I have been writing FishNet every week, more or less without a break, since July 2006. I’ll certainly miss doing it, but I have to admit that a rest from the relentless weekly deadlines will be most welcome

Why not say au revoir by leaving a comment below?

It was held this year from 6-9 January and was truly remarkable for the fact that, although open only to the trade and media, it is still attracted 140,000 visitors.

Represented were something like 2800 technology companies who, between them, launched over 20,000 new products to tempt an unsuspecting public.

There were mobile phones, photographic products of every description, home entertainment, in-car technology, gaming products and all manner of other gadgets, including robots and fitness monitors.

One thing that all the many commentators mention was the huge number of tablet computers which were launched by various manufacturers to compete with Apple’s game-changing iPad.

Tablets are small lightweight devices, mostly with touch screens and without keyboards, which can be used for many computing tasks but will probably the most popular for reading books, playing games, watching movies or listening to music.

Rumours that Apple would launch a tablet computer were in circulation long before the launch in April, 2010, but other manufacturers were obviously not convinced that tablets would be all that popular with the public.

Talk about getting things spectacularly wrong because Fortune magazine estimated that, in the first six months, Apple probably sold 8.5 million of the things. Sales have been so good, in fact, that they have not even reached these shores yet.

Other manufacturers soon noticed their their success and began to rush to get their own product out the door. I’ve seen various estimates about the number of tablets launched at CES, ranging anywhere between 50 and 100.

Some of these new products have already shipped but a number were merely announced at the show, with others expected to be available for sale sometime in the future.

Some of these, notably in the Motorola Xoom, did attract enthusiastic responses from those who saw them, but we’ll have to wait and see what impression that they make in the market.

I personally think that the manufacturers have not reacted quickly enough and have allowed Apple to gain a market-leading position, just like they did with their iPod music players.

There are, of course, plenty of different brands of portable music player including many which work out way cheaper than the fashionable Apples, but the majority of users still want an iPod if they possibly afford one.

I have mentioned that iPads have not been on sale in South Africa but quite a few, bought in the USA, have found their way here and a friend brought one along, the last time we met for coffee.

The thing is that these devices are actually incredible and I have to say that I couldn’t believe how good the graphics were in the games that I was shown. These included the hugely-popular Angry Birds and a motor rally game.

The iPad touchscreen was fantastic to use and the number of programs, or apps, which are available for it, is massive. I defy any geek to see an iPad and not want one and, by the looks of things, a huge number of other people agree.

One potential snag for local users is that music and some apps, including all games, are not available from the South African version of the Apple iTunes Store. There are ways around this which are described here and here.

__________________

Breaking News

I learnt after we went to press, that the iPad was to be launched in South Africa at a very competitive price.  The 3G version with 64Gb of RAM has a recommended retail price of R7599 ,which compares very favourably with the $829 they cost in the US. iPads were to be in stores including Apple iStores, and some Incredible Connection and Dion Wired branches, by Friday, 28 January.

There doesn’t seem to be any accounting for taste.

This picture is now the second most viewed on my Flickr photostream. There are plenty of my pictures which I feel are much more worthy but, instead, a vintage Coke sign attracts much more attention?? Worse news is that my most-viewed picture is a Coke vendor.

The program, FastStone Image Viewer, has been mentioned in these columns before and is available from the website FastStone.org. I use it every day even though I own copies of Photoshop and Lightroom, because it is the quickest way I know to look through a lot of digital pictures.

The new version, 4.3, hasn’t changed much as far as the interface goes, but it has a lot of new features which make it even more useful.

Previous versions did allow you to change the exposure of a picture but, to my eye at least, the results always looked a bit flat. This new version has a number of new tools including Levels and Curves adjustments which allow you very precise control over exposure and contrast.

There is also a new Adjust Lighting feature which is similar to the shadows and highlights adjustment in other programs, and which lets you lighten dark shadows and darken blown-out highlights, without affecting the rest of the picture.

There are new clone stamp and healing brush tools in the package which allow you to remove imperfections like dust spots or zits from your pictures. I was particularly impressed with the healing brush which blends into the background so well that it is often impossible to tell that it has been used at all.

