Go West… err East…no, is it North?

Monday, July 25th, 2011

If you haven’t got a satellite navigation system or smartphone app, don’t bother reading any more than this paragraph. Buy CoPilot Live Premium and you won’t be disappointed. It does everything you need and a lot more besides, running on Android and iOS phones. If you have CoPilot Live 8 already and are wondering if it’s worth upgrading perhaps our experience will help you decide.

CoPilot Live Premium is a brand new app based on CoPilot 9 and not just an update to CoPilot Love 8. This means it will cost the same as you have already paid. Even so, the two prices added together are still cheaper than a dedicated sat-nav and arguably a lot better. In two weeks of testing, CoPilot Live Premium hasn’t let us down and there are still many new features to be explored. As before, maps, POI’s and speed camera updates are free. Try that with your Garmin or Tom Tom.

From initial start-up, CoPilot Live Premium is very different from previous versions. The screen display is less cluttered with emphasis on showing the next turn and the name of the road to turn into, as a large icon and text running along the bottom of the screen. After turning on the text to speech option, CoPilot Live Premium informs you “in 500 yards, turn left into Bayswater Road”. Unfortunately, Emily, who has lived in our CoPilot across Europe, isn’t up to this task and her colleague Eleanor speaks instead.

She sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn in her ‘On Golden Pond’ voice, all juddery as if she is sitting on a one-cylinder diesel engine. Most of the time we leave her switched off and especially in Europe. After all, Place de Gaulle could be almost anywhere in France and who would know the Rue de Cholet as such when you are looking for the D960. However, once you get into city centres this changes especially if you are following a tourist map and know the road you are looking for.
Text to speech is especially good when you are walking and following Eleanor’s directions. Then you have time to search for the street names hidden behind a boulangerie’s awning or high up on a wall still pitted with bullet holes from WWII.

Getting ‘there’ is another new experience and a lot better than the previous CoPilot Live. From the start you are offered three different route options, based on your personal preferences or motorways or not and whether to allow toll roads or ferries. It is easy to adjust the routes by ‘clicking’ on the road marked on the map in one of three colours. Then dragging the line to the road you prefer to use. As before, CoPilot doesn’t get into a hissy fit if you miss the turning and rapidly recalculates back to the old or a brand new route.

ALK, publishers of CoPilot, ask you to send your automatically recorded routes to them so they can gather real-time data or correct errors. This is done easily from your cellphone as an option in one of the settings. At the same time you can grab some of their live updates such as traffic information. Live traffic data needs a data connection so it limited to the UK or the very wealthy. At only £7.99 per year it is still an upgrade worth buying.

We proved that the route selections are darned good too. Driving from Le Havre into France, CoPilot kept trying to get is to avoid the Pont de Normandie, which costs about a fiver to cross, and instead routing us to the nearby and free crossing of the Pont de Tancarville which would also take us onto our chosen route for very little extra time. En-route CoPilot continued to argue with the Nissan’s sat-nav we were following in the car in front and the route it chose to Saumur cost us about £30 more than CoPilot’s route.

There are still one or two glitches with the maps. For example: CoPilot wants to route me by way of Dover and Calais to get to Dieppe, rather than using the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry just down the road. It recognises the route but thinks the 4 hour crossing will take over 15 hours. It could just as easily route me from Portsmouth to Le Havre or Ouistreham in quicker time than the three hour drive to Dover.

As any sat-nav user will tell you, there are times when motorways meet in a spaghetti of options where getting on the wrong one may mean a round trip of 100 miles to get back to where you needed to choose the correct route. CoPilot Live Premium has tackled this with clearer route markings showing the correct route to take. I need to test it around Paris or Rouen before I will believe it. Where three or more roads combine then depart from each other, while you are driving at 130kph, on the wrong side of the road. Behind is a crazy trucker in a 40 tonne articulated monster, indifferent if he runs you over or not. Remembering Dennis Weaver in Spielberg’s Duel is not a good thing at such times.

