The BBC News website got a redesign this week. Naturally, lots of people hate it, but that’s because people hate change. I’m largely on the other side of the fence, and, objectively, the BBC’s mostly done a good job: the site content has room to breathe, the space-wasting left-hand nav strip has been ditched, there are no rounded corners, and although the amount of home-page content hasn’t been reduced, the design feels less cluttered. (That said, as Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, White space is like the comma: you have to put it in the right places, not just sprinkle around.)

However, I do wonder how much testing the BBC did across platforms. On my Macs, article body text is significantly less legible than it was previously. Delving into the style sheet, it seems the corporation’s centred on Helvetica Neue in grey for most of its text (falling back to Arial for anyone who doesn’t have this installed—in other words, anyone but Mac users). This is baffling, since Helvetica Neue is designed for print design, not the screen; and while Panic sometimes uses the font on its website, it’s doing so for what’s effectively a read-once advert, not many thousands of news articles. (Crucially, Panic also has the text in black, not a mid-grey, thereby hugely increasing readability.)

The BBC News redesign is therefore a great example of single-point of failure in web design. It looks great, the layout works, and even the headings look good. It only falls down when you start trying to read an article—but unfortunately for the BBC, that’s the main point of a news site’s existence.

In April, Steve Jobs was asked about multitasking in iOS 4. “In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it” was the Apple CEO’s reply.

Unfortunately, I’m increasingly thinking Apple blew it. I’m actually coming round to iOS multitasking in terms of a concept—I really like being able to flick between Safari and Twitter, and especially between Photos and the excellent Pastebot—but I now often enter the task manager and have to think about multitasking.

I suspect the problems are RAM-based, stemming from me having an iPhone 3GS, and playing games. Videogames push iOS hardware like nothing else and are notoriously RAM-hungry. On my iPhone, I’ve noticed performance issues after installing iOS 4, with many games becoming jerky. Sadly, other apps are randomly affected too. Instapaper almost entirely froze last night, and it took about three minutes to get back to the home screen and open the multitasking tray. On removing a few ‘frozen’ apps, everything returned to normal.

This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact I can’t always do this. I’m getting about one freeze per day on my iPhone 3GS right now, which means in the past week it’s frozen more times than it did over the first six months of usage. I would do a full system restore, but Apple provides no reliable means to restore app data, and I don’t want to lose progress in my installed games.

I’m hoping iOS 4.0.1 is on the way soon and will fix this problem (perhaps by closing long-inactive apps), because it’s a pity that the most robust ‘computer’ I’ve owned is now behaving like a somewhat flaky PC.

Following on from Chris, who wrote a piece after an open invitation from Ian, who himself was inspired by Matt, Alice, Ben, and Dan…

1. People need to take a step back regarding technology

At a recent Chris Addison gig, the comedian noted at one point how we’re living in an age of technological magic, and we’re all missing it. If you’d have told me about the iPhone 4 ten years ago, I’d have laughed in your face. A hand-held device with more games than the Commodore 64, that can stream video from your home computer while you’re sitting on a train, that can hold thousands of music tracks and photos, that can surf the internet, and that can do literally thousands of other things? If you’d have then also mentioned its slight problems under very specific circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared. Why today do people only concentrate on the negative aspects of exciting things, rather than being excited about the positive?

2. Gaming is becoming truly mainstream

When I was a kid, I had a few computers (one at a time—we weren’t that well-off!), and I mostly used them for games. Videogames were a geeky pursuit. Then the PlayStation came and opened things up somewhat, although that was mostly my generation growing up, drinking beer and convincing friends to have a go. Today, though, gaming is almost universal. The Nintendo DS started things off, targeting games at very young kids, women and older people, and the web took over, embedding addictive gaming into social networking sites like Facebook. Apple’s devices have gone a step further than both, providing the best gaming experience to date: novelty has returned, because releasing a game is now often relatively low-cost and low-risk; access is simple (go to the App Store, find a game, click ‘install’); prices are low (reducing risk for the consumer); and the choice is wide. Stats suggest about half of women and 40 per cent of men with iOS devices primarily use them for games, and as a long-time gamer, these are heartening statistics.

