Howard Oakley

Colour coordination

by Howard Oakley on 18 May 2010 in Help

Your Mac’s built-in tools aren’t always the best way to test colour combinations. Sometimes, it’s better to rely on your instinct instead. It was probably Leonardo da Vinci who first proposed that red and green complemented one another, although French painter Roger de Piles later castigated such combinations as ugly. That dogma delayed the widespread [...]

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Unqualified opinion

by Howard Oakley on 18 May 2010 in Help

Universities are churning out students with computing degrees, but these mean little until a universal certification standard is introduced. The past couple of decades have seen an explosion in qualifications. Whereas degrees used to be the prerogative of the few, everyone now seems to have gone to university; even your postman may sport a degree [...]

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Back to Apple’s roots

by Howard Oakley on 18 May 2010 in Help

Apple has become a success by offering a diverse range of products, but it needs to remember its roots if it’s to continue its current renaissance. It seems that the days of the Renaissance man are long past, it being exceptional to find contemporary artists who are great all-rounders. Among the last to achieve greatness [...]

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iPad: British to the core

by Howard Oakley on 18 May 2010 in Help

With its key hardware components designed by UK companies Arm and Imagination, the iPad’s internals are as British as The Archers. Archers addicts, like my wife, will find multimode radios such as Pure’s Evoke Flow a source of eternal joy. Not only do they have a choice of traditional FM and novel DAB broadcasts, but [...]

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The iPad makes the ideal muse

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Poised between the iPod and notebooks, the iPad can bring a touch of magic to the eBook market by allowing access to a wide range of content. One of the trickiest calls in painting is deciding how much detail to render. Paint outdoors and this determines whether you take an hour or a few weeks. [...]

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The end of the world is IT

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

There’s no escaping technology’s impact on our planet, so it’s about time the computer industry stopped its excessive resource consumption. As visual artists started to record their travels through scenery made dramatic by nature or man, so they rendered some into visions of the Apocalypse. Gone were the disturbingly grisly scenes of torment detailed by [...]

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