Shirts; Breast Pockets are a Must

It is such a simple rule for shirt-makers: always include a breast pocket. That's it. Nothing fancy or complicated, no monograms or reinforcements, just a simple pocket for holding sunglasses, credit cards or a pair of in-ear headphones when you're not using them. Most retailers understand this rule but apply it inconsistently so here is my comprehensive guide to shirt suppliers.

Let’s start with the high-street brands. Marks and Spencers offer a breast pocket option in their Made To Measure range (they also offer monograms, which counts against them). Buy off-the-shelf from M&S, though, and you take a chance; many of their shirts lack pockets.

The Savile Row Company offer pockets on at least some of their shirts. Importantly, they also offer non-iron material (as do M&S) across part of their range. In our environmentally conscious age, it doesn't do to buy shirts that need to be ironed (and who wants to spend time ironing if it can possibly be avoided?).

TM Lewin have several non-iron button cuff shirts which all seem to have breast pockets. The range is small (is seven colours really enough?) but the shirts look good and seem to be excellent value for money (assuming you get them during a sale - a plain white shirt sounds good at £30 but isn’t quite as exciting at the normal price of £89).

For something a little more individual you could try Tailor Store, an online retailer of custom-made shirts. Their offering is basically the same as M&S’ Made to Measure service but with far more bells and whistles. You can not only choose fabric, cuff and collar style, you can have epaulettes, angled front plackets, elbow patches, contrasting cuff, collar or fronts and optional matching boxer shorts. This is the very definition of a comprehensive service but they don’t have non-iron material. The hunt goes on.

iTailor advertise non-iron custom shirts but their site requires Adobe Flash which I don’t use on my laptop (and I’m not installing it just to play with a shirt design website).

Charles Tyrwhitt has a fine selection of non-iron shirts. Pockets are an optional extra, bringing a basic shirt to about £42, but overall they look like a pretty good compromise between cost and features.

Finally, if you’re after something a little more exotic, or you just fancy taking a trip to visit your tailor, how about MySingaporeTailor.com. They’ve got just about every option you could want (except, as far as I can tell, non-iron) and you can use them as an excuse to visit Singapore.

Personally, I like Charles Tyrwhitt’s non-iron shirts with the optional breast pocket. All (or at least most) of the shirts I’ve seen on the sites listed above look good (some are clearly awful) so it comes down to ease of ordering, maintenance and use; Charles Tyrwhitt seem to offer all of this at a decent cost. Jackpot.

Questions you might ask Siri

Asking for stock price updates or weather forecasts might be useful but it barely touches on what Siri, combined with the Wolfram Alpha, can do. The pairing of great voice recognition with a seriously impressive search engine allows Siri to answer all sorts of questions that, under normal circumstances, you might answer by first finding a specialist database on Google then trawling through said database for the information you need.

One I picked up from a site (questionsforsiri.com, or something similar) is "Who is Luke's father?" which Siri correctly answer through Wolfram Alpha (Google gets this one right as well). Spoiler - the correct answer, for anyone who hasn't seen The Empire Strikes Back, is Darth Vadar.

In a similar vein, Siri can tell you who shot JR (Google doesn't know the answer to this one but will offer links to several sites, some of which might have the information), although you may find that the younger generation hasn't the faintest idea why this might be important. Some of them haven't even heard of Dallas, let alone JR, which just goes to show how standards have slipped since the mid-80s (it could be argued that knowledge of ancient soap opera plots is less than entirely useful).

Fans of the late Douglas Adams (and who, in all honesty, could claim not to have been delighted by his writing?) can take comfort from the fact that Siri knows the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42 (anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about should read TheHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or ask a white mouse for help). Google pretty much gets this one as well but it's an awful lot of typing.

Obscure pieces of UK history are a bit more tricky. Siri wasn't able to tell me who the fifth man was (not surprising, really, since definitive identification has apparently never been made) or give me the location of Shergar or Lord Lucan (again, not totally surp rising). Siri did correctly capture each of these questions, however, so preparing a web search is child's play.

Siri can also be confused by non-specific references to historic events. "When was the civil war?" yields the correct answer for an American (Friday 22nd April 1861 to Sunday 9th April 1865) but, as I'm asking in British English, this answer is slightly disappointing. Asked "When was the War of the Roses?", Siri gave me details of the Danny De Vito film, including gross receipts and release date but of the epic struggle between York and Lancaster it (or more properly, Wolfram Alpha) knows nothing.

Overall Siri is hugely impressive. The voice recognition appears to be very accurate, correctly identifying almost all the words spoken to it; Siri's ability to answer questions is limited by the quality of the databases and search engines it uses, not its voice recognition. As Wolfram Alpha improves and more databases are made available to Siri, this feature can only improve. Looks like a winner for Apple.

