Post-Office Urban Work Equipment

You're an intrepid urban explorer, drifting through the city and working wherever, and whenever, you feel the need. You need good kit, the best you can get, to smooth your working experience and maximise your productivity. I spend a lot of time working from airports, trains, planes and hotels; here is my list of the best tools money can buy.

The first thing you need is a bag that's large enough to carry your kit but small enough to be easily carried and stowed when you're stationary. If you need to carry a laptop then my suggestion is the Timbuk2 D-Lux Messenger, a sturdy, well-made all-rounder that you can use when cycling, walking or struggling through an airport departure lounge. If you don't have to carry a laptop then you should be able to get away with a small bag, something like the Tumi Alpha.

For communication, photography, transit planning, note-taking and everyday mobile computing you could choose any modern smartphone by my recommendation is Apple's iPhone 5. It's fast, reliable, lightweight, easy-to-use and offers all the apps you're likely to need through a world-beating screen.

If you need a laptop then you'll want something small, light and fast. Apple's 11" MacBook Air should do everything you need (and you can install Parallels if you need access to Windows software) or you could go with a lightweight Sony Vaio (if you absolutely must have a Windows machine).

My advice would be to try to leave the laptop at home and do everything on a tablet instead. There are plenty of options in the tablet market but there's a reason that the iPad is the market leader and unless you have a particular requirement for something that the iPad can't do (which is possible, but unlikely) you shouldn't spend too much time on the decision; go to an Apple store, play with the tablets, leave with the one you fall in love with.

If you find yourself still needing to make written notes then a Moleskine Evernote notebook is the thing to go for. The smaller version fits nicely in the Tumi bag, the larger fits (just) but would be more comfortable in a larger bag. Pair this with a decent pen (like this one) and you're good to go.

To keep you going all day you will probably need a charger for your phone. Your best option is the Mu folding USB charger, which neatly circumvents the storage problems of UK plugs.

To round out your kit you will need a headset for hands free talking and musical entertainment. Something small and discreet with inline controls would be ideal and I would recommend the Sennheiser CX 890i In-Ear Headphones, which should give you complete control of both you phone and your tablet.

And that's it. You should now be fully equipped for a productive day's work away from the office. Just make sure you don't spill coffee or beer on your equipment.

Home Screen Apps

If you have a smartphone you probably find, as I do, that the apps you use on a daily basis change only slowly and that the list on your home screen can remain unchanged for months at a time. This wasn't always the case. When apps first reached the mass market on the iPhone 3G in 2008 there weren't that many apps around and the rapidly evolving market meant that the list of favourites grew and changed quickly as new apps were launched and existing apps were upgraded with exciting new features.

In today's more mature market, with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from (I'm assuming that you're not using a Windows phone), we could use hundreds each week but my suspicion is that instead we use only a handful. Here are my current non-Apple favourites.

Reeder - Google Reader offers a great service for managing RSS feeds but the interface is a bit of a train wreck. Into this niche falls Reeder, which syncs with Google Reader and gives you a slick UI for reading RSS feeds.

Drafts - for making a quick note, scribbling a short email or updating Twitter (or any one of a few dozen other text-related tasks), Drafts is my app of choice because it is fast, simple, elegant and easy to use.

Evernote - in the realm of cloud-based note-taking solutions, Evernote is the market leader. I use it as an external memory bank dumpting documents, notes, shopping lists, to-do lists, web links and pretty much anything else straight into Evernote.

Instapaper - normally I read articles or web pages as I find them but sometimes, particularly for long or challenging texts, I prefer to save them to Instapaper and come back to them later. Instapaper is ideal for reading long articles on the train or plane when web-browsing might otherwise be tricky.

Tweetbot - Twitter's iOS client is not very good (he says, with light understatement). Tweetbot is by far the best client I've found on iOS.

Citymapper - when I upgraded to iOS 6 my previous navigator software stopped working and I was forced to change. At first, Citymapper had only a few, nicely executed, features. Now, if you want to make your way round London, Citymapper is essentially feature complete and by far the best navigation tool I have found.

PlainText - my default text editor, which I may have mentioned before. It's brilliant.

TactioHealth - I have found that tracking my weight on a daily basis helps me to keep it under control. TactioHealth does far more than just track weight.

Letterpress - And finally, when I need a little entertainment, I switch to Letterpress and play an elegantly designed, beautifully finished word game against a total strange.

Apart from boring (Facebook) or system (Safari, Calendar) apps, that’s about it. My home screen changes infrequently because I’m basically happy with my chosen apps and it takes something truly special to knock one of the above from their perch.

Airport Travel Tips

If you do any international travelling at all you will have experienced the joys of navigating an airport. Unless you are very lucky (or you travel in First/Business Class) you're going to have to spend a couple of hours in the terminal before you can fly to your exciting destination. There are a few things you can do to reduce the stress of this experience and ease your transit through the airport.

Take a taxi. Unless the public transport to or from the airport is ridiculously good, take a taxi instead. The saving in time and stress is almost always worth the extra cost.

Check-in Online. If your airline and airport support it, check-in online or on your phone and avoid the tedious queuing in arrivals. If you're carrying hold luggage you may still need to queue for the bag drop (which sometimes takes as long as checking in, depending on the airline), which leads me nicely to my next point.

Reduce your luggage. The objective is to carry as little stuff as possible, both to and through the airport, and to get in and out as quickly as possible. Some compromise is required here, since the goals of speed and lightness are mutually exclusive (unless you are embarking on a by short trip indeed), but the aim is to carry everything you need in your hand luggage so that you can skip the bag drop and the pickup. If you're away for up to three nights this should be possible if you pack carefully and cut out everything you absolutely don't need.

Buy the Best. When you are looking for travel equipment - bags, clothes, wallets etc. - take your time and spend a little more money to make sure you get something that fits well with your lifestyle. Saving a tenner on the backpack you use for hand luggage (you're not planning to use a devilish wheeled suitcase, are you?) by choosing the one with the thin straps is something you may regret later and it just isn't worth it.

Dump the Metal. You're going to be screened through a metal detector and if your fail the test you'll be searched, probably by a disinterested "security" person. On the assumption that you don't want the inconvenience of a full body pat down, go through your pockets and out everything in your bag or coat pockets, including belt, watch, coins, phone, wallet and keys (remember to collect everything on the other side of the scanner).

Book a Decent Airline. Unless cost is the top priority, don't fly with a budget airline. Instead spend a little more and try to get those little extras (allocated seats, in-flight food and entertainment) that massage away some of the pain of travelling.

Drop the Attitude. Don't bother arguing with the staff or their regulations, particularly at security. It simply isn't worth the effort and you won't achieve anything.

Those are my top airport travel tips. I hope you find them useful.

Marina Bay Sands

Last week I gave you the guests' eye view of O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat; this week it's the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore - an altogether different kettle of fish.

The Marina Bay Sands (MBS) is a mixed-use resort in Singapore's bay. The resort includes a hotel, a casino, two theatres, a museum and a shopping centre, all located on reclaimed land in the Marina Bay Area at the southern tip of Singapore. MBS is about as different from O'Reilly's as it is possible to be. Here are my thoughts.

The Grand Club rooms include a free-standing bath, a walk-in shower, a large sitting area and a private (sort of - it overlooked a ten-lane expressway so it wasn't all that quiet) balcony. The room was huge and the range of bathroom condiments (shaving kit, shampoo, toothbrush etc.) was similarly impressive.

The rooftop infinity pool is simply stunning. 146m long and 200m above the ground, it has views across the city and is the hotel's most recognisable feature (after the three towers that support it).

With our package (the Grand Club) room comes breakfast in the rooftop Club Lounge. It's a standard buffet breakfast (as seen in any other international hotel) but the Lounge is on the 57th floor overlooking the swimming pool and the city; the service is excellent.

Also included are afternoon cocktails and canapes in the Club Lounge, although that description doesn't really do justice to the comprehensive drinks menu (which, strangely, didn't include any cocktails) and the buffet of cakes, cheeses, meat, canapes and other treats laid on by the hotel. Make the most of the afternoon sun by sitting outside in the shade of the palm trees, watching the city bustle.

Did I mention the antiques? Along one wall of the foyer the hotel displays its collection of European and Asian antiques. You can't use these items, of course, they're far too valuable, but they are an interesting distraction from the otherwise completely modern (and vast) foyer.

Then there are the staff, doing their absolute best to make the hotel feel a bit more human and a little less robotic. As well as doing a great job, the staff are also friendly and welcoming; they smile and make polite small talk rather than, as in many hotels, simply moving on to the next customer as quickly as possible. They may, in fact, be the hotel's biggest asset.

