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August, 2008

  1. Less grammar. More driving pleasure.

    August 24, 2008 by dafyd

    I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:

    Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.

    That said, Fowler says that

    less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100

    In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.

    The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…

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  2. iPhone wishlist

    August 10, 2008 by dafyd

    I’ve had my shiny new iPhone 3G for four weeks now, and while I love everything about it, I can’t help but feel that there’s more that it could be doing…

    Fortunately, Apple has enabled users of the iPhone to download additional applications for the phone through the App Store, which works very much like the iTunes Music Store, except that instead of downloading music you’re downloading full-blown programmes to provide extra functionality.

    Of the dozen-or-so that I’ve downloaded so far, the Facebook app is probably the one I use most, providing (almost) all the functionality of the website in a quick, shiny, touch-optimised interface. The Google app ties in nicely with the GPS functions of the phone to keep search results relevant to where you are (a search for “pizza” finds your nearest takeaway), for example. NetNewsWire does exactly what the Mac application does (or it did, until the latest iPhone firmware update killed it – a fix is in the pipeline).

    I love the Apple Remote app, which lets me control iTunes on my Mac/PC from anywhere in the house. Last.fm provides me with a huge number of streaming songs, based on my listening history, with which to supplement my iPod playlists. Shazam does what it has been doing for years, identifying music based on a few seconds of it – perfect for pub quizzes…! The TubeStatus app will doubtless come in useful the next time I’m in London.

    Did I mention that all of these apps were free? There are, of course, others that cost, including a few fairly decent games, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. Almost.

    I can think of a few things I’d like my iPhone to do for me that it doesn’t at the moment:

    • Flight tracking. There’s a Dashboard Widget to do it, so why is there no iPhone app to track planes?
    • Trains. A National Rail arrivals/departures app, based on the live National Rail data. Surely this can’t be too complicated?
    • TV listings. The Radio Times listings data is perfect for an iPhone app, isn’t it?
    • SlingPlayer. Apparently this is coming. It will be awesome.
    • BBC Radio. The new iPlayer is very flair, but because it wraps the Now Playing/Listen Again streams in Flash, they don’t work on the iPhone. I’d love for the Beeb to develop a nice touch-friendly interface for Listen Again, so I never have to miss The Archers… They’ve done it (sort of) for the Podcasts.

    If any of these already exist in the App Store and I’ve missed them, feel free to point me in their direction…

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  3. Britain From Above

    August 10, 2008 by dafyd

    Also, now that the BBC has its embeddable media player working, any chance of embedding full iPlayer programmes on external sites? Can’t be long…

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