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iPhone 4, probably, just because it’s always there, always connected, always on. I have a more purely delighted relationship with my Amazon Kindle as a gadget, however, which does ‘it just works’ better even than Apple.
Alternative answer: as the piece of hardware that I physically interact with most, the slim aluminium wired keyboard. That’s good action, dude. -
Pick your answer:
(a) None of your fucking business
(b) I can never manage more than one -
Meh, I don‘t type especially quickly. Like, it’s the sort of speed that makes “y’mum” comment in wide-eyed amazement, but it’s nothing special. I don’t think working for a magazine specifically has speeded it up; rather, mere familiarity with QWERTY, gleaned over years of use, speeds me.
I don’t think I type any more than twenty percent faster now that I did a decade ago. And I’d lay at least some of that small increase at the feet of a good, light-touch keyboard such as on Apple’s laptops and slim aluminium keyboards. If keyboards had feet.
(Tangent: if, like me, you think you have to look at the keyboard to type accurately, try looking at what you’re typing on screen instead; you’d be amazed at the extent to which you’re actually touch-typing.)
Final thought: I make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts to navigate around text when writing. Well worth familiarising yourself with, whatever platform you use. -
Deputy editor? Dammit, I’m also an editor!
So, mildly serious answer, in descending order of importance to me: (others may have different criteria and/or priorities)
• Don’t be a dick
• Care about the subject you’re writing about
• Know about the subject you’re writing about
• Not merely know how to form grammatically-sound sentences, but to do so unthinkingly and without prompting
• Have charm and social graces
Tips: like Stephen King says, just write. Write, write, write. Blog, blog, blog. (He didn’t say exactly that.) When you get in touch with me through email, Twitter, phone or whatever, the thing I want to see above almost everything else is examples of your writing where you’re lucid, concise, witty-without-being-wacky and authoritative. The best and hardest trick in writing is to make it look effortless. And fun.
Lots of love
Christopher Phin, editor, Tap! The iPhone and iPad magazine
Christopher Phin, deputy editor, MacFormat
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The 11″ in particular is lovely. If I was Stephen Fry (from a financial and technophilia point of view) I’d have one in a heartbeat. As it is, I can’t justify one in addition to my iPad and my gorgeous and much more capable flexible 15″ MacBook Pro. (Tangentially relevant: the only reason I went for the 15″ rather than the 13″ model is because of the much higher quality screen; smaller is generally better for me – hell, even the 11″ MacBook Air will power a ridiculously large display if you want to use it on a desk – but not at the expense of quality.) But yes, I love the 11″ MacBook Air, and that line is no longer priced such as to make me angry and resentful.
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10,000 BC
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Geography. Love that shit.
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Nah; I have a new Mac mini as my media centre, and I'd rather have that flexibility.
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What criteria are we applying? Acting ability? Melanin levels? Sexual compatibility? Actually, it's academic; Will Smith in all three cases.
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Three answers for the price of one!
I love working for a magazine; it sounds trite and like I'm saying it to make myself sound good, but I genuinely love helping people get more from their kit in this way. My family were teachers, and my wife is a qualified teacher, and I believe what I do is in the same tradition.
If the question was why I work for a magazine about Apple kit as opposed to anything else, then it's an easy answer: I like the stuff, and know a lot about it. Having said that, though, I have lots of other interests, so it would be odd indeed if I spent my entire professional career in this particular market.
And finally, overall: I started almost through chance. Having graduated with a graphic design degree, I was taking a break before starting the job hunt properly, and happened to notice that one of the magazines I read, MacUser, was advertising for a Labs Assistant to join the staff. And here we are! -
Time. It's just time. When I worked in London, my work/life balance was totally screwed and it damaged me and my marriage; I’m determined not to let that happen again.
I may well at some point, however – though it's likely that I'll partner with someone to provide UI and UX input informed by my design background; I am in awe of fellow hacks such as Mark Hattersley who have taught themselves Obj-C – but for the moment I just don’t have the brainspace. -
Jenny.
Actually, lots of things – clever puns, old-fashioned gags, unnatural juxtapositions of situations – but the one person who can unfailing have me actually helpless with laughter is my wife. -
Not a single gadget as such, but a service: AI. Actually, I don’t even need true AI, just enough smarts to be able to act as a PA and prioritise tasks for me, or to understand and properly act on a spoken, typed or even thought instruction such as ‘set up a meeting with Paul next Thursday at some time in the afternoon when he's free'. Tech at the moment suffices for most of the tasks I want it to do*, but it requires me to work and think in an unnatural, tech-centric way, and makes me subservient to it rather than the other way round.
*Of course, I'm sure that by the time tech gets even fake AI, I'll want it to do even more. -
My main computer, for more than six years, has been a laptop – first an iBook G3, then G4, then 2GHz MacBook, now 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. (I had other computers before that, of course, including a G4 Cube and an Amstrad PcW10.)
I have desktop computers, but for me, the ability to take <i>everything</i> around with me – from work to home, even just from study to living room – is too useful to ignore; despite services such as SugarSync, it's still too much of a dick-about to sneakernet files, apps and settings around.
In a couple of years time, I may switch to using an iMac, say, as my 'main' computer, with everything portable being done on an iPad successor – especially with improved cloud services – but for the foreseeable, it's laptop, laptop, laptop. -
@stitchbitch. If, however, you had asked me to choose between her and a rack of ribs from Bodean's in Soho, I may have had to have claimed my right to silence.
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Schwartz Bros, the burger place. We lack the In-N-Out Burger (“those are good burgers, dude…”) but Schwartz is a pretty good methadone.
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The latter. I'm completely comfortable with the idea of spirituality, but I'm (currently?) firmly convinced that it's an accidental consequence* of how our brains work, and, good little post-enlightenmentist that I am, I'd need a terrific amount of convincing that there's any objective spiritual plane into which the dolphins _could_ link in.
OR MAYBE THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT ME TO THINK, TRICKSY LITTLE BLIGHTERS.
(* There's a more elegant, pithier way of saying this, but I can't put my finger on the damn thing.) -
Safari for me. The reason's a bit shit, though: I like having my bookmarks synced through MobileMe. I know you can sync Chrome-to-Chrome, but I like having as few services running as possible, and besides, the MobileMe thing means that my iPhone is kept up to date as well.
I've always liked Safari, and have never found it sufficiently bad, or alternatives sufficiently compelling, to make me switch wholesale.
I'm also a special case: because Safari is the dominant Mac browser, I need to know it well in order that I can write about it for MacFormat. I need to know the competition as well, of course, but Safari's the one I need to have at my fingertips, professionally. -
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I don't think it's a regional thing as such; both have the potential to be successful – if not, perhaps, mainstream – and I'm aware of more of my UK friends and colleagues using FourSquare than those of my contacts who are in the US. That's a statistically-poor sample from which to draw any conclusions, however.
Personally, I'd rather use the geotagging stuff built into Twitter to update my friends on my location than hook into yet another service – and I don't really care about being mayor of anywhere – but then I'm lazy that way. (And it is sheer laziness on my part; I don't have significant issues with privacy concerns.)
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Christopher Phin’s Bio
Editor of Tap! Uses language suitable for miners, not minors.
