I would like to apologise for my reporting of the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the years they were together in government. Some said it was tittle tattle, others that it was speculation, a few dared to suggest that it was fabrication.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair I now accept that I made mistakes. Things were worse - much worse - than I reflected at the time.

via BBC - Nick Robinson's Newslog: Blair and Brown: An apology.

Nick Robinson then goes on to list the things he knew but couldn't tell us.

It's annoying that a BBC correspondent has withheld important information, but I assume if he did spill the beans at the time he'd lose access to important sources of information and would essentially be out of a job.

I do like after the fact revelations like this though.

I think they spread them out over the year now, but I use to like it when on New Years Day, the Government would release documents that were over 30 years old and no longer hidden by the officials secrets act. The BBC would have a TV show on that morning that covered the revelations along with the back story. The problem always occurred when the events they described happened over the course of 2 or more years. You'd have yourself a year-long cliffhanger on your hands.

But the fall of the Labour Government have brought about several after the fact revelations, and it hasn't taken 30 years to discover them.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”

via Email overload? Try Priority Inbox - Official Gmail Blog.

I like the new Priority Inbox feature in Gmail. It's got a pretty good grasp of which emails I consider important.

Admittedly though I don't really get enough email to have a need for it, and that's helped by the fact I tend to read my email through the day via my phone rather than check every time I'm at my home PC.

One thing Google might have misjudged (at least in terms of how I use Gmail) is the fact they consider the starred emails as 'todo' items: emails I need to action or read properly when I get the chance. The new priority email interface seems to be designed with that in mind.

However, I tend to use the stars more of a "I'm forever needing this email, so I'd just as well make it easy to find" kind of way. You know, login details. That sort of thing.

Radio 1 usually make a point of doing something different on bank holiday Mondays, and Virgin use to be the same.

I have fond memories of being stuck in a car off to a sea-side resort listening to a "Top 100 songs of all-time" like countdown on Radio 1. It's always a pleasure listening to Stairway to Heaven on national radio, knowing there are millions of others listening along.

In recent years Radio 1 have done the 12 hour take-over where listeners choose all the tracks. The music the listeners choose is rarely challenging, but if you're in the car with no DAB radio it's great to hear some variety on the radio. Tracks you long ago forgot.

Today BBC 6 Music are doing the same. Where as with Radio 1 it's nice to hear some old classics along with that 'shared' factor of others listening along, with 6 Music and it's listeners you can be sure that they have some genuinely decent music to suggest. Unknown songs by bands you've heard of but never got around to trying. It's making for a great soundtrack to the day.

• enable you to tag a photo with the names of the people in the photo
• likely know the date the photo was taken
• and in Facebook's case, they know the date of birth of the people being tagged

With that in mind, it would be neat if when you view the photo it optionally tells you the age of the people at the time the photo was taken.

I was going through photos of my son earlier and it would have been great to see how old he was at the time.

Of course, this feature would be subject to some kind of privacy control.

When you download it to your Android phone, it integrates AddThis sharing right into the phone’s native user experience. Simply long press any link on your device, touch “Share page” and AddThis will help you share to any of the ~300 social networks, online tools, and services that we support.

via AddThis Blog » Blog Archive » AddThis Android App Makes Mobile Sharing Easy.

The fact the Android_(operating_system) allows developers this sort of integration into the OS is what tempts me away from the iPhone. Developers simply can't provide this on iOS. This isn't me speaking as a developer but rather as an end-user. And in terms of being able to easily share, it doesn't help that it's a pain in the arse to create a bookmarklet too.

So I've set up a Tumblr blog. Hopefully the ease of which you can post with a Tumblr blog will mean I'll post more often about the little man.

Check it out here.

An obvious place to try this is with reference material. In the same way that Google Maps redefined the atlas and Wikipedia redefined the encyclopedia, a truly native mobile app can do a lot to improve on the "user interface" of a traditional reference book. Our first experiment with this is a mobile reference on HTML; rather than prepare a revision of the previous printed "pocket reference" format, we've created an innovative mobile app that makes it much quicker and easier to access practical information about specific HTML elements.

via A New Take on the "Pocket Reference" -- Public Beta of new O'Reilly Mobile HTML App - O'Reilly Labs.

