Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Windows 8: The Verdict Isn’t In!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 14, 2011 at 12:03 am

My lousy photo of two of the devices I'm carrying around at the moment.

On Monday, the day before Microsoft formally unveiled Windows 8 at its BUILD conference here in Anaheim, it held a event for the press. Tech journalists from around the world (including me) got a preview of the news that would break a day later, and we went back to our hotel rooms with loaner Samsung tablets loaded with the developer preview of Windows 8. We agreed to a Microsoft embargo that said we could publish our stories at 9:05am on Tuesday, once the BUILD keynote was underway.

On Monday night, I frantically put the Samsung through its paces and hurriedly began to write, knowing that my first-impressions piece would be one of dozens that would hit the next morning.

And then I thought to myself: What’s the rush?

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Windows 8 Liveblog

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 13, 2011 at 9:31 am

Say, I’m liveblogging Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch at its BUILD conference right now. Join me.

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Decide Tackles Phone Purchase Timing

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 12, 2011 at 4:02 pm

When people ask me when they should buy a particular tech product, I have a standard answer: “Wait as long as you can without driving yourself crazy, but no longer.” That is, of course, a pat, one-size-fits all response.  A site called Decide tries to provide more sophisticated answers for specific products, by analyzing the chances that its price will fall or rise, and whether or not it’s likely to be replaced in the near future.

The company’s been doing this for laptops, cameras, and TVs for a while, and now it’s added phones to the roster. So far, its advice doesn’t appear to be comprehensive or completely up-to-date: It doesn’t seem to list the Droid Bionic and Triumph, two Motorola phones I reviewed last week. But it does have lots of models, and the recommendations I checked seemed sensible. For instance, it advises against buying an iPhone 4 right now, but says it’s safe to buy one of Apple’s recently-released MacBook Airs.

No matter how much data you have, timing purchases is tough–and whatever and whenever you buy, you need to be able able to deal with one of the eternal verities of the technology world: Better, cheaper stuff is always ahead. But Device looks handy. (Retrevo, which has some purchase-timing features of its own, is another handy resource.)

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Waiting for Thunderbolt

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 12, 2011 at 9:54 am

Over at Cnet, I wrote about a technology that I’m excited about, although it’s unclear whether any big players other than Intel and Apple are as enthusiastic as I am:  Thunderbolt.

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Coming on Tuesday: Live Coverage of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Keynote

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 11, 2011 at 11:22 pm

I’m in Anaheim, holed up in my hotel room next door to the Anaheim Convention Center, where Microsoft will be holding its BUILD conference this week. It’ll serve as the launching pad for Windows 8, and will give us our first opportunity to see more than glimpses of the OS. A new version of Windows 8 is still a big deal, so I chose to come here rather than attend any of the other tech conferences that are going on this week in other locales. (Boy, are there a lot of them: DEMO, TechCrunch Disrupt, the Intel Developer Forum, the Information Week 500, and the Tokyo Game Show.)

On Tuesday morning at 9am PT, Microsoft will hold a BUILD keynote that’s likely to involve lots and lots of new details about Windows 8, an operating system we still don’t know all that much about. I’ll liveblog the whole event at technologizer.com/win8. Hope to see you there–and stay tuned for other Windows 8 news this week as it develops.

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Remembering 9/11, on the iPad and on the Web

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 11, 2011 at 4:27 am

Steve Rosenbaum's The 9/11 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future

On September 11th, 2001, the Web basically consisted of words, images, murky RealAudio sound, and a smattering of video that was a hassle to deal with, especially if you were still on dial-up. And tablets, in their modern, iPad-era form, didn’t exist at all. But a lot has happened in the past decade–and the tenth-anniversary coverage of the attacks and subsequent events include some remarkable creations which make use of today’s technology to do things that TV, books, magazines, and newspapers can’t.

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September 2001 Was a Long Time Ago in the World of Technology

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 11, 2011 at 3:35 am

I wrote about my memories of 9/11/01 a couple of years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the attacks. They involve me sitting at my desk at PC World in Boston and learning of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center when my colleague Denny Arar IMd me from San Francisco. (We both assumed it was an errant small-plane pilot, and both got e-mails from the organizers of a wireless conference scheduled to be held at Windows on the World reassuring us that the location would be moved if necessary.)

I remember trying to follow the news on the Web and discovering that major news sites were unusable, and then turning on the TV and attempting, sort of, to work as the day progressed. (By the evening, when my coworker Tom Spring and I had a beer and sat there in stunned disbelief, it felt like Tom, me, and the bartender were the last three people out and about in downtown Boston.)

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Pioneering Videogame Journalist Passes On

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 10, 2011 at 2:03 am

I haven’t thought about Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz, or Electronic Games magazine in years, but I loved it back in the day and was saddened to hear of Kunkel’s death in this New York Times obituary:

Mr. Kunkel and his friend Arnie Katz are widely credited with starting the first published gaming column, called “Arcade Alley,” which began appearing in Video magazine in 1978.

The column, a monthly look at new video game hardware and software, drew more readers as home gaming systems became popular in the in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1981, around two million home systems were in use in the United States.

To cater to those new consumers, Mr. Kunkel and Mr. Katz teamed up with Joyce Worley to start a monthly magazine, Electronic Games, which had a circulation of more than 250,000 at its peak. The magazine coined descriptive terms like “screenshot,” for a still image of a game, and “play mechanics,” for the way a game is played.

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