And the shops. Wow. If you want designer brands in a convenient mall then MBS is the place for you. The shopping mall, connected by an underpass to the hotel foyer, has over 300 stores (Burberry, Tiffany's, YSL etc.) and high-end restaurants (HY California was particularly good). It's big, bright and (insofar as this is possible for a shopping centre) fun. And they have a skating rink.

In summary, if you want to relax in a luxury hotel in Singapore with the opportunity for a little light shopping and gambling, Marina Bay Sands is definitely worth considering.

O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat

You have probably never heard of O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat in Southern Queensland but from the name you would likely guess that it is a hotel of some sort in the rainforest. You would be right. Calling it a "retreat" isn't at all unreasonable given that you have to drive 40km through the mountains on narrow, winding roads to reach it but it also suggests a certain level of luxury and refinement. Let me reset your expectations.

If you want the best, go for a villa. They are larger (two bedrooms) and have a more redefined set of features, including hot tubs, TVs and telephones. If you are on a budget (as we were) then choose the Mountain View rooms, which (unsurprisingly) have a pretty good view of the mountains. If you're not worried about seeing mountains from your balcony, go for a Garden View room. Whichever you choose, you'll find that the only noise at night comes from the forest, which can be rather noisy.

A large number of trails start or end at the Retreat, ranging from 800m to about 25km. If you're planning to walk any of the medium to long walks (3km+) make sure you have appropriate footwear, long trousers, waterproofs, medical supplies, water and other things you'd take on any long walk in the wilderness. There's also a treetop walk which takes you high into the canopy; worth doing.

You are going to be in a rainforest, which really shouldn't be a surprise. Prepare to encounter spiders, cockroaches and other creepy crawlers, possibly in your room (especially at night, when they seem to crawl under the door). In my mind, luxury and cockroaches don't go together but they're everywhere in the forest; a blanket stuffed under the door seems to keep them out of the bedroom.

It may be thirty degrees at the coast but at the top of the mountain, about 950m above sea level, it will be quite a bit cooler (around 15-20 degrees, colder in the winter) so pack warm clothes. You'll also need waterproofs (rain forest) and you might like to take insect repellent.

The food at O'Reilly's is good and you'll probably find that the combined breakfast and dinner package represents value for money. They also have an on-site shop for minor items (which is very useful, given that the next shop is over 40km away), a decent but not fantastic cafe and a rather dull bar (the drinks are ok but the atmosphere is a little dead).

The infinity pool at the bottom of the site is pretty special but not very warm; brace yourself. The plunge pool at the top of the site is also cold (as you would expect) but is accompanied by a very comfortable hot tub with nice views over the forest.

Overall, if you want a quiet couple of nights with restful rainforest walks, O'Reilly's is probably the place for you. If you want ultra-luxury and pampering you'll need to look elsewhere.

Contact List Management

I seem to have spent quite a lot of time over the last three or four years battling with my contact lists to keep them synced, current and de-duplicated. The root cause of the problem is that I want my contact information to be available in lots of places - phone, tablet, work mail client, home mail client, home laptop address book etc. - so that I always have access to it. This is a fine and noble goal but there are a few issues keeping me from my Contact Nirvana.

Firstly, I have three cloud contact providers, all of which I want to use, for one reason or another: Gmail (home email), iCloud (non-email purposes) and Exchange (work email). Three-way syncing and de-duplicating is non-trivial, especially when each service assumes it the definitive source.

Secondly, my home laptop doesn't want to sync Contact information from my work Exchange server. The problem seems to be that Outlook/Exchange use a number of different address books and the OS X address book doesn't sync with the right one, so no contact information is downloaded (there's bound to be a way to fix this but so far it remains hidden in the noise at the Microsoft/Apple border).
Finally, all three services have "features" and idiosyncrasies which prevent them playing nicely together (probably for sound commercial reasons) and make contact management more difficult than is strictly necessary.

I could sort this out by hand (download each address book to Excel or Numbers, normalise the fields, de-duplicate the entries then upload a new list to each service) but this solution is prone to errors, takes a long time and needs to be done regularly to keep the three lists in sync; awkward.

It would be nice to define one service as the master and slave the other two to it so that updates to the master propagated down to the slaves. Nice, but not currently possible (see comments about idiosyncrasies, above).

There might be a solution amongst the third-party contact management systems (Xobni, for example) but they all cost money and there's no way of knowing if they will do the job; risky.
If the APIs for these services are publicly available (assuming they exist) it might be possible to build an app that queried one service and updated a second, de-duplicating as it goes. Possible, maybe, but this is not a quick or easy solution.

My only realistic solution, as far as I can see, is to scour the Internet in the hope of finding someone who has not only suffered from the same problem but has had the time and energy to build and document a solution. Such a person would surely be lauded across the land, as indeed would anyone who could identify such a person and make their achievements more widely known. So far, my efforts in this direction have not met with significant success but I'll keep trying; updates to follow, probably.

Impressions of Sydney

Sydney is Australia's oldest, largest and most diverse city (this is pretty much the first thing that all the guidebooks tell you). Here are a few tips for your first visit.

• The people are friendly and helpful, especially if you are used to somewhere a little more reserved, like London (where you can go days without speaking to anyone, if you choose).
• Sydney, still a relatively young city, is blessed with two internationally famous landmarks - the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Both can be inspected at close range, either by climbing (the bridge - best done on a clear day) or by a guided tour (the Opera House - best done on a damp, overcast day). The Harbour provides the backdrop for most of the tourist activities in the city so it's worth exploring by ferry or on foot (around the edges, obviously).
• The food and drink are expensive, even from the skewed perspective of someone who lives in London, and visitors should prepare themselves for bar bills of Scandinavian proportions. In Sydney the beer will be good but £7-8 a pint (Fat Yak Pale Ale is worth trying, if you can find it). Main courses in decent restaurants start at around the £14 and head rapidly higher but bargains can be found if you're prepared to shop around.
• Navigation is easy because Sydney is laid out on a grid, a style of town planning apparently favoured by most modern cities. This is a boon to the visiting tourist but means the city lacks some of the charm of older European cities, like Rome or Paris. 
• Sydney seems to prefer new to old, meaning that much of downtown Sydney is modern and shiny. Older buildings can sometimes be found crouching timidly between the skyscrapers or incorporated into their lower floors (the city is confident enough to retain some of the old to balance the brash thrusting of the newer towers) but the centre of town is dominated by soulless glass towers that you might see in any large city.
• With the grid layout comes, almost inevitably, an over reliance on the internal combustion engine. Cars and buses crowd the streets and an almost total lack of other transport options make Sydney a somewhat grim place for pedestrians. Heavy traffic and lots of walkers (there are, strangely, almost no bicycles and very few motorbikes) make for crowded pavements and tricky road crossings (although the traffic moves so slowly that you generally don't need to wait for the crossing lights to change).
• The weather, which was supposed to be warm and sunny in November when I visited, is becoming more changeable and less reliable. Some of the locals put this down to global warming but the appetite for change (for example by curbing car usage) seems limited. 

Sydney is a great place to visit with friendly locals and plenty of things to see and do, especially if you like surfing or other beach/water activities. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

Bikes and Buses

London's roads are not lightly driven. Danger lurks around every corner, a plethora of hazards waiting to ensnare the unwary and bring them crashing to a halt in a blaze of light and crushed metal.

But surely there are some amongst us stout enough to brave the dangers, to drive where mere mortals fear to steer, to put themselves in the front line of urban travel for the benefit of their fellow Londoners? Yes! There they are - the stalwart drivers of London's myriad bus companies, rescuing us from the terrors of the roads and carrying passengers to their destination safely and quickly in both comfort and style.

But let nobody imagine that life on the mean streets of London is free from risk. Bus drivers face a terrible danger from which they protect us on a daily basis; cyclists.

Cyclists are, by far, the most dangerous road user that a bus can encounter. Small, soft, slow and nimble, cycles float around buses like flies around a corpse, pushing their way through narrow gaps, taking up space on the road and generally antagonising the poor bus drivers. Like a flock of crows around a hawk, cyclists mob buses and force their drivers to take defensive action against in the face of persistent attacks.

Let me give you an example. If you sit at the front of the upper deck of a London bus you will regularly see cyclists deliberately and aggressively slow down when they realise there is a bus following them (don't try to blame hills, road conditions, weather, fatigue or other traffic - everyone knows that these things don't affect London's psychotic cyclists). The tactic is always the same; cyclists, individually or in groups, intimidate drivers of double decker buses by slowing so that their back wheel is mere inches from the front bumper of the bus. Often they will swerve randomly across the road (ignore obviously false explanations like "I was turning right" or "I needed to avoid a parked car") to further inconvenience the heroic driver of the ten-ton transport behemoth.