Apple and TV Sets

There has been a lot of speculation recently about Apple’s possible move into the TV set market, which seems like a nature next step after the iPod, iPad and Apple TV set-top box. I don’t doubt that Apple could launch a competitive TV but my suspicion is that they’ll continue to iterate the current product rather than launching a new display panel business. Here is my thinking.

All of Apple’s existing media consumption devices are self-contained, high-quality, tactile products (except the existing Apple TV, which is neither tactile nor self-contained). TVs are remote objects (poor user experience from traditional dumb remotes could be a differentiator for Apple), viewed from across a room; when was the last time you touched your TV? Often TVs work as part of a system with amplifiers, set-top boxes, DVD players and other specialist equipment. These devices are outside Apple’s control and I don’t think Apple will want to get into the amplifier business; consistent user experience differentiates Apple’s products from the competition but this is tricky to deliver if you don’t build everything in the system.

What about physically building the displays? Apple’s existing panels are well received as computer monitors and their legendary design team may well be able to deliver a stunning TV set. Apple’s supply chain management is superlative but even they might find it difficult to maintain margins while competing on price; at £899, Apple’s 27” displays are significantly smaller (although possibly of higher quality) than similarly priced Samsung TVs (John Lewis have a 40” Samsung LED TV for £849).

Branding could also be tricky. “iTV” would be the obvious name but that runs into a problem in the UK, where ITV is the name of a major broadcaster. John Gruber suggests that the situation is similar to that of the iPhone trademark, which was owned in 2007 by Cisco. He might be right but I think it would be a much bigger deal for ITV to give up their company name and established brand than it was for Cisco to surrender the almost unused iPhone trademark.

What about new features or use cases? Nobody could deny that Apple are technical innovators but TV has been around for a while and as The Economist points out, the killer app for televisions has turned out, so far, to be television. The obvious new feature is apps but TVs are social objects and single-user apps are unlikely to appeal in the same way they do on personal iDevices.

Finally, once these problems are solved and the new TV exists, what has been done that couldn’t have been done more easily with a set-top box connected to someone else’s display? What is it that Apple can do with once they control the entire user experience, from media sales to on-display delivery? My guess is that this is what Steve Jobs was referring to when he claimed to have cracked TV. We can only hope.

Traffic on Aldwych

Aldwych and Kingsway in the centre of London are broad, tree-lined avenues whose buildings house embassies (the Indian embassy and the Australian High Commission), hotels, theatres, universities (the LSE and Kings College London), cafes, restaurants, offices, apartment and a radio broadcaster (the BBC World Service). People throng the pavements, frequent the eateries, queue outside the Indian embassy and generally navigate their way around the area. These avenues should be pleasant, friendly areas but they aren’t; they are noisy, traffic-laden nightmares.

Ok, so “nightmare” might be a bit of an exaggeration, but you should see them when the roads are closed to traffic, as they occasionally are when something goes wrong, to understand what I mean. It doesn’t take long on a traffic-free Aldwych to see how much better it is without taxis and buses. The reduction in noise alone is dramatic but the freedom associated with escaping the confines of the pavement is unexpectedly enjoyable. Along these roads the pavements are often quite wide but they still feel too narrow for the numbers of people using them. Simply wandering at will across the carriageways is a rather liberating experience.

The biggest improvement, at least in terms of quality of life for pedestrians, would come from re-routing all the traffic away from part or all of these roads but this is likely to be very difficult. Kingsway and Aldwych have between four and six lanes and at peak times they are often very busy. More achievable, maybe, would be a partial re-routing of buses and a discouragement of other traffic so that amenities for pedestrians (and cyclists - Aldwych at rush hour looks horrific for bikers) could be improved.

Here are a few suggestions that might make things better:

• Removal of the bus park on the south side of Aldwych 
• Reduction in the number of motor vehicles lanes 
• Addition of cycle tracks along both roads 
• Widening of pavements on both roads, possibly with indented bus stops and new trees 
• Removal of traffic lights and light-controlled crossings; replacement with pedestrian crossings 
• Additional pedestrian crossings along both roads 
• Improved road-marking so that drivers have clear lane designations. 

These changes would probably have wider effects; it would be necessary to review the layouts of Strand and Waterloo Bridge, both of which feed traffic to Aldwych and Kingsway. Adding cycle tracks to Aldwych and Kingsway might be difficult and could provoke calls for tracks on Strand, Fleet Street and Southampton Road - all roads that would benefit from having fewer cars (and if Strand had cycle tracks, Trafalgar Square would surely need them - it could be the start of something beautiful).

In short, what I’m asking for is nothing more than a wholesale re-working of the roads in central London. Four-lane highways have no place in the middle of our ancient, people-filled capital. It’s time to think the unthinkable, do the undoable, and make our city once again somewhere that people can walk safely and breathe cleanly.