Matthew Baxter-Reynolds's Blog, page 2

Here’s why you should encrypt both laptops and desktops

The simple answer to this is: “just because you can”.

One of the issues with the rise in mobile device use (and I include laptops here) is that because people take the devices into the outside world, there much more likely to get lost, stolen, or damaged. In all three cases you have a situation where the device is going from a place where it has supervision by a trusted entity to some situation where you know not what could happen to it.

Encryption is the easiest way to protect yourself from an...

The tyranny of IAP in casual gaming

When Apple first launched the App Store, they took an unusual move of not allowing vendors to sell evaluation versions of their apps. Given that for two decades shareware had actually been a thing, this was an unsual move.

The result of this was that the only option way for vendors to get their apps moving was to offer the apps at such a low price it effectively “de-risked” the sale from the customer’s perspective. Hence the $1 app market — buying an app for $1 and it being rubbish ended up be...

Consumer Mobile App Casebook — Amazon Lockers

The other day I was out shopping in a local Co-op, and I noticed that they had installed an Amazon Locker. Having never tried one before, I thought I’d buy myself a late xmas present and see how it worked out.

The reason why I was interested in this is I’ve been hearing anecdotal comments from a number of sources about employers getting increasingly irritated about employees having ecommerce deliveries sent to their place of work.

The principle of these lockers is that you can stop off on your...

Post-PC devices and UK television product placement

Last year (2012) when I sat down to watch The X Factor, I was surprised to see the contestants sitting there using Samsung tablets. I would have expected, honestly, for them to be using iPads, for no other reason than these were at the time far and away the most popular tablets in the market.

As the weeks went on I kept seeing Samsung tablets in the show. Eventually I discovered that The X Factor was one of the first TV programmes in the UK to use product placement. Although this had been ille...

What is going on with Chromebooks?

To be upfront about it, I really like Chromebooks. But they are a weird beast. They’re a post-PC device from the pre-post-PC era. I class them as post-PC in Death of the PC, because they hit a good number of the attributes of a post-PC device. The most notable ones they hit are around their appliance-like and intimidation-free natures.

They’ve been rolling around the top of the bestseller lists on Amazon for ages now, which implies people are buying them. But you often don’t see people using t...

Amazon WorkSpaces VDI could be just what the doctor ordered

I recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and I had to buy the biggest one available because I needed the horsepower for development. What I would actually like to do is have a slimmer, lighter, laptop, and just dial into a server in the cloud whenever I need development horsepower.

(Not to mention the cost and/or risk of losing or breaking the thing, which always worries me.)

Two years ago I tried doing this with an iPad. I rented a server from AWS, put Visual Studio on it and tried accessing it ov...

Consumer Mobile App Casebook — Starbucks and Shazam

I used to be a huge fan of Starbucks, but over the past few years I’ve ended up being a much less frequent customer. I used to love the vibe of the place but now, not so much.

One thing that’s often worked for me is when I’m in the store, picking up one of the iTunes freebie cards. For the uninitiated, next to where you pick your drinks up they have a stack of credit card-sized cards with an iTunes redemption code on the back for either an app, a TV programme, or a music download.

By way of an...

Consumer mobile app casebook — X Factor

One of the most interesting digital life phenomena is the of the use of digital social networking to change how television is consumed. In short, it might be fun to watch X Factor, but it’s more fun to tweet about it whilst you’re watching it.

X Factor in the UK has been going for ten years, and so predates post-PC devices and mainstream digital social networking. For the first time this year I had a look at the iPad app — and it’s a mixed bag.

Technically, it’s very well executed. It looks gre...

The “shake” gesture must die

Gestures are a paradox in the post-PC world. They are entirely un-discoverable — i.e. they are hidden, and users have to be told that they are there. Related, Windows 8.1 now shows the user where its gestures are, whereas in Windows 8 they did not.

A well-designed OS doesn’t require the user to know any gestures. iOS is packed with gestures, but most people don’t know they are there because they are not required to use the platform. Compare this to BlackBerry 10, which is entirely gesture-base...

Why does Apple close its online store?

We’re taught that when we build computer systems, we need to strive for 100% uptime. Amazon going down gets reported as news. Yet one of the largest companies in the world happily takes its online store down for hours at a time. They must get ~80% uptime on the Apple Store!

Technically, there’s no reason why this situation should persist. Back when they started doing it, it was easy to point at a possible incompetence on the part of Apple’s web team. Now it’s been standard operating procedure...