Published stuff

My Stuff column this week is: Google Podcasts is dead – as is my trust in the survival of any Google service. Not that I’ve trusted Google for years at this point. I don’t think anything is truly safe – and, yes, that includes Gmail, YouTube and Docs. (Also, I do hope people enjoy the pictures I made for this one.)

A busy week over at TapSmart, where I explored ways Apple could shake up iPhone home screens, built a social media toolkit, and added excellent podcasting app Ferrite to my classic app series.

Upcoming stuff

Having recently filed a piece on Sinclair, I’m now writing about Commodore. And the CPC’s 40th is on its way too, and so I’ll be writing about that for sure.

Other stuff

Graham Cluley discovered what can happen when Amazon claims it’s delivered an expensive item but hasn’t, decides it has and refuses to do anything about it. Honestly, I find it surprising this doesn’t happen more. Locally, most couriers now abandon packages regardless of provided instructions. But quite how Amazon can avoid refunding someone when a signed-for package was not signed for, I have no idea. I imagine it’s all explained in line 24,467 of the terms and conditions, which state “we can do whatever we please”.

More App Store changes are on the way. The latest is a long-time personal bugbear of mine: blocking emulation. As 9to5Mac reports, game emulators will now be permissible. I look forward to certain US commentators now deciding emulation is evil, that the EU forced Apple to allow emulators on to the App Store (it didn’t) and predicting this will destroy the games industry (it won’t). What it will do is fill a hole in the iPhone’s gaming arsenal.

Note: I’m aware emulators have long existed on the App Store in strictly limited fashion. But Apple long ago blocked being able to load anything into them. So every emulator, such as this lovely ZX81 one, has had to bundle the titles you can play on it. Which is a bit like allowing music players – but only if they pre-load every album you can listen to.