It’s 4:45 pm as I start writing this, and it’s getting dark outside. This wasn’t the case on Saturday and earlier, before the clocks went back. But today, things will be different. Way more people will drive home in the dark; fewer children will play outside, instead being told by their parents to “get home before it gets dark”. Heating and energy bills will rise, as will road deaths through traffic accidents and collisions. Depression will soar. On balance, people will be less happy and poorer, but for no good reason.

We’re living with arbitrary daylight hours designed largely for the benefit of the agriculture industry almost a century ago. In this modern age, isn’t it about time we had a serious look at moving our clocks to CET, matching France? While we’d still have the winter ‘jolt’ in late October, it would be less severe. And throughout the year, especially in this current age of austerity we’d reap the benefits: more daylight (and, potentially, lower obesity levels, since people are more inclined to exercise when it’s light), fewer traffic deaths, happier (on balance) people, lower energy bills.

Each year, the argument is made to at least investigate amending the UK’s time zone, but support usually stalls because of major concerns. However, most of those have fallen away in recent years. The agriculture industry no longer seems to care, leaving most of the resistance against change with traditionalists who think changing the time-zone is some kind of anti-British movement, and some Scots, who claim any change would plunge Scotland into eternal darkness (when in fact you’d merely end up with some parts of the country not seeing daylight until around 10 am).

Traditionalists can bugger off, frankly. Anyone rattling on about how silly it would be for Greenwich to never be on Greenwich Mean Time should note that it isn’t for seven months of the year now anyway; furthermore, anyone clinging to ‘GMT’ is being rather quaint, given that UTC is the world standard. No-one cares about Greenwich Mean Time these days, and so Brits should let this go.

For Scotland, I have more sympathy, but then I also happened to live for a winter in Iceland where it’s dark until gone 11 in the depths of winter. If Icelanders can deal with this, I don’t see why Scots wouldn’t be able to. And if they think otherwise, Scotland has its own parliament now anyway—give the country an opt-out if it wants one, and let the other 55 million Brits on these isles have clocks that make sense for 2010 rather than 1910.

Microsoft on Mac Office’s draconian product activation (which makes the product literally unusable if you don’t activate it within 15 days):

Microsoft Product Activation tries to reduce counterfeit software, and to make sure that Microsoft customers receive the software quality that they expect.

(Source: Macworld.)

Compare this with Apple’s iWork, which as of iWork ’09 even ditched licence codes entirely. With iWork, you just install the app and it works. However, having used iWork ’09 and Office 2008 extensively, I can say the former definitely has more ‘quality’ than the latter; so unless Office 2011 is an absolutely massive improvement to go along with its stupid new activation, Microsoft’s taking shit.

Additionally, how long will it be before Office 2011 is cracked? Once again, those who’ve legally bought a product will be saddled with a worse user experience than those who torrent the thing. So, well done, Microsoft, for joining the boneheaded brigade. And extra points for turning the two-computer install from Office 2008 into a single-computer install for 2011, forcing those who have a back-up machine or use a desktop at home and a laptop at work to buy an extra licence. Stay classy, Redmond guys.

UPDATE: So someone from Touch Arcade found this post and said to me: “Really Craig? Your blog post is preceded with ‘I haven’t tried iDOS yet’ and you still go on to admonish Eli? Grain of salt.”

It’s a fair point, but my argument was more to do with the fact emulators for iOS never work as well as native games. Having since spent a couple of happy hours mucking about with iDOS, I certainly agree that it’s a fun curiosity, but the game-playing experience pales in comparison to games designed specifically for iOS, much as you’d expect.

Yesterday, an app called iDOS came to the App Store. Essentially a port of DOSBox with a couple of nicely IP-infringing Namco games welded to it, I predicted the emulator would be pulled off the store within two days. In fact, it only took a few hours before the Apple Police took it out back and shot it.

I’ve not tried iDOS yet (the developer was kind enough to send me a promo during the few hours the app was live), but I like me some retro-gaming, and it’s a nice curiosity. I have vague ideas about maybe getting a few old DOS games I’ve got knocking around working, but ultimately I probably won’t have enough time.

This is a good thing. That’s because it’s part of the slippery slope that I experienced with DS-based emulation. On Nintendo’s system, the lack of decent new games meant I very often ended up playing ZX Spectrum games via an emulator. On iOS, I pretty much download a new game every day, which is far more interesting than repeatedly playing stuff I’ve already played; also, I’m potentially supporting more developers; additionally, this means I’m getting optimal experiences, since the games are made for the system.

Touch Arcade doesn’t get this. In an article called The Importance of iDOS, Eli Hodapp says this:

What if developers leveraged the power of iDOS, or, more accurately, the open source nature of both Dospad and Dosbox to release individually tailored versions of iDOS with a specific game embedded and the emulator extensively tweaked to run that game well?

I can’t think of anything worse for iOS gaming. Emulators already exist on the system. Sega’s Mega Drive one is dire. Manomio’s C64 one is a good effort, but those old 8-bit games just don’t work without digital controllers. About the only emulator I can deal with is Frotz, and that’s because it’s a text adventure player (specifically, it runs Z-Machine files), and so it only needs a decent keyboard, which the iPad happily has.

I’m fine with retro games on iOS, but I sincerely hope if iDOS has inspired people, it’s inspired them to remake old games, or at least adapt them to iOS. I’d love to see Cannon Fodder for iOS. I’d be perfectly happy with the DOS version, but only if it had controls reworked specifically for iOS devices. What I don’t want is to be swiping my iPad screen like a crazy person, trying to move a cursor, thereby providing another layer of control abstraction that’s totally unnecessary in iOS gaming.

Back in 2008, Apple talked about availability of the iPhone 3G worldwide, and offered the following map:

(Pic credit: Iceland Review.)

For reasons unknown, Apple decided Iceland (and Greenland, for that matter) didn’t exist. My wife just discovered the same attitude prevails in iOS. Back in the heady days of iOS 3.x, Icelandic characters were readily available from the English keyboard: ð under D, þ under T and ý under Y. Now, they’re gone, forcing users to switch keyboard language to access them.

Fair enough, you might think, but think about it: Apple removed support from the standard English keyboard for no real reason; the characters were also useful to anyone needing to write about Old English/Anglo-Saxon; and the keyboard still retains a bunch of characters from other European languages that aren’t used in English.

So what’s the story here? Did Steve Jobs visit Iceland in 2007 and have someone recommend him hákarl and brennivín, without telling him what it was like, therefore sending the Apple CEO into a rage that he’s never recovered from? Or, more likely, has Apple just decided on a whim to remove support for something that people find useful, just because it can?

John Gruber talks about the MacBook Air’s place in the Mac lineup, and comes the following conclusion:

Here’s the way I see it: the Air is a secondary Mac; MacBook Pros are for use as a primary computer.

[…]

The new MacBook Airs—particularly the 11-inch model—don’t compete against the other MacBooks so much as they do the iPad. It’s like a ‘pro’ solution for the same ‘in between a smartphone and a full-size laptop PC’ market segment that the iPad sits in.

With iOS device sales outpacing Mac sales and the MacBook Air pricing being surprisingly aggressive, it’s looking like 2011 will see an increasing number of ‘second devices’ that rely on a ‘main’ Mac or PC. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone can figure out some way of dispensing with the hub—it’d be great to be able to just have a couple of iPads and a MacBook Air knocking around, relying on some kind of networked storage for holding large files and back-ups. Right now, you can do this with Macs, but not with iOS devices, but I reckon it’s only a matter of time.