The menus for settings and accessing other features of the app, are easier to get at with one tap on the map taking to the most immediate needs with a further button to get to the rest of the options such as POIs, PhotoNav and My Places. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar with icons for the remainder of the settings. Compared with the previous version of CoPilot it is far easier to use but has advanced options we haven’t tried yet and to be honest probably never will. We have no real wish to broadcast where we are to Facebook or Twitter, one of the new features for those who want it.

One thing we found a little irritating is that on tapping on the Points of Information to find the closest, you are presented by three options for the nearest: Restaurant, Hotel and Petrol Station. Not our chosen three which would probably be: Carrefour, vineyard and Public Toilet. Nevertheless, underneath is are two large buttons saying Search All which brings up a text entry screen, and More Categories, listing all POI types in alphabetical order as well as having a broader selection than earlier CoPilots. These work without a data connection and are downloaded to your cellphone regularly when data is available.

I note that according to CoPilot, my local Co-Op is called a Co-Opreative which just about sums up CoPilot Live Premium. For anyone about to buy a navigation app, it is pretty hard to beat and the price is very reasonable. We are glad we have the new version and going back to the previous one makes us realise all the new tricks you appreciate. With only a short time playing with the options and learning the menus, you’ll co-opreate with CoPilot Live Premium and trust it to get you to your destination. But do take a map with you as well, just in case…

To see is to understand

Monday, July 11th, 2011

I had the opportunity to see the new Samsung phones and tablets recently. Not the ones on sale but prototypes of the devices that will be on sale soon.


They are all very nice gadgets, the phone especially with its superb screen and camera. Although the phone’s back flexes alarmingly because it is made of plastic. Apparently this is to protect the phone if it is dropped, as I am sure we have all done to our phones. My concern was more about how it will react to living in the average bloke’s hip pocket. Sitting down and pressing the phone’s back into to a bunch of keys seemed as though it would crack the case with ease.


Samsung will be selling a revised tablet, more along the lines I suggested when Apple’s first iPad came out. It has a smaller screen size than an iPad but is far thinner than Samsung’s existing tablets and with the screen centred in the frame. The gadget was out of juice when I saw it so all I could to is touch and feel it. At nearly pocket sized it might suit handbag-toting commuters but I think most will go for the new Samsung iPad-alike.


This is a very lust-worthy piece of kit with a fast operating system and user interface, if a little less slick than iOS. Being prototypes, no prices were mentioned but if they get their costings a lot lower than Apple’s iPad 2, Samsung will be onto a winner. The Windows and non-Apple fanbois are, if anything, more rabid than Apple’s followers and will lap up the new Padalikes when they are on sale.


This is all assuming Apple lets Samsung get away with it. As far as I could see the new Samsung is identical to Apple’s iPad, even down to the location and appearance of the buttons. To see it is to understand why Apple has had such a huge row with Samsung. Until recently their relationship was worth over $5 billion to Samsung to make parts for Apple’s iOS mobile devices. In April, Apple accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying the iPad and iPhone. I can see what they are getting at.


It might make sense for Apple to find new suppliers because Samsung is competing with Apple, making its own phones and pads running Android. Having your major competitor’s designs in your own factories makes it easy to guess the direction Apple is heading as well as knowing how much Apple will probably sell them at.


Equally, Apple’s business is enormous, worth tens of billions each year to Samsung and all the other manufacturers. It will take months for a Samsung replacement to gear up, even if the contracts in place will let Apple move. We can assume they will still be partners in the months to come, just as Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel are at Red Bull Racing. They’ve only knocked each other off the circuit once, or is it twice, or maybe three times now?

Eaten by a Lion

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

This weekend I had to say goodbye to some very old friends who have been my best buddies for many years. It wasn’t my fault really, it’s just that, for me, Lion went GM.

It’s now 3rd of July, I’ve been MacOSX Lioned-up since around about March or maybe earlier but having slashed open an artery to sign in blood I wasn’t able to say anything about Lion. Even now I have to mention MacOS 10.7 in only the vaguest terms in case the Infinity Loop Patrol notice, clicker-click their sawn-offs to blast me to smithereens in a dark alleyway.

All I’m prepared to say is that when my Mac rebooted in the trusty, old MacOS Snow Leopard 10.6 partition, to convert it to the new OS, I ran back to Lion with relief. I hated Lion at first, bought a trackpad, found alternatives to applications and now think it’s the best OS since… err… the change between System 9 and MacOS X. Yes, It’s that good.

