Richard Gaywood

Richard Gaywood's Latest Posts

Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep

by Richard Gaywood (Dec 1st 2011 8:00PM)

By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I hoped would be an interesting blog post about what I feel this means about Apple and our relationship to technology. I see an interesting link here ...

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Deep dive: Aperture and Photo Stream, how do they work?

by Richard Gaywood (Nov 6th 2011 8:00AM)

I'm a bit of a shutterbug, so Photo Stream is something I was really interested in when it was announced as part of iOS 5's feature set way back in June. Frictionless, automated sending of photos from my phone to my computer? Sign me up! Of course, as is too often the case with Apple, the nitty ...

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Smartphone wars: Android "has half of the UK smartphone market"

by Richard Gaywood (Nov 1st 2011 5:45PM)

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a prominent market research firm and a powerful figure on the Scrabble board -- today released its latest "smartphone OS barometer" report, and it has some noteworthy conclusions in it about the British market. Specifically, the report claims that in the 12 weeks ...

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Notes on the iPhone 4S announcement

by Richard Gaywood (Oct 7th 2011 3:00PM)

Similarly to my previous notes on the iPad 2 launch, here are a few things I noticed about Tuesday's event that were too small to deserve a post of their own. On it being the iPhone 4S and not the iPhone 5 The iPhone 4 is the best selling smartphone in the US. The iPhone 4S presents a solid ...

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Why the iPod touch 3G makes no sense

by Richard Gaywood (Oct 3rd 2011 6:00PM)

Amongst the frenzied speculation that tomorrow's media event will see new iPhones and the end of the iPods both Shuffle and Classic, there's also been some lower-key talk of a possible "iPod touch 3G", designed to sit halfway between the iPad 3G and the iPhone. I must confess, this makes very ...

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Hands on with Boxee for iPad and Boxee Box v1.2

by Richard Gaywood (Aug 10th 2011 9:00PM)

The long-awaited Boxee for iPad app went live yesterday and quickly rose to the #13th most popular free app for iPad. Simultaneously, Boxee released a new firmware version for the Boxee Box set-top media player, v1.2, with some new Apple-friendly features like AirPlay and AFP support. We've ...

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Mac malware 'explosion' missing in action

by Richard Gaywood (Jul 21st 2011 6:00PM)

The appearance of the MacDefender trojan back in May provoked a lot of back-and-forth between various tech writers (including your humble correspondent). Was this a sign that the good times were ending? That the Mac platform would come under ever-fiercer attack from malware authors? That soon ...

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Sensor-rich computing: the quiet revolution that started in your pocket

by Richard Gaywood (Jul 2nd 2011 12:15PM)

Suppose you're at at your desk with a MacBook and an iPhone. You want to check cinema screening times at your local multiplex and the weather forecast so you'll know if you'll need a jacket or not. Which device do you reach for? If you choose the MacBook, you'll need to go to a cinema ...

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How iTunes Match solves my obscure downsampling problem

by Richard Gaywood (Jun 11th 2011 12:45PM)

I have a longstanding audio quality problem with iTunes -- but iTunes Match will finally resolve it for me. Hurray! Hopefully this post will help others in the same situation. It all starts with the sad fact that I'm a perfectionist idiot about audio quality, so I still buy CDs and rip them ...

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Piictu puts the fun into iOS picture sharing

by Richard Gaywood (Jun 7th 2011 4:30PM)

What? Another iOS photo sharing app? No, wait, keep reading! The just-released Piictu app (official site, iTunes) has some new tricks to show you. Piictu's big idea is to treat the photos you post not as the traditional timeline view we associate with blogs and apps like Instagram, but rather ...

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