FastStone is a remarkable program which has such a wide range of capabilities that it could be useful to anyone dealing with digital images. It is likely to appeal equally to enthusiasts, professionals, or even newbies looking for an easy all-in-one imaging program.

It can basically take care of just about any task including downloading pictures from a camera or memory card, viewing just about any type of image, including many different Raw file formats, and fix images and apply a choice of special effects, including text, lines and shapes.

In addition, the program makes it easy to crop pictures, e-mail them, print them and can even import pictures from a scanner. It can be used to create image strips out of a number of pictures or create a decent slide show including any number of pictures that you care to select.

I must confess that I don’t often use the image adjustment features in FastStone but I do use it as a viewer to select the pictures that I am going to work on in other programs. Another feature that I commonly use is batch processing which, I find, is a lot quicker to use than the equivalent in Photoshop.

I often need to produce small thumbnail pictures for display on the web and FastStone makes it very easy to select some pictures and produce thumbnails in the size I need. You can also use the feature for a number of other things including adding borders and copyright notices to multiple pictures.

I also like the way FastStone remembers the locations where you have copied or moved pictures and then allows you to repeat the operation with a keystroke or two.

Keen digital snappers may eventually need other software tools to work alongside FastStone, to create panoramas, HDR pictures, or to make composites of more than one picture, for example, but it would be an excellent starting point for just about anyone.

It is not a heavyweight image manipulation program but more than makes up for that in being simple, easy-to-use and fast. At the moment, I can really only think of one area where I would like to see an improvement, and that is the ability to burn selected images to CD or DVD discs for backup or to take to a minilab for printing.

Take mobile phones for example. They have been a blessing in so many ways, allowing you to phone someone in an emergency or when you are lost.

They have been even more of a boon in the South African context because they are the means of communication for the many who have no access to fixed-line telephones.

The trouble with them, however, is that many people don’t keep them for emergencies, but use them to share with their list of contacts, every random and inconsequential thought that enters their heads.

It’s bad when you get people in public places sharing every banal detail of their lives in piercing voices and even worse when you’re in company and someone starts checking messages or answering calls on their mobile, without a by-your-leave.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I think that’s pretty impolite. In the past, it was expected that, when talking to someone, you gave them your full attention.**

It would not have been considered okay to get up and walk off for five or 10 minutes without a word of explanation. Yet it now happens all the time when people answer their phone and walk off to find a quiet place in the shopping centre, to talk.

Even worse, is when they have their chat there and then at the table, leaving the rest of the party staring into space, in boredom or with some embarrassment, depending on how intimate the conversation gets.

I have never tried this, but I have wondered what would go through the phoning person’s mind if everyone else carried on talking loudly amongst themselves. They’d probably think their friends had no consideration for them.

Mobile phones are relatively new but I think it’s high time a consensus began to emerge about what is considered polite and what is not. I think it would be a considerable improvement if we only used our phones when alone or, if in company and unavoidable, we made our excuses first and kept conversation to the absolute minimum.

Another gripe I have with mobile phones is that they do make their users contactable all the time and have thereby cut into many people’s relaxation and leisure time.

One friend had the right idea and religiously switched off his phone outside working hours. It would probably be even better to have a private and a business number on the same phone so that you could ignore the business one after hours, but still be contactable by friends and family.

The last thing about mobiles that worries me, is their use while driving motor car cars. A scary experience recently has left me with the feeling that it really is better not to use my phone while driving.

I’m not sure that a hands-free kit is a viable option either. It’s not holding the phone that kills you; plenty of people drive one-handed on a regular basis, and are used to it.

What actually can kill you is concentrating too much on talking and not enough on piloting yourself safely through traffic.

I heard a suggestion from a panellist on the Buzz Out Loud technology podcast, which made perfect sense to me. It was suggested that the solution would be a phone that knows when you’re driving, and doesn’t distract you by beeping or ringing.

Such a system would be able to automatically reply to your text messages and calls along the lines of; "Hello, I’m driving and don’t feel like dying today! I’ll call you later."

I haven’t even got to the long-term effects on society when people get so used to interacting with each other on online social networks, accessed via their phones, that they forget how to get on with real people, but I’ll save that for another day.

