With all the (technical) media interest in the iPhone I decided it was worth taking a look at the iPod Touch to test out its new web browsing features. Other handheld devices and mobile phones have gone down the route of reducing a web page to fit the restricted environment of the screen, as can be seen in the screenshots for Internet Explorer Mobile. However there seems to be a trend for this paradigm of using a normal page but zooming in & out and scrolling around with your fingers. For example the new mobile operating system that Google have developed (Android) has similar features, as can be seen in this demonstration.

As I’ve been testing it out I have been struck by the similarities with the screen magnifier demonstration that I posted about before. …

Recently I’ve been reading The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot. It was partly out of interest as I’ve been a fan of their series More or Less on Radio 4 for a number of years. I can heartily recommend it, even for the numerically-challenged as it’s very readable & brings the figures back from the abstract into real life. It’s a great help not just for charting a rational path through the health scares and political claims & counter-claims, but also for making sense of the statistics that are conjured up about the Internet.

In the past month there has been interest about the novel approach that Radiohead took for charging to download their latest album, and all things connected with mobile phones has gone into a frenzy after the launch of the iphone & Google’s involvement. …