Glorious tech

Hey all,

Here's just a couple of cool things I found this morning whilst browsing the apple store which caught my eye. This is seriously cool...

Yes people, that is a real instrument with a light up touchscreen table and play blocks!! What's even better is that you can get a digital version for the iPad. Amazing!!

Every once in a while manufacturers like Korg and Alesis concoct little serieses of cheap and cheerful audio effects boxes which hang around for all of about six months until their extravagantly undercutting Chinese supplier goes bust or gets put in jail for human rights abuses, or something. A few back there were Alesis's modfx boxes which I absolutely loved and nearly caused me to shed tears when I had them stolen out of a bandmate's car. Then of course there was the ubiquitous stylophone and theramin.

Now, happily, korg have a new one, which is kinda like a hybrid of all of them, called the Monotron...

DV lists it at £34. Don't think I can refuse to be honest!!

Whilst I'm in the tech zone, I can't fail to mention apple. I, like many others, have grown to really appreciate their obsession with design and user experience. Their hardware (such as the iPad I'm currently writing this with) is amazing. They have designed and marketed so effectively over the last 10 years that many of my friends who have apple products won't hear anything negative said about them.

But I have to say, the latest iPhone and iOS release is disappointing. Not because I seriously want a new phone (my old, old Nokia still calls and texts thanks very much), but because of what these announcements say about the company. Many well-reported features that could have been added to the new iphone squarely seem absent simply because they don't need them for the phone to sell well, while the only reason I can see for their decision to ditch a perfectly great mapping app for their own inaccurate, bug-ridden one was because they dislike having anything to do with google.

I only go on about this because I think it's great when companies like apple give us technology that makes us go "wow" (see above examples) and when they are obviously designing and building products in a spirit of co-operation and with a passion to give people useful things that improve their lives. It's just a bit sad to see them so obviously isolating themselves and putting profits before everything else.

Chris

Posted with Blogsy