paul capewell's blog

March 1, 2012

The wait is over: Readability for iOS is out (so don’t be a douchebag)

Readability is a platform for reading articles found on the web. It strips them of formatting and enables you to view them on a variety of devices at your convenience.

There are lots of other services like this – notably Read It Later and Instapaper.

Readability’s been doing pretty well, but for a long time they didn’t have an iOS app – although they did/do have a very neat web app which works rather nicely in mobile browsers, which was a pretty good halfway house.

In November, Readability announced that it would be coming to iOS some time soon:

Readability is on its way to the iTunes App Store. Our new apps for the iPhone and iPad are free and undeniably beautiful. [...] Readability for iOS is submitted and awaiting approval from Apple.

But for one reason or another, the iOS app got held up. One comment on the above blog post, left three months later, in January, really annoyed me – but I enjoyed Readability’s response:

The cheek of it! The sheer entitlement! No-one should have to confirm that they’re not being a douchebag in making a really cool service available to its users for free…

I swear by God we are not douchebags.

Christ.

But anyway, that’s in the past. Readability’s iOS app hit the app store earlier today - for free – and it looks very nice indeed.

Thanks, douchebags.

Readability is well worth investigating – whatever platform you’re on. Have a look: http://www.readability.com/

I must admit, I’m a big Read It Later fanboy. I’ve been using the service, first on Android, now on iOS, for a good little while – coming up for a year, in fact.

I’ve recently been participating in the beta testing for Read It Later version 3. I can’t say much about it, but it’s a really nice user experience, and as you’d hope, a pretty big leap ahead of version 2.

But, to keep me abreast of the competition, I will be using Readability where I would have used Read It Later for the next week or so. Maybe longer, if I’m totally swung by it.

I’ll report back with my findings.

February 29, 2012

Orlando Whitfield on the London Library

Although I’ve never visited the London Library, in my time working at a public library, one of my duties was dealing with the inter-library loans. This meant that, every now and then, amongst the stuff from neighbouring counties, I would get to handle more exciting books from the likes of the prestigious Bodleian and London libraries.

One of those books was something that blew my naive little mind: it was a concordance to the works of William Shakespeare. I’d never come across such a thing before, and I was amazed at first at the size of it – roughly 60x40cm and about 20cm thick.

But it wasn’t till I came to open it and realise just what it was. It was an alphabetical list of every word (except a few common ones) Shakespeare used in his entire works. Alongside the words was a legend, providing information as to where, in which work, that word occurred.

It was, in essence, a search engine. A Shakespeare-specific search engine. A big, lovely, hardback, paper search engine.

But enough about me. On my way home from work tonight, I was reading an article on iOS app Read It Later (about which, more, in a few days). It was from the blog of literary publication the Paris Review, and it’s a captivating description of one man’s lifelong love affair with the London Library.

Some bits of Orlando Whitfield’s post that I liked:

I would get up early, eat breakfast in the square, and arrive at the library when it opened. I ate lunch in the square when the weather was good, in the members’ room when it was bad; I smoked cigarettes on the embassy steps; in the evenings, I drank at the Red Lion on Duke of York Street around the corner [...] On Sundays, when the library was shut, I was listless. Days among my own books and those of my parents felt inadequate, less nourishing; I longed for Monday to arrive and for my explorations to begin again.

…

If you borrow an old book from the library, you may go to bed with a volume that Dickens once read by candle light in Doughty Street, or that Eliot read as he walked over the London Bridge.

…

The library is a place of safety for the bibliophile, and a cooling refuge for the city-heated mind.

…

On the spine of the book, the title and the author’s name and the date of publication were embossed in sans serif, gold letters. On the front, centered at the top of the board was a green bookplate bearing the name and address of the library. Inside, on the reverse of the front cover, were stuck some extracts from the library’s rules.

Lovely stuff. Pop over and read the rest of the blog post now, if you like: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/28/the-london-library/

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February 29, 2012

Infra_MANC – an exhibition at CUBE in Manchester

I popped into CUBE (the ‘Centre for the Urban Built Environment, a gallery on Portland Street) today, to check out their participation in the Manchester Histories Festival: an exhbition called Infra_MANC.

I’ve already made the ‘in for a penny, Infra_MANC’ joke via Twitter already, so I won’t repeat it here. Oh, woops, etc.

Actually, because I am slow on the uptake, it took me to see the sign which dissected the title before I realised Infra.. was short for infrastructure, and that this is what the exhibition deals with: four big ideas for Manchester’s infrastructure in the 20th Century, two of which came to fruition, two of which were pipe dreams.

The four Big Ideas are:

a city centre heliport for Manchester
the Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange
the Mancunian Way
the Piccadilly-Victoria underground railway line

I was as fascinated by the drawings, photographs and information on show about the existing projects (the Mancunian Way and the Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange) as I was for the other two.

Some of the conceptual drawings of the stations for the underground railway were very lovely – particularly the one of the space on Whitworth Street near Canal Street, currently occupied by an empty building site. However, I must admit the drawings of the subterranean elements just brought to mind Glasgow’s own underground railway, the infamous ‘Clockwork Orange’ with all its plastic-and-tiles, modern-for-the-1970s design.

Some excellent prints on display too, from Tony Perry, of the Guardian Exchange taken in 1998. Apparently these great black and white shots of tunnels and cables are available via an English Heritage website, but I found them more readily here. They’re on display at CUBE as large prints, and I very much enjoyed seeing them.

