I last year wrote about Vue Cinemas and its interesting perception of the ‘value’ bit in ‘value meal’. Vue wasn’t (and isn’t) alone in gouging customers, matching ever-increasing ticket prices with astonishingly marked up snacks and drinks. At our local Vue, the cost of a drink and popcorn ‘meal’ is about the same as a ticket; worse, it’s about the same as a proper meal at one of the many nearby restaurants.

On the BBC today, in an article about surprising charges, Vue makes a suitably surprising statement:

Vue Cinemas, where a regular popcorn and soft drink costs £8.25, say food and drink is an optional extra and customers are free to take their own snacks in.

On Twitter, @immobiliser than asked the official Vue account if this statement was correct:

Are we indeed free to take in our own supplies for a film?

Vue’s response:

It is indeed within reason. We don’t allow hot or smelly food, so leave your tuna sandwiches at home 😀

If this is the case, great. No hot/smelly food is a perfectly reasonable restriction, but there’s an ‘if’ here, summed up nicely by Andy White’s comments to me, also on Twitter:

Didn’t work for us! Our [k]ids are coeliacs and we tried taking in special food for them – were told no entry unless binned!

He stated this happened at Vue’s fairly new Camberley branch, and his family were “pretty upset about it at the time”. Elsewhere, Stuart Alexander Arnott said to me on Facebook that a BBC report found cinema terms and conditions effectively enable staff to block you taking in your own food whenever they like. His reading of the rules:

I think the cinemas don’t enforce it much, but they’re happy that people think you’re not allowed (according to the show 67% of people think this).

I’ve asked Vue for clarification on its recent statement, asking whether this is company policy or down to each individual cinema, and I will update this post should I get a response.

UPDATE: No response directly from Vue as yet, but the company responded to White on Twitter and since sent an email, which he forwarded to me. It notes high prices are the result of a need to have a viable business model, since much box office money goes to distributors; however, it importantly confirms:

Please note that you are able to bring your own food and drink into the cinema rather than purchasing from our confectionary stands. This is with the exception of hot food or alcohol.

Apple’s issued an invitation regarding its September 12 announcement.

Although it’s possible Apple could throw a curveball and not call its next iPhone the iPhone 5, that would be curious when taking this invite into account. There had been speculation with the iPad dropping a number (simply being dubbed ‘the new iPad’), the iPhone would follow suit. This doesn’t appear to be the case, which suggests two things.

First, the iPhone still requires clear sales differentiation in terms of device naming, meaning at least two other numbered models will remain on sale. Given that iOS 6 works (in a feature-limited fashion) on the iPhone 3GS, it’s possible Apple’s line-up next week will include the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. Fast forward a couple of years and dropping the number would leave you with the iPhone, the iPhone and the iPhone, and all kinds of sales problems.

Secondly, the iPad road-map apparently does not need sales differentiation in terms of device naming. This suggests the iPad 2 remaining on sale is short-term plugging of a low(ish)-end price-point hole. Although I still struggle to see the point of a 7-inch iPad, I now reckon there’s a good chance we’ll see such a model this year or early next year, and older models of the iPad will be removed from the channel as new ones appear, rather more like the iPod touch or Apple’s laptops/desktops than the iPhone.

In case you’d not noticed, Twitter’s management are being jerks. New API rules have brought in arbitrary caps for third-party clients, and this has already impacted on Tapbots, who had to pull the Tweetbot for OS X alpha. Elsewhere, Twitter no longer reveals what client someone is using to post. These things are linked to Twitter no longer wanting competing clients at all. Instead, it wants smaller apps linking in to its system, in order to boost ‘social CRM’, ‘social analytics’ and ‘social influence ranking’. So-called ‘traditional Twitter clients’ are out as the company seeks to remove from the equation apps that ‘engage with the consumer’; instead, devs should ‘engage with business’, or provide business/consumer analytics. In other words, in order to control the Twitter experience and finally make some money, Twitter needs to run everything through its own clients, rather than enabling the third parties that created the service to flourish to also flourish, despite many of them defining Twitter standards—something Twitter itself didn’t do until surprisingly late on.

Right now, Twitter’s playing a cruel game—a death by a thousand cuts. Developer David Smith earlier today said we should “be considerate of 3rd party twitter developers by revoking access from apps you never intend to use,” thereby enabling them to claw back some room in their arbitrary Twitter cap. While it’s a nice sentiment, it starkly showcases the absurdity of the situation—users should not have to revoke app access, in order to enable an app to continue through people gaining access to unused slots. Most users won’t even know how to revoke an app’s access anyway.

It’s clear why Twitter’s taking this path, though: it’s relatively low-risk, spreading out the fallout over a long period of time where people are also hoping things will change. By the time Twitter does pull the ‘no third-party clients’ switch, it will undoubtedly issue a press release stating that only a very small number of people use them anyway, neglecting to mention those who’ve left the service because of being squeezed out, or those ‘forced’ to switch because yet another of the dwindling number of alternative clients by that point had been effectively killed by Twitter’s own rules.

I’d like to propose Twitter therefore at least be honest about the future.

At the end of June, we reported about how we’re working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. In order to achieve this and roll out all the exciting features we’re planning, we are going to transition our users entirely to our own Twitter clients.

