Giles Turnbull

Biography

Giles Turnbull has been a professional journalist and writer since 1995, and freelance since 2000. His main areas of interest include computing, Mac OS X, cyberculture, web applications, productivity, low-cost computing, gadgets, digital photography, parenting, environmentalism, science, and the weather. He lives in the beautiful town of Bradford on Avon, England, with his wife and son. He has a web site at http://gilest.org.

Books

Your Life in Web Apps
by Giles Turnbull
June 2006
$5.99 USD

Articles

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The Good Easy on OS X
Publish Date: Jul. 25, 2007Giles Turnbull examines Mark Hurst's "Good Easy" productivity tools and methods for Macs. Giles spoke with the author of "Bit Literacy" about his philosophy and choices for simplifying computing. Indie Mac Development in the UK
Publish Date: May. 25, 2007Giles Turnbull interviews a group of UK-based indie developers to ask them a little about their lives, how they stay in touch with Apple, and why international exchange rates make such a difference to them. Introducing Google Desktop for Mac
Publish Date: Apr. 9, 2007Giles Turnbull takes an in-depth look at Google Desktop for the Mac, putting the recently released OS X version of Google's desktop search product through its paces. Learn what Google Desktop can do for you, how it does it, and why it needs to install itself with high-level permissions on your system. Peter Green's Modded Macs
Publish Date: Nov. 21, 2006Giles Turnbull recently visited hardware hacker and composer Peter Green to check out his homemade Mac laptop and tablet computers. Learn what inspires Green and how he made these machines, along with images and video of these inventive Mac mods. Text Tricks and More Text Tricks
Publish Date: Oct. 10, 2006We've covered text editors here before. We know, from various posts at the Mac DevCenter blog, that our readers are often as fanatical about using plain text as we are. Tips on using your editor of choice are easy to find, but we thought it would be fun to gather a whole bunch of them together for the first time; not only to spread the word, but to invite our readers to add their own tips and time-savers. We've also asked a handful of Mac users to contribute their own favorite text tricks. Email Protocols: Where Do We Go Now?
Publish Date: Aug. 29, 2006Having established that email has a complicated history, tends to drive people crazy, has had entire books written about keeping it under control, and is broken beyond all repair for some people, let's try to work out what we can do--practically speaking--to make using it less of a hassle. Giles Turnbull explores our state of email and provides a few glimmers of where we may be headed. So Del.icio.us! Intelligent Tagging for the Mac User
Publish Date: Jul. 18, 2006It's time to learn about del.icio.us, a glorious, minimalist, tag-tastic bookmarks database. It was designed to be a "large-scale outboard memory," with added sharing smarts. It works like this: you take all your digital stuff and throw it into your del.icio.us account. Thanks to tagging and searching, you can find your stuff easily later. And you can find other people's stuff, too. Giles Turnbull shows you how. Photoshop Elements 4 for the Mac: Worth the Wait?
Publish Date: May. 16, 2006There was a minor uproar in the Mac community when Photoshop Elements 4 was released for Windows with no Mac version in sight. But Adobe has rectified the situation with a stellar release of Elements for OS X. Giles Turnbull takes you on a tour of its highlights. Mac FTP: A Guided Tour
Publish Date: Apr. 13, 2006(S)FTP has a valuable place in the hearts of web builders and developers, and is still one of the most practical methods of getting files from one place to another in a secure manner. In this article, Giles Turnbull surveys six FTP clients for the Mac platform and shows you the major characteristics of each. Mac OS X Website Builder Face-Off
Publish Date: Mar. 8, 2006You may be a web expert, but surely everyone you know isn't. What tools do you recommend to others? And, what would you use for those quick sites that you don't want to code from scratch? Giles Turnbull compares three potent offerings: iWeb, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver. The results are surprising. What's New in iWork '06?
Publish Date: Feb. 22, 2006iWork's tandem offering of Pages and Keynote provides a useful collection of tools for presentations, word processing, and layout. But how much has changed since last year's debut? Giles Turnbull walks you through Pages 2 and Keynote 3 to help decide if this upgrade is for you. Tweaking iTunes
Publish Date: Jan. 31, 2006Our favorite music app, iTunes is much more than a player. It's Apple's representative to the non-Mac world, a focal point for Apple's growing media empire, and a pioneering combination of desktop application and online service. With all that in mind, let's ask ourselves: how can we mess around with iTunes? Giles Turnbull shows you how. Mac Users and the Macs They Use
Publish Date: Dec. 28, 2005When you read the articles and weblog posts by prominent Mac users and Mac pundits, do you ever find yourself wondering what kind of computer setup they're using? Giles Turnbull does. He recently contacted a spat of Mac professionals and asked them what they depend on. Here's what they had to say. A Look at Keychain Access (and Why You Should Care)
Publish Date: Dec. 16, 2005Introduced in Mac OS 9, Keychain Access is an API and an application designed to provide secure storage for all your sensitive information. It has continued to evolve in Mac OS X, and Giles Turnbull helps you unlock its mysteries. New Palm TX Forced Me to Address Mac Sync Options
Publish Date: Dec. 9, 2005Palm devices were once the model of simplicity for Mac users. Giles Turnbull, late-'90s PDA geek, picked up a new Palm TX after a lengthy mobile device hiatus. But he soon discovered that syncing feeling that accompanies Palm/OS X connectivity these days. Here's his report.