However, we have lost a load of friends in this last switch. With a bit of brilliant forward thinking I have a sparse image of my entire start-up Snow Leopard disk, complete with applications and Users Folder. Belt and braces just in case, eh?

I managed to get an Iomega external 2TB hard drive which had been designed to sit under a Mac Mini server until Apple redesigned the Mini’s case. As a hint, it means there are some superb FW800/400/USB2 drives waiting for someone to find them on the Web. I love the way the drive spins up with an ooooh-wup sound and it sits neatly on top of a Mac Pro, matching aluminium casing and looking exactly unlike any other desktop drive I have ever seen. Mac top would be a better description.

The loss of old friends is a heavy burden. Gone are Freehand, Adobe Suites, CS 2 and 3, Switch, Visual Hub, Turbo 264, Call of Duty UO MP (ooooooooohhh)…. In fact so many I can’t bear the loss without shedding a tear or two. We have many work arounds: such as using Apple’s free Image Capture to get scans into Photoshop and Pages or Sun Office have replaced Word, Handbrake steps up for VisualHup or Turbo264.

It could be time to investigate virtual OS-es to run the old PPC applications but how far back does one go? After all, Steam does exactly the same with their MacOS games. We miss Vette and good old StarTrek, AfterDark, Streamline and Talking Moose but those are things the kids nowadays think are films on DVD rather than CRT or LCD.

One thing is for sure, my partner (still PPC based) and I are heartily sick of the interface Adobe slaps on their apps. We have been using them for over 20 years and still think they are the dog’s vomit. If MacOS Lion forces us to find new vector graphic and pixel editors it’s no bad thing. As she (my partner) said, ‘Adobe’s interfaces rival the worst Microsoft has designed’, which means the absolutely daft Ribbon of their latest Office. Why break a paradigm without offering something better?

Which was my first though about Lion until I let it get its teeth into me.

Désolé monsieur

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

The biggest tossers in Europe

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

That’s us Brits. We throw away more than any other EC country and much of it still usable. The bulk of our ‘stuff’ ends up in giant landfill sites even if we recycle it, all because the market is flooded with dead plastic, paper and CRT TVs.

We had to make a decision whether to give up something perfectly adequate. Our home and studio is in an area where we are offered a broadband choice from the best of the UK’s leading suppliers. Speeds available vary between pathetic to incredible but at what point does all the speed become a waste of money?

The best our telephone line could manage was a miserly 5Mbps download and 0.8 upload.  Thos was after numerous modem upgrades, changing wholesalers and switching between various flavours of ADSL, We could also guarantee that at half past five, ADSL would go down. Exactly the same time we wanted to upload files of the day’s work to servers around the world. Obviously people were getting home from work and hitting their connections. But we paid a premium price for business lines and contention ratios meant to make sure we had priority access.

The move to cable was inevitable and immediately our upload speed was better than the best download speed ADSL ever supplied. It is more than adequate for our needs and even faster than we are supposed to be paying for. Then Virgin told us we can have double that and shortly double that again. All for an additional £22 per month.

What will all that bandwidth get us?

At the moment our 50Mb cable link means we can do everything we need, rapidly and without the disconnects which plague ADSL. Up and downloads of gigabytes of data are a matter of minutes. The server we are connecting with is the limiting factor rather than our cable connection. BBC aside that is, which has been consistently the best in our experience.

We are a household where at times, we have four or more smart phones, one iPad, two Samsung Tabs, seven laptops and two or three desktop computers running ftp servers and the like. Plus our own little Cloud upstairs serving videos to whoever we give the password to. In addition, we might be streaming to an AppleTV or the iPad from Crackle. Perhaps one or two of us are having a video chat to girl/boyfriend left behind in London/Chicago.

If we fancy a movie download, usually about 1.5GB from the iTunes Store, between clicking on the link and sitting to watch is about the same time it takes to get the foil and wire off a bottle of Prosecco With enough time left over to pop the cork through the open French doors into the garden to see if we can beat the current distance record. An achievement I lost recently when my partner uncorked a particularly fizzy specimen. The cork shot up three metres, sailed past the greenhouse by a gnat’s crotchet to land in the garden pond some 15 metres away. Personally I think the wind was behind it.

