Alex Watson » Freelance

Recently: January and February 2011

Alex — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:40:38 +0000

January and February: so good at seeming unending. There are few good days, few clear days, because mostly the sky is like a silver lid pressing down on us. It’s a hard drag until the clocks change. Keeping busy at work helped. The new team – the Dennis Media Factory – is getting going, although I always forget how hiring just tends to take ages.

We went to New York right after new year to kick off this year’s biggest project, but there’s a long way to go with it. In early February, I spent a very enjoyable and intense 10 day period on the design for what will be our first app, and here I was lucky to find a terrific UX expert to mastermind the process, an old colleague I bumped into a Windows Phone 7 event. It was great to actually get out of meetings and strategising and start the sketching and questioning, plotting and planning for an actual product.

That said, it does feel like we’ve also made progress at Dennis when it comes to structure and strategy. It’s just a slow and far from straightforward process, and I’m not a patient person (as my friends and beaten computer keyboards can attest to).

Can’t really add anything more specific than that. When it’s done.

In terms of writing, January and February have been my two least productive months for perhaps the last ten years, if not longer. Life as a journalist is receding quickly: the only articles I’ve published this year are my Mac User columns. Incidentally, there’s a new editor on Mac User and the magazine is looking great, with some terrific covers. I should perhaps say practicing journalist. Like being a lapsed Catholic, it’s one of those things you never really shake, especially when half your friends and the people you work with remain true believers. It’s not just the career change that slowed down the writing, either: over Christmas I finished the first, very rough draft of my next personal project. The plan was to wait two months, then go back to it for the next draft and then see how it feels.

Photo-wise, despite the awful watery winter light, I managed to get some nice shots over the Christmas break, and some of New York, although home internet crappiness means there’s not that much stuff up on Flickr. The Wired Jester has begun its latest metamorphosis, and is now quite concerned with this year’s BHAG: cycling 2,011 miles over the course of 2011.

Recently: July and August 2010

Alex — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:40:27 +0000

* Work: Summer seems like a long time ago, even more so as my work in July and August is quite separate to what happened when September came along, and what I’m doing now. August saw me hand over the Custom PC and bit-tech Editor’s Chair – for it is a chair, nay, a throne more like, bejewelled wi’ rubies and emeralds and all the riches of the Orient – and I didn’t really do a whole lot of writing for the site in these two final months. Nothing on the blog, but I did contribute a couple of reviews of two fabulous Xbox Live Arcade games. I’ve never played a game that engages with death quite as viscerally and tenderly as Limbo. It’s a distinctive, bleak and audacious game that really stuck with me. The other game I looked at was the far lighter Snoopy Flying Ace, an arcade flying game that’s visually charming but with hard-hitting, exciting combat.

So, seven years, and 85 issues of Custom PC and nearly two years of bit-tech and that’s… that. I didn’t go out with a bang, but happily, these were two pieces I had the time to invest myself in and write well. Since both publications will go from strength-to-strength (and it’s not a complete goodbye), an exit via the side-door, quietly, with a bit of grace is entirely suitable. I’ll cover what I’m doing now in the next blog post, as it’s still all in the mix a little.

* Away from work, I spent the summer really getting into cycling, and over on The Wired Jester I posted some thoughts on riding the bike through London. It’s still not really a frequently updated blog, but stepping away from day-to-day journalism means I’ve had a bit more writing energy for the last couple of posts, which is a-good-thing(TM).

* Photography: I’ve finally put up some pictures from last year’s trip to Baltimore, Washington and the scenery inbetween. I also put up the photos from a brief trip to Gothenburg and the Swedish coast. Beautiful silvery light, and since I’ve started using Lightroom 3, I finally feel I’m getting a little closer to what I want from my photography. If you’re a digital SLR photographer and haven’t tried it yet, it’s an absolute must. It will make a bigger difference to your photography than any new lens or body, so stop saving for that, and get Lightroom instead.

I’m also using Instagr.am on the iPhone, as sifter if you want to add me.

* Freelance-wise, my Mac User column continues, and I was quite happy to revel in my geekery with this one, which begins with a debate as to which country has the best plug.

Recently: May and June 2010

Alex — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:59:54 +0000

* Work: Well, May and the start of June are all about Computex in Taiwan; we covered it in quite some style, with myself and two other reporters. It was good fun, especially as it was the first time for one of the guys, and Taipei delivered its usual craziness in spades. Not literally in a spade, although there are times when the jetlag and lack of rest mean you never feel something that surreal is too far off. The show this year lacked big product launches, but the behind the scenes jostling made it the most fascinating one I’ve been to yet. The battle between Intel and ARM is fascinating, as is Apple’s influence and the way that mobile smartphones/tablets are taking off. I tried to summarise it in a blog post. Speaking of mobiles, this blog post was a fun one to write: My iPhone told me what to have for lunch.

* Photos: I took my new Nikon D90 to the Far East – Taiwan for Computex, then gorgeous Hong Kong on the way back. The photos are on the all new Flickr, although I’ve not put them all up yet. Speaking of photos, I tried out Lightroom 3 and it’s terrific. The filters are amazing, and I think it’s had a great impact on my ability to take a photo that says what I think it’s going to say the moment before I push the button. You can see the results for yourself.

* My Mac User column continues; they’ve just relaunched their website into something more bloggy and individual, and it makes it easier to find my columns too. What more could you possibly want?

* I’ve found a bit of time for The Wired Jester, including some decent ramen links, a photo-post on jetlag and an extended ramble about clothes, particularly Uniqlo.

Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the warm weather – bit of gardening – I’m writing up a really exciting new project – and I’ve been to Sweden for a holiday.

Recently: March and April 2010

Alex — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:13:14 +0000

* Work: Well, we relaunched bit-tech! The new site looks lovely, it’s packed with additional features and functions and we improved the advertising (fewer annoying flashing things, better communication for advertisers and readers). I wrote two long blog posts about the redesign which go into details about the changes. I also spent a lot of time in the comment threads talking to readers. Bit-tech has a huge and passionate community who feel very connected to the site, and taking them through the redesign was tricky. A three week, open public beta really helped. So far, it’s worked well – traffic numbers are up, and the editorial team are able to write more content, and are less constrained, and more empowered. Happy days!

But that’s far from all…

* I’ve also written for the site, a technical blog about Valve and OpenGL and a more personal one on the Bullfrog games I loved when I was a teenager.

* Which leads me on to the fact I went to SXSW in beautiful, sunny Austin, Texas. I met ex-Bullfrog head Peter Molyneux, and wrote a lot about the conference, including Molyneux’s excellent talk on emotion in games. A second piece on bit-tech looked at Microsoft’s exploration of designing touch-screen games, while a hands on with the Windows 7 Phone and a write up of a talk on Google and China went up on PC Pro.

* The photos of Texas are on Flickr.

* On The Wired Jester, I’ve been noting down what I’ve been adding to the wishlist – mostly books – and it is expanding like the waistline of someone who’s drinking ten pints of cream a day. I saw David Mitchell read from his new book, which was thought provoking and I remembered an old book of mine, A Terrible Beauty.

* I’ve also started a new column in Mac User, Dennis’ Mac magazine. It’s called Mac to the Future, and it’s about new tech and how it will (might!) impact Apple. The first two are online, a look at the Apple A4 CPU inside the iPad, the second a piece on Apple’s use of Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 chips.

PC futures shown off at Computex

Alex — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:34:55 +0000

The Computex 2009 tradeshow, written up for the BBC News website.