From BBC News

Adobe released a software package, Creative Suite 5, on 12 April which can turn Flash code into iPhone code.
Flash programs are very widely used on the web and many games and videos are created using the software. However, under the new terms and conditions using Creative Suite 5 would lead to an application being rejected.

What do you think?

I have watched the debate over ebooks, publishing rights, drm, the death of ‘proper’ books for quite a while now. There’s an opinion or two out there as to what should be done to protect the publisher’s author’s rights. I firmly believe that creators of work should gain a fair remuneration from it. That, however, is not what I want to put forward today.

I love books, have done from a very early age, and read and re-read favourites til they are falling to pieces (Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is about due for yet another replacement) so to get them as ebooks alongside the dead tree version would be perfect. But why would I buy both when the ebook is often a similar price to the physical copy?

Why should I have to choose?

Publishers should possibly look into the idea of offering those who buy a paper-based book the opportunity to download an e-version for a nominal sum. I know I would happily pay a pound or two extra to get both. That way I could sit down by the fire with my book when it’s cold and rainy outside or I could take my preferred eReader (Sony for me) out and about knowing if I did finish what I was reading I could easily find something else in my electronic library to keep me going until I got home. You should have seen the pile of books I took to the US a few years ago - bet they could have added another passenger on the plane if I had left them at home!

I love the feel and smell of physical books, I love the cover art, I love having a library of books that I can peruse - but I also love technology and the ability to have a library in my handbag.

So, come on publishers - be brave, be innovative and be my friend forever.

Just a quickie here as I believe in praise as well as complaints

A couple of years ago I had an issue with Asda’s online shopping experience as it forced me to use IE rather than my preferred Firefox. I tried again today and I am pleased to say they now state their website is best viewed in IE8 and FireFox 3. Hurray for progress.

I was actually using Chrome and it also looked fine.

So well done Asda for bringing your website up to date; there’s no excuse for big companies not to support all the major browsers.

The latest gossip/buzz or whatever seems to be how Android (specifically Nexus One Google phone) is an ‘iPhone killer’. I don’t want an iPhone killer, I want a high quality phone that not only makes calls and sends texts but keeps me in touch with my clients, colleagues and friends through social networking. I want a phone that works 99% of the time. I want a phone that I can browse the net on - properly. I want apps that will direct me to local amenities & businesses, that tell me what’s playing at the local flicks, that help me keep my online & offline life in synch - I want a phone that is fun.

I thought the BlackBerry Storm (mk1) was that phone, and it is to an extent, but it reboots itself on a whim (usually when I need to reply urgently to a text or need to make an important call) and needs manual reboot regularly to cure its quirky behaviour (keyboard appearing in the wrong place, messages refusing to delete and so on). Not good enough when I am trying to run a business. So that promising relationship will be coming to an end once my contract is up.

I am now looking at Android as my next phone OS. There seems to be a few handsets coming onto the market and I currently have an old G1 to test out. I have two good people I know who have Android based phones and love them. I am hoping to fall in love too…

My daughter sent me this link to Clientcopia and, as I started to browse randomly, I found myself nodding and giggling so I thought I would share.

I’ve just been reading the BBC news article about proposals to make users of the BBC iPlayer pay.

Personally I would be very annoyed about this. I rarely watch the BBC anyway so already paying for a service I do not use often and now they want to charge me more? About the only thing I watch is an hour of BBC Breakfast in a morning and I have found the iPlayer on my PS3 does make me get more value for money from the BBC licence fee. If the BBC charged to use the iPlayer I just wouldn’t watch it - I guess that’d solve a lot of their problems as they wouldn’t be forking out for streaming so much over the net…

What do you think? Would micropayments be taking the biscuit?

Has anyone else been having problems with Firefox recently? Sometimes it seems to just ‘break’ sites for the hell of it. Twitter is a favourite, the BBC News site rendered incorrectly today and it’s just happened with a website I am designing - it was looking OK til I refreshed it to check on a change I’d made and it broke. I thought I’d mucked up the code but it looked fine in Chrome and even IE8.

I have now switched my browser default to Chrome to try Google’s offering out more thoroughly.

What do you think? Are Mozilla growing to far too fast?

Yesterday I took down my personal blog which was at histrel.me.uk/blog - why? Because since around 13th May the amount of spam comments I have had to moderate has been in the region of 10+ per day.  I had a few before that but not on this scale. I got fed up of seeing them in my inbox and, as I wasn’t doing much with the blog anyway, I decided to back-up and then delete it. For now.

Not being into spamming I was curious - how does it work? Was my blog address submitted to somewhere? If I set up the blg again will the same thing happen?

As I always moderate none of the spam actually appeared on my site so what was the point?Is it just a thrill from knowing someone’s being annoyed by all the spam? Very childish if you ask me.

Any advice gratefully received

I have just been looking for a laptop for my son - he’s had an old desktop for ages and it won’t run half the stuff he wants so we thought we’d treat him. There was a budget but looking online I knew we could get something decent. Plus he wanted it urgently (don’t they always).

Because of this so-called urgency we stopped off at PC World first. I’d had a look on the internet so knew roughly what was available. We had a look around and decided on the Dell 1545 as it had the right specs to play Oblivion (a 2006 game) and looked nice and sleek like Dells generally do.

The salesman eventually came over and we started talking about it and how I didn’t want the add on Norton or TechGuy set up. We mentioned gaming and he immediately said it would not be good enough. No word of a lie - he actually said at one point that this Dell didn’t have a graphics card. Now, Oblivion runs perfectly fine on my daughter’s 4+ yr old laptop so I knew that a new, if not exactly high-spec, Dell should be OK. But no, he wouldn’t have it. I needed a dual-core processor and a better this that and the other. I ended up walking out.

I am now about to set up the Acer I bought from Comet, same price but slightly better spec with a similar glossy, dark blue lid.  The guys in Comet said that it would an older game no problem (thinking about it, daughter runs Sims 3 perfectly fine on her older laptop so I don’t foresee any problems).

Can someone out there vindicate what I think - that the guy in PC World was trying to pull a fast one; mother on her own with teenage son = easy target maybe? Or do Dell really sell laptops without graphics cards?

I have a lovely pink Asus Eee 4GB Surf. It currently has XP installed on it and worked very well for a while. However, recently I keep getting messages about low disk space and everything is feeling a bit more sluggish than usual.

I am therefore in the market for a new OS. I like to write & surf on my Eee but do very little else. My main requirements are that it works with a 3G dongle (from 3) and that it can run MS OneNote - under WINE if necessary.

So, do I go for the latest Ubuntu or is there another, possibly better, option out there? BTW - I have a 16GB SD card in there for storing all docs etc.

Answers below pretty please with sugar on top…