3. Media industries and laws need to be radically overhauled

The music industry sort of gets it. Although the odd lawsuit still arrives, suing someone into oblivion because they shared half a dozen tracks via a torrent, we must remember that music is now almost entirely DRM-free, affordable and also available via streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify. What’s now needed is for the ‘moving picture’ guys to realise that they could be doing the same thing. Imagine if an episode your favourite series aired on television, but was then available worldwide the following day for 59p. Would you still feel as compelled to arse about with torrents, or would you just subscribe to it? And in today’s environment, why is the UK still lumbered with archaic copyright laws that don’t enable fair-use on format-shifting? It’s insane that one cannot legally rip a CD to iTunes for personal use, and while the BPI promises not to sue people who do so, that’s a long, long way from something being enshrined in law.

4. I liked Apple’s way of multitasking in iOS 3

Seriously. The whole ‘one app at a time’ approach (apart from background music) made me focus, in a way that’s much harder on other systems. On my Mac, I’ve noticed that I often create a similar environment myself anyway—when I’m on deadline, I shut off my email and Twitter client, to avoid distractions, only letting music play in the background; when writing, I use WriteRoom in full-screen mode, to block out everything else. Luckily, iOS 4 hasn’t ruined this, and so I’m actively looking for some kind of solution that will enable me to shift from mostly working in front of my iMac to at least partly doing my writing work on my iPad.

5. Digital storage is slowly seducing me

On a recent holiday, I took my usual small pile of books, my iPhone and my iPad. Both Apple devices were loaded with music and reading material. In the end, the books remained untouched, and the iPad was used for almost everything. On returning home from the minimally decorated apartment, our walls lined with DVDs, CDs and books suddenly seemed awfully cluttered, not least because the CDs are pretty much never played anymore. I’m starting to ask myself: what is the point of buying CDs? With decent readers on the iPad, books and comics are also on borrowed time for me. And if the issues raised above in point three are solved, DVDs will also fall by the wayside.

Update: For more articles like this, Ben Horn is collecting all those he can find.

Engadget reports on HP rattling on about flexible display Palm devices. Phil McKinney talks about the great display technology that will “change what we think of in form factors, both in products from Palm with flexible displays, and with HP”. That’s great, so where are these devices? Oh, they don’t exist yet, except as a concept in people’s heads, or perhaps as devices sitting in a lab.

People moan about Apple’s secrecy, but here’s the thing: when Steve Jobs goes on stage and starts talking about something, it’s almost always because he has something to show. He’ll talk about something revolutionary, then he’ll show it to you, say how much it costs and when pre-orders are going to start.

If only others would follow suit.

I waited longer than many to upgrade my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, because I was on holiday when it was released, and also Drop7 hadn’t been updated (it has now). The experience has so far been variable—while Camera is now insanely fast, Angry Birds regularly judders; I enjoy Apple’s implementation of multitasking but it’s clear it’s been responsible for totally freezing the iPhone for the first time; and folders are a joy, but moving icons around is now even more of a finicky process.

It’s Mail, though, that truly offers the best and worst updates. On the plus side, the absurd dance back and forth to access accounts has been banished via the ‘All Mailboxes’ view (although it often freezes while downloading email from multiple accounts), but the way Apple has implemented automated threading is bonkers.

The way things work is fine until you actually bother to read something. Emails that are part of a thread are gathered together and flagged by a number denoting the messages in the thread. Tap it and you see the overviews of the thread’s messages, in reverse chronological order, so the latest one is at the top. This is all fine, but in the mailbox the thread’s overview is shown not by the most recent message, but by the earliest available one—and this changes depending on how many messages Mail is allowed to store.

The net result of this is that when threading is turned on, you see several new messages and then a very old one, followed by more new ones. To see an overview of the latest reply to a thread, you have to enter it, which is absolutely horrid from a usability standpoint. Not only should this action not be forced, but users shouldn’t see an overview and then jump to an entirely different message—it’s confusing.

Apple should make Mail threads show an overview of the latest email within the thread—something that would be logical and helpful. At the very least there should be a setting for this.