I went into the T-Mobile shop in Kingston, and asked them about their lowest-price SIM-only deal, which then cost £7.70 or something per month, and asked them what would happen if I changed tariffs mid-month. I did this because I had done this a few years ago and got an enormous bill at the end of the month, when my new tariff was meant to be lower. The guy in the shop told me that my tariff would be “pro-rata’d”, in other words, I’d get the rest of the month on my new tariff with my minutes reduced accordingly. The number of minutes I’d get seemed unusually low, so I decided to pass on it until the end of my tariff month (which is on the 10th of every month). The 9th was this past Monday, so I went in just before the close of business on that day.

I asked him when my new tariff would kick in — whether it would be on the next business day, or right now, and he said right now, and I could not get a satisfactory answer as to how many minutes I would be entitled to for the rest of that day. The likely answer would, of course, be “very few”, if I had a few hours’ share of an allowance of minutes that would normally last a month, which would be only a very few minutes. In the event, I did not make any calls or send any texts, and the internet is free. However, it would be much simpler to be able to arrange to change to the new tariff when the present month is over, particularly when that happens to be the next day. That spares me the uncertainty of not knowing how many minutes I can use without running up extra charges.

Also, T-Mobile should have made sure I was transferred onto a SIM-only tariff as soon as my 24-month contract was up. I did bring this up with the agent and was told that the phone was free, and that the money paid for a “line rental”. I do not understand this, because I do not have a physical line; rather, I have a number and the right to use their network. Phone bills subsidise the cost of the handset; if they didn’t, they would not offer SIM-only deals for those who could bring their own phone, and they would not charge more per month for expensive “free” handsets like the iPhone and the Galaxy S2. There is simply no reason for them to be charging people for phone-contract tariffs when their contract has expired and the phone is paid for.

The Mac mini doesn’t come with a keyboard, a monitor, a mouse or indeed anything except the system box. You can (and for a week, I did) use a Dell monitor, keyboard and mouse. However, Macs are set up to work with Apple gear, so for example, Apple’s font rendering is meant to work with Apple monitors like those you see in an Apple store. For a few days after, I looked in dismay at “black” text that looked like it had been written with a pen that was just about to run out of ink. Then I found this article which explains how you can restore decent text on a Dell monitor if your Mac is using Snow Leopard or Tiger. The short version is: you go to a Terminal (which you can find by clicking the Finder — that’s the smiley face — in the Dock, choose “Applications” from the list at the side, then double-clicking “Utilities” which is where the Terminal is — and entering this command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

You can’t change this in System Preferences; Apple got rid of the setting in Snow Leopard. It’s a bit worrying that they have banished this to an obscure setting which you have to use the Terminal to set; in the past, this has been the prelude to getting rid of it altogether. (The article says that the last figure can be 1 or 2 to give acceptable fonts.) To get rid of the setting (say, if you acquire a dedicated Mac monitor), you can type this:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

It’s depressing that Linux offers more readable fonts for free than Apple does on a computer that costs a minimum of £529 (UK prices).

The first thing I sought to install were the developers’ tools, and the Qt libraries I needed to compile my application (which I’m using to type this entry) to run on my Mac (and hopefully, anyone else’s). Unfortunately, it being Christmas Day, it appeared that everyone was activating their new computers, smartphones and tablets and large downloads (such as the updated version of the Mac OS itself) were impossible: even more frustratingly, they would get to the end of the download and just stop, telling you it was corrupted. Later on in the day, this fixed itself, but it would have been better if Apple had actually loaded the update onto the computer before shipping it (it was released in October).

Anyone who’s used Linux will know that one of its best features is how easy it is to download software, particularly open-source software: there is a package manager, there are archives, and you just use a package management tool to download your package (and anything it needs to run, called dependencies) and install it. Sadly, this isn’t true on the Mac. Back in 2004, a project called Fink provided the package manager and archives, but for some reason it has ceased to provide compiled downloads, only source downloads, which MacPorts already offers, so I am not sure what it provides that MacPorts doesn’t. This means you have to go to the vendor’s own website and download their disc image if you want a compiled (that is, runnable) piece of software. This is a major weakness of the Mac as a development platform. Perhaps it suits Apple’s purposes, as it hinders cross-platform development and encourages Mac developers to develop Mac-specific software, using its own developers’ tools.

A further disappointment was how my application actually looked once I’d got it compiled. Clearly, the developers of Qt have not anticipated that an app would look, and handle, totally differently in Cocoa (the native Mac toolkit which is inherited from NeXT) to how it did when Qt was based on Carbon (the “old-Mac” toolkit). I had hoped to simply compile and release that day, certainly within a week, but that’s not possible: there is an unsightly large status bar (the bit at the bottom where messages are displayed) and a problem setting the window to the size I want (that is, the size I set, or the size a user will set). I can forsee having to personally write a replacement for the status bar.

