Formerly being such an advocate of all things Apple (and therefore the iPhone), many people have asked what on Earth has possessed me to switch to Android after building a vast collection of paid-for applications on iTunes. The answer is simple.

Usability

The iPhone is widely praised for its brilliant usability, offering a very simple approach to accessing applications and services through the familiar “home screen.”

It’s great, though I have heard those who are less tech-savvy question why it is not possible to access Facebook friends (for example) through the contacts list, or be able to send a photo directly from a gallery to a Twitter feed. These questions are interesting, especially since those more techy of us can instinctively create a workaround and not notice these as problems.

On picking up another more open smartphone – such as Android, for example – both techies and newbies alike appear to appreciate how everything fits together a lot more than when greeted with the obstructions the iPhone platform creates. Yes, you can send a photo from your photos gallery to Twitter and, yes, you can access Facebook contacts though your phone’s contact list.

Best of all is the fact that most applications natively support notifications (without having to be relayed through third-party servers a la iPhone). Want to know if you have been mentioned in a tweet? Your phone will alert you straight away. Want notifications for your personal email account but don’t want disturbances from work email? Your phone can be customised to do so. The phone is really what you make it.

Frustratingly, how this works is largely in the hands of handset manufacturers and mobile operators – some do it brilliantly (like HTC/T-Mobile with the Hero)  others may not (Vodafone and the HTC Magic – 500MB download limit?!). Although Android marketplace simplifies installing add-ons and customisations, it is often difficult for the average consumer to find and install them.

I’m a relatively new user, so using my phone is as much a learning experience as anything else – feel free to email me thoughts and suggestions to teach me more!

I’ve started blogging on Android at http://www.r3troid.com – take a look for my latest views!

“As we leave behind the 20th century, it is almost as if we have come full circle back to the village where everyone potentially knows your business.”

This is something that we’ve been talking about for quite a while in the office, in fact it’s one of the first things we say when we introduce social media newbies to the art of digital communication – the media we are using to communicate may be ‘new’ but the actual way we communicating is pretty age-old. The Wired UK article states that social networks hark back to the days of village life, but I would argue that other aspects of social media, such as crowdsourcing and memes (as we now know them) could be much older still.

To illustrate this, let’s go way back to the times of the ancient Greeks. Scholars of the ancient Greek oral tradition have long asserted that one of the most important pieces of literature in history started as a ‘crowdsourced story’. Though attributed to ‘Homer’, The Iliad (or the story of the Trojan War) was shaped by the people who told it before it was finally scribed in hard copy format; the most popular additions to the story survived the test of time, less popular ones are now forgotten.

Although we aren’t creating epics en-masse in today’s world, what we are doing is shaping cultural trends and brands. mystarbucksidea.com(client) is a great example of this – those who have an interest in shaping Starbucks to their own designs can do so by participating. Like with The Iliad, the most popular ideas survive and are built into the company’s strategy and those that are less popular do not usually see the light of day.

The Iliad was a meme of its time – numerous different storytellers in different places telling a very similar tale repeatedly over a period of time. In its day, one person heard the story from someone else and then went and told it to their own friends, who then told their other friends etc. It became the story everyone was telling and talking about and, as such, became viral.

This sounds remarkably similar to what we call memes in today’s digital world, doesn’t it? Remember when Rickrolling appeared everywhere? Or when LOLcats was at its height of popularity? Friends tell friends who tell more friends, just like how stories were relayed in the ancient oral tradition. These ’stories’ tend to be shorter in length and longevity these days, but the way they are communicated are fundamentally the same.

What I’m trying to say here is that we shouldn’t be claiming that digital communication provides us with a ‘new way to communicate’, but that recent technology developments enable us to return to an older – and probably more natural – way of communicating.

I’m going to be honest here, I’ve never understood the love for Space Invaders. I had it on my (now antique) Atari back in the (very) early ’90’s, but I never enjoyed it as much as others raved about it. To be honest, the only thing I ever have really liked Space Invaders-related is the fantastic mosaic artist Invader.

However this sentiment has well and truly changed over the past week. After reading raving reviews on Touch Arcade and Joystiq, I went to download the latest Space Invaders release; Space Invaders Infinity Gene.

Three things that make it worth the £2.99 I spent on it, and then some:

1. The presentation. Infinity Gene looks great on the iPhone screen. Taito has kept the graphic style simple, retaining the traditional Space Invaders style with monochrome 2D sprites overlaid on visually-appealing (and somewhat relaxing) background patterns. Sound is also simple, but fits the game well.

2. The gameplay. The games controls are great, allowing users to steer their ship using any point of the touchscreen, allowing better visibility and manoeuvrability. The levels range from easy to ridiculously hard and provide some awesome rewards upon completion, such as new ships, options to tweak your game and extra levels.

3. Music-generated extras. The game featuresa unique “Music” menu option, allowing you to pick a song from your iPhone/iPod’s library and play a song-specifically generated game level. This offers a limitless number of levels to the stock 38 that ship with the game, boosting replayability enormously.

If you fancy giving the game a spin (which I highly recommend you do), follow this iTunes store link: Space Invaders Infinity Gene

Mentioned in a previous post, Lazarides Gallery’s new home on Rathbone Place has given the gallery space for larger exhibitions that its previous home in Soho had. Last night, I took a visit to the latest exhibition from Vhils, featuring a series of Portuguese revolution-inspired pieces entitled Scratching the Surface. The exhibition showcases the importance of mural-art to Lisbon’s culture, providing a communication tool to the masses in a time of political instability.

