Mashed Articles

Nothing makes me feel guiltier than buying ebooks. I don’t doubt that they’re the future, but in my heart, I don’t want them to be. I like paper. I like the feel of books. I like having shelves of them, filled with memories and trophies of old stories. I like the tactile sense of flipping a page, and the satisfaction of reaching the end. I like the lack of distractions, of being able to sit back, switch the world off and get lost in mystery and adventure for a couple of hours, courtesy of a solid block of pure story.

Unfortunately, I also like convenience. Which is why when I was in town yesterday trying to track down the next novel for a book group I’m part of, it didn’t take long for my principles to waver. Amazon had no copies in. The bookstore could order one, but it would take a week or so. I didn’t even stop to think. By the time the cashier was finished apologising for not stocking an obscure (and not very good) novel, I had my phone in my hand, and with just a couple of presses, that book was sitting on my iPad at home. No waiting, no hesitating, and actually slightly cheaper than buying the book from the store. Hurrah.

And yet not hurrah. The thing is, a book isn’t simply a collection of words, in much the same way that a film isn’t the same at the cinema as it is on DVD, or if you see it alone instead of with a group. We read differently on screens, the action of switching pages just lacking that tactile oomph of turning over a new leaf. Soon, only millionaires and truly hardcore book snobs will have the satisfaction of hurling the new Dan Brown novel into the fireplace.

For my part, I’ve read several novels in ebook form, but I often catch myself just not doing it right. I find it harder to remember what I just read. When I flick the pages, it’s faster, more dismissive. When I get to the end, there’s no real satisfaction at a book well read, but something more reminiscent of slobbing out in front of the TV for the evening. That was fun, I think to myself, but only so long as it takes to start wondering what else is on. YouTube. Videos. TV Tropes. Anything will do, so long as it’s momentarily diverting, which isn’t the book experience at all.

Really, using an ebook makes me realise what real music fans felt like a few years ago. For me, music isn’t particularly important. It’s background noise. It’s added spice to something. It’s not something I ever sit down and listen to. I own about five CDs. Moving to digital formats was easy because I didn’t really have anything to miss. Liner notes? Never read them. Pretty box art? Never cared. I shouldn’t really complain that other people feel the same way about my precious books, although I should point out that this isn’t going to stop me for one self-righteous femtosecond.

The real fear, though, isn’t that other people will abandon the printed word, but that as time rolls on, and ebooks become easier and easier to buy and read, screens become more eye-friendly (the iPad is fine, but it’s high contrast – Amazon’s Kindle on the other hand offers a great reading experience with its e-ink technology, but has limited functionality), I’ll find myself drifting away.

The technology we have now can only improve. Higher-resolution screens that allow for scribbled notes in the margins, as well as more official typed ones. Instant bookmarks to jump right to the fun bits. Easy clipping and quoting. Possibly even a virtual fireplace for immediate cultural gratification.

And that’s only thinking about recreating the experience of books as is. There are so many things that could be added, from integrated discussion forums that you automatically visit at the end of a book, to simply being able to tap a button to send a thumbs-up to the author as recognition for a story well told, or to pre-order an upcoming sequel while you’re still burning to know what happens next.

I want to see where all of this takes us, and how the electronic book world adapts to an audience that increasingly doesn’t feel as compelled to read. I want to be part of that, even as I feel the dirty looks from my shelves of old books every time I break out the iPad.

The simple fact, though, is that it doesn’t really matter. I love reading. Always have, always will. That won’t change based on what books turn into over the next few years, and nor will the decades of good memories. Paper may or may not have long left at the centre of the book industry, but at least it’ll always have a place in my heart.

Last month, I committed journalistic hara-kiri. I claimed nobody will know or even care what chips are inside their PCs 10 years from now. It’ll be all about the software, services and styling. As a hardware guy, that gives me a limited shelf life. Still, I reckon I’ve got several years to transmogrify into a touchy-feely software sage. Indeed, the next year in PC processors will be one of the most exciting yet for hardware enthusiasts. The best news is that it won’t just be Intel making the headlines – in many ways, it’s AMD that has the more promising roadmap.

Starting with AMD, then, the coming year will see two brand new processor architectures, as well as the arrival of the company’s CPU-GPU Fusion chips. Admittedly, AMD’s roadmap has been all over the place of late, but the launch windows are narrowing and the timing of AMD’s new kit is finally firming up. First out of the gate will be a chip known as Ontario, due to go on sale early next year. It’s a low-power design focused on efficiency rather than performance. However, not only does it debut Bobcat, AMD’s answer to the more powerful variants of Intel’s Atom architecture, but it’s also the first Fusion chip.

Despite my best bribe-and-badger efforts, AMD is remaining frustratingly reticent about the graphics core in Ontario. All that’s known for sure is that it will be DirectX 11-compliant and sport the latest version of AMD’s 2D video acceleration engine. But that’s enough to know it will blow any Atom platform away when it comes to high-definition media playback. The processor part of Ontario looks promising too, thanks to its fully out-of-order instruction execution. Atom makes do with a simpler and slower in-order design.

AMD’s next move is harder to pick. By summer 2011, both Llano and Zambezi should be flowing out of the fabs. The former is AMD’s first full-power, quad-core Fusion chip. It’s derived from the existing Phenom II core, rather than the all-new Bulldozer architecture, but Llano’s graphics core promises to set new standards for an integrated solution. With so many features packed into a single processor die, Llano will also be very power efficient. I think it will make for a killer notebook chip.