I have also had some difficulty getting stuff that makes the Mac fit into my existing cluttered desktop with its jumble of cables. My keyboard, mouse and monitor all work with the Mac, but I only had one of each, and it would have been nice to have some sort of switch that I could use so I didn’t have to unplug and replug each cable every time I wanted to switch computers. These switches are known as KVMs and Maplin’s do one with a brightly-coloured box with various misspellings and old logos that positively screams “Made in China” for £39, but it doesn’t do DVI switching, only VGA. New computers usually come with DVI outputs now, and DVI produces better colour output that doesn’t require calibration (I never could quite get white to show as white when I plugged my Dell monitor into my old Mac). DVI has been around for years, so it is a mystery that there are no affordable DVI switches. That cheap and nasty-looking switch in Maplin’s would have let me double my keyboard and mouse, but I decided to get an Apple keyboard instead (which has USB sockets that I can plug the mouse into). Mac minis no longer have DVD/CD drives, so you will need to buy an external one (and if you shop around, you can find one much cheaper than the £66 Apple charges for theirs; mine, by Samsung, cost £35).

Finally, one thing that was a bit of a culture shock the first time I got a Mac was the totally different nature of the Mac and Linux presses. Linux magazines are all about in-depth stuff — news and comment on the politics of open-source, patents and the like, reviews of fairly low-level software (programming toolkits, for example), articles on setting up servers and services, and programming tutorials. There’s very little of that in the Mac press: much of that is about products you can buy, and learning to do things like use iPhoto, iMovie and the like. A lot more software on the Mac has to be paid for and that doesn’t always mean it’s of better quality than the free software that is available for Linux, even if it is more polished. Still, there are some products which are fairly inexpensive, like Apple’s own Pages and Keynote, the second of which was good enough for Steve Jobs to do his own presentations on.

The Mac itself is pretty fast — considering that I do a lot of development on it, it really burns through jobs that took hours on my old machine — and quiet: the fan comes on only rarely, and only when the machine is seriously working (I did not realise it had one until several hours after first turning the machine on). My ‘old’ 2009 Dell, which has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, was incredibly noisy and sometimes made a barely tolerable sawing noise. I’ve yet to test out iPhoto and I’m not sure if I’ll use it for keeping photos — I still have a lot of old photos on my Dell which still has two barely-used 500Gb hard drives in it. I will probably use this much more for movies, as I have a camcorder which I haven’t used much so perhaps will do so a bit more (and maybe get working on that film project I’ve mentioned to one or two people, although perhaps that needs a better camcorder than mine and better software than iMovie). Anyway, however much old stuff remains on the Dell, I’ve not used it since Boxing Day, I think (I’ve used my older Dell laptop a bit, though). It’s a great little machine and I expect to get a lot of good use of it the next couple of years.

Although I started out using SUSE (now OpenSUSE), I’ve been using mostly Ubuntu since 2006 and no other distribution proved as reliable as that one, particularly starting with the April 2007 (Feisty Fawn) release. I found that it detected my wireless card and downloaded the correct driver for it and that the desktop was conservative and didn’t get in the way. GNOME 2 had been in development since 2002, and although the very first version was lacklustre (I remember well the slow screen-redrawings of that version, whenever you moved or closed a window), it had developed into a very solid and reliable desktop. Along the way, KDE radically re-invented itself and after KDE 4 was first released, it took a couple of years for it to stabilise and become reliable, losing a large number of followers along the way when they did not recognise, much less like, what they saw. In addition, most well-used apps, many of them also available on Windows and the Mac (such as Firefox, Thunderbird and, more recently, Chrome) used the same application toolkit (which provides windows, buttons etc) as GNOME itself (called GTK+), so it looked well-integrated. Of the current generation of Linux distribution, only Ubuntu manages to replicate this (by updating its theme for the latest version of GTK).

Come the end of 2010, however, the GNOME developers had decided to radically re-work their desktop, and what they came up with was a “shell” in which everything except the application windows and one top panel are hidden, so as to maximise screen space for applications. At the same time, Ubuntu rolled out Unity, a Mac-like set-up with a menu across the top and a “dock” (or launcher, as they call it — not that the term “dock” is trademarked, as it has been used in open-source projects since the specification for OpenSTEP was open-sourced years ago) down the side. These had the advantage of maximising vertical screen space on small, wide screens such as are common on laptops, but the latter, in particular, does not suit screens with a high vertical resolution (such as my desktop screen). Although the launcher can be retracted, it cannot be repositioned or resized. As part of the design project (called Ayatana) it was part of, the system tray was crippled as its use was determined to be inconsistent and (supposedly) confusing, so apps that depended on it (like the one I develop, along with most KDE apps) were prevented from functioning. And other bugs started appearing, such as a failure to detect my wireless card, which had worked fine up until the April or October 2010 releases. It didn’t in either of the 2011 Ubuntu releases.

