I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Minter at the weekend. Jeff’s been responsible for some of my all-time favourite games, and his titles for iOS are by and large really great. (I’m particularly fond of Gridrunner, Minotron and Goat Up.) The article won’t be out for a while yet, but I thought I’d share a nugget of insight from Jeff, which struck a chord and is great advice for anyone in a creative industry:

Make the things you want to exist. That’s always been my prime motivation. Yes, I’ve wanted to make a living, but really I’ve wanted to make games I want to play. I think as long as you’re doing that, you’ll be happy and you’ll make good stuff.

IT World Canada might be rethinking its whole guest blog thing after running 10 solid reasons RIM will make a comeback, which would have been more accurately entitled ‘Dear Santa: please can you this Christmas send me a box of MAGIC UNICORNS that I can forward to RIM, to help make the company relevant once again’.

The list itself is a great mix of delusion and outright bonkers, and before that author Tim Collins helpfully notes:

It’s not just wishful thinking.

Precisely in the same way this is not a blog post dripped in sarcasm.

1) Developers believe in BB10. RIM has a knack for motivating some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. I personally know several developers who are still working for RIM and who are not the least bit interested in jumping ship.

We all know several developers will be enough. The App Store and Google Play are clearly going to be doomed as the several developers who still give a crap about RIM fire amazing apps out of their brains.

2) Teenagers and messaging. It’s still the best messaging device bar none (this is why teenagers still carry Blackberrys–a pretty important demographic).

Fortunately, the iPhone isn’t increasingly becoming the choice for the teen demographic.

3) RIM has always had the best keyboard. My bet is that the genius engineers at RIM are going to have the best touchscreen keyboard on the market.

Just because. That’s always the best argument. Not: I’ve tried this and it was great. That’s far too sensible. I also love the assertion that because RIM once had the best hardware keyboard on mobile, that will translate right across to the best touchscreen, just because (again). Also, don’t many of those RIM holdouts moan that other systems suck precisely because they lack a hardware keyboard?

4) They smell the coffee. Thorsten Heins has woken up RIM from their dreams of past glory. Now they are facing reality and Heins promises big changes.

Thorsten Heins? Gil Amelio!

 5) Licensing. The BB10 operating system is being licensed for other hardware like Microsoft Windows Phone 8.

That plan’s currently working out so great for Windows Phone.

6) Cash flow + growing existing user base. They still have $2 billion in cash and a user base of 80 million that grew by 2 million last quarter.

Luckily, RIM isn’t haemorrhaging money hand over fist, for example by losing $235m in the past quarter.

7) They dominate the high-security niche market. RIM is famous for the security of its smartphones. That’s one reason they dominated the corporate market before BYOD hit the fan. It’s still the go-to device for most governments around the world.

Still the go-to device for governments! *ignores bit about corporates binning RIM as fast as possible*

8) Leaked specs.

Sorry? I thought you said ‘leaked specs’ for a moment there.

8) Leaked specs.

Oh. Sigh.

According to leaked BB10 specs reported by the Droid Guy, “RIM would be releasing smartphones that would pose a threat to Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X and even iPhone 5. If the recent leaks were legit, RIM might be back with a vengeance. BlackBerry 10 A-Series may also be the Canadian company’s key to reclaiming its position in the market where it has dominated before.”

Because as we all know, a specs list is the only thing that matters in mobile. “We’ve got a 987-core phone running at a billion magigahertz!” “Great, but what apps are available for it?” “A billion magigahertz!”

9) Incremental Improvements are boring. The last iPhone had only incremental improvements. The top two smartphones look more and more alike with every new release. If BB10 can offer us something new that we always wanted but never thought was possible, we’ll buy it.

That plan’s currently working out so great for Windows Phone. Also, people like familiarity. Start out with something great and make it better. Pundits calling the iPhone boring simply don’t understand how most consumers think. Mind you, that’s why they’re writing crap for tech blogs and being wrong all the time when it comes to sales forecasts and the like.