Cyclists often flock together to better disrupt the activities of their enemies. Wearing bright colours (for example a terrifying neon yellow high-visibility jacket), carrying numerous flashing LED lights to distract tired drivers or sporting ridiculous headgear to advertise their presence, cyclists will take whatever means necessary to disguise their true purpose (traffic disruption) and to attract like-minded sexual partners so that they can spawn ever-larger crowds of bus-hating fanatics.

The solution, and it is the only one available to address this appalling state of affairs, is to stop cyclists from using the public highways upon which they currently torment our bus drivers. On major roads they should instead be restricted to a dedicated network of cycle paths, leaving the bus lanes free from danger and allowing the esteemed bus drivers to proceed along their allocated route without fear of interference or aggravation from scores of brightly coloured, easily spotted, bus-fearing cyclists.

Handling Your Inbox

How do you handle your inbox? Whatever you do, the chances are you get more email than you really need and that it often distracts you from the things you should really be doing. How well you manage your inbox can have a big impact on the way you do your job; here are some tips.

1. Notifications - Outlook, by default, pops a message to your screen every time you receive an email. This is very useful until you receive more than a few emails a day, at which point it becomes a huge distraction. Turn off pop-up notifications and use rules to alert you to important messages, like those sent with high priority, from key customers or from your boss. 
2. Use folders - once you have setup your rules, use them to move your important email to a separate folder so that you can check those messages without being distracted by other, less urgent, communications.
3. Don't check your email - it is tempting to check for new email every few minutes, particularly if you're working through a long, boring task. Try not to do this and stick instead with your chosen task.
4. Work from a task list - don't use your inbox as a surrogate task list. Instead, list and prioritise your tasks in a separate application (Word, Evernote, Excel, Trello or whatever best suits your workflow) so that you don't need to hit your inbox, and risk distraction, to find your next task.
5. Distribution lists - choose your distribution lists with care; do you really need to see every email sent to every team? Be brutal; remove yourself from any list that isn't absolutely key to your normal daily task and trust your colleagues to forward to you anything for which they need your input. 
6. Hide your client - is your email client always visible on the screen? Minimise it or hide it behind your active windows to reduce its ability to interrupt you. If you're working on a difficult or time-sensitive task, close your client.
7. Trust your colleagues - if you are on the cc list of a non-urgent email, skim read it then let your colleagues deal with it. If they really need your input they'll ask (the flip side is that you may need to nudge colleagues who are similarly trusting you to contact them with anything urgent or important).
8. Finally, tackle your regular, unimportant email only between major tasks in 15-30 minute blocks. Aim to reduce your inbox to zero unread messages during that session by working through all your messages, responding to any that can be quickly handled, adding new tasks to your task list when quick answers aren't possible and coldly ignoring anything that doesn't actually require your attention. Once you're done, minimise your client and pick up the next task from your list.

These tips won't magically shrink your workload but they should help you to manage it more efficiently and that can be a big win in a competitive or high-pressure workplace.

Blogging Platforms

Twitter and Facebook seem strangely complementary; Facebook offers private sharing of text and photographs with friends and family, while Twitter offers public sharing of similar data with strangers holding similar interests. Since these services took off, "traditional" blogging, by which I mean the self-publishing of newspaper-style text and photographs, seems to have slipped from the public eye. Where once the mainstream media would have reported on the "Blogosphere" (horrible term), now the talk is all of Social Media, led by Twitter and Facebook.

That doesn't mean that the bloggers have gone away, of course. They're still around, crafting long-form articles (to varying degrees of success, quality and obscurity) and pushing the subjects that interest them but their media profile has definitely slipped. In part, this is a natural response to the sudden availability of new, faster, more convenient forms of communication, predominantly Twitter, that have enabled a new style of rapid engagement between individuals, governments, companies and other organisations.

This is great. I am a big fan of Twitter and I use it almost daily (not least to publicise my blog posts, which never fail to get at least 1-2 views per week) but what if you want to write pieces longer than 140 characters? For you there are several tools available and I'm going to look briefly at two of them.

First up is Posterous, a relatively new blogging platform, acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Posterous's unique feature is its ability to re-post your blogs to a variety of other social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr and a huge number of others. You can, with very little effort, distribute your blogs across all the major social media sites, maintaining a distributed presence with little or no effort.

Is this useful? Well, sort of. Posting a link to your blog to Facebook or Twitter is reasonably likely to increase your audience and the integration is mature and successful. Pushing updates to other sites, for example Blogger, works but the end result is less than entirely pleasing because of the way that the updates are formatted, which means your Blogger site fills up with slightly dodgy Posterous updates. Not great.

My preferred option (and I have spent a long time thinking about this) is Blogger, which I have used for about six years. By far the more powerful tool, the only thing it can't do is auto-post to other social media sites. This is a bit of a pain after the convenience of Posterous but salvation arrives in the form of IFTTT, a configurable tool for doing things with your stuff on the Internet. Configuring IFTTT to, for example, post blog links to Twitter or Facebook, is quick and easy, rendering Posterous's most compelling feature redundant and addressing the one hole in Blogger's formidable feature arsenal.

My recommendation, therefore, if you are looking for a blogging platform, is to use Blogger with a side-order of IFTTT; simple, quick, elegant, robust and fun.

Newspapers; What are they good for?

As a general rule, newspapers really aren't worth the effort. They offer a small selection of yesterday's news written largely by people more interested in meeting their deadlines than in producing insightful, informative articles. The news they present is, in most cases, unsupported by references to the source material and thus largely unverifiable by interested readers.

These failings are particularly prevalent in articles covering science, technology or economics, where specialist input or familiarity with the subject matter is often seen as unhelpful or downright dangerous. It seems that some papers deliberately produce misleading but exciting headlines and poorly written articles powered by glorious ignorance simply to increase their circulation.

This is, of course, entirely understandable from a commercial perspective. Nobody wants to read a boring newspaper and I suspect that people also chose papers that already reflect their own beliefs; nobody wants to be too challenged in their world views by their morning paper. Tailoring your news to satisfy your audience is therefore likely to be financially advantageous but might there not be a middle ground? Could we not find some happy compromise that allows papers to print simplistic, audience-pleasing stories that are both accurate and informative? Might it not, if we set our sights a little higher, actually be possible to shift the perspective of readers by gently nudging them towards a more liberal, caring future and away from whatever prejudices they might have been lumbered with in childhood?

Here is my (amateur) manifesto for improvement in the media:

All quoted sources should be referenced (unless they are confidential, of course) so that interested readers can dig more deeply into a subject.

• Articles, editorials, photographs, graphics and any other published item should be attributed.
• Articles should be fact-checked before they are published and background information should be linked.
• Re-printing of commercial press releases as news should be discouraged, or at least accompanied by some sort of opinion, explanation or editorial. Many press releases would, with only a modest amount of extra effort, surely provide a good starting point for stories like "Corporation pushes unproven/unnecessary product on unwary public".
• Papers should avoid articles that reinforce negative stereotypes or prejudices and should instead strive to produce texts that embody the best, rather than the worst, attitudes.
• Education is not a dirty word; giving readers information or outlooks that they might not previously have had can be a good thing.

There is evidence that these ideas (or, more likely, more sophisticated, considered versions) are already in place at some organisations. BBC News Online and the Economist both adopt these practices to some extent but other papers, like the mainstream dailies (and their online equivalents), seem to go out of their way to avoid anything that might be mistaken for sensible, responsible journalism.

If I had the money (and, frankly, if I knew anything about publishing) I might start a paper of some sort to put these ideas into practice; anyone want to start a new business with me?

PlainText and Innovation

I have written before about the app PlainText (Hog Bay Software), my text editor of choice, because it has a lightweight, intuitive, clutter-free, easy-to-use user interface and it syncs with Dropbox. I have written also about the features I would like to see added to iOS, particularly for text editing. Today, somewhat to my surprise, I find that PlainText already has one of the features that I had requested but with an unexpected and delightful implementation that would transfer nicely to other editors (I'm thinking of Pages and Diet Coda, specifically).

So what is this feature? How will it transform your life? Actually, in answer to the second question, I have to say that it probably isn't going to have much impact on your wider life. It would be nice if it did but text editing features can do only so much; you have to be realistic about these things.

One of the things I wanted to see in iOS 6 was an extended keyboard that included left and right cursor keys, as seen in Diet Coda. My reasoning was that cursor positioning in iOS, even on the iPads larger screen, is a bit tricky. Dedicated buttons for small adjustments seemed like a good idea in terms of increasing usability and productivity. How often, after all, do you use the cursor keys on a physical keyboard?

