In February, I wrote OS X Lion and motion sickness from full-screen animations and transitions. This outlined a problem I have with OS X Lion, in its full-screen transitions between full-screen apps making me dizzy. I’ve since written to Apple, practically begging for the company to bring in an option in OS X Mountain Lion to turn the transitions off, or at least change them to something less likely to fry my brain (such as a simple cross-fade). My thinking: if Apple can provide largely aesthetic alternate Dock minimisation effects, a checkbox in Mission Control’s settings that either enables a full-screen cross-fade effect or just turns off the slide isn’t too much to ask.

Based on the response I got on Twitter, I’m not alone in terms of OS X Lion and motion sickness, and today’s seen the article picked up by The Code Project. I hope, if nothing else, it might help the message get out there, and perhaps someone from Apple will even take note and become interested in solving the problem. The company, after all, makes a big deal out of universal access, and so I would hope it would attempt to reduce motion sickness in a sub-set of users.

In the meantime, Lukas Mathis earlier pointed me in the direction of ReSpaceApp. (Update: The app has now joined Binary Age and has been renamed TotalSpaces.) Currently in beta, the app aims to recreate the 2D Spaces grid functionality that Apple ditched from OS X Lion. But what Mathis pointed out to me was the app’s Transitions settings in the preferences—with a single click, transitions can be turned off, and user-definable hot-keys can be used to switch between spaces and to full-screen apps.

ReSpaceApp isn’t specifically designed to solve the problem I have—it’s an add-on for bringing Spaces-like grid functionality back to OS X. However, the settings nonetheless work much as I’d hoped. Command-tabbing to a full-screen app immediately switches to it, with no delay and no animation. It’s also possible to use shortcuts to move between full-screen apps. Currently, you cannot turn off the grid entirely, thereby forcing you to use at least two desktops along with full-screen apps; however, the developer tells me this will soon be fixed. (Update: This is now fixed.) Also, ReSpaceApp doesn’t affect Apple’s own code, and so the odd and—in my case—dizzying morphing effect as an app becomes full-screen remains.

Despite this, I can already recommend OS X Lion users suffering from motion sickness when working with full-screen apps at least check out ReSpaceApp. And while I wish the developer well with his product, I also hope someone at Cupertino is listening. Although transitions can be useful in providing direction to where things are located spatially, that’s no good if some people cannot use them at all, because the transitions make them sick. The transitions should certainly remain on by default, but Apple should also enable you to disable them.

I this morning awoke to find yet another email asking me how much it would cost for a developer to have their game reviewed and charges for placement. This isn’t nearly the first such email I’ve received—plenty have come my way, and more so since I started writing for Tap! magazine.

I find such emails hugely disheartening, because publications should not be charging for reviews (which some laughably refer to as ‘expedited’, as though it’s a good thing)—they should be curating on behalf of their readers and earning their money through advertising and readers paying for content.

Reviewers do get sent stuff—hardware, software, online codes—and sometimes they get to keep it. But there’s a world of difference between getting the odd freebie and outright asking people to pay you to review their wares. Gary Marshall sums this up nicely on Twitter:

It’s a betrayal of the readers. You’re in the scoring free stuff business, not the reviewing business.

I totally agree. So, devs, please stop asking me how much money I want to review your app or game, because the answer will always be nothing, and just the act of reading the email makes me sad. If you want me to consider your software for review, send me some information about it—a link to your website or to an App Store page; if it’s a paid app and you have a promo code handy, fire one over, so I can immediately install it on my kit, ready to check out later. But please don’t offer me money.

If you’re not British, you perhaps won’t know that the country currently has a government that is, to put it bluntly, rather toxic. It’s set about systematically dismantling the welfare state, including the NHS, and reducing taxes for anyone earning over £150,000, despite yelling “we’re all in it together”. The latest murmurs are that bank holidays are in the firing line, backed by reports arguing if bank holidays were scrapped, the UK would be £19 billion better off (BBC News).

These kinds of reports drive me nuts, because they are based on dry numbers and not how humans work and interact. Simply measuring the UK’s typical output and applying it to days off is simplistic in the extreme. This is because holidays give many people time to rest and recharge, and they enable people to do things together, thereby increasing morale. By removing holidays, productivity during some of the working days that would replace them would be lower, and that £19 billion would end up being a very optimistic figure. This is even more the case when you examine the losses that would impact the leisure industry if those in the UK by default had fewer days off.

Another argument in the same article, is merely to spread out the holidays throughout the year, because they’re currently mostly in the spring and summer:

[ Centre for Economics and Business Research founder Douglas McWilliams] said that by spreading out public holidays, rather than scrapping them, people would enjoy them more.

Spreading them out is certainly a better idea than scrapping them altogether, but why would people enjoy the holidays more if they were moved to less appealing times of the year? That the UK has most holidays in spring and summer is beneficial, because people can make better use of them. Move one from August to November and you just have people moping about on a day off, staring out the window at grey drizzle.

Before I became a freelancer, there were two things I steadfastly believed employers should never mess with: pay and holidays. Oddly, many employers do screw around with both, but those that don’t generally have more content staff. Whatever goes wrong at work, people at least know they have their days off and their pay cheques. The UK, though, now has a government that’s happily assaulting the incomes of more or less anyone who’s not hugely wealthy (Guardian), and I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before some halfwit Tory or Lib-Dem MP argues in front of the Commons that no-one really needs bank holidays anyway—before one of Parliament’s extended breaks, natch.

Good grief. I have a really busy week, turn my back for a moment and the entire bloody internet explodes about OMG GOOGLE GLASS IS TEH BEST! Bad internet! Go to your room!

Google outlines more about Project Glass on Google+:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

Call me old-fashioned, but I also happen to think technology should actually exist and be available to buy, rather than companies shitting out pointless concept videos. If Project Glass was available now, I might be all: “Hmm, that’s actually quite clever of Google.” But as a concept video? Gah! Did someone from Microsoft take over Google when we weren’t looking?

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Or pulling you out of every single moment by overlaying said moments with horrible pop-up messages and stupid advertising. It’s one step away from Google Mandatory Brain Implant, which would give you no escape from massive corporate giants desperately trying to sell you things and that git on Google+ who just won’t stop asking you stupid things, despite you practically begging him to stop.

As for exploring and sharing your world, things are bad enough with smartphone zombies walking along the streets during rush hour, staring glumly at their glowing screens while the world rushes by. With Project Glass literally sitting between you and the world, I expect a lot of people would start exploring the underside of a really heavy bus and sharing their innards with the world.

The sky is once again falling for Mac users, with many now hit by the Flashback Trojan. The BBC reports that 600,000 Macs might be infected! But that also happens to be a figure well shy of the number of viruses that can screw up Windows PCs.

Ultimately, infection from viruses and malware continues to be a numbers game. Such things are extremely rare on the Mac but less so on Windows. Apple has since released a security update, but once again an antivirus company started stiring:

“People used to say that Apple computers, unlike Windows PCs, can’t ever be infected—but it’s a myth,” said Timur Tsoriev, an analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

I don’t recall ‘people’ ever saying Apple computers can’t ever be infected—that is the myth. And, of course, Kaspersky Lab would be thrilled if millions of spooked Mac users suddenly started using its products. But the reality is that even those Mac users who don’t have a clue about security will be less likely to be affected by trojans, malware and viruses than their Windows PC-owning chums, and with Gatekeeper for OS X Mountain Lion, such problems will become even rarer on the platform. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft follows suit.

As ever, the best advice—on Mac and PC—remains the same: don’t open documents and files if you aren’t confident about where they came from and that they won’t screw up your computer.