I've just given this web app a try. The neat thing about it is it acts just like an iPhone app, and is nippy to boot. Given the choice of a web site or an app, I'd take the open web. But generally speaking web apps have a bit of catching up to do. This is a good start.

I also like the way the content is presented. Bonus points for the Elements by Task section.

However, with all that said, I don't really see a use for it from a reference point of view. The thing is, if I'm looking up HTML elements, there's a bloody good chance I'm going to be at a keyboard typing in some HTML. And given the choice of fiddling with my iPhone or performing a quick search in my desktop browser, the browser wins every time. For now you can't beat the desktop keyboard for input. Perhaps I'm being short-sighted here. Maybe with a bit of voice control it would be handy to have it appear on the little screen on my desk.

As I've stated a couple times, I use MobileRSS for my Google Reader client on the iPhone.

One of the features I like is the ability to add a page to Read it Later. However, to do this I have to open the page before I can mark it to read later.

This doesn't sound like much, but when you're on the train and signal is tweak, it can take up much of the journey opening the page. And if I'm reading a good post with lots of interesting links out (Nat Torkinson's Four Short Links series is an excellent example) then I can kiss goodbye to that journey. Not only that, but it interrupts your flow of reading the article.

What would be much better is to have the option of pressing and holding a link, and along with the option to 'Open' and 'Copy', you could also have the option to 'Read it Later'. It should be a simple feature to add, but a very useful one at that.

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I've just added a new page called Recommended iPhone Apps. Like the Recommended Podcasts page, I aim to try and keep it up to date.

To save you the click, I've included the page's content here:

HippoRemote

HippoRemote is an excellent app that allows you to control either your Windows, Mac or Linux PC with your iPhone. These apps are quite common already, but HippoRemote offers a couple features that make it more useful than most.

First off, it has profiles. Profiles are screen layouts created especially for certain apps. So the XBMC profile has buttons specifically created with XBMC in mind (eg. play, pause, volume, OSD etc) and the Firefox profile has buttons specifically created with Firefox in mind (eg. New Tab, Search, Find, New URL etc). This essentially creates a keyboard that adapts to the app you're using. This works well on the small screen of the iPhone, but I'd imagine it would work really well with an iPad.

The other feature I like is that when you switch profiles, it also switches the app on-screen. So I can easily switch between Boxee and XBMC with a couple taps.

It's not quite as convenient as actually having a mouse and keyboard (especially on an iPhone 3G where it takes a while to open) but if you already own an iOS device it's considerably cheaper and in some ways is better than a physical keyboard and mouse.

I use to it control the media PCs in the house. Both were created on a near enough £0 budget, so this £2.99 app was ideal.

MobileRSS

More than anything else, I use my iPhone to read my Google Reader RSS feeds. So trust me when I say I've tried a fair few. And of all those I've tried, MobileRSS is my personal favourite.

There are two things in particular that I like about MobileRSS:

1. Compared to others (with the exception of the buggy Byline), it syncs with Google Reader very quickly (ie. the content is there to read within a minute). When you've only got a 10 minute train ride to read your feeds, you don't want to be waiting 3-5 minutes for it sync and download the content you want to read.
2. It's got all the methods of sharing I need. And by that, I mean that I can easily share an article on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and via Email. I can also easily add the article to Read it Later.

I appreciate most RSS apps on the iPhone can do number 2, although the last time I checked only MobileRSS and Byline can sync so quickly as well.

TuneIn Radio

TuneIn Radio allows me to listen to BBC 6 Music when I'm out and about. As well as 6 Music, it has tons of other radio stations.

Read It Later

Read It Later is a bookmarking service for articles you don't have time to read, but you would like to read later. A similar service is InstaPaper.

Using a combination of bookmarklets (in Google Chrome, MobileSafari), a Firefox add-on and iPhone apps (eg. MobileRSS, Twitter for iPhone) whenever I see an article I'd like to read later, I can add it to Read It Later. I can then view that article at a later time using either the Read It Later iPhone app, or a web browser.

One of the things I like about Read It Later is that it tracks how far into the article you are. So if I get halfway through an article in Firefox, when I come to read it on my iPhone I can continue from where I left off.