___________________________

** Maybe I’m wrong in believing that politeness is important or, even, desirable, but I don’t think so. In my view, a society whose members have no consideration for each and are concerned only with gratifying themselves, will not be a society for too long.

Most columnists get to this point sooner or later, and usually plug the gap by writing a column about how they got into that situation. It’s a noble tradition and whom am I to change it.

The thing is that I had been planning to install and review a free new operating system, Jolicloud, but when I sat down at the usual time of the week to do this column, Jolicloud stubbornly refused to start.

I had taken a look at the browser-based version of Jolicloud and was interested enough to download the 700 Mb installation file. Making very sure that I chose the version which can work in tandem with Windows on an existing machine, the file downloaded quickly enough over Cell C’s broadband service.

The installation went smoothly even though I read one of the messages that came up, as ‘scamming the hard drive’, which gave me an instant vision of a tiny confidence trickster swindling my hard drive out of its retirement fund.

Jolicloud installed itself in such a way that I could choose to boot into it or Windows, when I switched the machine on. The first time, I chose the Jolicloud option, I got a nice welcome screen to look at. That was quite promising but less promising, was the next message which came up saying that a particular folder did not exist, and that Jolicloud was ‘dropping to a shell’.

The next thing to appear was a text-only DOS prompt with a very cryptic single Help paragraph detailing commands that I could type in at that point.

It made me realise just how much easier and more reliable computing has become in the last few years. In the past, we often had to delve into our computers’ innards and tinker for hours before they’d run again.

Anyone who has had an IRQ conflict on their computer, such as when they tried to install a new device, like a modem or a printer, will know what I’m talking about.

With new hardware and operating systems that have got really smooth and refined, this sort of thing happens rarely enough to be surprising and, if you’re trying to write a column at the time, very inconvenient.

The experience also underlined the change that has come over me. In the past, as an eager wide-eyed young computer enthusiast, I would have seen a failed software installation as a challenge.

Now, my first thought was "To hell with that! Where’s the uninstall button?" Life is just too short to get involved in unnecessary battles.

The trouble with Jolicloud and other alternative operating systems, I think, is that there are so many different computer environments where they might be installed. It takes lots of money and R&D to produce and refine an OS so that it will work in the majority of situations.

I can imagine that Jolicloud would work perfectly on hardware, like Jolibook netbooks, sold by the company. As my experience shows, however, there will be machines and setups where it just won’t work.

Google’s Chrome OS is on its way and I predict that it will be a better bet in the free OS stakes, if only because the company has huge resources to put into making it more bullet-proof.

One of the surprises waiting for me over the festive season was the arrival of Cell C’s fast and affordable Internet service in my remote neck of the woods.

I had been to the launch last year and had been very disappointed to find that there was no signal yet at my home in Waterfall.

Sometime between the launch and Christmas, it did finally arrive as I found in an idle moment when I plugged the modem into my netbook and found I was connecting to the Internet at hitherto undreamed of speeds.

One of my first acts was to download a 700+ Mb file and I was delighted (a bit of an understatement) to see it arriving on the netbook at speeds of between 3 and 5 Mbps. And me used to my paltry 384 kbps ADSL connection!

The arrival of the Seacom undersea cable, the subsequent bandwidth price war between ISPs, and the Cell C launch means that the time is coming when South Africans are really going to be able to participate in a truly meaningful way in the Internet revolution.

One development in that revolution, launched late last year, and which is going to make a great deal of difference around the world, is Google’s Chrome OS. It is a free operating system for netbooks which is designed to allow people to to access all manner of online applications and services in a quick and easy way.

It looks and behaves pretty much like an Internet browser and has the benefit that its small size will make it much quicker for users to switch their computers on and get on with whatever it was they were wanting to do.

There was quite a lot of hype and discussion about the new OS but I discovered that a competitor had already arrived on the scene, before the Google launch.

Jolicloud (jolicloud.com) was born for the web, according to the website, and is also a free operating system which works along the same lines as Chrome OS.

It has the even more ambitious aim of bringing a decent competing experience within the reach of people who can’t afford new computers, expensive operating systems and applications.