Hog Bay Software's solution is to make the left and right borders of the app, which are merely white space (clutter-free UI), into giant (but invisible) cursor keys. Tap the right margin to move right, the left margin to move left. Simple, elegant, easy to use and executed without need to have extra buttons on the keyboard.

The only real problem is that the feature is literally invisible. Looking back through the app's release notes I see that the feature was added in version 1.4 and that the app is now on version 1.61. In fact, things get even better, now that I've read the release notes, because they include this little gem about one and two finger taps:

New: (iPad only) In full screen mode, tap the page margins to move cursor left or right by 1 letter (1 finger tap) or 1 word (2 finger tap)

A two finger tap turns out to be a bit tricky to do (both fingers have to hit the screen at pretty much the same time - easier to write than to do) but it still works rather well and should give me another little productivity boost.

From here, it would be nice to see these features propagate out to the rest of the iOS development community, where they could do good service in many apps with text editing features. My hope is that, like Pull to Refresh in Tweetie 2, margin tapping could become a standard feature in apps or mobile websites where text entry is required. It would certainly make my life easier, which is never a bad thing.

Mastering London

London is one of the world's great cities but with its confusing layout and complicated social and transport systems it can be a tricky place to navigate, even for long-term residents. If you're visiting for the first time, here are a few tips that might help.

Public Transport - getting around the city is easy using the Underground (Tube) or buses. You can cut your costs and blend in with the locals by buying an Oyster card, which you can order online before you arrive or buy at most convenience stores. Charge the card online or in a store, then tap it on the yellow readers to pay for your trip. You tap at each end of your Tube journey (on and off) but only once on the buses (fixed rate, irrespective of distance traveled).

Clothing - London's weather is changeable and unpredictable. Expect to carry a waterproof coat on all but the warmest of days. In winter you'll want stout shoes and warm clothes to cope with rain and wind.

Apologising - the biggest sin in London is appearing impolite and unless you want to stand out as a tourist you'll need to master the art of apologising. The general rule is that if you touch or obstruct anyone at all, say "sorry", even if they're clearly at fault or the incident is so trivial you've barely noticed it. If in doubt, apologise anyway.

Asking for directions - most of the people you see on the streets in the popular tourist areas will themselves be tourists. If you need directions look for someone without a camera - most residents will be happy to help. Alternatively, the centre of the city is strewn with maps showing roads and points of interest within 15 minutes' walk; these are a great way to orient yourself.

Shopping - all prices include sales tax (where applicable - VAT, 20%) so the price on the ticket is the price you pay. Many shops will open late into the evening Monday to Saturday but the larger shops can only open for 6 hours on a Sunday.

Taxis - unlike almost anywhere else in the world, London's black cab drivers are required to know the roads of their city. This means, theoretically, that they can take you anywhere you want to go without consulting maps or using a GPS system. Charges are fixed and strictly speaking they should take you wherever you want to go (although sometimes they refuse if you destination is out of favour). Don't use unlicensed minicabs; either pre-book your minicabs or use a black taxi.

Escalators - strangely, there is etiquette even for escalators; stand on the right, walk on the left. If you can't climb all the way to the top (and some of the escalators on the deep tunnels of the underground are very long indeed) you should stand on the right to allow others to walk or run past.

There's more, much more, but master these seven things and you're well on your way to fitting in.

Not an iPhone 5 Review

The web is full of long, detailed, professionally written reviews of the iPhone 5. You don't need me to write another so here instead I present my reasons for favouring Apple's ecosystem over those of their rivals. You may disagree, preferring the "open" Android or the "business oriented" Blackberry, but hear my arguments first.

I have several Apple products: a 32Gb iPhone for everyday telephony and computing; a 64Gb iPad for mobile content creation and consumption; a 13" MacBook Air for use as a "proper" computer; an AirPort Extreme for wifi; an Apple TV for media viewing and an iPod Touch and iPad for the wife. This hardware is supported by an iTunes collection (all our music, most of our TV shows, quite a few films, a growing number of books), iTunes Match and iCloud. In short, we use Apple for most of our computing needs.

There are several advantages to this arrangement that might not be readily apparent to customers of more ad-hoc solutions:

1. It keeps improving. Whatever you might think of Apple, it is undeniable that their products (both software and hardware) improve each year. New features and enhancements to existing features are rolled out in regular upgrade cycles and older hardware isn't abandoned as soon as it has left the shop. This is a big deal; it gives you a degree of security when buying your hardware because you can expect all but the most cutting-edge new features to be added to your kit as they are released.
2. It works well together as a team. Even before iCloud it was possible to share data (media, contacts, email etc.) between devices and these functions have grown much easier to use over the last year as iCloud has developed. Moving data from one device to another to allow it to be shared with friends or family is easy, quick and reliable.
3. The hardware is supported by a large (and rapidly growing) collection of media and apps. The app stores for iOS and OS X carry huge numbers of applications and although the system might not be perfect, it's pretty good for all but the most advanced users (who will, by definition, be able to work around any restrictions to achieve their desired affects). 
4. It is reliable and well supported. Apple's manufacturing quality and after-sales support are renowned. Product support is easily obtained by simply walking into the nearest Apple store and asking for help. 

This network of products and services is something that any of Apple's larger competitors could replicate and some, notably Amazon and Google, are trying hard. They might succeed, eventually, but Apple has a good lead and shows no signs of slowing. You might be able to obtain the same advantages with a group of devices and services from several different companies but, for now, Apple is the only company with this mix of philosophies and services. When reliability, ease of operation and security are important, this makes choosing Apple a no-brainer.

iOS 6 Maps - Apple's Mistake?

A truly astonishing amount of text has been produced over the last few days covering one (fairly major) feature in iOS 6 - the new Apple Maps app. Articles like this one in The Verge make it sound like the app is totally useless and has no merit whatsoever. This isn't entirely true and my observations are that, while it undoubtedly has data problems and is lacking features offered by its Google-powered predecessor, it is actually a damn good app.

Here's what I've found.

The big new feature is Flyover, powered by technology Apple acquired by buying Swedish firm C3in October 2011. The 3D models of central London and New York (the only ones I've looked at so far) are seriously impressive. It's true that there are a few issues with the images but overall it worksvery well indeed. In fact the biggest issue is not the areas that have been mapped but those that haven't, which (at least in London) represent by far the majority of the city.

How long will it take Apple to fix this problem? The C3 promotional video (which you can find on this page) predates Apple's acquisition of the company and states that they can photograph 100km2 of terrain in an hour and generate the 3D models in five. At that rate it should be able to map all of greater London (about 1,500km2) in a week. The rest of the country would take longer - 2,500 hours for photography and 7,500 for processing; Let's call it three months of parallel processing.

That's a lot of effort but it is not, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of time. Whether Apple choose to take this route (or whether they are already part-way through the effort) remains to be seen.

What about the rest of the app? The standard, non-photographic view of the world (which until recently was the only way to view a map) is brilliantly executed. The map adds and removes detail elegantly and smoothly as you zoom in and out. You can tap into points of interest (which you couldn't do on the previous version of Maps) and view contact information, reviews and photographs. You can report data errors or other problems straight through the app.

Compared with the previous app, the crowd-sourced nature of the new Maps and its incorporation of Yelp data and reviews makes this a highly promising solution for smartphone users in urban areas. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months but my prediction is that we will see rapid improvement, if only because Apple won't want to give Google any help in selling Android phones.

Despite the problems, Maps looks to me like a winner. The data and imagery issues can be corrected by Apple in the cloud (no user intervention required) and the current feature set is, if not comprehensive, very impressive. If they can lever in public transit directions, it'll be perfect.

Sandwiches of the Gods, Part II

Last week we discussed three of the greatest sandwiches ever devised; cheese and pickle, cheese and tomato and roast beef and brie. Simple, elegant and full of flavour, they represent the very best achievements of the sandwich-maker's art but if you are not a fan of rotted bovine lactation (or cheese, as it is otherwise known - definition courtesy of Sir T. Pratchett in his excellent book Thief of Time) then they probably don't excite you to any great extent.

So if cheese isn't your thing (and, believe it or not, there are people in this milk-product infested world who don't enjoy the tast of a fine wheel of mature Cheddar), where should you turn for sandwich-based culinary delights? Read on, dear friend, read on.

Let us start gently with the flavours and fillings of our childhood; sweet spread-filled sandwiches, normally on cheap white sliced bread. Jam, preserves, honey, lemon curd and other spreads undoubtedly make fine distractions for the under-twelves and students coping with a late night drinking binges but they aren't really suitable for consumption in sandwiches by anyone who cares about these things (although they do make fine ingredients in a host of other dishes, of course). We can set them aside and ignore them.

