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Just a quick post to draw your attention to this presentation about Shanzhai phones in China. Shanzhai means something like ‘mountain hideout’ and they are a kind of guerrilla class of new devices appearing on the streets of Beijing. The designs range from the batshit-crazy (but, yes, I want one):
to the *cough* aspirational:
It’s not too hard to connect this, which arrived in my inbox today:
with this, which arrived in my spam box today:
Check out this forthcoming phone from Indian mobile manufacturer, Lava:
Notice anything unusual compared to the normal Nokia/Blackberry fare?
Should people be allowed to be anonymous online? World of Warcraft developer Blizzard seems somewhat undecided. Earlier this week, it introduced a Real ID scheme that would force people to post under their real names on its forums. Following widespread protests at this movement of goalposts – from pretty-much 12mn of the game’s 12mn subscribers – the company has today backed down on the idea. It used to contain my test of the Guardian news feed WordPress plugin. De-activating the plugin disables all the articles connected to it, as shown here, changes the title of your post, removes the tags, all the content (not just the feed content, but whatever you had to say about it, too) and the extract. I wasn’t thrilled about the amount of control it was exercising on my blog’s content in the first place: dictating the title of the post, the tags and the excerpt. It also reverted these when I tried to change them. So I disabled it, whereupon it’s added insult to injury. So, nice idea. Horrible in practice. Sorry.
You’ll have come across the stories, talks and interviews about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus. I think that all of us get – and recognise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/waste so very much time watching television. That’s typically pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing something different. We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and discussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all: And when I say ‘design’, of course, I mean theft. Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different – for about five minutes. This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out. This is how I started. Continue reading Making it Yours – An Inept Guide to Website Design I was asked to review the latest release of Xara’s graphic design software, Xara Designer Pro 6. Since I’ve been a fan of the application for a while, I was happy to oblige. I ought to disclose that Xara sent me a free key.
You might not realise it, but Xara is one of the real grandaddies of software development, having been formed in the UK in 1981. Nowadays, the company is owned by the German Magic AG group, though they’re still based in Hemel Hempstead, north of London. Over the years, they’ve produced all sorts of stuff: they made Snake, Wordwise and Space Invaders for the BBC Micro, for example, and continued to support the Archimedes range of education-focused computers over the 90s. |
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