Blog

An untimely obituary for the Mac mini?

July 26 2007

Dan Knight at Low End Mac has written an obituary for the Mac mini, basing his assumption of its death on the lack of updates since September 2006. Dan’s theory boils down to this: If Apple still considered the Mac mini a viable model, at the very least they would have… read more

Get Time Machine right now with TimeDrawer

July 25 2007

Introducing TimeDrawer… One Leopard feature that a lot of people are looking forward to is Time Machine. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start using it right now? If your answer’s “yes”, you might be interested in TimeDrawer. As you might be able to tell from the name, it’s an application… read more

Monday links

July 23 2007

Film Roll 1.0 is a bunch of little Finder plug-ins useful for manipulating photos in situ. Nokia Media Transfer 1.0 beta lets you move stuff from your Mac to your Nokia. It’s a 1.0 and it’s a beta, clever. TabletDraw claims to let you “draw like you draw”. What’s Narc? “narc is a… read more

Going Dockless

July 18 2007

From MacJournals, Let’s make it “Understand the Dock Day” instead: Yet from the first public descriptions of “Mac OS X” from Apple, the company has made it clear that the Dock is not optional and not replaceable. It’s a poor amalgamation of a program launcher, status center, and application menu/switcher–but… read more

Subliminally yours

July 18 2007

Here’s the weird-download-of-the-day: Subliminal Message lets you create custom subliminal text or image blipverts that will flash up on your screen - so fast you can hardly see them - at user-defined intervals. Just why would you want that to happen? Good question. Let me know if you have a good… read more

Life on Mars

July 16 2007

Bloggers rejoice, because Daniel Jalkut has offered up a sneak peek at the forthcoming Mars Edit 2 release, and very nice it looks too. New stuff to spot (in both the post and the comments that follow it): bye bye drawers, hello sidebars; a new markup selector (for Markdown goodness and… read more

It ain't what you touch, it's the way that you touch it

July 16 2007

Craig Hockenberry makes some excellent points about the possibilities and pitfalls of using multi-touch technology on a desktop computer: The iPhone’s multi-touch UI works similarly: if you watch people use it, I think you’ll see a lot more people working at waist level than at chest level. The only time… read more

iPhone's missing todos

July 10 2007

Question: Why did Apple not make iCal todos synch with the iPhone? My first reaction on hearing about this problem was astonishment. I couldn’t understand it - if they went to all the trouble to make sure the event data was used, why not go that final step further to get… read more

Opera takes a swipe at PC-Mac ads

July 10 2007

Opera, makers of fine cross-platform browsing software, are so proud of their new Opera Mini beta that they’ve made a (not very funny, unfortunately) Apple-baiting “PC and Mac” style video ad. The idea, it seems, is to point out how much more widely available Opera is, and how free it is… read more

The state of Mac email

July 10 2007

Brent Simmons strikes a chord with his summary of Mac email software failings: Email is, or ought to be, a keyboard thing–it’s about reading and writing. I’m not drawing anything or applying gradients or moving shapes around–I should be able to set the mouse aside. Since getting an iPhone, complete… read more

O2 wins UK iPhone contract?

July 10 2007

O2 has won the rights to sell Apple’s iPhone in the UK, according to a report in The Times. The story says: Apple’s agreement with O2 is thought to include a continuing share of the revenues generated by each iPhone customer. O2 ’s network will also have to be specially configured… read more

Tuesday links

July 10 2007

The most startling part of Engadget’s iPhone review: We expected that if you’re an email user, when you plug in your iPhone and iTunes says it’s “syncing your mail accounts,” that means it’s actually comparing and moving messages between the device and Mail.app. Not so. In fact, the iPhone does… read more

iPhone: unlimited data

June 26 2007

Thank goodness Apple made the right choice on this one. In all price plans available for a new iPhone, the data usage is unlimited. The data price for the iPhone was crucial; a device so dependent on data had to offer a data price plan that was reasonable. There’d have… read more

iPhrenzy

June 26 2007

The iPhone launch hype is gathering momentum, and with the hype comes a frenzy of excess, hyperbole and silliness. Is Apple guilty of raising expectations beyond the norm? Some say it is: Even for a company that’s mastered the art of product-launch hype, Apple Inc. has propelled iPhone hysteria into the… read more

Mori's new owner outlines future plans

June 26 2007

As promised, here’s some more detail about the acquisition of Mori and Clockwork by Alfonso Guerra of Apokalypse Software. I sent Alfonso a bunch of questions by email, and these are his replies. What new features are you planning? The main emphasis on the next feature release for Mori (tentatively, v1.7) is simplifying… read more

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