With that out of the way, our next inductee into the sandwich hall of fame is Tuna, Mayo and Cucumber. Made well, this filling delivers solid flavour with a good crunchy texture. I favour line-caught rather than netted fish - it just seems right in these times of human-induced species extinction to minimise the impact our sandwiches have on other marine life - but I normally settle for traditionally farmed rather than hooked cucumbers. Ho ho.

In this great year of Jubilee and Olympic celebration, no list would be complete without Coronation Chicken. Originally conceived as a cold dish in its own right, coronation chicken makes an excellent sandwich spread and needs no ornamentation except what might be afforded by a fine roll or loaf of bread.

Veering away from the mainstream, how do you like the sound of Roast Chicken and Bread Sauce? Sprinkle a little salt on the chicken (thick sliced breast is best), smear a good dollop of bread sauce on the bread (bread as a filling? Yes, it really works) and you have a great post-roast snack or lunch. Tasty, with just a hint of cloves to compliment the chicken.

Finally, I'd like to suggest a sandwich that lurks on the fringes of civilisation, one that I enjoy but that many, probably, will not: Corned Beef and Tomato Sauce. I know, it sounds strange and unearthly, possibly even downright distasteful, but thinly sliced corned beef (the secret is to chill the can before slicing and to clean the knife after every cut) with a tangy tomato sauce actually works surprisingly well.

In all this I've said hardly a word about bread. It's important, of course, but it's a subject for another day. Cheers.

Sandwiches of the Gods, Part I

They're a wonder of the modern world, an ode to all that is great about British cuisine and a vital component in the nation's arsenal of sustenance. I speak, of course, of the humble sandwich, a foodstuff long considered the ultimate resting place for the even more humble slice of bread.

But surely, I hear you cry, not all sandwiches are created equal? Do not some, you might reasonably ask, pass beyond the reach of normal lunchtime fodder to stretch out their flavours towards the distant stars and entice with tastes and combinations more subtle than and devious than even the most subtle deviant can imagine? Might it not be said, you may ask in a breathless voice, that only a few of the many thousands of possible sandwich fillings could ever hope to mingle unremarked with the stylistic greats of British industry and fashion?

Yes, yes and again yes, I say, and I shall show you how.

Some sandwiches are big, bold, boisterous monstrosities, overwhelming the eater with their exuberant fillings and flamboyant structure. The American Hamburger, for example, is often stuffed full of superfluous, unpleasant or downright weird ingredients, designed for no other purpose than to convince the consumer that he's getting a serious grown-up meal instead of an overblown snack. A sandwich in the strictest sense of the word (being a pile of filling between two pieces of bread) the Hamburger is an outlier, an edge-case, an abnormal member of the category that no true fan would seriously entertain. I mean, what sort of person puts pickled gherkin in a sandwich? Who even regards pickled gherkin as a foodstuff?

So let's have a look at three of the other sandwiches, the ones that could reasonably be called Foods of the Gods.

First on this illustrious list is the somewhat agricultural Cheese and Pickle. Whether it's home-made chutney or mass-produced pickle (which, of course, means Branston's) the art of this beast of a sandwich is to partner thick chunky slabs of strong Cheddar with a fairly healthy dollop of pickle (which should not be regarded as mere "garnish:). Works best with thick-cut white bloomer.

Next up with have we have the noble Cheese and Tomato. A simple concept; thin slices of mature Cheddar cheese with a similarly svelte layer of that greatest of red fruits, the tomato. Prepared with care, the sweetness of the tomato will balance the strong taste of the cheese.

Stepping up a gear, we find the most exquisite of the meat-filled sandwiches; Roast Beef and Brie. It is tempting to use big, chunky lumps of meat but this will simply make your sandwich difficult to eat and there is little to be gained from exercising the jaw muscles. Instead, use several pieces of thinly sliced beef layered with a rich Somerset Brie.

Is that all, you ask? Absolutely not, but I'm out of words; tune in again next time for more advice on the art of the sandwich.

Surviving International Business Hotels

What do you need to know to survive a business trip and a stay in an international business hotel? Literal survival is actually very simple - hotels, after all, exist to provide shelter, warmth and food - but if you are travelling alone (often the case if you travel for business) it is easy to become trapped in an anti-social and destructive work-eat-sleep-work cycle that you wouldn't dream of following at home. Here are a few tips for breaking the cycle and maintaining your work/life balance.

Get out of the hotel - your hotel, however luxurious, should be your starting point rather than a destination. Even the best hotels struggle to compete with the attractions of their host cities so spend time in the city itself exploring the tourist attractions, visiting the local parks or simply enjoying coffee and cakes in a local cafe.

Hit the fitness centre or swimming pool - hotel fitness centres are often small and poorly equipped but you should still be able to get away from work and reduce your stress levels by spending half-an-hour on their treadmills or cross trainers. Swimming pools are often not suitable for lane swimming or Olympic training but floating around in a rooftop pool is a great way to unwind, especially in tropical climates.

Turn off your laptop - outside normal work hours, do not let work occupy your time. You may be tempted to use your evenings to complete tasks that require time and concentration and thus lend themselves to a peaceful, interruption-free environment such as can be found in a remote hotel bedroom. This temptation should be resisted or, at the very least, the work should be tightly time-boxed so you don't find yourself working through the entire evening.

Location is important - company policy may be to book a hotel as close to your place of work as possible but if that leaves you stuck on an industrial estate miles from anywhere you should resist. Choose a hotel in a location that allows you to get away from work - being within walking distance of the office can be very bad, especially if your colleagues back home are intent on keeping you "in the loop", despite time zone differences.

Avoid the hotel restaurants and never use room service - the hotel restaurant is the easy option for my first night in a new city, especially if I've travelled a long way. After the first day I try try to eat in local restaurants so that I experience a little of the culture and enjoy a modicum of social contact. Room-service should be avoided.

I enjoy visiting new cities and sampling their wares but I don't really enjoy staying in the bland hotels of the international chains (and smaller, local hotels often don't have the facilities I need). These tips help to keep me sane (or, at least, prevent me from slipping further into insanity) when I travel and combat the inevitable loneliness; good luck.

New iPhone - Some Predictions

The rumours (confirmed by people with reliable sources, which normally means Apple itself) say that Apple will announce the new iPhone on 12th September (to ship 19th Sept.) just over eleven months after the launch of the iPhone 4S. The rumours also say that the new iPhone will have a larger display (iOS 6 includes features for handling taller, but not wider, apps on the iPhone), the same basic physical shape (and probably exactly the same outline) and a completely new dock connector. All of this makes sense but what other changes might we see in the hardware of the new iPhone? Here are my predictions, which you should most definitely take them with a large shovel of salt because I've never been right about these things in the past.

LTE - now relatively common in Android handsets, LTE hasn't yet made an appearance in the iPhone, apparently because the chipsets consume too much power and shorten battery life by an unacceptable amount. I expect LTE to appear in the new iPhone using either a new, low-power chipset or some very cunning engineering to give the phone at least as much battery life as the 4S.

128Gb Storage - the last two iPhones (and the iPod Touch) have topped out at 64Gb and now seems like a good time to make another jump. Is there any point going beyond 128Gb? Not this year, certainly, but maybe in 2014-15.

Improved cameras - it isn't all about resolution. The camera on the iPhone 4S is simply brilliant but I predict Apple to at least tweak both the optics and the sensor to further improve performance. We might see a leap to 10Mp and a new set of lenses for the main camera and I think we are also likely to see the front-facing camera improved to allow hi-res FaceTime, which would be great over a 4G connection.

Faster CPU and GPU - nobody could accuse the 4S of being slow but Moore's law marches inevitably onwards dragging even mobile devices in its wake. Expect improvements in this area although I doubt we'll see quad-core overkill.

Updated wifi - incorporating the latest wifi standards seems like an obvious thing to do, especially after recent bumps to the specifications of Apple's wifi routers.

NFC - a programmable NFC chip that could do service as a smart card or credit card would be an ideal partner for Wallet, the new iOS 6 feature for managing payment and reward cards. Personally, I'd like to be able to use my phone as an Oyster card or a payment card so that I can cut down on the stuff I carry everyday.

None of this is particularly revolutionary - it's all been done in other phones that are currently on the market - but it'll be interesting to see what Apple come up with and how they work everything together. With any luck they'll also have something special to add to the mix that nobody has predicted; anyone want to bet?

iOS 6 Feature Requests

iOS 6.0 arrives later in the year, probably at the same time as the next iPhone (rumoured to be announced on September 12th, name unknown but unlikely to be called "iPhone 5"). I've written before about features I would like added to iOS and each year a few of my requests are delivered. Here is this year's list.