GNOME 3 featured the already-mentioned Shell, as well as a fallback mode which slightly resembles the old GNOME, if done right (which it often isn’t as it’s an afterthought). The Shell hides everything except a top panel featuring a clock and a calendar; you use the Windows key (or move the mouse to the corner) to activate the “Activities” screen, which allows you to start any application, choose another virtual desktop (similar to the Mac’s Spaces) or use its Dock (yes, it has one now as well) to launch a commonly used app. The only problem is configurability is poor — the basic product does not even come with a configuration tool to change the fonts used — and it does not offer an easy way of turning off annoying features such as “edge tiling” (a window shrinking to half the size of the screen when moved to the edge — it seems not to appreciate that you just might have wanted the window to be at the edge). Although it offers a system of extensions (which do things as simple as allowing you to shut down the system from a desktop menu, which you could do in the old version of GNOME), many of these (including the simple one just mentioned) will actually cause the desktop to crash. At least one “reworking” of GNOME Shell is heavily based on such extensions — I installed Linux Mint 12, after finding that the latest version of Ubuntu would not even play sound on my laptop — and I found that, although it bizarre screen effects when switching applications (in particular, when switching to Qt apps, such as mine). Regarding the lack of configurability, an editorial response to a letter in Linux User and Developer magazine mentioned a “developer knows best” attitude, in which desktop capabilities are limited by the tastes and design decisions of the developers.

Currently, on my laptop, I’m running KDE on Linux Mint 12 (as Mint is based on Ubuntu, you can download software from Ubuntu’s repositories, and from any third-party Launchpad repository also). KDE is on the face of it, nowadays, a very stable and presentable desktop, which has regained the usability it lost in the big move to KDE 4. I hardly ever use its two special features, Activities and Plasmoids, except for the folder displays on the desktop background (a good alternative to the automatic display of the contents of the Desktop folder on the background). However, I generally find that I do not use any KDE applications when I’m using KDE, as many of them are not up to scratch (there are exceptions, such as the photo manager Digikam and graphic editor Krita). The mail client (KMail, which can also be used as part of Kontact, which also offers a calendar and various other organiser-type features) is especially awful: it continually threw up errors when trying to configure a simple IMAP email account (giving the impression of failure, and indeed it kept exiting), and continues to do so during use. I use it, in fact, only because Thunderbird refuses to display the contents of some messages (which I am certain is a problem in Mint, not Thunderbird, as I have never come across this problem with Thunderbird before and it is not a problem with OpenSUSE or, for that matter, Ubuntu).

In short, a year ago, Linux (and mostly Ubuntu at that — I tried others, but always came back to it) was a reliable operating system, fairly easy to use if you had a bit of computer experience, with a well-maintained desktop on which nothing looked out of place. Today, we have a hotch-potch of ill-conceived desktops with important features missing and some unwanted, forced on us by developers who believe they know best and did not think to consult with application developers outside their circle, and the people behind the biggest distribution even seems to be neglecting hardware compatibility. The reason, some have alleged, is the drive towards making the desktops compatible with the small-screen netbooks, yet this is no reason to neglect the traditional desktop user or screen formats other than cinema aspect (it may also be that, with the rise to prominence of the Linux-based Android on mobile phones and tablets, securing a place for Linux on the desktop has become less important to many people). The upshot is that Linux is no longer the pleasure to use that it was a year and a half ago (while at least one of the commercial rivals has finally put out a usable and reliable operating system) and my use of Linux is likely to drop considerably as of next week.

I use social media a lot. That mostly means Twitter and Facebook, a bit of Google Plus and Disqus to moderate my blog. (Until recently, I used WordPress’s own comments, but problems at the WordPress site itself were causing constant slow-downs, and I was getting thousands of spam comments a day and, sometimes, no real ones.) I don’t use the MP3 playing functionality of my phone at all, although it’s there. I’ve not used the YouTube app either — I always think “I’ve got a computer for that”, and don’t want to waste the storage space on the phone.

There are two Facebook apps for Android: the official one, which is free, and a third-party one called Friendcaster (formerly known as Flow), which comes in ad-supported and paid-for versions. When I got the Samsung, I discovered and installed Friendcaster, which initially proved to be much faster than the official app and provided much more of the functionality of Facebook than the official app (such as access to old-style groups). However, before very long I realised that parts of my feeds weren’t showing up — in particular, some friends’ posts were not appearing. I am not sure if this had to do with their privacy settings, or with some bug in the app, but it diminished its usefulness somewhat. (While I was writing this, version 4.0 came out, and the problem persists.)

So, I downloaded and installed the official app, and discovered that although it displayed my whole news feed, it was incredibly slow — when it first displayed your news feed, it hung, making it impossible to scroll, and when it finally recognised that your finger was (or had been) on the screen, it activated the link you might have touched rather than scrolling the page. It also crashes quite a lot. Sadly, this has all happened since they changed the app and presented it more like a website; previously, you would click on a news-feed entry, or a comment, and it would present a list of links or options. The old way of doing things is still there when you view Facebook pages (and, strangely, when it opens your News Feed the first time), and it works as well as the old app did.

So, that’s Facebook: two apps, and neither of them both offer the full functionality and work without crashing constantly. There are several clients for Twitter, and some of them offer other services such as Facebook and the moribund Google Buzz also. There are a few features I want in a Twitter client: TwitLonger integration (i.e. your TL posts show as tweets, not as links to TL), URL shortening (which has to be automatic and which has to make way for extra letters rather than shortening a link while still requiring the tweet to accommodate the long version within 140 characters), clearly distinguishing mentions, retweets and my own posts, and working without crashing and hanging. I’ve tried most of the apps that are out there: Seesmic, Tweetdeck, the official app, Twicca, Tweetcaster and Plume. I currently use Plume, but it has its share of annoying bugs or omissions too.

