Mobile Me on the way

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Macworld.com is reporting that .mac will be switched off at 2am on July 10th with Mobile Me coming online at 8am. The site reports Apple as saying:

Apple declares: "As part of the MobileMe launch, www.mac.com will be taken offline at 6pm PT on Wednesday, 9 July. Members will be unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services during this time with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch."

It'll be nice to see it live if for no other reason than it gives Microsoft a kick and gets them offering similar services to those of us who are still sticking by them.

Image from Apple.com

Review - Hancock

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I went to see Hancock last night in the cinema and, while it's nothing to do with tech, I thought I might as well give it a quick review. So what's it all about? John Hancock, played by Will Smith, is a superhero who has completely forgotten the first rule of being a superhero, with great power comes great responsibility. While he does try to save the people of Los Angeles he goes about it in all the wrong way and ends up causing thousands/millions of dollars worth of damage. He even flies and lands with all the style of a 1990 Volvo, there's none of the smooth Superman stuff here. However it's during one of these acts of goodwill that Hancock meets a PR Executive Ray Embrey, who takes on the unenviable task of turning Hancock into a much loved man of the people.

This film was never going to be a Hollywood masterpiece but as far as being an enjoyable and at times funny little action romp it could probably be held in the same regard as Men in Black and Independence Day. Seeing Hancock in his supersuit was hilarious. The times when the tempo of the show slows and we start looking at the emotional side of Hancock are well handled. They don't spend too much time on it but there's enough to make sure that we understand the conflict and eventually understand it's resolution.

This is a great action flick made all the better by Will Smith's humour and excellent portrayal of the 'messed up' Hancock. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys Will's style of movie.

Image from Apple.com

A few fun headlines from Paul Thurrott

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Paul Thurrott took a fun look at some tech industry headlines and it's a fantastic read. Check it out here. Here's a couple of examples:

Apple's Snow Leopard. What's The Point?
It appears to be a tacit admission that Leopard is horribly broken.

Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer
Just think, "I'm going to sell 6 copies of this application!"

Paul's blog is my favourite read online at the moment. Keep up the great work.

What Should Viacom Get?

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A quick post on this before I head out to work. As I'm sure you know Google has been told to hand it's user logs over to Viacom. The reason is apparently to let Viacom see if the legal or illegal clips are getting higher viewing figures. That's fine if the logs didn't contain IP addresses, login names and other personally identifiable information.

So what do you guys think? Should Viacom be allowed this level of access to the logs? What will they do when they know that a user they can now identify has uploaded or viewed copyrighted material?

Where does Windows Home Server fit in?

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I have decided that the time has come to buy myself a new toy. My first inclination was to buy a Windows Home Server from HP. I did some research into the options available and regardless of the noise the product is reported to make I was still keen on it. You see I was using WHS a few months ago through the Microsoft Connect Program and I loved it. Great backup, easy to access from any location and very stable.

However I've changed my mind. Why? Well it's quite simple and it's nothing to do with HP or WHS itself. It's all to do with Microsoft's lack of an integrated future. You see I've got Office Live Workspace, Live Spaces, Live Mail, Skydrive, Live Mesh, Vista, XP and Windows Mobile 5 and I have absolutely no idea how it all connects together. Obviously I know that I can save to Skydrive or setup Mesh on Vista and XP but where does WHS fit into all this. Surely there are some obvious over laps between Mesh and WHS and with no ability to map Skydrive onto Mesh, WHS, Vista or XP it's very hard to see the point. I now fully understand the problem people are having when it comes to waiting for Windows 7. I'm thinking the same about WHS. I think, well if I wait for version 2 maybe it'll have better integration with the new services and therefore be more appealing. It's not that it's not an amazing product at the moment, because it is, it's just that Microsoft don't seem to have a clue how to present an integrated environment to the users and this is starting to confiuse us. Apple present new services like Mobile Me, with it's support for Windows, Mac and iPhone it immediately show us what we can do. Microsoft just don't seem to be able to do the same. Why?