First up, I want left and right cursor keys on the standard keyboard. Some applications (Diet Coda, for example) have these buttons and they save a fantastic amount of frustration and effort when trying to place the cursor - their presence effectively ends the need for repeated cursor placement attempts, allowing you quickly to correct placement errors caused by last minute movement as you lift your finger.

Personal hotspot, the ability to use wifi to share a data connection with other devices, is a very useful feature and it does exactly what you'd expect. I'd like to know more about the devices connecting to my phone, including their names, the amount of data they've used this session, length of time connected and so on. In essence, I want to know which devices are connecting to my wifi and how they're using it.

It's not unusual for iOS to ask for your Apple or other password. Unfortunately, because the dialogues can pop up according to iOS's needs rather than in response to user actions, it isn't always possible to see why the password is needed. To fix this, login dialogue boxes should clearly show which services they work for, maybe by putting an icon in the window so that it is easy to tell that you logging in to FaceTime rather than iMessages.

A recurring favourite on these lists, widgets on the home or lock screen have long been a strong feature in Android and it would be nice to see something similar in iOS. The ability quickly to review upcoming appointments, reminders, weather forecasts and even share prices would be most welcome, even if it meant relegating the familiar icons and folders to a second screen.

The notification centre introduced in iOS 5 went a long way toward delivering a decent system for notifications and was clearly a huge improvement over the previous implementation. That said, there are further improvements to be made before this feature could be considered complete.

We already know that Facebook integration is coming in iOS 6 (and as an update to Mountain Lion at around the same time) and this is most welcome (although it's unclear that posting more stuff to Facebook will actually improve anyone's life). Hopefully these features will enable cross platform contact management and unification because contact duplication can make contact lists unnecessarily long and difficult to use. It would be nice to have improved contact de-duplication or merging features but I suspect these would sit better in a desktop app.

So that's my list for this year. My wish list of new hardware features will follow (probably next week). Thanks for reading.

London 2012 Olympics - Part II

Wow. The London 2012 Olympic games are a triumph. At the time of writing (Sunday morning, 12th August) Team GB have won 62 medals (including 28 golds) with more to come today as the competition draws to a close, making it our most successful games since 1908 (when we had an embarrassingly large medal haul). 

For a small country on the edge of Europe, finishing third in the medal table behind America and China is something of an achievement and one in which the whole country can take pride. Our elite athletes, the coaches and their support teams, the products of a sporting system that has been utterly transformed over recent years, have exceeded both their own targets and our expectations, burying the rampant pre-games cynicism in a shower of medals.

So what's next? After the final day of competition and the closing ceremony (a great excuse for a party) this evening comes the Paralympic Games, starting 29th August. It may not receive the TV and Internet coverage of the main Games but the Paralympics should still provide an extraordinary  sporting spectacle. Our athletes deserve the same level of the support seen in the main games and hopefully they'll be able to enjoy a similar level of success.

After that we have the long buildup to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where, I suspect, Team GB will try to better their 2012 haul. Their ability to do this is directly related to the funding the team receives, so David Cameron's announcement that the Government's funding of UK sport will continue until at least 2016 (albeit at the current level - inflation will force the organising bodies to make some tough decisions over the next few years if they can't make up the difference with lottery funds or private sponsorship) is very welcome. 

And what of the cost of the 2012 games? Hosting the games cost an estimated £9bn, which isn't a small amount of money for a country stuck in recession. As a showcase for Britain, and especially for London, the games have been fantastic. The volunteers, resplendent in their pink and purple outfits, did a great job and provided an uncharacteristically friendly welcome to visitors to the games and, at least in London, unprecedented help to tourists; they've been brilliant and we should applaud them (I hope they get a special mention in the closing ceremony).

The prophesied security problems, even after the debacle with G4S and the last-minute drafting of thousands of extra troops, didn't materialise and there haven't been, as far as I know, any issues at all (and the anti-aircraft missiles, thankfully, haven't been needed).

Overall, despite whatever worries the naysayers might have had about the costs or the undesirability of the games or LOCOG's performance, everything seems to have gone fantastically well. I'm looking forward to seeing what Brasil, and Team GB (I've got used to seeing large numbers of GB medals on the table), can do in Rio in 2016. 

London 2012 Olympics - Part I

We are now halfway through the London 2012 Olympic games and despite heavy cynicism and last-minute problems, it looks like it will be remembered as a triumph, a great exhibition of sportsmanship (if we ignore the badminton) and organisation. There have been some great moments, particularly in the athletics yesterday, that it is difficult to know what to mention, but here are a few of my favourites so far:

• Opening ceremony - a humorous celebration of all things British, a fantastic parade of athletes and a touching torch lighting ceremony. Danny Boyle and his team did a great job. 
• Jessica Ennis winning the heptathlon, Mo Farah taking gold in the 10,000m and Greg Rutherford winning the long jump to give us the most amazing evening of sporting success in a very long time. 
• Andy Triggs Hodge, Pete Reed, Andy Gregory and Tom James led from the start of the men's four to add another gold in the rowing. 
• Sophie Hosking and Katherine Copeland winning the women's lightweight double sculls and being quite astonished by their own success - the expressions on their faces when they realised they'd won were priceless. 
• Laura Trott, Dani King and Jo Rowsell taking gold in cycling's team pursuit and destroying the United States in the process. Setting a sixth successive world record at the same time was just the icing on the cake. 
• Andy Murray reaching the finals of the men's singles and, with Laura Robson, the final of the mixed doubles. 

All our medal winners have put in a tremendous amount of effort and it's great to see so much success. Even when they aren't winning gold (and silver or bronze, at this level of international competition, must surely represent significant achievements) they're giving it everything they've got (and here I'm thinking of the heroic efforts of Rebecca Adlington and the men's lightweight double sculls duo of Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter).

Today, day 9, holds much promise and anticipation. Whatever the outcomes (and it could be another great day), Team GB is providing a spectacle the likes of which we have never seen before and the crowds are clearly appreciative of their efforts, as they should be. The roars of approval that fill the venues whenever a British competitor enters the field show a level of engagement in the experience that few would have predicted in the run-up to the games.

And what about the park and the venues? The Olympic park looks stunning and I can't wait to visit (Monday for the synchronised swimming). The permanent structures, especially the velodrome and the main stadium, look fantastic. Even the temporary venues, like the archery range at Lord's, look great (although it's a pity the Paralympic Archery won't be held there).

Overall, a great first week and I'm a lot more impressed with both the sporting achievements and the organisation of the games than I thought I would be. Congratulations to everyone involved - you've done a fantastic job and made the whole country proud.

Schools and Vaccinations

The Guardian broke a story last week (link) about a small number of schools that deny their pupils access to the HPV vaccine on the grounds of religion:

"Some schools in England have opted out of the HPV vaccination programme because their pupils follow strict Christian principles and do not have sex outside marriage."

Childhood vaccinations aren't compulsory in the UK and although most schools allow the recommended programmes to be administered on their premises they are allowed to opt out. The voluntary nature of the programme makes sense in the context of a liberal, well-educated society that values reason, informed consent and patient involvement but the system is damaged when some pupils, for whatever reason, are denied vaccinations.

The schools argue that the vaccine is not in line with their Christian principles (presumably because the virus is transmitted through sexual intercourse) and that they are therefore unable to administer it on their premises. There are several problems:

• Vaccination at school is an excellent way to ensure that children get the protection they need. It is very likely that at least some (possibly most) of the children who aren't vaccinated at school will never be vaccinated so by opting out of the programme schools increase their pupils' risk of death from cervical cancer.
• Putting the schools' principles ahead of the wellbeing of pupils is immoral and unethical. Institutions that value their "Christian principles" more highly than the health of their pupils have failed in their duty of care and would be well advised to find some better principles to follow.
• Even if pupils never have sex outside marriage they are still at risk of catching HPV. What if their husband is a carrier? What if they re-marry and their second husband has been exposed? What if they are sexually assaulted by a carrier? What if pupils decide after leaving school that the Christian teachings about sex and marriage are complete rubbish and that they're just going to live life and have fun? 

It is right that schools have a set of defining principles and that they defend them against criticism. They should be allowed to draft their own constitutions and to set the rules they believe will benefit their pupils. But they should also accept and follow guidance on matters which are outside their expertise irrespective of their personal or institutional preferences - it is inconceivable that the schools refusing to offer HPV immunisation have a valid medical reason for their decision.

Society as a whole has a duty to ensure that our children receive the best treatment and education we can provide. Vaccination against life-threatening illnesses is a perfectly reasonable and sensible precaution, even if some people object to the nature of the illnesses being prevented. To allow religious extremists (can anyone argue that someone who puts their "Christian principles" ahead of their pupils health isn't an extremist?) to dictate health policy and act against the interests of their pupils is wrong and should not be tolerated.