Overall, the exhibition is a fascinating glimpse at the what-could-have-beens and the what-was of Manchester’s post-war infrastructure. Some of the items on display will have been hidden away in archives, and it was also refreshing to see stuff about the Guardian Exchange, given how it is normally so steeped in mystery.

My one complaint would be that I was left wanting to find out more – admittedly not too much of a criticism for an exhbition of this nature – but I do think some of the labelling and captions could have been more in-depth. Tony Perry’s photographs, for instance, had one label for them all, and it would’ve been interesting to know exactly what I was looking at in each shot. But the exhibition is only on show for a couple of weeks, so this could be excused.

Thankfully, just before I left, I stopped to look at the literature on the counter by the door, and found a thick, bound volume which turned out to be the exhibition catalogue. In it, curators Richard Brook (Manchester School of Architecture) and Martin Dodge (University of Manchester) have done sterling work, explaining the background to all the projects, illustrating them very well at the same time.

I spent probably the same amount of time looking at the exhibition as I did with my nose buried in this book, particularly on the chapter about the Guardian Exchange, as it spelled out in black and white just what it was all about – a refreshing revelation after years of Chinese whispers on the Web.

Perhaps my favourite titbit was that although the Exchange was built to withstand nuclear attack from above (such that if Manchester was flattened, the telecommunications network would still survive), by the time it was completed, the power of nukes had increased to the extent that it wouldn’t have had a chance anyway.

I’d recommend stopping to look through the catalogue if your appetite is whetted by this exhibition. I’m not sure if copies are available to purchase, but I’d hope so. I’ll be popping back soon, as I hear there is more in the neighbouring RIBA Hub.

Infra_MANC runs until 4th March at CUBE on Portland Street as part of the Manchester Histories Festival.

I think my favourite element of the exhibition was a personal one; on a previous visit to CUBE a few years ago, I left the building and stepped out onto Portland Street feeling very cold and alienated by Manchester. It’s a long and completely other story, but something weird happened in my brain that day.

I’m pleased to say that as I left CUBE today, my mind was reeling with thoughts not just of the Manchester that was, or the Manchester that could have been – but predominantly of the Manchester that is, or that could be.

And that’s a very positive frame of mind to be left in, I’d say.

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February 25, 2012

Out of the ashes of Oceansize rises British Theatre – debut EP available now

Source: http://www.britishtheatremusic.com/

You there! It might be a year to the day since Manchester’s fantastic and much-missed Oceansize decided to call it a day, but fret not: two of its members (Mike Vennart and Richard ‘Gambler’ Ingram) have formed a little off-shoot named British Theatre.

Threatening for months to experiment with beats, loops, guitars and delay pedals, the new outfit has today made its debut EP available via Bandcamp, ahead of an album later in the year. You can stream the tracks below, or by clicking here. You can also buy the three-track EP from just 50p, which is obviously a bargain.

The EP is really very good. I’ve had it on a loop for about an hour now. If you want to know more about the men behind the music, pop over to This Is Fake DIY for an interview.

February 23, 2012

Manchester Time Machine: The North West Film Archive’s new iPhone app

It would be cruel of me to say that I’m surprised to see my own humble university (Manchester Metropolitan University) producing something great and exciting – but that’s kind of how I felt when I got wind of, and finally saw, this new iPhone app.

Produced, as far as I can tell, by MMU, and using clips from the North West Film Archive (“80 unique film clips from the [...] collection of over 35,000 items”), the iOS app is free and pretty nicely made.

When you open it, you are presented with a map of Manchester, with pins all over the city. Each pin links to a dated clip. Tap the pin, watch the clip. Simple. On each clip is an optional overlay – a caption with some brief information about the clip. The clips are short, but they’re all contained in the app, so there’s no buffering or problems – it all Just Works.

The idea of the map interface is that you can home in on clips that are nearby – and in some cases, it’s easy to see familiar buildings and really put yourself into the same location. Other clips are of places that have radically changed, so it’s nice to know exactly where they were filmed. As the app’s blurb reads:

Manchester has changed a lot, and hardly at all.

As well as using the map to browse for clips, there’s also a very neat timeline, enabling the user to simply scroll through the years, regardless of location.

All in all, it’s just a really well-made app, and I reckon it’d be of interest to locals and history fans alike. I’m not sure if there are other apps like it – although I’d reckon there are – I’m just proud that not only does it feature the city I love so much, but that it’s come out of my own university. Well done, whoever is behind it. I hope more clips can be added in future.

To download the app, head to the app store on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and search for ‘Manchester Time Machine’, or follow this link. Separate iPad and Android versions are reportedly in the works, too.

There is some more information, and some videos of the interface over at this link.

As well as the app, there’s another way to view some of the North West Film Archive’s fascinating clips. Installed over the new year, there is a large screen on MMU’s Mabel Tylecote building, on the corner of Cavendish Street and Oxford Road, opposite All Saints Park.

Erected by Corridor Manchester, the screen aims to display various curated content, but is currently displaying NWF Archive clips of Oxford Road. I didn’t know what to make of the screen initially, but the several times I’ve sat on my bus home at the traffic lights, and a short clip of Oxford Road from some time in the past has emerged on the screen, I’ve grown to love it. I wonder what will be shown on it next?

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