So what are we looking for? Well I'm looking for a WHS that stores my big files and backups along with the remote access and basically everything it's offering at the moment. All I really want added is an integration with Mesh, some Media Server capabilities, the ability to map Skydrive as an external drive and perhaps the ability to wake the server over Mesh when I need to. Offer these servcies and I'll buy it without hesitation. Oh and one other thing....integrate it with Mac. Apple are a company that can no longer be ignored. I love Windows but I'm writing this on a Mac. I'll buy into anything Microsoft offers if they can give it to me cross-platform.

What do you guys think? Do the Redmond guys need to start offering cross platform services and better integration or is the current setup working for you?

Studio 60: Pure Class

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A few months ago I watched an episode of Studio 60 on television in the UK and I wasn't won over by it. In fact it was the only episode I watched and after it I wasn't surprised that the show was canned. Then iTunes came along and I decided that after watching South Park and Flintstones I would give something different a try and downloaded the Studio 60 Pilot, afterall I didn't bother with the West Wing until Season 3 and now I own all the box sets. So I sat down and without much hope of being entertained I watched Studio 60 one more time......then I downloaded the entire season! It is, quite frankly, the best show on television since the West Wing. The quality of writing is exceptional, as you would expect from Sorkin, and the characters are one's you can easily connect with. The season finale is stretched over 4 episodes and had me hooked from beginning to end.

There are of course places where the show moves slowly but what 22 season show doesn't have the odd episode like that. Considering the garbage on television that gets 9+ seasons, I'm thinking here of Big Brother, S60 deserves another chance. If NBC don't want it then Fox should pick it up. They made the mistake of not listening to the people and abandoning Futurama and look how that turned out. Listen to them now and give S60 another go.

Reactions To A Few Things

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Since I last posted a few things have happened in the world of tech that I think need to be covered. The most obvious is the Microhoogle. This deal turned into an absolute mess. Microsoft managed to get out of it with a few bumps and scrapes but they do now seem to be much more focused on what services will succeed and which ones they should simply drop, like book search. Book search has been done and done well. Microsoft is not going to benefit from trying to clone Google's version so there's really no point in wasting money on it.

What Microsoft do need to do online is actually quite simple. They need to bring the current services into a more logically connected structure. Microsoft's online offering, and part of Google's for that matter, feel like they're a bunch of independent services with the word Windows or Google in the title. They don't really work together particularly well and they certainly don't bring other devices together well. Now I'm using Live Mesh and I love it but I'm not sure why it has online storge when Sky Drive is offering storage too and neither connect together. Surely adding SD to Mesh would make sense.

Also the Redmond boys need to start deveoping applications for devices other than Windows based ones. Internet Explorer for Mac would be nice, I'm using Firefox on my Macbook but I'd like to see IE 8. I'd also like to see some live services for Nokia devices that I can just download and not have to go through that annoying download application only to discover that my mobile carrier doesn't support Live for some weird reason even though I can get Google off the mobile Google site with no issues. A connected environment that offers O2's Bluebook with Live Mesh, Sky Drive, Live Mail and the other services across multiple platforms would be great. In fact that sounds very similar to a certain Apple offering doesn't it? I really am looking forward to Mesh on mobile and Mac.

If Microsoft are serious about offering Software + Services then they need to embrace the multitude of environments that are now being used. By all means favour Windows but offer services on all. Oh and one more thing. Please fix Spaces. I really can't see a use for it. It's worse than Orkut. Give us blogging software we can use on our domains and this blog will be running off it. Give us ad's we can put on our sites and we'll do it. The future of the Cloud is not going to be the awful applications that you can develop for Facebook and Bebo, it's going to be the services users can place on their own domains and homepages and the simple way you can fulfil the simple needs of the end user. A blog, a few ads to make a few quid, a decent search engine, somewhere to put pictures and a gallery to display them. Mobile Me looks set to offer this Microsoft can too if it just takes a sip of the coolade and worries more about end users than end-user-developers.