitely happier. It's what I do to newspapers and to those who want to upset or provoke me. No matter who you are no one has a right to see your tweets, a right to be followed or a right to address you if you don't want to be addressed.

These days if you're a celebrity you will often find yourself followed in the street by amateur paparazzi. Any kid with a decent camera can be such a creature. They hope you'll go into a porn theatre of course, or be seen with someone inappropriate or doing something dodgy. Failing that they really, really hope that you'll become pissed off at their wasp-like presence, the boredom, the impertinence and the unkindness of being stalked and that as a result you'll turn and remonstrate. *SNAP* – that's the picture they want, you looking cross, sticking up a finger, your face contorted with rage. Even better if you hurl their camera to the pavement. A lawsuit! Well, as in life so online. There are twitter stalkers like that. One soon learns to spot and to block them. One obvious clue is that they only seem to follow, and publicly to tweet, "celebrities".

And yet…

And yet it's mostly wonderful here, Jonathan. The majority, the great majority of people are friendly, forgiving and kind. It is a miracle that so much can be read into little messages of 140 characters that offer no personal clues by way of handwriting, styling or formatting. After a while you will be astonished by how perceptively your moods and meanings are interpreted and with what bewildering accuracy. You will be astonished too by the wit. The speediness, elegance and brilliance of some twitterers regularly takes my breath away.

Of course there are dimwits who will ask a question rather than Google or look back up the timeline. Well, maybe they aren't dimwits but opportunists. A certain kind of person will always end their tweet with a question in the hope of getting a reply.

I like replying, I like being involved in twitter. If I'm raw from a recent mauling I'll stay away and feel shy and nervous of looking at any single tweet or DM, either because they'll be upsettingly sympathetic and concerned or because they'll be mean. But mostly Twitter and my two million followers are as good a reason as I know to trust people. To respect people. To believe in people.

Welcome, Jonathan, and enjoy.

*hug*

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Published on November 30, 2010 12:37

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