Twitter recently introduced their own URL shortening service, t.co, which means that even if we already use a shortener, it gets converted to t.co on posting. However, for everyone to use one service means that they will inevitably get longer than if people were allowed to use their own. WordPress already offers its own short-link service (wp.me) as do some other social networks (fb.me for Facebook) and news providers (aje.me from Al-Jazeera, bbc.in from the BBC), so why should all of these be converted into t.co? Their links are already longer than those produced by other shortening services, resulting in tweets that appear to be within the 140-character limit being rejected, as the t.co version pushes them beyond the limit.

Tweetcaster and Seesmic did, in the past, integrate Twitlonger, but it seems they were fouled by the t.co imposition, so although they can shorten tweets, the result will appear as a link, not a long tweet. The only clients which presently integrate TL properly are Plume and Ubersocial (formerly Twidroyd). Ubersocial doesn’t clearly differentiate mentions from other tweets (despite having a system of downloadable and user-definable themes, that still isn’t built into it) and Plume has an annoying bug whereby if you use the Back button from certain screens, like another user’s profile, it will take you back to your timeline rather than where it should — back to the screen you were viewing before that one (particularly a “view full conversation” screen). It also does not allow you to view conversation threads if it starts from a retweeted post that appears in your timeline, rather than an actual tweet that someone you follow posted. The information is available to Plume (I know this because Seesmic and other clients can do it).

While writing this, I tested out some iPhones in the Apple Store and, although I could not test out any Facebook or Twitter apps on the demo phones (they have a demo version of the Twitter app, though, but it does not let you use your own account), I could test out the mobile websites. On Android, I’ve found them to be slow and overblown, giving the impression of not having been tested on a real mobile browser, and that their developers conceived them as web-delivered apps rather than as interactive websites (mobile Twitter functions almost identically to the Android Twitter app). I was shocked — they actually operate very smoothly on an iPhone, with none of the lag I find when using them on any Android browser I have tried. Facebook seem to have recently updated their mobile version and (at least on wi-fi; I have not tested it on mobile internet) it works more smoothly than the last version and a bug that often stopped drop-down menus from opening seems to have been resolved. Still, it shows that people who write mobile websites often do not realise that they have to be simplified as far as possible, not just cut down to fit the size of the browser.

I’m not sure I’ll be trading in my Samsung Galaxy for an iPhone any time soon — I had a look at the iPhone 3GS in the Store as well, the only one which is within my price range, and although its operation was smoother than the Samsung’s, the screen is smaller and of drastically inferior quality. Although you can install iOS 5 (the version that comes on the new iPhone 4S) on it, it remains to be seen how far they will permit users to upgrade it. There are things I definitely prefer about Android’s interface: the dedicated Menu and Back buttons, the interchangeable keypads which offer long-press for numbers and punctuation, being able to “draw” rather than press each letter and predictive text, all missing from iPhone (except for the second, and that’s only if you jailbreak). Apple show no sign of entertaining any of these features for iPhone. The Android system also has the advantage of price and openness, of there being competition among manufacturers.

Despite these advantages to Android, there is no doubt that the iPhone has much smoother operation and considerably less lag than the Android, whose users simply get used to it hanging a lot. I saw an article the other day by an Android (Nexus S) owner, who said he loved his phone, trying out an iPhone and finding that the Android “just feels wrong” after using it — he had got used to the lags, to having to stop and then reload a page and so on, and then found that it did not have to be this way. Will the Android developers realise this before their users do?

Image source: Android Market.

Until last year, Ubuntu’s main desktop was GNOME, which had been around since 2002 and had developed over the years into something very stable and reliable. That wasn’t the main reason it succeeded in that; the main reason for that was that its competition in the free software desktop world, KDE, was based on a toolkit called Qt which could be used for free and open-source products but not commercial ones without a paid licence. The toolkit used for GNOME (GTK) could be freely used for either, although I do not recall many heavy commercial applications being ported to Linux using GTK (RealPlayer and VMWare used it, though). While Qt was released under similar terms to GTK after Nokia took over the company that developed it, KDE’s developers then radically re-invented their product in 2005, causing it to lose a lot of ground for years afterwards. By last year, however, KDE had returned to form and GNOME had come to be seen as a bit long in the tooth.

Both products offered essentially the same things — menus and applets which could be arranged on one or more panels, and these were often arranged so that they resembled a Windows desktop; GNOME more often resembled a cross between a Mac and a Windows environment. Interestingly, perhaps because display technology has improved and more computers have accelerated graphics cards that are capable of more sophisticated 3D effects, the new GNOME environment has moved to a more Mac-like feel. The new version of GNOME has a “Shell”, offering a “Dash” (obviously modelled on the Mac’s Dock), and windows that scale down at the touch of the Windows key so that you can see all of them (similar to Exposé on the Mac), although some of its other improvements are quite original, and not all of them are a great improvement. It still offers multiple desktops, for example, but using them is more involved than in KDE or the older GNOME.

