News reaches us of a move by Vodafone to offer its customers the ability to change the system font on their mobile phones in exchange for £1.99 of hard-earned cash. As a scheme for getting people to part with money for something that costs the supplier virtually nothing, it's an ingenious move – particularly because it panders to our seemingly compulsive need to personalise or customise our phones and computers, despite them looking pretty good at the moment they were switched on for the very first time. Why do we have this insatiable urge to make things look so much worse?
The aesthetic quality of any personal web page or gadget seems to have an inverse correlation with the amount of freedom its users are given to mess around with its settings and change it to "suit them". For example, finding the most unattractive MySpace page is a pretty demoralising task, but this one – clearly created in a deliberate effort to bulldoze the barriers of taste and decency – is a pretty good example of how bad things can get when a free rein is given. Facebook, meanwhile, forbids the embedding pictures of Paris Hilton in the background of the page, or tinny midi-files of the theme tune to Terry & June, and thus creates a substantially more pleasant browsing experience.
I've owned various Macs since the early-1990s, and during that decade I went through every possible system tweak – extensions to change the system font, daily-changing background pictures, customising icons, blasts of guitar from "Entertainment" by the Gang Of Four whenever the CD tray ejected – you name it, I tried it. I like to think that those years of experimentation – maligned as they were with system crashes and umpteen crises of confidence about my design choices – managed to flush the customisation bug out of my system, to a point now where I keep things incredibly simple. I figure that the people who designed the website or gadget I'm using have vastly more design flair than I do.
Of course, it helps if the system you're using looks good in the first place; it's notable that the screens of the iPhone, and indeed the T-Mobile / Google G1 (which I was lucky enough to have a go on last week, although I was embargoed from writing about it) are masterpieces of design, with perfect font rendering that only idiots with misplaced self-confidence would want to try and improve. On the other hand, if I had a Motorola RAZR, I'd probably leap at the chance to try and rectify the hideous spectacle that confronted me every time I flipped it open.
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dear cyberclinic,
I really wanted to read your article on 'pimping your gadgets' but a huge, irremovable popup covered most of the page, asking me, of all things, what I would like to see more of on this site.
Well let me help you and tell you that I would like less popups for a start, especially if they can neither be used nor removed when using a humble mobile Internet device.
Please, a bit of love towards us who surf on the move would go a long way.
Posted by: ken fegore | Friday, 31 October 2008 at 05:25 PM
Actually; less pop-ups for those of us on full sized computers too please. The Indy website seems to have caught a particularly virulent case of popupitus vomitus recently. Several times in the last week it's tried to spew two or three at a time at me, each time I go to a new page.
Posted by: John | Friday, 31 October 2008 at 09:21 PM
Apologies to both of you. I'm not experiencing the popups myself, but that might be because I use software that blocks such things.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Friday, 31 October 2008 at 11:35 PM
You should see what I do to my PC then...
First off its a water and peltier cooled affair, with a heat exchanger very similar to that of a car's cooling radiator but convected with something called a Peltier thermal pump which on one side freezes the chip in exchange for heat on the other when electricity is pumped through... Taking the heat away is a vast array of water pipes filled with water laced with a UV dye turning it a lovely bluey green via the UV lamp hidden in there, a pump and radiator.
The windowed aluminium case is lit by a series of fans that draw laser patterns, the RAM has gold plating on it, the front panel conceals the CD drives and another laser fan and built into it are three blue backlit analogue VU dials for sound, heat and fan speed flanked by two inset blue lit panels.
There is a point for the mechanics here, that I have overclocked it by a 100% e.g. my quad cored chip is running 100% faster than its original set speed.
Its like buying a 1 litred car and tweaking it to get the same performance and power as a 2 litre one.
Next project is full DIY cryogenic cooling, see some of the best ones at work via overclockers.co.uk on their forums.
Posted by: Ian Watson | Saturday, 01 November 2008 at 11:46 PM