#oneaday, Day 199: Waving Goodbye

So, Google Wave is going bye-bye, huh? Can't say I'm particularly surprised. As cool an idea as it was, there just wasn't the buy-in from people that it deserved. Largely because a goodly proportion of the Internet population didn't seem to understand what it was actually for.

It's easy to assume people who didn't "get" Wave are just a bit slow. But the fact is, Google never did a great job of explaining what the technology was for in the first place.

"Yay, collaborative editing!" they'd say.

"Yay, we can do that with Google Docs!" everyone else would say.

"Yay, you can see people typing!" they'd say.

"Yay, who gives a shit?" everyone else would say.

"Yay, it's like a combination of email, Twitter and a word processing document!" they'd say.

"Yay, I've never wanted to combine those three things together!" everyone else would say.

It's a pity, as I've seen some genuinely interesting uses of Wave out there. One particularly cool Wave I was invited to took the form of a moderated "text adventure", where participants could direct the protagonist (played by the moderator in the role of an interactive fiction-style narrator) by inserting commands. Eventually, the non-linear nature of Wave allowed two parallel storylines to develop at once—one happening in the present, another as a flashback. Wave's ability for anyone to edit and insert new content at any point in the "conversation" meant that these two things could continue going on without becoming overly confusing.

Then there were all the possibilities for things like education. But then you have to deal with your average teacher's technophobia.

When I was working in schools, I had a grand idea that Wave could be used for the preparation of interactive resources. The fact that media such as YouTube videos, flash thingies, pictures, text, hyperlinks and even iFrames could be inserted meant that Wave could have been an ideal tool to use on interactive whiteboards during lessons, and also a good means of collaborative planning if teachers in question weren't able to meet and discuss things. As they frequently aren't.

As a result of many of these things, I had a Wave account which largely went unused because no-one else was using it. This is a shame, as I could see the potential in the service. But the fact the service was invite-only for so long, and then by the time it went public people were still scratching their heads and wondering what to do with it—these things meant that it didn't have a particularly "mass market" appeal for the average Internet user.

All is not lost for the moment, anyway. Wave is going to remain open—Google have just said they're stopping development on it. They've also open-sourced a goodly proportion of the code, so enterprising clever people with mathematics in their brains will be able to pull it apart and make it better, faster, stronger, I'm sure.

So it was a swing and a miss for Google on this one. To be honest, though, I think it's good to see them experimenting with different technologies as a company. It would be very easy for Google to just think "Right. We do these things. And we do them well. Let's just stop there and make bundles of money and stick them in our ears." But no; they seem to be on a constant quest to make the lives of the Internet's denizens better. Sometimes these things work. And sometimes they don't.

So raise a glass to Google Wave, the web app that couldn't. And start speculating on what they might be up to next!

#oneaday, Day 159: Obligatory New Phone Gushing

I picked up an iPhone 4 today. Cheap, too, thanks to the contract I went for. I was already on a £45 a month contract, so continued with that and got a new iPhone 4 16GB for £29. Nice. Plus I can recycle my old 3G and get at least £150 for it, so that'll be good too.

The new phone is absolutely astonishing when coming from the ageing 3G. I'm not sure if it was the OS updates or that apps were just getting more and more sophisticated, but the 3G was really starting to struggle with a lot of things. Even doing simple tasks like sending a tweet were causing momentary pauses, requiring you to wait before it would respond to an input. Some apps were better than others, but unfortunately some of the apps I was using most frequently were the most severely affected.

No such issues with the 4. While I was waiting in the queue at the Apple Store, a former colleague came up to me and showed me how quickly apps started on the new phone. It was impressive stuff. It's noticeable with games, too – I tried out Warpgate earlier, a game which stuttered and juddered all over the shop on the 3G. On the 4, the loading is so quick that it really doesn't need loading screens any more.

The biggest wow is the screen, though. It really is not an exaggeration to say it is pin-sharp. You can't see the individual pixels. Unless you look really, REALLY closely, but then you're just the guy pressing his nose against his phone. It's particularly noticeable on text. Everything has a lovely smooth-edged but sharp look to it, which makes text beautifully readable. The high resolution also means that web pages can be viewed zoomed out and still be readable, too.

Gave the camera a brief try tonight, but not a serious one. It certainly seems good, though, and the preview image on the screen looked ludicrously sharp. The flash seems to work well, too, and the iMovie app is neat. Not sure if it's £2.99 neat, but it's cool to be able to trim and edit video, including adding stills and audio, on your device. And for a dinky little phone to shoot 720p video? That's pretty awesome however you look at it.

In short then, it's great. I haven't spent a significant amount of time with it yet, but I very much like what I've seen today. Those of you still with a 1st gen or a 3G iPhone should definitely make the upgrade. If you've got the 3GS, I'd say it's less pressing, though the extra speed, the lovely screen and the enhancements to the camera are all very nice indeed.

And I haven't seen any evidence of the "you can block the antennae with your hand" thing yet, but maybe that's just because I naturally hold the phone in a way that doesn't cause that problem!