Ubuntu does allow you to install GNOME 3’s Shell, but defaults to its own shell called Unity, which was originally based on the old GNOME and appeared on the Netbook version of Ubuntu from 2009 onwards, but became the main desktop for its main release for the April 2011 (Natty) version. It offers an even more Mac-like user experience, with a top-of-screen application menu and a permanent Dock (called the Launcher) at the left hand side of the screen. The trouble is, it doesn’t go the whole way. You can’t move the dock from the side, for one — which may suit wide-screen monitors fine, and most computers (and nearly all laptops) come with wide screens nowadays, but some of us are still suck on 1280x1024 displays, like me, and a strip down the side of the screen, even though the screen is wider than it is long, takes up what looks like an unreasonable amount of screen space. A strip along the bottom would give more space for icons and allow apps the full screen width, giving something more like the cinema aspect that is increasingly standard. Besides which, it’s a choice, which the Mac offers and Unity does not.

Even more irksome is the fact that you can’t program the launcher as you can on the Mac — you can simply set up a menu and apply it to the Dock icon with one command, and it will appear if you right-click (or long-click) your application’s icon. That doesn’t work on the launcher — you can add menu items to it, but although there may be a way of doing this from within a program (which is not well documented if it exists), but the standard way is to write a file with a set of commands that can be run whether the program is running or not. All very well, but some way of automatically running the program first if it isn’t running already would be very useful (as it is, you have to write a script yourself to do that). It still isn’t as much functionality as you get with a menu you can attach to the system tray icon (which Unity has been busy crippling), and it’s not as simple to program. GNOME 3’s Shell lacks even this functionality at present. Worse, it pops up a menu saying “New window” which does no such thing — it just starts a new copy of the program, which may not actually open a new window at all. The “Quit” item in the same menu in Unity is just as bad. It doesn’t actually close the program, just all the open windows. If the app has a system tray icon, that remains visible, i.e. the app is still running.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu and Unity) have been trying to get developers to address what they saw as the mess that was the system tray and GNOME panel structure. To be honest, it was inconsistent, as they say, with some items being buttons and others being menus, there were different stylings, and accessibility problems. However, it does provide a way of providing a global menu for a piece of software and it is a cross-platform standard, so apps written using it with one toolkit can run on all the major desktop environments, plus Windows and Mac OS X. Since Unity’s “app indicators” aren’t present on the Mac or Windows, an app that depends on that alone is tied to Unity — it will not even function properly on any other Linux distribution, or on KDE. Canonical acts as if its product is the Linux desktop, when in fact it is merely one version of it (albeit the single most popular) and Unity does not ship as standard on any other version of Linux. I’d be the first to admit that the Mac’s way of providing a global menu through the Dock icon is better than using the system tray, and if Unity had provided the same, I would have used it some time ago. But it hasn’t.

Canonical have some other funny design concepts, among them doing away with an explicit Quit command. They present the Quit command as a compromise dating from back when the only GUI was on the Apple Lisa, which had a 5MHz processor, 1Mb of memory and two floppy drives and only one application could run at any one time. More recently, they claim:

Mac OS X moved the “Quit” menu item from the “File” menu into the junk drawer that is the application menu. But quitting has remained a basic part of how Mac applications present themselves, and it has persisted for many applications in Windows and Ubuntu as well.

A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984.

How is the Mac application menu a “junk drawer”? Having the Quit command there, rather than the File menu, is a quite logical thing to do if the application menu exists. It doesn’t anywhere except on the Mac, of course, but that is their way of making the Quit command look like a throwback. They diverge into how modern environments such as smartphones do not have the Quit command. I have an Android and I can see the consequences: apps that just won’t die, and annoyingly keep throwing up notifications long after you last used the app. Some Android apps do, in fact, have a Quit command. There are still applications, even on desktops with dual-core processors and 4Gb of RAM, that are inefficient, bloated memory and processor hogs and being able to get rid of them when finished with them is not a throwback, it’s essential.

All that says, Unity works fairly well on my laptop. There are some nice features, including the Ubuntu Software Centre which starts if you try to load an application that is not there, giving you the option to install it; however, it should really have an easy way of running it from USC once you have installed it. On the 64-bit desktop machine, for some reason there are bugs which don’t seem to appear on the 32-bit version on my laptop: Google Chrome always opening to cover the whole screen (maximised), and regaining the GNOME title strip when you click the button that sizes it down (a known bug that has existed for a long time). On the laptop, it covers everything except the dock. That doesn’t happen in Unity 2D, but when you scale Chrome down there, it does not redraw properly and so bits of the old bigger window are still there until you move something over them. The icon for the text editing program GVim is missing on the desktop, but is there on the laptop. On my laptop, although it detected the Broadcom wireless modem and downloaded what it thought was the correct driver for it, the driver did not work and it took a browse of the Ubuntu forums to get the right packages. This bug was present in the last release as well.