National Rail

National Rail is a well designed app that among other things, allows me to see the status of my train. I especially like the 'Next Train Home' function when I'm out in Taunton for a drink after work.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based social networking site. When you visit a location, you open up Foursquare and 'check-in'. It then notes your location and assuming you have friends on Foursquare, they can see where you are.

I don't use the social aspects of this app (solely down to the fact I have no friends on there. Bridgwater, Som, UK isn't exactly "Silicon Valley", CA, USA), but I do use it just to keep a record of where I've been. I don't know why, but I like having a record of things I've done. That's why I use last.fm.

On a recent trip to London I made a point of checking in everywhere I went. I now have a reference of what I did in London. This might prove useful next time I'm up there and want to go into the same restaurant as last time.

I only use it for irregular places I visit though. So for example I don't 'check-in' to work every day.

IMDB

If I don't end up using IMDB whilst watching a film ("where have I seen that actor before?!"), I certainly use it at the end in order to view the film's trivia. Now I get to do it on the sofa, straight away.

iReddit

Reddit's Official iPhone App to view Reddit. A way for me to get a fix of geek content when I'm done with RSS and Twitter.

Hacker News

An unofficial Hacker News iPhone app to view Hacker News. A way for me to get a fix of geek content when I'm done with RSS, Twitter and Reddit.

To tell you the truth, I don't know which Hacker News app I downloaded. There are several out there. The fact it's simply called Hacker News on the iPhone homescreen doesn't help much either.

Football SC

Football SC offers up football scores provided by Sky Sports. Badly designed, but I get to view the scores at least.

Shazam

Let Shazam hear a track, and it tells you what it is. Sounds gimmicky but I use it a surprisingly often.

Amazon UK

The Amazon iPhone app provides a nice interface to make those impulse purchases on Amazon.

XBMC

XBMC Remote acts as a remote control for XBMC. Much like the Apple app Remote, which allows you to view and select from your iTunes Media Library on your iPhone and have it play on your PC, this does the same with XBMC. I find it to be an excellent way to choose and listen to music in the living room. It also has a remote profile similar to HippoRemote, allowing me to navigate the on-screen menu systems using my iPhone.

London Tube

I don't get to use this London Tube app much, but when I do I find it very useful.

The general routine is as follows:

1. We're up London and decide we want to go somewhere.
2. We find out where that 'somewhere' is using Google Maps for iPhone.
3. Once we've found it, we find the nearest Tube station to it using the map and also the nearest tube station to us.
4. Using this app (London Tube) I enter those two stations and it gives us the best route to get there.

I think it's possible to leave out the Google Maps step if you purchase an add-on. I've not looked into that though.

FindMeTV

FindMeTV is an app for TV listings. Other than to view listings without brining up the TV's on-screen display (and so avoiding annoying the wife), it's also useful for instructing our Sky+ box to record a show whilst we're out of the house - or if I'm feeling really lazy, just upstairs. Being able to record a show when you think of doing it rather than waiting until you get home and forget to do it is a great benefit.

The fact you can keyword search listings is also a great advantage over the TV's on-screen guide.

The 2 recommended podcasts added are:

The NSFW Podcast

As far as podcasts that make me laugh out load go, this one is tops. Hosted by Brian Brushwood and Justin Robert Young, it's essentially a podcast equivalent of 4Chan, but a much more pleasant one. In spite of the NSFW name, it's very much safe for work. However it does cut it close at times. Like 4Chan, it's quite capable of starting its own Internet Meme.

As dull as it sounds, usually every week they host a 'zany' game show of sorts. Although on occasions the gameshows can be a genuinely good idea, the bits I like is just the general banter between the hosts and the guests, and also the general Internet culture it's based around. This isn't a podcast I can stick on in the background as it's usually far to entertaining to ignore.

Framerate

Currently this TWiT produced podcast is only in 'beta'. As a result it's only available via YouTube.

Hosted by Brian Brushwood (of NSFW) and Tom Merrit (Tech News Today), the theme of the show is 'anything video'. This includes TV shows, movies and YouTube clips. Considering I don't watch many movies or US tv series, it's a credit to the two hosts that I find the show so interesting. Mind you, it helps that it's a show created with a geek-slant to it, with plenty of references to films and tv shows I have watched. It's also been good to see a show develop from it's very first alpha episode where they literally sat around and talked about what they're going to talk about in the show. Mmmm meta.