The portraits of unknown faces displayed in the exhibition are created using acid and bleach that eat into surfaces to expose layers of material underneath.

Vhils also scratches portraits directly onto walls, creating a rather rudimentary yet complex artistic style that is humbling to look at. As a rule, Vhils tends to destroy his media to create his art, something that I think creates a great effect (both visually and poetically).

Vhils is one of the street artists recently invited to take part in the widely acclaimed ‘Tunnel 228’ show in London’s Waterloo.

Over the next month, London Graphics Centre is hosting a showcase dedicated to street art and “all things urban” in it’s flagship store in Covent Garden, London.

Running from 18th July to 28th August, the summer exhibition includes work by Blam, Fark, Trans1, MTomsky and Ventzah.

If you can’t make it to LGC over the next four weeks, the website will also feature highlights from the exhibition.

The event also marks the the unveiling of a revamped street art department in store, featuring the full range of the often raved about Montana Black spray paint.

Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid, released last week to the iTunes App Store, has well and truly dominated my time gaming on the iPhone this week.

Continuing the success of the great Rolando, which was met with similar anticipation and praise of the sequel, ngmoco:) has bettered the original with some fantastic updates to the core gameplay. Though you’ll be pleased to know rolling Rolandos through perilous environments is still the main premise of the game

First of all ngmoco:) has incorporated support for it’s innovative Plus+ system – XBOX Live for the iPhone, if you will -which extends gameplay into a competition to top the high-score leaderboards and send and receive challenges from friends via push notifications. It really does become addictive.

Secondly, the game boasts 2.5D graphics – while you still roll though side-scrolling levels, the 3D give the game a great depth of field and makes the overall experience even more colourful and immersive than the first one.

The return of MR SCRUFF for the soundtrack further adds the the playful “ngmoco:) feel” of the game’s overall ambience.

If you find yourself with a spare £5.99 and iPhone, I highly recommend giving this game a roll (hah! Get it?). Plus+ alone extends the gameplay for the competitive of you out there, let alone the additional levels ngmoco:) will be adding to the game for free in the near future.

The Arctic Monkeys is bit of a guilty pleasure for me: I first heard the band via MySpace in the golden era of my university life and their debut album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” became the soundtrack to my early adulthood.

The band’s new single Crying Lightning is the first from their upcoming album, Humbug, and presents an ever-so-slightly more mature sound. Developing on the darker sounds of the second album ‘Favorite Worst Nightmare‘, the single pulls away from the more generic ”indie” out there, but because of this it is hard to say whether it will be a hit.

The lyrics are still very humble, referencing the likes of “pick ‘n’ mix” and a Sheffield cracker factory – maintaining the Arctic Monkeys’ typical northern charm. Alex Turner’s vocals also keep their northern twang, which again provides an element of authenticity to the single.

On first hearing the single, I felt that it was just OK – it grows on you and gets catchier the more you hear it. After a few listens, the single is one of the band’s better tracks, though not as punchy as Brianstorm or as relaxed as the first album. Nethertheless, I still recommend a listen.

The only catch is that the single is only available on iTunes (and not on Spotify) at the moment and is priced at the usual 79p.

I always love these future gazing efforts by the major technology corporations, because if anyone can make their predictions correct, it’s usually them.

The latest is by Ericsson, a company famous for its collaboration with Sony to produce the imaginatively-named Sony Ericsson brand, dubbed the “Life in 2020 Project”.

Drawing together information on socio-economic trends, patterns of consumerism and technology sustainability to determine how life will change in the next decade.

One of the coolest things predicted was The Spider (pictured) – a mobile (and ultra-powerful) computer which projects a hologram-like keyboard and screen, both of which the user can interact with.

Another really cool thing highlighted is the Virtual Doctor’s Bag – which would allow patients to get treatment without having to leave their home – sending any information back to the doctor who can stay in contact with the patient using a 3D observation glass.

I don’t know about you, but roll on eleven years – I can’t wait to see what emerges from the technology giants over the next decade.

[via Wired UK]

Part of the ongoing Rosetta Project, which aims to preserve all of the world’s dialects past and present, The Rosetta Disk is the physical manifestation of the project’s preservation of 1,500 human languages.

The Disk surface (shown above) is etched with an image of Earth and carries a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

A version of the orb has even been travelling through space since 2004 on the Rosetta space probe.

According to the project group, The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals all the way down to nano-scale.

On the reverse side of the disk surface are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. Apparently, this is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope.

For each language on the disk there are several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. Also displayed is grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, linguistic structures, a basic vocabulary list and texts.

The disk is held in a cool four-inch spherical container that both protects it. The upper hemisphere is made of optical glass and doubles as a 6X viewer, giving visual access deeper into the tapered text rings. The bottom hemisphere is stainless steel.

The translations on this awesome-looking disk are a close analogue to the Rosetta Stone, whose parallel texts enabled the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

The disk is being designed and developed through the collaboration of artists, designers, linguists and archivists including Kurt Bollacker, Stewart Brand, Paul Donald, Jim Mason, Kevin Kelly, and Alexander Rose and Laura Welcher.

To download your own copy of The Rosetta Stone content for free, visit the official Roseta Project website.

Also read:

• The Rosetta Disk Online – 1,500 Languages In A Browser Window (laughingsquid.com)