Andy Beaumont

Talking of Windows being shit, every time I see this advert on TV I can’t help but marvel at the jerky window movement as this guy drags his windows to the edges of the screen. a) Why is Microsoft still incapable of making an OS where window dragging happens at more than 3 frames per second? b) Why did the ad agency that made this shitfest not simply animate the window dragging sequence to try to hide the lag?

AdMob have announced their Mobile Metrics report [PDF] for 2009 and it makes for some pretty interesting reading. The unstoppable rise of the iPhone OS is to be expected, but it’s nice to see this graph showing change over the last 6 months shows the 3 innovative operating systems all on the rise and everyone else in decline. Image credit to AdMob of course A couple of points worth noting… the fact that Windows Mobile’s share has now reached a level with Palm’s webOS and given their current trajectories is actually probably already behind.

Dropzone is really nice.

This giant pulsating lump of plastic appears as a stinger every time ITV football goes to a break. Given Sony’s history of releasing pointless crap that nobody wants, I wonder how many people think this thing is available right now from Dixons.

With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone.

And it looks like the best update yet. Finally Pixelmator has all the tools you’ll need to use it for web work, including slicing, export for web and an info panel (of sorts). Bye bye Photoshop. I never have to look at your stupid clunky custom interface again.

Really interesting video charting the design evolution of the iPhone app Convert by tap tap tap.

Lovely to see the iterations gone through and the design decisions being made along the way. Especially interesting is how much more usable this ends up than the pretty but woeful ConvertBot.

A little late posting this I know, but as a quick follow up to our panel at SXSW I'd like to thank everyone who came along and particularly the other panellists for some amazing insights and our superb moderator Liz for all her hard work. It was standing room only in our room with people being turned away at the door so the subject must still be a big issue for a lot of people.

Testing out Linkup.com’s new service I got a slightly unexpected error message; “We couldn’t understand the location london that you provided.” While I don’t mind that it didn’t understand the word London, it is a shame that it doesn’t offer the user any options that may make their search work. Here it should be trying to help the user, rather than simply telling them that it doesn’t understand. “Did you mean…” followed by a list of linked words similar to the search term helps to catch misspellings.

Two products from Elgato, EyeTV lets you use your Mac as a PVR and Turbo264 massively speeds up video encoding to h.264. You’d expect them to work together beautifully but this is what I see every time I ask EyeTV to export a recording through Turbo264. The last operation could not be completed because an error of type -536870176 occurred. Such a shame that they can’t seem to make two of their own products work together.