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Wedding 2.0

By Fiona Halkerston

Very soon, I’ll heading back home to Edinburgh and I’ll have the great honour of becoming Fiona May Rush.  Yes, that will be my married name.  I thought spelling Halkerston for 28 years was a pain, but my new name will bring a whole load more amusement by being a full grammatical sentence.  Good. 

Aside from this realisation, planning our wedding has actually been a lot of fun.  However, conversations with family and friends have made me realise how different and how much easier this process has become with the help of apps.  There are now endless articles in bridal magazines, but also in tech publications, recommending the top ten wedding planning apps, helping you count down, organise, budget and brainstorm for the big day. 

While everyone who knows me will tell you that I’m pretty glued to my iPhone and iPad, I was a little hesitant at first.  I started out fairly slowly, downloading a countdown app as soon as the date was set and using Pinterest to create what traditionally would have been a scrap book.  By sharing this page with my bridesmaids, we were able to quickly get an idea for what all the girls liked or would hands down refuse to wear.  The result?  Bridesmaid dresses bought on first shopping trip within about two hours. 

All my friends who are already married said that table planning was the biggest nightmare, with many designing a big cardboard plan with post its for each guest that could be moved and reorganised as they went along.  Our solution was Easypinz – you can drag and drop guests onto tables and move them around effortlessly.  The whole process took around an hour, which was a lot better than some of the horror stories we’d heard of entire weekends wasted. 

While most elements of our wedding are set to be rather traditional, I’m really pleased that our planning was made so easy with the help apps.  Never has the expression “There’s an app for that” felt more relevant or proved more useful and given that my husband to be and I are often in different countries, it’s meant that we don’t have to waste all of our time when he’s home going over wedmin (much to his relief!).

GTA V – the end to your social life

By Gemma White

The most expensive video game of all time, Grand Theft Auto V, has today been released, signalling the end of social lives across the globe.  GTA V, which reportedly cost its developer Rockstar around £170 million to make and market, saw a flurry of fans queuing to grab their copies at special events late last night. 

Its release got off to a shaky start however, with Amazon accidentally shipping copies of the much anticipated game to customers ahead of today’s official release date – oops!  This undoubtedly sparked outrage among avid GTA fans that had patiently waited to get their hands on the latest copy.  An investigation by Rockstar into the early sales is currently underway.

What I found fascinating is the preparation that went into GTA V’s release from the fans themselves, who are most likely immersed in game play as I write this.  A recent online poll by gaming site IGN.com revealed that 46 percent of its readers had booked holiday on the release day, while 19 percent planned to phone into work unwell.  I even stumbled across a post on GTA forums discussing what snacks people had planned to bring when they collected their game last night – not surprisingly, energy fuelled food and drink were a popular choice, perhaps for the long night of gaming ahead.

So, what can we expect over the coming months?  Well, with 25 million copies due to be sold in the first year, social lives will undoubtedly be consumed by a virtual world and disconnected from the realms of reality.  Let’s just hope that Rockstar is prepared for any potential ‘glitches’ or ‘downtime’ – although that might not be such a bad thing. 

Apple adds a bit of colour (and not much else)

By Richard Scarlett

Apple’s much anticipated – unexpected, yet expected – product launch was finally upon us yesterday evening. With a contract upgrade due any day now, I for one was waiting with bated breath to see what the fruity tech giant would have in store. Friends swear by their Samsung handsets, but being the hardcore fanboy that I am, I wanted to stick with an Apple device despite being increasingly disillusioned with dull version updates. As such, I considered this Apple’s last chance to win me over.

There were rumours of a bigger screen, wireless charging, NFC, a 13 mega-pixel camera and other wondrous concepts. Yes, it’s true that the likes of Samsung are already touting most of these features and Apple is merely playing catch up, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. As long as Apple jumped on the proverbial bandwagon and made it cool, that was OK by me.

So what did we get? First up, it was announced that there will be two new iPhone models, which was different, promising and presented a shift from the traditional pattern. But after some new colours, a fingerprint sensor, some well-timed comedy from Tim Cook and a marginally improved battery, that was it. And this pretty much sums up how I felt at the end of the conference (or indeed the live blog that I was anxiously scrolling through) last night.

This launch was supposed to signal a new beginning for Apple, it’s last stand against rising challengers such as Samsung that are, quite frankly, edging them out of the ‘cool’ market with features that people actually care about – screen size, diversity, camera quality and user interface. In my opinion, it seems that with this launch, Apple has tried too hard to appeal to new markets – namely China – with its phone of many colours. In doing so, it sadly failed to listen to what its established base really wanted – admittedly, an Apple-branded Samsung Galaxy S4.

Hopefully, the iPhone 6 will see Apple take a bit more of a risk and shake things up from both a design and aesthetic perspective, and THAT will really be its last chance for me. Besides – and forgive me if my frustration is showing – everyone knows that the speed-bump ‘S’ launches don’t matter anyway.  

Wearable technology laid bare

By Mike King

No one can have failed to notice that wearable technology is being hyped as the new, new thing and with this week’s announcement of its Galaxy Gear smart watch, Samsung has added further fuel to the fire.

With the hype comes the customary industry clamour to jump on the wearable technology bandwagon but so far there’s been little beyond talk of Google Glass and interactive watches; innovative in their own right, but hardly the dawning of a new era.

Back in the real world, it is early days for mainstream wearable technology.   In spite of the huge levels of media interest and feeling that Google Glass has been around for ages (it was first mooted more than two years ago), you still can’t buy it.  Admittedly, Google Glass is currently being tested by a select number of early adopters and developers (people dubbed Glass Explorers) who each paid $1500 to get their hands on test versions of the product but the general launch isn’t expected to be until next year.

In true hyped technology fashion, head worn displays are nothing new; they’ve been used in a wide range of specialist areas from training to the military for a couple of decades.  A quick Google search for ‘optical head mounted displays’ will show just how many are out there. 

So what else falls into the wearable technology category to justify all this excitement?   Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of health and fitness related stuff such as the smart tooth that can monitor what you are eating and then make recommendations on ways to improve your health; the Airwaves pollution mask that shares information on pollution levels and advises people on which areas to avoid; and the Sensoria Sock that is designed to help reduce foot injuries by monitoring running style.  But, by far the most interesting has to be the Intimacy 2.0 smart dress, a dress that apparently becomes transparent when the wearer is aroused.  This is a product that’s been around for a couple of years (launched in 2011) and was clearly ahead of its time. 

What happened to the Intimacy 1.0 I’m not sure, presumably it contained some bugs that have been ironed out in the latest version but even with version 2.0 I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone trusting their dignity to wearable technology just yet.  It seems to me that this is a high risk product, fraught with potential calamities but maybe that is part of the appeal to some.  It certainly adds a new dimension to the need for adequate virus protection.