It is relatively small and designed to work on old low-powered computers to make it easy for their users to connect to the Internet and use a huge variety of online applications and services.

It is available for download for free from the Jolicloud website and can be installed on a computer without an operating system or alongside an existing operating system. In that case, the user can choose to use it or the original OS and applications that were on the machine.

Jolicloud will also power new low-cost netbook computers and, in fact, the first of these Jolibooks has already been launched. It can be viewed on the Jolicloud website and I must say it looks as cute as a bug.

I will be installing Jolicloud on my machine and, next week, I’ll report back on it in greater detail.

Top of my list is will be Apple’s iPad tablet computer which, it is rumoured, is probably going be updated soon.

It has been an absolute game changer in the mobile computing space and Apple has sold  many millions of them in a very short space of time. Most other manufacturers are attempting to compete, and some have even launched products, but I don’t believe that anyone has yet achieved the level of coolness that Apple has.

People are using iPads for all sorts of things including browsing the Internet, listening to music and watching video and even as a work tool for displaying portfolio pictures, taking notes at meetings and many more tasks. I want one badly.

The latest version of the iPad operating system, iOS 4.2, which applies to the iPhone and iPod touch as well, offers a new facility known as AirPlay. It sounds great and allows you to stream music and video wirelessly from your Apple device to any AirPlay-enabled video or music system.

What this means is that entertainment content can be easily transmitted from the device in your pocket and played on any compatible television set, music centre or external speaker. I can see AirPlay in my future, that’s for sure.

Another technology that has recently arrived in South Africa is called Powermat and it is able to charge electronic devices without the need to plug them in. All you do is place the device on the Powermat and exactly the right amount of power is transmitted to it, via the mysterious process of induction.

It sounds like witchcraft, but it’s apparently true and you can get a Powermat that can charge two devices at a time for $99.95. There are also a selection of receivers which you attach to your devices to enable induction charging.

There is also a power cube available, with a selection of pins on it, that will allow you to charge a wide variety of devices that do not have dedicated Powermat receivers. The technology has arrived in South Africa, but so recently that it does not yet feature on the importer’s own website.

Another technology which I’ve noticed and which will probably come into its own next year is solid-state drive (SSD) devices. These are essentially hard drives without moving parts.

They are still pretty expensive but are significantly faster than conventional hard drives and, because they have no moving parts, are going to be much less prone to failure as well.

Western Digital SSDs are already available in South Africa and the recommended price for a 64 GB drive and the associated kit to upgrade an existing computer is R 1499.

The prices will certainly come down as more of these things are produced and it may soon become common practice to have one in your computer to store its programs and operating system, a step which would significantly improve the computer’s performance.

Those two sound like great cameras and aimed at squarely at enthusiasts, with price tags to match, but there are still very good buys to be made for a lot less money.

Still very capable, are the Nikon D 3100 and Canon 500D models which are often available around town in bundles, which offer great value. You’ll often get the camera, a bag, a memory card and a second lens for between R7000 and R8000.

Point-and-shoot cameras are also popular gifts with happy snappers and professionals alike, because they are relatively compact and, although they don’t offer quite the same image quality as a DSLR does, they will produce pretty good pictures.

The number of compact is available is so huge and they are updated so frequently that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to keep track of them. The trick here is to pick a well-known brand and buy the best model you can afford.

I do not have a compact myself but I have been hankering after Canon’s new G12, released a couple of months ago. I have also heard good things about the Panasonic cameras and slightly less good things about Nikon, although their latest P 7000 looks very promising.

Blogger Thom Hogan has just completed a review of some compact cameras on his bythom.com blog, and this may help in choosing one. I’ll include a link to the review page on my blog, address at the end of this article.

I mentioned Amazon earlier and they will also be the source of the next gift on my list, which is a recently-released CD which covers the early recordings of Elvis Presley at Sun Studio.

Elvis: Rockabilly Years’>Rockabilly Years: Just About As Good As It Gets, at £7.99, includes all the material recorded by Elvis at the legendary studio and, as a bonus, there are a couple of tracks recorded during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session when Elvis played along with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.

