PC Pro June 2021

IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE the editor of a technology magazine wanting to write a column about how astonishingly rapid the growth of computing has been. Imagine you’re looking for an opening line for said column. Imagine that you want to confirm when the first computer was built, and think that asking your smart speaker might be the perfect illustration of technology’s rapid rise… Me: “Alexa, when did computers begin?” Echo: “Here’s something I found on the web. According to lsuagcenter.com: The LSU AgCenter expert says most researchers recommend that children begin using the computer at age four.” Maybe I phrased that badly. Let’s try again… Me: “Alexa, when did computing begin?” Echo: “I know about 837 film noirs, including Sunset Boulevard, which was released on 10 August 1950.” A bit bizarre, but okay. It’s clearly my fault…

James O’Malley In this month’s PC Probe, James investigates whether Google might just be losing its grip on the mobile web as rivals to AMP emerge. Turn to p12 to find out more Barry Collins Whether it’s photos or Facebook accounts, we all have digital belongings that we’d like to pass on to loved ones when we die. Barry explains how to create a digital will on p26 Abadesi Osunsade Language matters, explains Abadesi, and that includes terms such as blacklist and master/slave that we use so naturally in IT. So what can we all do about it? Find out on p32 Athina England Athina, this month’s guest RWC columnist, explains why she found being an IT apprentice so useful and what apprenticeships have to offer employers today. See p116…

It’s now been six months since Apple shook up the personal computing world with its own processors. The launch of the M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini was a dramatic moment for the company because it marked the transition away from Intel’s chip architecture and on to silicon of Apple’s own design, based on the ARM chipset. In other words: all existing software written for the Mac will no longer run natively on any new Mac that Apple releases. This means that if developers want their software to work on the new machines, they will ultimately have to rebuild them for the new architecture. So, half a year on, we think it’s time to check in and see how the transition is going. The PowerPC principle When Apple made a similar transition…

For five days in February, people in Australia experienced a version of Facebook that many may wish they could keep: all of the news had disappeared. Following a dispute with the Australian government over a proposed new law that would see tech giants paying a fee to link to news stories, Facebook pulled the plug on news. The blockade was expansive, hiding posts from Australian news outlets, and preventing Australians from linking to stories – even those from international outlets. It was one heck of a way to make a point. It was, however, a fight that the Australian government appears to have won. By mid-March, both Facebook and Google, the two companies targeted by the “News Media Bargaining Code”, had signed licensing deals with the major news publishers in Australia, exactly…

You can see from the two screengrabs, taken from our sister site itpro.co.uk, the difference AMP makes to the mobile web-browsing experience. On the full desktop web page, a large banner ad appears at the top of the page, a second prominent advertisement runs in the right-hand column and a pop-up video appears over page content. The reader has to scroll down before they can read any of the story, even on a full-size desktop screen. On the AMP page, the ads are gone (although limited AMP ads are permitted), the overlays are not permitted and the content is readable without scrolling. Further differences are evident as you scroll further through the story too (not shown here). For example, tweets that are embedded in the desktop version of the story show only as…

The mobile web can be frustrating. Click a link to that article you’d like to read and you might find the page takes ages to load because of all of the junk. There are cookie consent boxes, auto-playing videos, obnoxious banner adverts and images that resize at random when they finish loading, sending the text you’ve started reading flying off the screen. In 2015, Facebook and Apple both hit upon similar solutions to this problem. They turned news articles into app-like experiences. Apple launched the Apple News app and Facebook had “Instant Articles” built inside of its main app. Both led to something similar: news articles with all of the gunk stripped away. They loaded up instantly, scrolling was smooth and they made reading more pleasurable. But not everyone was happy with…