On both machines, speed and responsiveness is good. I used the “desktop CD” to install on my laptop; it was incredibly slow and unresponsive, opening up with the installer program that I didn’t want to use just yet, and crashed when I tried to close that. It then started up the normal live-CD session, and when I ran the installer again, it failed while cleaning up after finishing the install, giving no indication of how to fix the problem. I rebooted into the newly installed operating system and nothing was amiss, however. On the desktop, I used the alternate installer CD (a straight text-based installer) and everything worked perfectly. There was, as expected, a huge update to be done afterwards; this is because I installed from a Beta CD, but by that time, the packages had been updated to the Release Candidate versions but no new CD had been released. I have always preferred to use the text-based alternate installer CDs and will continue to do so.

In short, an improvement on last time. I haven’t tried out KDE on this version yet, but might well do as none of the four versions of GNOME are quite satisfactory on the desktop. On the laptop, this one is a keeper.

I’ve got a lot of disabled friends who really rave about Macs and other Apple products: Mac OS has screen-reading software built in (not an unreliable, expensive extra as it is on Windows) and their handheld devices can be used (with the help of special software, which is extra) as speaking devices for people who cannot speak themselves (known as an AAC). There are other cases of disability where the Mac still doesn’t shine: Windows Vista and 7 have speech recognition built in (so, kind of the opposite to the Mac in that sense) and, although Dragon Naturally Speaking is the product most used for this (by those who cannot use a keyboard, such as quadriplegics), some have reported that Windows’ own speech recognition is good. Others have reported to me that they cannot use a touch-screen phone or PDA; they require an actual keypad, as on the Blackberry. and no Apple device has one.

I bought a Mac in 2004. At the time, they were good value for money, although I had a bit more freedom than I ever have had since as a trust fund (not huge, and sadly less than had been invested in it) had matured. For much of the time since then, Mac hardware has consisted of standard commodity hardware crammed into a fancy box, with a specification which fails to jusify the cost of the unit; in particular, memory and hard drive space were often low by comparison with PCs of the same price. To upgrade memory at purchase, you would have to pay twice as much as you would pay at Crucial or Kingston. For example, an upgrade for the current i5 Mac Mini from 2Gb to 8Gb currently costs £240 from Apple, while the memory itself costs £111.85, including VAT and delivery, from the Kingston partner SMC. I have heard various justifications for why the kit itself is so expensive (including “aluminium unibody casing” and the “Apple ecosystem”), but that is simply a rip-off.

Apple simply do not care about people who are on a budget and need a computer that works for a reasonable price. (This includes, for example, many of the Unix hackers who work on the BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X.) Jobs was on record as saying he had not come across a $500 PC that was not a piece of junk; it may have been junk to him, not coming in one of his fancy aluminium cases, but no doubt worked and had more memory and storage than a much more expensive Mac, and could be expanded, if need be, the case opened with the aid of a screwdriver rather than a decorator’s spatula. For me, the fancy box was nowhere near as important as what was inside it, and that’s why I haven’t bought a Mac since 2004 (and I once wrote that I would buy another Mac when it came to upgrading that one, if they were still a viable option). Mac ownership has become rather like an exclusive club, a bit like a gang of schoolkids at a posh school which shuts out the “poor kid”. Since I’m not rich enough to join the gang, am I going to mourn its leader? No, I’m not.

Why? Because the time has come for a Facebook replacement, and Google has all the infrastructure in place necessary to blow them out of the water if they have a product that’s good enough, much as Facebook was in a position to do that to MySpace. Why did MySpace lose out? Because its user interface was awful — it was inconsistent, with some pages displaying in the user’s own theme and others not, and often the themes were image- and animation-heavy and slowed your browser down, or made the text illegible. Facebook doesn’t allow any of that, and its Walls, Groups and other features all look like part of the same site, and the FB colour scheme is pleasant and unintrusive enough.

However, they have a nasty habit of making unnecessary changes to the system which almost always prove annoying. Most recently, they merged Chat with Messages, effectively crippling the message system so that messages cannot have titles and have to be typed into a tiny box. Whoever heard of something so ridiculous as merging instant messages with a mail system, anyway? They have also vandalised the Groups system, removing the discussion forums, allowing people to add someone else to a group without asking them and instituting an equally irritating chat box, which does not go away when you navigate away from the group. Oh, and they do away with the group Info page as well. Not to mention having to press Shift+Enter to start a new paragraph when typing a comment (but not when typing a status update), making it easy to submit a comment before it was finished. Then there is the annoying and pointless “theater” pop-up which appears when you try to view a picture. Need I go on? Like mentioning the bugs, such as comments appearing then disappearing then appearing again, or it messing with your browser history, such that the entry for www.facebook.com has the title of the link you clicked when you last viewed it? Every time they tinker with things, they make it worse, and it has made Facebook much less pleasant to use than it was when I first joined.

Of course, Google Plus still has the same issues of being an advertising-supported free service, in which the customers are the advertisers, not the users, in which even more of our data is being held by one big corporation, which in this case has a history of selling its users out when it suits their commercial interests (e.g. to the Chinese secret police), but in this case the service does not need to have all of FB’s features to win over FB: Google already has Blogger, GMail, YouTube and Picasa, and as long as it does not freeze out, say, Vimeo, WordPress or Flickr users by preventing us linking our non-Google photos, blog entries and videos, it is likely to succeed if it is just less annoying than Facebook has become. Facebook has a month or so to sort out its user interface problems, or it stands to lose out, and deservedly so.

