The write:click widget

Courtesy of the good people at Widgetbox, I’ve created a widget to let you have my latest musings delivered effortlessly to a desktop near you. Get it here.

Something Useful No.1: MioToolbox

First in a series of posts flagging up tools, sites, etc that I’ve found useful and hopefully, you will too.

First off, Mio Toolbox, a downloadable collection to tools for graphic/ image users. The set comprises:

• A Color Picker – allows you to quickly choose a color and HTML code.
• Freely positionable Screen Rulers – allows you to Know the exact size and position of any element in the screen.
• A Screen Capture tool – allows you to copy a part of the screen to the clipboard or to a file.
• A Screen Magnifier – magnifies around  the mouse position to increase your precision.

Pros: intuitive, easy-to-use, free

Cons: PC only

And Another Thing…

I can’t decide if Eoin Colfer is brave or foolhardy. Attempting to step into the shoes of Douglas Adams to pen the sixth and final(?) instalment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy was always going to be a thankless task, a fact evident within hours of the announcement being made, according to The Bookseller.

Colfer is an enjoyable read and his humour and inventiveness are the strengths of the Artemis Fowl series. However, I haven’t seen anything in them of the genius that created the world of the Guide. To be fair, I don’t think anyone could do the commission justice and like a lot of Adams’ fans, feel the Hitchhiker’s series would have been best left well alone.

Doubtless, Penguin will push the boat out when it comes to launching the book, on a scale rivalling the truly extravagant publication of Sebastian Faulks’ new Bond novel earlier this year. It’ll be interesting to see if it fairs any better with its true fan base. When Devil May Care was published, it was received orgasmically by press reviewers well-versed in Faulks’ more usual literary fare; by contrast, reader reviews on Amazon.co.uk were much less enthusiastic. That said, it still topped the bestsellers’ chart and I suspect the new Hitchhiker’s Guide will do likewise, However, no matter how competant Colfer’s effort turns out to be, it’ll never be accepted by fans of the original Arthur Dent.

The SEO Rapper

Pure genius – not only an excellent rap but also one of the best and most concise guides to putting the ideal web page together that I’ve come across.

It’s a book, Jim, but not as we know it…

The new Reader (© Sony)

The release last week of Sony’s latest portable ebook reader brought forth the usual discussions in the press as to whether this was The One, the technology that would see our 500-year love affair with books printed on paper finally brought to an end. The consensus seems to be that we’ve not quite reached the tipping point towards mass acceptance, with issues over proprietary formats, DRM restrictions, and the cost of ebooks amongst the list of proferred reasons why this is so.

I think another more obvious reason to add to this list is a mismatch between the kinds of book available for the e-readers and the customer profile of likely early adopters. A quick survey of Waterstone’s eBook store lists 5864 titles available, of which almost 4200 are fiction (ironically, the first book about an ebook, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t amongst them…). A mere 195 were scientific, technical or medical titles and yet it is precisely this kind of readership that the Sony and its rivals, Amazon’s Kindle and iRex’s iLiad, should be targetting.

Besides portability, the main USP of all these devices is the sheer number of titles they can store – 200 in the case of the Kindle – and it is this that makes them such appealling tools for academics and researchers across a wide range of professions. I think if I were Sony, rather than doing exclusive deals with Waterstone’s to punt Mills & Boon and the latest instalment of Jordan’s life story to the technorati, I’d be trying to sign up as many reference and academic publishers as possible to get textbooks, research papers, dissertations, standard reference works, etc. turned into ebooks asap. That way, the standalone e-reader might find a ready and willing market. If not, I suspect that the advance of converging technologies (that has already spawned an iPod Touch with an e-reader module) will overtake it and make it redundant.