The final piece of the puzzle for AMD is arguably the most exciting. I’ve had my say on the merits of the revolutionary Bulldozer architecture in the past. Suffice to say that it’s the sort of forward-looking design that might just take Intel by surprise. Think Athlon 64 circa 2003. Whatever, our first taste of Bulldozer will come with Zambezi, a chip that will probably pack in four of those intriguing Bulldozer modules.

As for Intel, the next year is all about Sandy Bridge, its new CPU architecture. I barely feel like I’ve got to grips with the current Nehalem chips, but Intel is really trucking and by the end of 2010, Nehalem will be so much bunkum. Superficially, you might think Intel has already harvested all the low-hanging fruit in terms of architectural upgrades with Nehalem. After all, Nehalem brought the memory controller and PCI Express bus on-die, while adding features such as HyperThreading and Turbo Boost.

Nevertheless, Intel is going to have a damn good crack at raising the bar. At the high end, the first Sandy Bridge offering is a six-core beast hewn from 32nm silicon and packing 15MB of cache memory, support for Intel’s new 256-bit AVX extensions, a quad-channel memory controller and PCI Express 3.0. It’s due out some time in the first half of next year. As if that’s not enough, an eight-core model will follow.

However, the first Sandy Bridge chips will actually be dual- and quad-core variants and should hit PCs before the end of 2010. Rumours suggesting Intel has decided to lock out enthusiasts from overclocking these more mainstream Sandy Bridge chips are circulating, but my spies tell me it ain’t so. Sandy Bridge will be just as much fun to fiddle with as existing Intel processors.

I’m also told to look out for something special from the new integrated graphics core found in dual- and quad-core Sandys, but they don’t stand a chance of beating AMD Fusion for video prowess.

What’s more, Intel will test the loyalty of its fan base with the new CPU sockets that come with Sandy Bridge. Out go LGA1,156 and LGA 1,366, along with any hope of drop-in upgrades. In come LGA1,155 and the monstrous new LGA2,011 socket. Overall, expect Sandy Bridge architecture to be a masterclass in x86 CPU design, but don’t be surprised if AMD’s Bulldozer chips leave it looking like a technical dead end.

The web is entering a fascinating, exciting and, frankly, ball-bursting phase in its history; a phase that will revolutionise the way web content is consumed and presented.

In its first few years, web content was primarily delivered via PCs running one of several mainstream browsers. The PC was the box that contained the browser, the browser was the box that contained the site, and the site was the box that contained the content. This outside-in approach to web design resulted in the content often feeling like an afterthought.

In the late 1990s, a new breed of designers started to push standards-based web design, which separated presentation (via CSS) and content (via HTML). Making changes that involved content became easier, and so designers began to view it with more affection.

Over the following years, advancements were made: CSS and HTML evolved, JavaScript provided a new way to enhance user interfaces, blogging tools and CMS platforms enabled anyone to get content online, and web publishing made steady progress. However, the PC was still the main way people accessed content, and though presentation had improved, the outside-in design approach remained. But in 2007, the iPhone arrived and everything changed.

As we sit among a slew of browser-enabled mobile devices, it’s hard to believe that up until the launch of the iPhone, the main question designers would need to answer was whether 1,024×768 was still the best screen size to design for according to browser statistics.

To appreciate the full extent of mobile’s march toward world domination, let’s look at a few statistics.

• According to Gartner, global smartphone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009.
• Forrester Research expert Sarah Rotman believes 3.5 million tablets will be sold in 2010, growing to 20.4 million in 2015. She expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015.
• In May, Google announced that in May 2009, it had been activating 30,000 Android phones per day. By February 2010, that number had jumped to 60,000. By 23 June, that figure had surpassed 160,000 per day.

So what do these figures tell us? In short, that the ‘luxury’ of designing content for one screen size – or ‘viewport’ – is no longer an option, the concept of a static website is dead, the days of putting content in a series of set boxes are gone, and the promise of flexible content and design can now be realised. Like I said, these are ball-bursting times.

Like any movement, it often takes someone to capture the zeitgeist in a way that resonates with their peers. And in the case of flexible web design, a designer called Ethan Marcotte has managed to do just that, in an article titled Responsive Web Design, written for the quite brilliant online journal A List Apart.

In this article, Marcotte says: “In recent years, I’ve been meeting with more companies that request ‘an iPhone website’ as part of their project. It’s an interesting phrase: at face value, of course, it speaks to mobile WebKit’s quality as a browser, as well as a powerful business case for thinking beyond the desktop. But as designers, I think we often take comfort in such explicit requirements, as they allow us to compartmentalise the problems before us. We can quarantine the mobile experience on separate subdomains, spaces distinct and separate from ‘the non-iPhone website’. But what’s next? An iPad website? An N90 website? Can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But how can we – and our designs – adapt?”

The answer, as Marcotte explains, is to put content at the heart of your design process and create a fluid grid with flexible images that can adapt to the screen size it’s being viewed upon. A desktop user will see a three-column layout, in landscape mode on an iPhone you’ll get two columns, and so on. This is all possible thanks to an addition to CSS3 called Media Queries.

I may be getting over-excited about the possibilities this presents, but I really think we’re looking at the future of web design. If you have any interest in how the presentation of web content is going to change, then Marcotte’s article is a must-read. You can find it in full at A List Apart.