On March 31, 2013, traditional third-party Twitter clients will no longer have access to the API. In order to facilitate the transition and ensure a consistent experience for our users, we will on or before January 31, 2013 be rolling out new Twitter clients for iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. We realise that client developers have made a huge impact on the service, and we’d like to thank them for their efforts, but we now have to move on and do what’s best for Twitter, thereby ensuring the service’s long-term future.

Brutal? Perhaps. Likely to piss off a bunch of people? Undoubtedly. But at least it’s honest and doesn’t leave people hanging on, hoping for a future that will never come.

Update: Well, that was fast. The ‘double update’ thing is now gone, and I’m no longer given the OS X Mountain Lion download ‘option’. Looks like a glitch has been squished and an engineer cuffed around the ear.

Despite a half-hour swearing at Mail for refusing to update my email database until it randomly had a change of heart, my Mountain Lion upgrade appears to have gone smoothly (although I did of course make two clones prior to doing so), somehow avoiding what Mr Matt Gemmell has referred to as the Grannell Tech Halo of Doom, given my usual upgrades from hell. The reason I upgraded, truth be told, is I had to, because one of the magazines I regularly contribute to, MacFormat, is switching all its grabs to Mountain Lion next issue.

Generally, I don’t like to upgrade OS X prior to a point upgrade being made, but Mountain Lion’s so far been reasonable. GarageBand seems to have continued its gradual decline, now running even slower than under Lion (if that’s possible) and with more playback glitches. Elsewhere, though, I’ve witnessed few app crashes, but also witnessed few reasons why I’d have upgraded given the chance. I think about the only new feature I’ve used so far is Calendar’s mini-calendars (back after vanishing in Lion), and I’ve had to do some minor surgery to remove the Calendar page rip and also stop iCloud-enabled apps defaulting to iCloud every single time they access a Save dialog. (I could hug Mac OS X Hints for the Terminal command for achieving this.)

Today, though, OS X 10.8.1 arrived, and so I dutifully went to the Mac App Store, which has now taken over from Software Update and saw this:

Without thinking, I clicked Download on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1 and noted it had started to download the full installer. Given that the aforementioned Mr Gemmell had earlier today noted the svelte nature of the update, I was a little taken aback by this. On further investigation, I discovered the updater was hidden inside the collapsible Software Update entry at the top (although the OS X 10.8.1 listing only appeared after I restarted the Mac App Store app—prior to that, it was just voice updates).

This strikes me as an odd piece of user experience design. One option is right in your face and the other can be hidden. How many relatively novice OS X users are going to by mistake download the full installer rather than the updater? (And, for that matter, how many pro users? Judging by my Twitter feed, it appears I’m not the only one who nearly did this.) For some people, that will also eat into bandwidth caps, due to what’s primarily an interface issue—not putting the most important thing (the update) front and centre over the thing of lesser importance (downloading the entire OS X installer again).

I hope this is teething problems and will be addressed, because to my mind it’s a really poor piece of design. Oh, and if you made the same mistake I did, you can cancel—rather than pause—a Mac App Store download by holding Option and clicking the Cancel button (which is what Pause then turns into—another piece of hidden but essential UI).

Carol Pinchefsky, Contributor for Forbes, argues ‘2000 AD’ Comic Book Is Snubbed in Latest ‘Dredd 3D’ Trailer:

In the most recent commercial for Dredd 3D, the upcoming Lionsgate film to be released in the United States on September 21, 2012, we get some style and substance, a taste of what we hopefully have ahead of us. But there was something important left out of this 30-second trailer. The title card reads, “Based on the legendary comic book”…but it doesn’t actually mention the comic book’s name.

That name, for the record, is 2000 AD.

Actually, no it isn’t. Judge Dredd is a comic strip within 2000 AD, which is an anthology comic. The shorthand in the commercials and trailers is effectively saying “this is a comic adaptation”. Make the argument Dredd is based on 2000 AD, and you’d be asking where Sláine, Strontium Dog, Nikolai Dante and all the other characters are.

To be fair, Pinchefsky is really trying to draw attention to 2000 AD, which is a good thing. The comic’s managed to survive since the 1970s and is in something of a golden age right now. (You can find out more at 2000adonline.com and there’s now also an iOS app, which fires a bunch of free back issues your way when you subscribe.) However, with Dredd I’d argue the film-makers have been utterly respectful to the comic, far more than almost any other adaptation I can think of—probably only Hellboy comes close. Original co-creator John Wagner was heavily involved and the script, look and cut was adjusted on his recommendation; the film contains numerous nods to things that have happened during Dredd’s history, often peppered about as graffiti and posters; names of the giant blocks in the city are often named after 2000 AD writers and artists; there’s a reference to fan film Judge Minty; and even some of the 2000 AD forum members get cameos in the film.

To top it all off, Alex Garland last night answered a ton of questions on the 2000 AD forum. Usually when this sort of thing happens, a screenwriter or director will answer a few things before vanishing into the night. As far as I can tell, Garland answered everything, in a candid, exhaustive manner. As a long-time fan of 2000 AD, I don’t feel the comic and its followers have been snubbed at all by Dredd—quite the opposite.