I’ve been getting into early rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly and Amazon has an extremely good selection of music and books. I recently bought A Rocket In My Pocket: The A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music">Hipsters Guide to Rockabilly, by Max Décharné.

It covers the origins of rockabilly including a substantial section on Sam Phillips, the studio owner who gave Elvis his break, and his Sun Studio. There is a companion soundtrack CD’>companion soundtrack CD to the book, and I got that too.

Talking about music, and not just rock ‘n’ roll, buying music online is the new big thing and, although Apple’s iTunes music store is not available to South Africans, Nokia’s Ovi store is.

I have bought some music from it and have found that the selection is great and the pricing quite reasonable. You do get unlimited music downloads included with some Nokia phones but I prefer to pay for the music I want because I can then play it on any device that I wish to.

The bonus is that the system keeps a list of the tracks you buy and, should these ever be lost, you can sign in to the store and go to the account section, where you can download them again.

While looking around at the South African online store, Kalahari.net, I found what for me must be the most unlikely gift of all. It is a Harley-Davidson pen and goes for a staggering R1995 although, at the price of the bikes themselves, that is a mere bagatelle.

Me being me, however, my first move was certainly not to try and find parking at a busy shopping centre but instead, to fire up my trusty browser and go out onto the web to see what I could find.

My first stop was almost my last when I visited South African shopping site wantitall.co.za to look for a new memory card for my digital camera and nearly gave it up in disgust. They had a 4 GB Kingston memory card on offer for the special price of R230, marked down from the ‘normal’ retail price of R480.

Now, I don’t know what planet these guys have been living on but, when I went to the B&H Photo Video’s website, I discovered the same card on sale for just over R 50.

From previous experience, I know that their delivery time is also about a week, so the choice of retailer for that particular gift is a definite no-brainer. I have said it before, often, but it bears repeating that South African retailers really do need to revise their business models.

I know this is a technology related column but I visited the Makro website and found that, at the time of writing, the small Weber kettle braai was on sale for less than R1000. I’ve been meaning to get one of those for ages because you can’t beat chicken and roasts cooked in them.

Maybe this year, Santa Claus will be kind to me.

My major Christmas present this year is Photoshop CS5 which I bought from the Adobe.com online store and downloaded. I have been promising myself a copy of Photoshop for years and I finally went ahead and did it even though, a month or two later, my wallet is still feeling the strain.

It is genuinely the best image manipulation program available and I recommend it unreservedly for anyone who needs (or wants) the power it offers. You do have to be fairly committed to go through its steep learning curve but the benefits are great.

Adobe also offers the extremely good Photoshop Elements program which is as much as the average digital photography enthusiast will ever need and, although there is still quite a bit to using it, it’s basic and guided-edit modes make it a lot easier to pick up and start using quickly.

Photo books you design yourself and have printed and bound make great gifts for family and friends. There are a couple of suppliers operating locally including www.myphotobook.co.za and burble.co.za.

Both offer free software which can be downloaded from their websites and both offer books and a number of other products, such as postcards, which you can create using your pictures.

The gift that really caught my eye this year and which I predict I’ll be giving to myself in the reasonably near future, is Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. The 3G version is available from Amazon.com at $189 and I have heard its owners recommending the $59.99 leather cover with a built-in light that you can use to read it at night.

Not only can you buy a huge range of books from Amazon, but you can also subscribe to a number of publications that are automatically delivered to your Kindle via the 3G mobile network. The Kindle can also be used as a basic web browser, using either the built in WiFi or 3G facility, and it doesn’t cost any extra.

Me being me again, my gift list would not be complete without at least a few cameras on it. I am a Nikon shooter and they have just released a new model in the form of the D7000, which falls at the upper end of the enthusiast bracket.

I have downloaded pictures taken with this camera and I have been amazed at how good its performance is in low light. My current D90 is a fine camera but the D7000 blows it away in low light.

Replacing the D90 is now on my list of things to do because I am very fond of shooting at musical gigs where poor lighting is the norm, rather than the exception.

Canon has also launched a new model, the 60D, and it is apparently also extremely capable and the perfect choice for someone looking for an enthusiast-grade Canon DSLR.

Continued next time.