Yeah, I'm an Apple geek. Sue me. If Android had got to me first, I'm sure I'd be a fan. But as it is, I've never felt the need to even look at an Android phone. The iPhone does what I need it to, and it does it well. I'm sure Android does some things better; but frankly if that's the case I'd rather not know!

#oneaday, Day 64: Act Your Age, Fanboys

Why does the phenomenon of fanboyism still exist? And more to the point, why does it exist amongst men (and it pretty much is always men) who are old enough to know better?

The simple and easy answer is, of course, that it's always been around. I remember growing up as an Atari-based family and all of the Atari magazines at the time belittling the competition with stupid names like Spectrash (Spectrum) and Crappydore (Commodore 64). Then came the schoolyard arguments – SEGA vs Nintendo. Sonic vs Mario. "We've got Street Fighter II! Hah! …Oh wait, now you have, too." It got pretty silly.

Once the Dreamcast came out, it was hard to justify fanboyism because, certainly once SEGA's wondermachine came out, it was so far ahead of its competition – the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and the 32-bit PlayStation – that half-hearted attempts to call it things like "Dreampants" always came across as more than a little desperate.

Things then kicked off again with Sony vs Microsoft, with Nintendo kind of relegated to "background observer" by this point. The PS2 and the original Xbox both had fiercely loyal supporters when, in fact, you'd have a far better experience if you bought both systems, played the relevant exclusives on their respective platforms and played multiplatform titles on the Xbox. That's what I did, and I never felt the need to slag off any of the systems.

And it still goes on today, despite each of the consoles arguably offering a more distinct and unique experience from each other than ever before. The Xbox 360 offers its legendary ease of online play, the PS3 is home to a variety of unusual and interesting games (like Flower, flOw, Linger in Shadows, the Pixeljunk games) and the Wii is the family-friendly bundle of fun.

Still the hating goes on, though.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in the world of smartphones, particularly between the owners of iPhones, BlackBerries (let's pluralise it properly, please) and Android-based phones. iPhone owners are either Apple fanboys who bang on about how great Apple is all the time or jailbreakers who bang on about which ludicrously-named hack they're installing this week – and, of course, which apps they could get for free rather than paying for them on the App Store. BlackBerry owners seem to be updating their OS every night. And Android owners seem to be particularly sore about the iPhone for some inexplicable reason.

The question is: why? When it came to the early console wars, slagging off the systems your friends had was just schoolyard banter. You didn't really think that the systems were inferior, otherwise you wouldn't have gone around to their houses and played those games with them. The fact that this juvenile banter has grown up with people who have been using gaming and other consumer electronics for years is utterly baffling. Even people who started gaming at the same time as me – or before – are still bitching and moaning about how much better their handset is that [x]'s handset, and blahblahblah open source, blahblahblah build quality, blahblahblah BlackBerry Messenger, blahblahblah… You get the picture.

Am I alone in thinking that all of this stuff, without exception, is seven degrees of awesome and we should appreciate the brilliant things we have? Yes, some of them have more features. Yes, some of them are objectively "better" in terms of capabilities, power and technical specifications. But is that really any reason to act like 5-year olds telling each other that their respective Mums smell of wee?

No, it's not. So why does it still go on?

One A Day, Day 29: Netbook 'em, Danno

I bought a netbook today – specifically, an Asus Eee PC 1005P. Why that one? Well, it seemed to have a number of decent reviews around the Net, was reasonably up-to-date specs wise (though it could possibly do with another gig of RAM) and was reasonably priced.

A while back, I was under the impression that netbooks were particularly pointless. I even remember a number of us fairly mercilessly laying into our buddy Luke for picking one up – though this was largely due to the fact that at the time he bought one, netbooks were very much in their infancy, no-one really understood quite what they were for, no-one really understood Linux (which was all you could get them preinstalled with) and, of course, we all worked for Apple at the time.

Nowadays, they're a different beast to what they were. This machine – which I'm typing on right now, in fact – runs Windows 7 Starter (with the opportunity to upgrade to Home Premium) and seems plenty quick enough to do most things on the Internet. The 10-inch widescreen is a comfortable size – not too small to be illegible, yet compact enough to be endearingly cute. The speakers are on a par with most laptops – i.e. shit – but they're plenty loud enough to be able to hear the soundtrack on a video.

The reason I bought this was so that I actually have my own portable computer to take with me to PAX. My wife has a MacBook but I would only be able to pry that out of her cold, dead fingers – and I don't particularly want to kill her purely for the sake of having something to blog on in Boston. We have several laptops in the house right now – my wife's old ThinkPad (complete with that dumb "nipple" pointing device), a Sony Vaio laptop that switches on if it's in the right mood (which it usually isn't) and the MacBook – and now this.

Every time I buy a new computer, it strikes me how far things have come. This thing that's sitting on my lap right now is about ten times more powerful than the first desktop PC that I owned, yet it's an "entry-level" machine with "limited" use. Hell, I remember being excited the day we upgraded our 386 to a 486 DX2 66MHz – finally we were able to run DOOM in high detail mode.

I'll be intrigued to see how well it handles various tasks. It's certainly more than fine for email and web browsing – I'm going to be seeing if latest Squadron of Shame mission Machinarium will run on it as soon as it's finished downloading. Reports will inevitably follow on Twitter.