Charles Arthur is the Guardian’s tech correspondent (he used to edit the Thursday Technology supplement, but then they ditched it), and this article is about how today’s smartphones are as powerful as computers used to be and are used for a lot of the same functions, to the extent that some people will no longer need a full-size computer. For my part, a smartphone could never take the place of a computer, precisely because it’s too small, has too little storage and is simply too inflexible.

It’s true that phones can do more than many computers could ten, let alone twenty, years ago; their displays are often the same resolution as early VGA monitors or better, they run operating systems that were designed for actual computers, such as Linux, and they can run email clients, social networking clients, web browsers and some games. But that is where the similarity ends. Yes, you may be able to edit a document on a smartphone as well, but you won’t be able to satisfactorily write and lay out a document on one, because the screen is too small, particularly if you are using an on-screen keypad which reduces the size of the screen further. You will need a proper monitor so that you can see your page layout clearly. Even the social networking clients do not offer all of the functionality that is available through the websites.

The web applications are also quite limited, compared to their desktop equivalents. I have yet to see an email client for Android that is capable of filtering spam, which I use commonly on Thunderbird, my desktop email client. There are mobile versions of many major websites for a reason: because the small screens make it impractical to load the whole site, which is designed for large screens that make multiple columns viable. That is why mobile versions of websites display the main content and very little else. Has anyone tried typing text into the boxes on some websites using a mobile phone? Very often it’s next to impossible, and more so to navigate the box to correct a mistake, because your phone (like mine) does not have a trackball or cursor keys.

And then comes the biggest reason of all why a smartphone could never take the place of my computers: typing. If you cannot touch-type, this may be less of a problem, but I can (and fast), and I can’t on a mobile device because I have to move one or two fingers from key to key rather than press the key that’s under my finger. It is unsatisfactory for typing anything longer than a text-message or tweet. Sometimes I have emailed from my phone because I am on the move and really have to get something out, but would not want that to be my only way of emailing. Any time I have to compose a long message on my phone, I think of a certain disabled woman who complained of having no way of getting the spinning thoughts out of her head other than by slowly typing messages to people on a tiny PDA (the precursors of smartphones, without the phone; nowadays, the iPod Touch is the best-known of these).

It is for the same reason that a smartphone cannot replace a computer that the companies which dominate the desktop do not dominate the smartphone. You cannot put Windows on a smartphone and have it work decently (if at all); the products Microsoft call Windows Mobile or Windows Phone are not the same as the Windows systems found on computers: Windows Phone 7 supports Silverlight and XNA, while Windows 7 supports a whole host of other programming methods. Attempts have been made to port desktop Linux platforms to small mobile devices, but they have not been all that successful, hence the need for Android, a Linux user environment which is tailored for phones and small tablets. It is more interesting that the earlier PDA environments have died out as smartphones have become popular, such as Pocket PC and Palm OS, and that some of the dominant players have failed to prosper in the smartphone world.

However sophisticated smartphones get, their form factor will always get in the way of doing the things a computer does. They will always be jacks of all trades and masters of none: you will be able to take photos and organise them into collections, but serious photography and editing will require a computer (and a decent camera). You can write short messages, but it is too frustratingly slow to write long ones unless you have no choice. You might even be able to watch films, but the video quality will never match that of a proper monitor or a TV. Worst of all, many smartphone users complain that they are less good as phones than older mobile phones, that the phone software is over-complicated, bug-ridden or seems like an afterthought (this was certainly the case on my old HTC). Smartphones might reduce the time we spend at a computer, but they can never replace them entirely.

Fedora 15 was the first official distribution release to actually come with GNOME 3 as standard and not GNOME 2, as all other releases this year have. I downloaded the live CD and proceeded to run it, and found it impressive to begin with. GNOME 2 provided configurable menus and panels, and you could have as many panels as you liked and put the menus, clock, system tray, window switcher and various other gadgets wherever you like. GNOME 3, or at least the GNOME Shell which is currently the only way to run it, streamlines everything, with a single panel at the top containing a clock, a “message tray” containing a volume control, a network monitor, an accessibility control and the user menu (which lets you log out or open the settings box).

Everything else is hidden, and if you move the mouse to the top left-hand corner or click where it says “Activities” in the top-left corner, GNOME will shrink down all your open windows so you can see everything, show you the Mac-like dock, the menu you can use to launch new programs, the bit of the system tray that showed application icons and the virtual desktop switcher (similar to the Mac’s Spaces). As on the Mac, you can add programs to the dock that you use all the time or remove what you don’t. Also like on the Mac, it seems to be possible to add a menu to the dock icon (or to the application icon when it appears in the top panel), but most applications do not support this at the moment. In addition, they do not interact well with applications that are based off the system tray; if you choose the option that says “Exit this app”, it will just close the window, not the program.