The Red Carpet Experience

London premieres lots of big films. Throughout the summer producers bring their stars and publicity machines to Leicester Square, rent a cinema, slap down the red carpet and throw a big party to publicise their film. This week I was invited (by my friend Lucien) to one of the year's biggest premieres - The Dark Knight Rises.

It was a surreal experience. Leicester Square, newly reopened after years of renovation work, was transformed into a crowd control system focussed on the centre of the square, in which a three metre tall model of Batman's mask had been constructed. Security guards and fences held back several thousand cheerful fans who took photos and screamed happily at the actors and celebrities as they paraded past.

Large screens showed clips from the movie and interviews with the stars, shot in Leicester Square on a small stage next to an enormous burning bat symbol. A camouflaged Tumbler (apparently the military variant of Batman's car from The Dark Knight) stood guard on the south east corner of the square. Synchronised gas burners shot flames into the air every few seconds and security guards bellowed at film-goers to keep moving toward the cinema (people on the red carpet were taking photos of the scenery and the crowd).

As befits a film so eagerly anticipated by its adoring fans, the producers had hired two cinemas - the Odeon and the Empire - to ensure that every part of the launch was as big as possible (is it normal to hire two cinemas for a premiere?). Helpful chaps positioned next to the Tumbler checked tickets and directed people along the right branch of the red carpet.

Inside the cinema, after more ticket checks, the seats were pre-loaded with mineral water and chocolate treats (peanut M&Ms in my case). After a brief introduction from the Sky interviewer and the president of Warner Bros UK, the major cast members, the producers and the director trotted up on stage to show their faces. That was as close as we got to the talent, who trooped off after Christopher Nolan's speech to places unknown. Then they screened the film.

In all, a very entertaining evening. Walking down the red carpet through hordes of fans (they were strangely quiet as we passed by, almost as if they were waiting for someone else), some dressed as characters from the film, is a strange experience I shall long remember. I'm fairly sure, having watched the actors work their way through the crowds, that I wouldn't want their job.

And what of the film itself? I enjoyed it. It's maybe not as good as The Dark Knight (which, given Heath Ledger's exceptional performance, was always a risk) but it's entertaining and worth seeing if you like action or superhero movies. It carefully concludes the trilogy's outstanding storylines whilst simultaneously setting the stage for a fourth film (that's all I'm saying about it - you'll have to find out how they do this by watching the film). Recommended.

Athens, Greece

With everything that's going on in the Euro zone at the moment, and particularly in Greece, you might be forgiven for thinking that Athens would be depressed, downbeat and generally a bit quiet. Having just returned from a 24 hour visit to the Greek capital, I have a few observations to report that may, or may not, be of interest.

Firstly, the flights, both out and return, were full. I'm sure this was the case on previous visits as well but, either way, there are still reasonable numbers of people travelling to and from Athens. Packed flights should indicate higher-level economic activity, since leisure travel is likely to be the first thing that gets cut when times are hard (although fewer flights using smaller planes might also explain the appearance of high levels of traffic).

The advertising billboards, of which there are an impressively large number along the route from the airport to the centre of the city, are almost all unused. Many are in a state of disrepair, which suggests long disuse. Lack of advertising, especially in a downturn, is a very bad sign indeed; successful firms often advertise aggressively to squeeze rivals during a downturn and grow their customer. Maybe the billboard owners have gone bust.

The hotel I stayed in, the Intercontinental, was busy (although not as busy as it was in May 2011 when I last visited). Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of central 4 and 5 star hotels have closed in the last year so it may be that the strong international brands are benefitting from reduced local competition.

The restaurant we ate in, Travolta, has moved to larger premises since my last visit but it was very quiet. The food was again excellent but business seemed slow.

The trendy bars and restaurants in Gazi, like Dirty Ginger where I spent a few hours on a Thursday night, all appear to be busy. The streets were crowded and the bars were packed but not, from what I was told, as heavily as they had been a few months ago.

Another recent change, again anecdotally, is that restaurants are now issuing tax receipts, as they would in any other city in Europe. This doesn't sound like a big change but hopefully it signals that tax avoidance, once considered a national sport, is falling out of favour. Anything that helps the Government to gather its expected tax revenues is likely to be good for the country in the long-term.

I like Athens. It's warm, friendly and full of things to do. It has a few strange features (like the damn great motorway running through the middle of the city) but it's a great place to visit. I enjoyed my visit, brief though it was, and I really hope they can keep things together over the next few years. I'll be going back again as soon as I can to see the sights and to take advantage of the cheap hotels and restaurants. Highly recommended.

Living in London

Samuel Johnson famously said, in conversation with his friend Boswell:

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

The short form is often quoted as part of an introduction to London:

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."

In either form the meaning is clear; in 1777 (September 20th, to be precise) London was considered, by a biased observer, to be about the most interesting place a man could choose to live.

What does that mean for the rest of us? Anything at all? I suppose 235 year-old quotes might sometimes be illuminating but this one, particularly in is shortened form, is merely witty. London in the 1770s was probably a great place to live if you had plenty of money, much as it still is, but a pretty lousy place to be if you were at the bottom of the pile.

So what is it that I like about this noisy, dirty, expensive, crowded, polluted and impersonal city? Most of my family live in small rural towns and villages in Hampshire, West Sussex, Lincolnshire and Surrey. They like the peace and quiet of the countryside with its tractors and birdsong and pesticides, the sense of space and lack of crowds and the almost total absence of community amenities. Strange.

All of these things are fairly obvious to a casual observer - they're simply the main differences between city and countryside living. What's less obvious is that we, living five miles from the centre of the biggest city in Europe, actually have easier access to green spaces than all of our rural relatives put together.

How can this be? Surely, out in the country, everyone can spend as much time as they like in green fields and woodland? Well, no, not really. If you live in the countryside you are basically surrounded by the agricultural equivalent of an industrial estate. Fields, meadows and coppiced woods might have paths through or around them but you can't roam freely across them - they're working lands, not pleasure gardens, and they're largely off limits. You can look, but don't touch.

In contrast, within a short walk (along tree-lined avenues) of our flat there are two large parks, Peckham Rye and Dulwich Park, and two fairly substantial woods, One Tree Hill and Nunhead Cemetery. They are all open and free. They have tennis courts, cafes, sports fields, bike hire shops, running tracks, exercise machines, Japanese gardens, bowling greens, woodland walks and boating lakes.

So why do people live in the country? I think it must be the sense of space and the silence. Which is great, if you like that sort of thing, but occasional doses are good enough for me; I'd rather live in a city with a decent collection of shops and a fast Internet connection.

The Long Slow Death of the Church

A thousand years ago everyone in Europe knew that the Earth had been made for man alone and that it sat at the centre of a universe created in seven days by a jealous, vengeful God who had made us in his form, sacrificed his only son to cleanse us of our sins and controlled the Heavens, the weather, the sea, disease, love, life and death according to an ineffable plan that only he could understand.

Five hundred years ago we knew that the Earth went round the sun and that the moon influenced the tides (somehow) but the Church (and God, of course) still ran everything else. Our knowledge of anatomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, history, geography, geology and pretty much everything else was rudimentary and the big questions, like why did the world exist, could only be answered by the religious. The Church had all the answers, and the answer was always "God did it".

By the mid seventeenth century we understood the circulation of blood around the body, the mathematics that governs planetary orbits and the layout of the world's major land masses. The influence of the Church was still very strong but in some areas it no longer claimed to be the ultimate authority; it had started to cede knowledge to the scientific movement.

After 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we finally had a good understanding of our origins and the development of life. Since then discoveries have come ever more quickly and the role of God in the natural world has shrunk further and further as science has pushed back the boundaries of knowledge. We now know what causes most diseases and how to prevent or cure them, why volcanoes erupt and the earth shakes, how the weather works, what the stars are made of; we have good answers to almost all the questions to which our ancestors might have answered "God did it" a thousand years ago.

The point of all this is that God, previously advertised as the all-powerful creator and dictator of the universe is now a bit of a joke, a relic reduced to listening to prayers and helping out a bit when people need an illusory crutch to lean on. As such, it is now most definitely time to stop treating God as anything other than the fictional character he clearly is. We don't need to worship, follow special dietary or dress rules, abstain from work on particular days or discriminate against people based on their gender or sexuality.

We need a comprehensive overhaul of our legal system to remove laws that are based solely on religious belief (like restricted Sunday trading) or that grant religious entities special privileges (like charitable status). We should dis-establish the Church of England and allow the monarch to choose their religion (or none). Completion of this project will mark the emergence of the UK as a secular and democratic state whose people are free from religious oppression.