10) The competition is distracted. Samsung and Apple are embroiled in legal battles that won’t end any time soon. Now Apple is going to battle with Google. This is going to be very distracting for them while their competitors RIM, Microsoft and Noikia come back to fight another day.

This point’s fair enough, because Apple and Google each only have one employee, and if that person is distracted in court, there’s no way they’ll be able to work on the next iPhone or Android device.

So, yeah: I’M CONVINCED!

TechCrunch reports on pricing for Microsoft’s Surface RT, which I assume a sub had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from calling an ‘iPad killer’. The short of it is the low-end model comes in at the same price as the low-end iPad, but with 16 GB more storage. The high-end model matches the 64 GB iPad’s price, but you get a cover. What you don’t get is a high-density display; instead, the device clocks in at 1280 x 720 pixels, a pixel density of 139 ppi.

In the comments, Alex Wilks states:

Compared to the iPad that’s a reasonable price- you’re basically trading in the retina display for an extra 16GB of storage, so it kinda feels like the cancel each other out to me. [sic]

It’ll be interesting to see if this is how others weigh up the pros and cons of the two systems. But to me, an extra 16 GB of storage space doesn’t cancel out a vastly better display—the thing that you spend all your time looking at and interacting with.

If you’re reading this, your AWOOGA alarm has probably already gone off, and if you’ve the latest model its vibrant 30-inch display will be flashing ‘Betteridge’s Law of Headlines!‘ in luminous green text. That’s fair enough, because the title of this article—Is writing about iPads making men stupid?—is clearly a load of old bollocks. And yet Chris Matyszczyk over at CNET has just penned Is the iPad making men effeminate?

Purses are a sensitive subject. Murses even more so.

I have no idea what a ‘murse’ is. I assume it’s some hilarious combination of ‘man’ and ‘purse’ supposed to elicit yucks at a rate of knots. As opposed to, say, vomit.

The other week, I was in a restaurant when my friend Ariane ballistically assaulted a man because he had placed his clutch on the bar.

Thereby annoying mechanics everywhere!

It was a very expensive clutch. “Men,” she huffed at him, “shouldn’t carry clutches.” She spent the rest of the evening bemoaning: “A clutch? A clutch?” She’s Belgian. She therefore has strong opinions, especially about men.

Oh, that type of clutch—a small bag for carrying things in. OHO! And sigh.

Still, there seems to be evidence of a sort that men are carrying more purses and that technology is to blame.

THE IPAD HAS MADE MEN INTO WOMEN! AIEEEEE! [Insert favoured deity] forbid that men can, like women, cart their shit about in bags without fear of idiots (men and women alike) bringing to the fore entirely arbitrary bullshit based on gender stereotypes! And [insert favoured deity] forbid that men in relationships with women might actually learn to carry their own shit once in a while, rather than sneakily offloading it on to women who carry bags without a hint of shame! SOCIETY WOULD CRUMBLE AND IT WOULD ALL BE DOWN TO STEVE JOBS!

Today’s Daily Mail, for example, reveals that sales of manbags are up 2,700 percent, a rise attributed to iPads and other slightly larger gadgets that men need to carry around. The Mail goes on to emote that as manbags have proliferated — and become heavier than women’s — the size of women’s bags has decreased by 61 percent. This it puts down (in so many ways) to women’s gadgets becoming smaller.

Probably true. After all, the 1980s was a terrible time for women, having to carry CRT monitors and telephone boxes in their bags. Wait, what?

Anyway, blah bags blah effeminate men blah prejudice blah stereotype. And the zinging finale:

Some will be feel that men with large leather bags tossed around their shoulders offers a fetching fashion statement. Others will recoil at the thought.

But with a little luck, time travel will be invented, enabling them to be propelled back to the 1950s when real men were real men, real women were real women, and real bags were real bags, only touched by the hands of real women and avoided like deadly fire covered with angry snakes by real men.

Macworld asked me to write about analysts. I duly obliged. If you’ve read any of my other articles about analysts, you’ve probably already realised it’s not entirely complimentary. However, this one features catapults, psychics and a curse.