The problem is that the new desktop is so limited. GNOME seem to have taken the opposite line from KDE when it launched KDE 4.0, which included desktop applets, whole new frameworks for searching and personal information management and hardware interaction, a brand new theme and a lot of use of transparency. In short, everything was brand new and untested. GNOME seemed to have taken the line of removing features and then adding them back as requested (one hopes). The trouble is, so much has disappeared, including, for example, the desktop preferences window, so you cannot alter the fonts or change the window stylings. The standard user menu also does not let you shut the machine down, which you can do from every other desktop on Linux or any other operating system. There is also no obvious way of setting how many virtual desktops there are, something that was easy in GNOME 2 and remains so in KDE 4.

A further annoyance is that activities mode only lasts until you do one thing, like launch a program. If you want to launch two, you have to go back into activities mode, and again if you want to launch another. With the old panel system, you could drag an application icon from a menu to the panel, so that you could launch it with one click. It would be useful to have some way of keeping activities mode on until you choose to turn it off. Also annoying is the way the system tray disappears into an obscure pop-up at the bottom right; you have to move the mouse to the bottom right to see the icons. It appears that someone, somewhere has decided that system tray icons are a bad thing, but neither GNOME 3 nor Ubuntu have implemented a satisfactory alternative. As a Qt developer, I can easily set the dock icon menu to be the system tray icon menu and not display the latter on the Mac, but there is no obvious way to do this on GNOME 3 (or Unity). Until it’s that easy, making the system tray this obscure is a bad idea.

As it happens, a number of extensions are already available to put back some of the functionality that is missing in GNOME 3. Fedora, however, has played along by removing some of its own graphical configuration tools, like the one that you could use to set the SELinux security level. SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) is the security monitor which comes with Fedora and can block actions it deems a threat to your system’s security, but any time I have run Fedora with SELinux enabled, it has produced alert after alert for things that no other version of Linux noticed, and I ended up disabling it. There always was a graphical tool to do this; there is none in Fedora 15, which has regularly resulted in the web browser, Chrome, crashing. I ended up changing this by manually editing the SELinux configuration file.

For all this, however, GNOME 3 is quite usable. It’s stylish and what is there works very well. I have not had it crash on me once (the Chrome problem excepted, and that was just that one program). However, it’s stripped very bare and generally, early adopters tend to be adventurous users, not those who want a very basic and simplified desktop experience. If you want to install Fedora 15, it’s either this or KDE 4, and I recommend the latter. Otherwise, it is not worth going to extra hassle (such as by enabling unofficial repositories) to get GNOME 3 now if your distribution offers the latest version of GNOME 2. It’s probably better to wait until some of the old functionality has been restored.

Why did I want to replace it several months early? The main reason was that I had installed the Swype keyboard, which means you can draw words on the screen by moving your finger from letter to letter rather than simply touching the screen for each letter, which is supposedly the fastest way to type. Unfortunately, my screen seemed not to have been made for that purpose, or maybe it’s just a bad idea that looks good until you use it for a few weeks. I found that my finger snagged on the glass if it was dry and not greasy, and that it became more and more difficult to get the system to correctly get what I was trying to type. It frequently failed to get frequently-used words, particularly those with double letters and some (but not all) words with apostrophes, as well as the name “Matt” which I type quite a lot, as it’s my name (and it often gave me a list of other names, including May, Mart and Mary, but not Matt). There were also reliability problems, such as a tendency to drop calls while getting it out of my pocket, and bugs in the software which often meant I could press the “Call” button on the touchscreen while viewing a list of contacts or recent calls, and nothing would happen (this would often happen while trying to return a missed call, often missed because I accidentally rejected it while getting it out of my pocket).

I had also installed the SwiftKey keyboard, which I paid for, but I found that it took up too much screen space and left hardly anything for the application, so when choosing this one, a large screen was vital as that’s what I’ve gone back to using (although Swype is installed as standard). I considered both this and the Motorola Defy, which also has a long-ish screen, is light (much lighter than my old phone) and came with Swype as well as the standard Android keyboard. It’s also water- and dust-proof, which really made me consider it over the Samsung, but having just finished a job I needed to save money. I could buy that new for £270 from Amazon, but this unit was a month old and cost £230 (and I seriously considered buying that the day before but thought no, then checked on Wednesday and found that they had reduced it by £10).

The only problems I’ve had so far are a shorter battery life (I had installed a replacement battery for my old phone, which meant it could easily last a full working day, which was vital when working the 12-hour days I was doing until last week) and a Micro-USB socket which seems to have more room than the socket on my old phone (a Mini-USB one), which enables the plug to shift a lot. When I connected my supposedly universal car charger to it yesterday, I found that it would not charge unless I held my finger on the plug to keep it pushed forward which, obviously, you cannot do when driving. The charger that comes with the phone still shifts around but does charge, so I will have to buy yet another charger for this one.

Still, I’m happy with the new phone; it’s light, it’s stylish, it’s much more responsive than the old one and, as far as I can tell with precisely 24 hours of use at the time I post this, much less buggy. I think it’s a keeper, although I’m not sure yet if I will actually forego my upgrade when it comes up in December. That was one of the reasons I decided to get a new handset outright.