Should we move to 100Mb link and then to 200mb?

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame would undoubtedly declaim of course we should, speed is essential. It didn’t do The Stig much good when he won the court case to reveal his identity. He lost his job, had a brief appearance in BTCC racing and seems to have sunk into history.

But he did give driving lessons to Cameron Diaz. And Tom Cruise if you are into short, Scientologist actors.

How to become a remarkable asset for the iTunes Store Family

Monday, June 6th, 2011

The problem was simple. For the first time ever I tried to download a movie rental from iTunes. Previously we have bought the films and downloaded them as MP4s to my Mac. This time I didn’t think we would watch the film more than once and tried to download it straight tom my AppleTV. (more…)

Small scale email marketing works a treat

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

A long time ago, in a place far from here, on a dark and stormy night, I sent out my first mailshot to 100 names plucked from Thomson’s Directory. It read ‘Mark and Mac for hire’. The response was amazing, creating a customer base which lasted for a decade and more. My wife and I were some of the first designers in Brighton with Mac set-ups, including a PostScript laser printer and a full range of design software. It all cost a gazillion to buy, the typefaces alone were worth thousands of pounds.

Over the years, clients moved on, to be replaced with others. As new facilities became affordable we bought them: ISDN, ADSL, high-res scanning, image manipulation, large format colour prints and web page design.

Gradually I specialised into book production, with clients in London, France and America, while my wife worked for a national charity. But the bankers screwed the world, people stopped buying books, publishing moved to ebooks and for the first time in 25 years I had to get a proper job. Ironically back to my old career where there is a huge lack of staff and I’m working less for the same money I earned from design. But I still keep a toehold in the creative world, hoping for the return of the good old days.

Zany, attractive and to the point

Which is how one email caught my eye and instead of marking it as junk, I read each new one with interest. They were zany, attractive and to the point, obviously from someone who knew what they were doing, or at least appeared to do so. The email was from Keith Scott, another jobbing freelancer who was trying to create a new client base via email.

Pre-recession Keith had been the man behind British Airport Authority’s annual report. As any designer will tell you, a glossy annual report pays the mortgage for a year. When BAA were taken over, Keith found he didn’t have enough work after a career in typesetting and design for print, dating from the days of hot metal.

Keith explained: “Once BAA’s 2006 annual report had gone to print I was back in the normal run of things with no financial umbrella and wondering what to do about the monetary vacuum. I had been sending postcards then followed up with a phone call but it became too expensive and time-consuming. I decided to try email.

“I had built up a small database of about 120 contacts whom I telephoned to get an email address before starting a monthly mail-out. It was a slow, manual process but it did keep the work coming in. Eventually I set FileMaker Pro to send the emails for me.

“At the start of 2009 I had 300 friendly contacts and about 1200 who had never replied. Each month I carried on emailing both and slowly increased the friendly list, which kept the work coming in. Unfortunately, as the recession hit, work started drying up, I had to put my time to good use.

“With the help of Yell.com, Yellow Pages on line, I searched for graphic design companies in London and the southern home counties. I telephoned them and said I was an artworker. I gave them my details and asked for the email address of the creative director or studio manager. The vast majority of people were very obliging.

Life threatening

“One day, searching Yell, an odd message appeared in a new browser window. It said that I was deemed to be using their site for the purpose of making a database which was strictly illegal and if I did not desist I would be prosecuted. It frightened the life out of me.

“Now I buy low cost lists from other companies. Not all of them have been particularly useful and one even instigated a contact from another database company threatening to prosecute me for using their data without permission. A list I had bought was clearly not legal and I had used a hidden trojan.

“I now have 570 friendly contacts and over 3000 who have never replied. The irony is that I have less work than ever, although it does seem to be improving slightly. Producing an html email for a client gave me the knowledge to create my own. I tried Dreamweaver which wasn’t very successful before I settled on TextWrangler which is free and very good. I use MacMassMailer to send my html emails.”

