Paul's Boutique

Apple promoted Leopard for so long that I got completely swept up in the excitement - I bought and installed it on the day of release, and initially things seemed ok. Not a million miles from Tiger - some odd aesthetic changes - but generally a smooth ride and nothing to worry about.

For the last month I’ve been getting the dreaded grey screen of death on a daily basis, usually when I’m in the middle of uploading a file from Coda. Naturally the crash occurs just after the file transfer starts, which results in the file truncating and me losing most of it.

I’d never seen the grey screen of death before. The first time it happened I was quite impressed that it wasn’t as abrupt as window’s blue screen of death - the screen gracefully fills with grey and then tells me in about eight languages that everythings screwed and there’s nothing I can do about it but switch off and start again. Now it’s happening with such regularity that even if Apple sent someone around to my house with some chocolates to gently break to me that my computer was going to freeze inexplicably and I’d probably lose data, it wouldn’t be enough to stop me becoming really quite angry.

SO - here’s the quandry. Do I ‘downgrade’ to Tiger (there’s a lot of talk of it but I haven’t found a walk-through that would make me feel safe), or do I sit it out and wait for 10.5.2, which evidently weighs in at nearly 400MB and sounds to me like a lot of fixes for something that possibly shouldn’t have been released until it was ready. No release date for that fix yet…

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I read (and subsequently participated in) an interesting debate on the Guardian site today. The first was around the issue of the BBC Trust stifling their ability to launch a leading edge on-demand media player. Opting to use Windows Media Player / Microsoft DRM technology and Kontiki Delivery manager for the ‘iPlayer‘ that they’re soon to launch could be a devastatingly bad move for them; Channel 4 launched their 4oD service at the end of last year based upon this cocktail and it’s not a great experience to use. For a start, I use a mac (millions of us do) and so I can’t download and watch Ugly Betty (or anything else) from them (even if I’m willing to pay 99p for the privilege). It’s a PC-only service, which is what the BBC will be offering.

Whilst Apple have demonstrated with seeming ease that DRM encrypted media can be deployed to macs and PCs with exactly the same user-experience, Microsoft have no interest in delivering content to non-windows users. Apple have even gone one step further and finally managed to convince several Media giants that DRM is no longer necessary. So why is the BBC, world media pioneer, opting for a second rate, single platform solution for their eagerly awaiting (long suffering) license fee payers?

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I spent an enjoyable morning today visiting Redruth School to talk to their ‘Art Ambassadors‘ about design, websites, and how they want to portray themselves online. I even got to visit the staffroom…

The Art Ambassadors project has been conceived by ProjectBase in a bid to get ‘young people’ (sorry, I struggle with that expression) interested and involved in contemporary arts. I’m going to be working with the groups to hopefully build a website that they feel truly represents them as a group, and more importantly that they use and enjoy and feel proud of… so watch this space, I’m back there next week with ProjectBase to talk about identity, layout, typography, colour. In about 90 minutes. Eek.

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