With the recent loss of Steve Jobs I felt I needed to write a little something to mark his passing; but with the eulogy that the Internet has become since his death I felt my words would simply be lost, or just not mean enough. A few days have passed and I felt now was a good time…

The thing is, that Steve, whether you liked him or not, had an attitude towards design, technology and life that changed the way the human race interact, communicate and learn with the devices around them. He was able to remove the technical boundaries from his mind and lead the creation of things that became extensions of ourselves, to make the way we create easier no matter what these creations needed to be; and that is why I think there has been such a reaction to his death.

Steve Jobs just knew what we wanted and gave his passion and eventually his whole life to make those needs a reality. Yes, there have been many visionaries before him, Bill Gates for instance has dominated the computer market with the Windows OS for nearly two decades, yet I don’t feel any empathy towards the man who created a system designed for those who had to have at least a basic knowledge of computers, and that is where Jobs differed.

Every piece of technology Apple has released in the last decade has not been made for geeks, they have been made for everyone! That is the genius of Apple and more accurately Steve himself, no matter who you are, what your knowledge, you should be able to use it, just like everyone can use a book or a pen.

And that is how I feel about Steve’s legacy, writing this on my iPad2, checking the responses to this on my iPhone and teaching my daughter how to use technology an her iMac – Thanks Steve

So I bought an iPhone 4 recently and so far it has lived up to my expectations, well, that was until I realised you can’t switch multitasking off!

So for those that don’t know what multitasking is or if you haven’t realised that the phone has the feature (as I didn’t, *gulps with embarrassment*), here is a quick overview.

Basically, when you open an app, use it and then hit the home button it doesn’t close, it disappears into the background. Hit the home button twice (quickly) and all the apps running in the background appear in a strip a the bottom of the screen, great right? Well actually no! And here is why…

What you don’t realise and I certainly didn’t, is that these Apps while running are draining your phone’s resources, including your battery life which is a little annoying. So if your battery is starting to run low quickly, then this is probably why.

So, quickly I realised that you can remove these Apps from the background in the very same way that you can delete Apps from the home screen, so no problem. Well not quite, doing this soon becomes a pain, I now spent most of my time removing Apps from the background! So, I assumed that I must be able to disable this function? Erm… Well apparently not, for some bizarre reason the recently resigned CEO of Apple decided not to give us the choice, yep that’s right you can’t choose to disable this function.

It would seem Apple have taken the right to choose away from the user on this one, still not quite sure why though. Hopefully, this will be added in future iOS updates, until then, if you know a work-round or have heard about a solution please get in touch.

A few weeks ago I wrote ‘Newspaper paywall panic’ where I gave my thoughts on The Times’ doomed paywall scheme.  Well in the last week or so the results have started to be released and as expected they don’t make good reading, well not for Murdoch anyway!

So let’s cut to the chase, the number of people willing to pay the money regularly is 15,000, yep your eyes are not deceiving you and yes the general consensus is that this is a rather poor figure;  oh, but the bad news doesn’t stop there, the online subscription is a mere £2 a week which is pricing itself well below what is needed to counter-act the steady decline of the more expensive print product, not to mention the loss in advertising revenue they will undoubtedly be experiencing.  (Am I the only one that saw that coming, surely not!)

Okay, so there is the bad news; hang-on is there a glimmer of hope on the horizon? No! Apparently the iPad application has 12,500 subscribers paying £10 per month which in contrast to the web figure is quoted as being positive, this is due apparently to the relatively low number of iPads in circulation which interestingly contradicts Apple’s recent announcement that the iPad is now outselling its Notebook range with three million sold so far, sounds like wishful thinking by News Corp if you ask me.

I suppose I have been a little hard on The Times’ attempt to make money, I just find it hard to believe that the Industry in general still thinks it is because banner supported content doesn’t work; yet a high number of other websites and ad-delivery networks are experiencing good levels of user response with less intrusive and more importantly static support adverts.

Put simply, this is print minded executives trying to control the web which is the root of this problem; in my opinion, unless radical change takes place certain sectors of the news print industry are heading for the end.