As with all jobbing designers, Keith has had to learn new skills and software to keep up with the industry. He is keen to learn from others’ experience. In the last couple of years, MacUser articles have made him re-evaluate his approach and present himself more forcefully. For example: a recent article showed that skilled freelancers should present themselves as specialists rather than just run-of-the-mill artworkers.

Like Keith, MacUser’s Steve Caplin convinced me to switch to a graphics tablet and adopt a different method to do ‘hairy cut-outs.’ This was immediately before I created a book for the Imperial War Museum called The Animals’ War. Page after page had cut-outs of hirsute animals which even the best Photoshop filters were a major head-ache. Steve’s advice was to paint quick masks, convert them to cut-outs before generating ‘hairiness‘ with brushes and fitters. This helped when I went on to do The Children’s War.

Keith Scott concludes: “The obvious thing for me was to promote my traditional typesetting and artworking background. This is why I try hard to distinguish the fact that design and artwork are two very different disciplines.

“But I feel that I’m barking up the wrong tree much of the time – some might say I’m simply barking.”

Far be it for me to contradict him.

New Vistas on Lion

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Terry Seabrook emailed me today, about his new CD and concert dates. Don’t know who he is (I hear you say)? Terry is just a cool Brighton-based jazz man, his new website is here: http://www.milestonesjazz.co.uk/ . I’m not usually a fan of jazz but Terry’s last band, Cubana Bop and his new latest, Sketches of Miles, give you a Jazz which is very light and listenable.

As I looked through Terry’s back catalogue I tried to remember which were the CD cover’s I designed, from an era when my studio was in Brighton and I traded design of their poster/cover/whatever in exchange for a copy of their latest music as CD and MP3s. Brighton is the birth place of so many bands and musicians, I made sure my music library grew exponentially by working for as many as possible. Most of the CDs remain sealed in their wrappers in case in years to come, I can take them to the Antiques Roadshow.

The chances of running the software I used to produce Terry’s covers, diminish as rapidly as Apple switches allegiance in it’s choice of CPU suppliers. The switch from System 8 to MacOSX was expensive in some ways as scanners and some printers were left for dust but software still ran. Apple introduced their Classic emulator which I found ran old software quicker and more reliably than under native System 8.

I still have some of those old packages and welcome anyone creating a new Classic emulator so I can get to my old barcoders, Streamline and various graphics apps. Then Apple switched from IBM to Intel as their CPU supplier. That change was again, helped by Rosetta, the PPC emulation software which has kept all my older MacOSX apps running.

It is the switch to Lion which is going to hurt the most because this time there will be no emulator to keep PPC apps alive. They will wither away to nothing as soon as I switch and will include some of the heavyweight software I cannot find alternatives for. This includes every Adobe application I own, Microsoft Office suite as well as old faithfuls such as VisualHub, SilverFast scanning software and others.

Losing Microsoft Office will be the least painful, I never wanted to upgrade from Word 5 and definitely not the latest Word with the dreadful ribbon. For the rest of broken apps, I just hope they get updates pretty darned quick. Some, such as Epson’s drivers, are all PPC. Others, such as SilverFast, will probably be a paid for upgrade.

This next MacOSX is the first where I shall really examine whether it is worth the hassle to use. For me to say that, I think Apple might be on the verge of making the same mistake as Microsoft did with Vista.

The Lion Wores

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

What is it with TV presenters? Why have we got so many all of a sudden who have speech affectations? Should such people be on TV in the first place?

I listened to some last night and their expressions included: Sir Anthony Beaumwant.… The Gweatest Wevolution… Cweated the kitchen wange…  Incwedible… pweliferwation…the scullery mwaid…middle cwases.

These aren’t the words of someone with a speech impediment caused by some physical or psychological disability. If they were I wouldn’t dream of mentioning them. Instead, they are from the voices of those who have been to the best schools, usually now being something like the curator of the Queens handkerchiefs, or should that be Cwuwater? Then there is Jonathan Woss…

After extensive minutes of research it appears I am not the only one questioning this affectation which they also notes as a pwoduct of the wealthy. The Queen in her 1950s voice sounded pretty stupid to us today. As if she had something stuck in her royal passage. Thankfully her accent has tamed and Britain is represented by a softly spoken lady with a wealthy London accent. Unlike the Estuary speech that Nigel Kennedy, wealthy iconic violinist, has adopted. In Jamie Oliver it is natural, in others it is forced.