Content Creation on an iPad

Ever since the iPad was announced, some tech commentators have delighted in claiming that it is suitable only for content consumption and that content creation just isn't feasible. I think they mean this to be an argument against the iPad (because they apparently feel that consuming content on a slick, user-friendly device with a fantastic screen and great battery life somehow isn't enough to justify a purchase) but, fortunately, their basic assumption is flawed; it's perfectly possible to create on the iPad (assuming, of course, that you're able to "create" in the first place).

This week a "journalist" in the New York Times has again rolled out this bizarre idea (thanks to the Macalope for the link):

The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation. The keyboard on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typing anything over 140 characters. There isn’t a built-in pen for note-taking, either.

This sounds reasonable, if you have never used an iPad, but it isn't and it's annoying, so here is a list of the things I create on mine.

The first thing I need to mention is that this blog entry is being written on my iPad using a great app called PlainText, which does exactly what its name implies. In fact, most of the blogs on this site are drafted, in some form or to some degree, in PlainText.

In a somewhat different vein, I use an app called Diet Coda to build and edit the websites I create for my own amusement. It turns out that the iPad can be used, if you have the right app, to build and publish websites, from scratch, without ever going near a traditional computer.

Photography is also possible using the built-in camera (the retina display on the new iPad makes a stunning viewfinder) and an image manipulating app like iPhoto, Photogene, ColorSplash, AutoStitch or SnapSeed. These are seriously impressive apps with powerful features; using them to create new content is a doddle.

Have I mentioned email? I've written many, many emails on my iPad.

And those are just the things that I can create on my iPad. Other people compose music (not really my thing), paint or draw (generally beyond me) or shoot and edit great videos. With the right apps and, more importantly, the right skills, you can do almost anything on an iPad that you can do on a traditional computer. I would go so far as to say that if you can't create art on an iPad you probably aren't going to be able to create it on a desktop (and the machine probably isn't the limiting factor).

If you're considering an iPad but you're wondering how it will fit into your content creation workflow after reading the Times' article, don't worry, everything will be fine. Buy one today, load it with apps and start producing your art; it'll be great.

On the Buses

Until I moved to London in October 2010 my experience of buses was limited. In Hampshire (where I used to live) the buses tend to be slow, infrequent and expensive with routes and timetable that seem devised to minimise their usefulness. The bus operators in Hampshire habitually send out their vehicles without the means to make change and with drivers seemingly trained to be as awkward as possible.

The net effect is that infrequent passengers, who might not be familiar with the arcane charging structures and indecipherable stop naming practices of the rural bus operators, are often deterred from travelling by the drivers' irrational demands for precise destination information and exact change. The change issue is particularly annoying, especially when, having waited 20 minutes for the bus to arrive in the first place, you're denied a ticket (the cost of which cannot readily be determined before boarding) by a hostile driver unwilling to accept a note.

You may have guessed by now that I have no love for Hampshire's buses, but what about buses in London? Good question.

Bus operators in the metropolis have several advantages over their provincial colleagues, primarily a large customer base. The huge number of people using buses in London allows operators to profit even with much lower ticket prices.

Part of the reason for the large number of travellers is surely the ubiquitous Oyster card, London's RFID payment system. The savings for regular travellers when comparing Oyster tickets (£1.35 per trip) with standard tickets (£2.30) are substantial and encourage everyone to use the fast and convenient Oyster card. Large numbers of people can board buses quickly when everyone pays by touching their card to the reader.

The other big advantage of the London buses is that there are lots of them so you generally don't have to wait too long for the next one to arrive. This lets you to take a relaxed attitude to catching a bus, something that is most definitely not the case in rural locations with only one or two services a day.

Beyond that, of course, things are much the same. The buses themselves are generally fairly uncomfortable, especially when stuck in traffic during hot weather; there's only so much that air conditioning can do to help cool a stationary greenhouse on wheels. Poor suspension and noise insulation make the ride rough (especially in those areas plagued by speed bumps) and loud.

The biggest problem, though, surpassing even the people who play bad music through tinny headphones, are the stinkers. Some people, for reasons unknown, simply don't wash regularly enough to prevent their stench making life unpleasant for their fellow passengers. Above all else, this issue makes travelling by bus an ordeal, especially on a cold day when the windows can't be opened.

This, then, is my request; if you're going to take advantage of London's cheap, reliable and easy-to-use bus network, please wash and deodorise before boarding. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Three things for London's Mayor

The Mayor of London has a number of responsibilities, as described on the official website:

The Mayor has a duty to set out plans and policies for London covering transport, planning and development, housing, economic development and regeneration, culture, health inequalities, and a range of environmental issues including climate change, biodiversity, ambient noise, waste disposal and air quality. The Mayor has a number of other duties relating to culture and tourism, including managing Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square.

Source: http://www.london.gov.uk/who-runs-london/mayor/role

There are three areas within the Mayor's remit that would benefit from immediate attention:

Firstly, traffic. There is absolutely no way that London's roads can be made to carry, at a reasonable average speed, the number of private cars that try to enter the city each day. The only option, if we are to travel around the city at anything more than a brisk jog, is to provide alternatives to driving, which means investing in both public transport and cycling infrastructure. Of the two, cycling infrastructure is by far the cheaper solution. There are lots of problems to be solved, of course, especially on London's narrower roads, but the Dutch and Danish have already solved them all - we just need to apply their lessons.

Secondly, and related to the first problem, Boris needs to tackle air pollution. London has no heavy industry to speak of and coal is now rarely used as a domestic heat source so most of the air pollution comes from motor vehicle exhausts. Air pollution in general kills around 13,000 people in the UK each year (source) so reducing the amount of rubbish we push into the atmosphere would have a significant positive impact on society. Trimming motor traffic, particularly in areas frequented by large numbers of people (like Oxford Street and Regent Street) would be the obvious first step and would have the additional benefit of making our city a more pleasant place to walk, shop, visit and live.

Finally, and completely unrelated to traffic or pollution, I'd like to see Boris reduce dramatically the number of underused properties, both commercial and domestic, which plague London in disturbingly large numbers. It seems strange that buildings are allowed to fall into disrepair in a city where property is so expensive but it isn't at all uncommon. Offices, shops, warehouses, houses and power stations (Battersea, for example) are abandoned and allowed to decay until they cease to be habitable and become a drain on society. Disused buildings reduce both the appeal of an area and its economic health so clearing (to create urban woodland, maybe) or re-occupying empty buildings could make quite a difference to the feel of the city.

This list is short and it disguises or ignores many obvious challenges involved in addressing these problems but Boris could make a real difference to our lives, and his chances or re-election, by taking decisive and effective action. Go on, Boris, you know you want to.

Booking Singapore Air Flights

I have a new worst flight booking website. I once thought that Thomas Cook's website and their general business practices were the worst around (they are truly awful) but they have been surpassed by Singapore Air's dreadful abomination of a website.

Here are a few of the problems I encountered when trying to book a simple multi-city trip for myself and the wife:

• Idiotic timeouts - the booking process has a very short timeout counter so if you're trying to check other flight prices or look at hotel details or confirm that Singapore will actually be open on the day you visit you need to do it very quickly indeed. If you're a bit too slow Singapore Air will plague you with stupid pop-up messages warning you that your session is about to expire.
• Stupid security measures - I presume they're security measures, although messages like "The system has detected that you have used the back button..." are pretty pointless, especially when they then offer you an "Proceed without Update" button that doesn't take you forward because it prevents you from updating the page that you can't leave without having made an update. Infuriating.
• Broken drop-down boxes - there's absolutely no excuse for drop-down boxes that don't work properly but the ones that Singapore Air have deployed close if you get to the bottom of them making it extraordinarily difficult to hit the last option in the list. 
• Lack of an edit feature - if you make a mistake entering your passenger details or if you decide to change your departure time or if you simply want to check a choice you made two screens earlier, don't bank on Singapore Air helping you out. Instead of an Edit feature, Singapore Air will just dump you right back at the beginning of the process and, to make life especially difficult, the system won't even remember your chosen airports or dates so you'll have to enter them again. This gets a little annoying when the above faults conspire to require you to execute multiple flight searches.

It's not all bad. They have a feature that helps you find the cheapest flights within two days of your target dates and this we were eventually able to use to save about £200 by making minor changes to our arrangements. They were also, even before those changes, the cheapest airline we could find and they seem to fly at reasonably sensible times. Also, unlike the infamous Thomas Cook, Singapore Air don't add surcharges to your bill if you wish to pay by credit card, carry luggage or "enjoy" an in-flight meal.

If it weren't for the awfulness of their website, which can only have been contrived to discourage potential customers and make life awkward for travellers, Singapore Air would most definitely rank as a top-tier carrier. For a more balanced review of their services, including comments on their in-flight services and the general comfort of their aircraft, check back in early December.