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Starting a New Chapter

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 1, 2012 at 8:23 am

Back on February 9th, I announced that I had a cool new job, as an editor at large for TIME. I’ll be writing about personal technology for the publication in both its online and print incarnations. And Technologizer is coming along with me: Starting later today, it will become part of TIME.com.

When we flip the switch, heading to Technologizer.com will take you to the new version that’s part of TIME.com. You’ll also find Technologizer posts, and scads more stuff, at TIME.com’s all-encompassing tech section, Techland.

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Technologizer’s Greatest Hits, 2008-2012

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 29, 2012 at 11:53 am

Whenever people ask me what the topic of Technologizer is–which they do all the time–I have a stock answer which happens to be true. This site is about the intersection between the tech-related stuff that I’m interested in, and the tech-related stuff that a critical mass of other people are interested in. You see, I’m not very good at covering topics I don’t care about–but I do like people to read what I’ve written.

My interests are eclectic enough that Technologizer has tended to be eclectic. And when other folks started writing for the site, it sometimes got eclectic in ways that surprised even me. One of the great pleasures of blogging here is that so many of you have gotten what we do here, even in cases when the subject matter has gotten a tad peculiar.

Now that Technologizer is about to end its life as a stand-alone site and become part of TIME.com,  I wanted to look back at some of our most popular stories to date. Here’s a month-by-month accounting of the most-read items we’ve published, by unique visitors. (Unless otherwise specified, I wrote all of these.)

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Ah, But I Was So Much Older Then, I’m Younger Than That Now

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 22, 2012 at 9:43 pm

[FURTHER UPDATE: As commenter Jdoors explains, I can see the video I uploaded when I’m logged into YouTube. But I’m the only one who can see it–for everybody else, it’s blocked.]

[UPDATE: The original video, with Dylan soundtrack, is still playing for me here at home in Daly City, California. But Network World’s Paul McNamara, commenters, and others are saying that it’s blocked for them. Sounds like the geolocation technology that YouTube uses has decided that Daly City isn’t in the U.S. Or something like that.]

Back in October, shortly after Steve Jobs passed away, I uploaded a wonderful video to YouTube. It was called “To Steven Jobs on his thirtieth birthday,” and was a film created by Jobs’ Apple coworkers in 1985 to show at his birthday party. (Craig Elliott, who worked at Apple when it was made and shown, was the generous soul who shared it with me.)

I’d never seen the video or many of the Jobs images it included, and thought they deserved to be more widely known. Now they are: The YouTube version has been viewed almost 240.000 times.

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Playstation Vita Review: A Killer Gaming Handheld From a Bygone Era

Posted by Jared Newman on February 22, 2012 at 8:35 pm

Next to the phones and tablets on my desk, Sony’s Playstation Vita looks like it doesn’t belong. It’s twice as thick as the latest smartphones, and twice as heavy. Its exterior is a hodgepodge of materials, gray and black, matte and glossy. Protrusions and intrusions abound, from buttons and triggers to jacks and slots. If there was a memo decreeing that all portable electronics be reduced to slabs, Sony’s ignoring it.

The Vita’s design turns out to be a good metaphor for the gaming handheld itself. It’s a device that makes some small concessions to the rise of phones and tablets as portable entertainment–things like the touch screen and motion controls, the bare-bones web browser and the obligatory Twitter, Flickr and Netflix apps–but then it ignores them in favor of playing kick-ass, modern video games. Not Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, or Sudoku, but Uncharted, Rayman, and Marvel vs. Capcom. Almost everything else seems like an afterthought.

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Kindle Fire: Not A iPad Killer, But…

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 16, 2012 at 3:38 pm

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is making its mark on the tablet sector, grabbing a 14 percent share of the market and skyrocketing into second place in the market after you-know-what, IHS iSuppli has found. Amazon’s success came at the expense of Apple, whose share of tablets fell to 57 percent, however the company says it was the iPhone 4S that may have put a crimp in iPad sales.

Consumers who may have otherwise snatched up the iPad during the quarter instead opted for the iPhone 4S, causing shipments to fall short of the company’s estimates. “The rollout of the iPhone 4S in October generated intense competition for Apple purchasers’ disposable income, doing more to limit iPad shipment growth than competition from the Kindle Fire and other media tablets”, tablet analyst Rhoda Alexander says.

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Checking In

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 16, 2012 at 3:29 pm

My apologies for the lull in activity here since I announced my new gig as an editor at large for TIME. Before too long, Technologizer will reemerge as a blog hosted by TIME.com. In the meantime, I’m doing most of my blogging on TIME’s Techland. Here are a few items you may have missed:

See you over there, I hope–and I promise to drop in here as well before the TIME.com transition is complete.

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The Offbeat World of Atari

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 13, 2012 at 12:18 am

For a forty-year-old company that remains synonymous with video games, Atari has experimented with an awful lot of other businesses. In its early years, it made pinball machines, jukeboxes, video phones, digital photo booths, music-visualization boxes for your hi-fi, and more. Benj Edwards, who knows more about this stuff than anyone, has compiled a look at Atari Oddities–including the aforementioned and others, and some strange games, too. (If you remember Puppy Pong, I’m impressed.)

 

Visit Atari Oddities slideshow.

 

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Atari Oddities

Posted by Benj Edwards on February 12, 2012 at 11:01 pm

Atari OdditiesForty years ago this June, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in California. And with it, they founded the video game industry as we know it today. Since then, the name Atari has become synonymous with the golden age of video games and a sense of Generation X nostalgia that will never fade.

If you’re reading this, I suspect you know the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 consoles. You’ve played the hit arcade video games, and you may have even used an Atari 8-bit or ST computer. But the story of Atari is filled with many unseen and little known oddities. Here are 13 examples of weird Atari products and strange Atari marketing you can use as trivia at your next 1970s or 80s theme party. When they ask, “How’d you know that?”, just tell them Benj Edwards sent you.

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