Fogey Friday
10th August
Hotmail, eBooks, Apple, YouTube

There was no Fogey Friday last week and this week’s is much diminished.  There is tech news but who cares when the Olympics is on and you can watch women boxers beating seven bells of shit out of each other and various thrusting young types working up a sweat?  If you have a gym membership and that gym has treadmills, here’s a little exercise you can try:  Consider Alistair Brownlee, who won triathlon gold for Team GB.  He ran a sub 30-minute 10k after having swum 1,500 metres and cycled 40km.  So his average running speed was a shade over 20km per hour, nearly 12.5mph.  Try it.  Chances are your gym treadmill won’t go that fast and if it does you’ll be sprinting like a hungry cheetah.  And then you will fall off.  For the 50+ minutes duration of the cycling time trial, mod-man Bradley Wiggins averaged over 50kmh.  That’s 31mph. In the velodrome sprinters such as Jason Kenny top 60kmh. The Olympics is a fiesta of such mind-boggling stats.  So while Tech Fogey routinely has its gob-smacked by technological wizardry, this week we’re happy to let the human variety take centre stage.  Hopefully there isn’t an appFrom Wikipedia: A mobile application (or mobile app) is a software application designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. They are usually available through application distribution platforms, which are typically operated by the owner of the mobile operating system, such as the AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department App Store, GoogleStarted life as a mere search engine; now hell bent on world domination. More PhDs work for Google than any other single organisation and they're determined to know everything about everyone. For some reason Google thinks this inside info will help them and their chums sell us more stuff. Play, Windows Phone Store and BlackBerryOld fruit. Smartphone, most often with qwerty keypad that can only be operated by those with the fingers of an anorexic pixie. Mostly a business device that's good for emails but not much else. A misser of many boats. App World. Some apps are free, while others must be bought. Usually, they are downloaded from the platform to a target device, such as an iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged., BlackBerry, AndroidAn operating system for mobile devices developed by Google. It is now the principal competition to Apple's iOS (i operating system). It has gone through several versions, all of which have been given wacky nicknames. The latest is known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Those Google geeks are sooo hilarious! phone or Windows Phone, but sometimes they can be downloaded to laptops or desktops. For apps with a price, generally a percentage, 20-30%, goes to the distribution provider (such as iTunes), and the rest goes to the producer of the app. The term "app" has become popular, and in 2010 was listed as "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. In 2009, technology columnist David Pogue said that newer smartphones could be nicknamed "app phones" to distinguish them from earlier less-sophisticated smartphones for that.

Book ‘em Danno

And so it came to pass – Amazon is now selling more digital ebooks downloads than the paper and ink alternative.  For every 100 regular books sold so far this year, Amazon has spewed 114 digital screeds.  And the tipping point, apparently, has been desperate housewives and their lust for smut.  One of the oft-mentioned vagaries of eReaders such as Amazon’s Kindlee-reader developed by Amazon. The top-of-the-range Kindle Fire is a touchscreen tablet, not unlike an iPad, that costs significantly less than an iPad. Despite all the column inches devoted to e-readers and how they will take over the book business and destroy the demand for printed books, they are still nasty devices when compared with the aesthetic gorgeousness of a hardbacked book. is that no one can see what you’re reading.  So your brow can be as high or low as it likes and the nation’s nosey-parkers will be none the wiser.  Not a factor that featured in many long-term predictions for our digital future.

Outlook for Hotmail?  Terminal.

Is your mail hot?  Not for much longer.  Microsoft has decided to ditch Hotmail, so anyone with an @hotmail.com account will need to replace it with @outlook.com.  Hotmail will be redirected to Outlook once all users have established a new account, so no one should lose any communications.  Hotmail (est. 1996) has 350 million users, while Google’s Gmail, which has been around only since 2007, has 425 million.  Quite why Microsoft thinks the new name will make any difference to people’s email inclinations is anyone’s guess but here’s a thought: no one likes elements of their identity being changed without having any say-so in the matter. It might seem an exaggeration to include email addresses in this generalisation but we humans get attached to such apparent trivia. If the name of your street was randomly changed you might not like it but you wouldn’t go so far as to move house – that would be difficult, costly and mental.  Moving email accounts, though, is very, very easy.  Google must be laughing all the way to the bank (as usual) because there’s every chance that disgruntled Hotmailers will take umbrage and defect to Gmail, just because they can.

Apple Divests

In a long-term fit of pique, Apple is shunning all things Google.  First it was Google Maps (dumped in favour of a fling with Tom Tom) and now YouTube (owned by Google) will no longer be a default app on Apple devices such as iPhone and iPad.  You’ll still be able to get YouTube on your Apple device but you’ll have to download the app from the App Store, at least until the App Store decides not to stock the portal to the world’s third most visited website (Google and Facebook are 1 and 2).  Steve Jobs was cross with the Googlers when they developed the Android operating system (OSOperating System. Windows, Apple's iOS and Linux, for example, are operating systems.) which is now in smartphones that far more punters are buying than his iPhone.  Jobs got all stompy of foot because he didn’t like competition and thought Brin & Page had nicked all his OS-type ideas.  So among his many legacies is Apple being committed to waging ‘thermonuclear war’ against Google.  Nice.