Here, one American asks the same qwestion:. While here the questioner notes it is not an affectation seen in other English speaking countries. Even the Beeb has some notes about it: BBC – Voices – Your Voice.

Macs have long had voices, which I find useful to grab my attention to something going on. For many years Alex has summoned me to click on a dialogue box or warned that Armageddon would occur if I didn’t choose between two options. Usually Erase Hard Drive Yes or No.

For me, the other voices just didn’t hack it. Victoria was nearly my dream girl but sounded just a bit too CanadianAmericanDigital. The others might appeal to some but I have never wanted to be summoned by Bubbles or his compatriots.

However, with Lion it looks as though this will change. A whole new range of voices may be included, according to those with Developer copies. The voices spoken be real people or nearly real people, from the countries the Mac is present around the world. This includes the various versions of English, such as Australian, South African and so on. Even such third world countries as Scotland are included.

But you can’t mix and match to have Jacques in Montreal speak English with his sexy French Canadian accent. He’s strictly French speaking, just like Brunhilda will always speak in German and Agnetha in Swedish, unfortunately.

Apparently the Speech control panel with have previews of the new voices which are then downloaded if you make a selection. The downside being they will be pretty big files to take in all the nuances of each voice. Personally I’d give a gigabyte to have Agnetha summons me but I can’t be bothered to learn Swedish.

Who cares?

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

Our four cars were lined up in the car park at the nursing home. Over the last week we had all driven hundreds of miles going back and forth to the death bed of a close relative. The cars were caked in filth: road and brake dust, bird crap and honey dew. The windscreens had more squashed bugs than a Windows service pack.

Coincidentally the cars were all silver in colour – apparently the most favoured for UK cars – with two having rear wash/wipers and two cars without. Yet the two without any automatic means to was the rear view had dusty but relatively clean rear screens, while the others had thick layers of muck with only the area covered by their wipers swept clean.

Why so? the cars without wash/wiper were a BMW coupe and most saloon cars don’t have or need wash wipers, and my Civic hatchback. The other two hatchbacks were a Nissan Note and an Astra. It’s pretty obvious that the design of the Nissan and Vauxhall meant that they picked up road dirt as wind whipped over the car at speed. Probably some weird vortex builds up behind them, swirling muck back at the windows. Whereas the other Honda and BMW are more streamlined and channel wind away from the rear of the vehicle.

When I bought the Honda I was aware it had no rear washer wiper system and accepted the car on those terms. Just like when I got my iPhone and now iPad2 which arrived a couple of days ago. Apple told me they were tracking the location of my gadgets and that I could look in and see where they were for myself. I accepted them on these terms and even think of it as a big bonus in case they get nicked.

I never once thought it was suspicious that Apple were keeping tabs on me. It was only a year or so that I willing drove around with a GPS receiver which logged all my journeys and speeds. That little box even came on holiday a few times and I have been grateful it did so because it was working out real average journey times for all mapping systems and satnavs using Navteq maps.

When the ‘discovery’ was announced about Apple tracking iPhones, under lurid headlines written by rabid hacks who had nothing better to do that day. Some more forward thinking journalists recognised a non-story when they read one and said “So what?”.

The guys found the little log file holding the dodgy data, hidden in full view here: /Users//Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ and even titled clearly in case you missed it . They even wrote an app for you to see what’s in it here: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

They warn the data isn’t accurate and indeed, when I view my phone’s info I have apparently been places I have never heard of. Which rather blows out the water the ideas the rabid hacks have of the data being used by private investigators to snoop on people. Apparently the location is determined by triangulating the nearest cell-phone towers and as this isn’t as accurate as GPS it often gets confused readings several miles from your location. In the case of my phone I can rest assured that I have never been in the middle of the English Channel or made a phone call from Reims even if I have the data to prove I did.

I just wish Apple could make my iPhone remember what it is I am trying to remember.