Signing off: five memories of the last few years

In April 2004 I joined Computeractive as a wide-eyed, fresh-faced, 'tyro' staff writer. Nearly eight years later I leave the magazine as reviews editor, and this seemed like a good opportunity to remember some of the technological changes that have taken place over the time I've been here.

Of course, there are some great memories that have little to do with computers, such as being flown by a sound-card manufacturer to Leipzig to drive phenomenally expensive cars around Porsche's test track. Or there was my very first 'press trip', two months into the job, in which I found myself at a party at Pierre Cardin's house on the cape overlooking the city of Cannes, with supermodel Helena Christensen milling around and drunken journalists having to be prevented from jumping naked into Cardin's swimming pool.

But the more interesting stories are of how computers have changed - and changed us - in that time. The younger me may not have been impressed by how fast the computer on his future-self's desk has become, but he may well have been surprised by how many things it can talk to, or how he can talk to it. And the advance of memory technology that allows him to fit millions of photographs into a device the size of a fingernail is a marvel.

It's easy to scoff at what appears to be the slow progress of modern life, when things don't seem to be changing, the world sometimes seems to be going backwards, not forwards, and t-shirts are sold that ask: "This is supposed to be the future: where's my jet-pack?"

Stop to reflect, and you might see that things have in fact changed more rapidly than was first apparent. There are plenty of things wrong with the world, true, and these are largely solutions to what are dismissively called 'first-world problems' but nevertheless they represent true technological progress. Here are some things for which I'm glad to be around in 2012, and with them I'm signing off.

1. Computers everywhere

Back in 2004, lots of people still had video recorders, big-box CRT television sets, film camers and analogue camcorders. The 2012 equivalent of every single one of those is in effect a computer. Digital cameras and digital camcorders contain far more advanced processors than the computers of 20 years ago. The phone in your pocket may well be more powerful, in pure terms, than a PC of seven years ago (when I joined the magazine my desktop computer was a 350MHz Intel Pentium II model). And they can all talk to each other, making for an amazing array of connection options. With an Eye-Fi card in my camera I can take a picture, tag it and have it uploaded to Flickr in seconds, with accurate location information attached to it so that anyone viewing it can see instantly where it was taken.

This has its downisdes - anyone using one of these devices must be wary of his or her privacy in a way that would have been unneccessary not long ago. And it's not always easy to get these machines to actually communicate with each other. But I have to say I'm pleased to be able to quickly stream to my living-room amplifier any music I wish to hear.

2. Spotify

Which brings us to Spotify, and the changing face of the music industry. One of the first big stories I covered was the arrival on this side of the Atlantic of Apple's iTunes Music Store. The iPod had been selling well here for a year or two, but iTunes was the first sensible way for most people to buy and download music. The record labels, IT firms and companies such as Coca-Cola were running their own downloading sites, but they were a mess: unfriendly, unconnected and unintuitive.

The main competition to iTunes was Napster, which had acquired the name of the first peer-to-peer service and turned it into a legitimate, legal music store. Interestingly, it charged £10 a month for unlimited listening, as Spotify does today for its most expensive package. But why did Spotify prevail and Napster fail (it shut up shop earlier this month)?

Spotify and Napster both give users unlimited access to huge music catalogues with the proviso that users only listen, not download, the music. Spotify has made it a mission to tie up with any device maker it can - you can now listen to its music on phones, amplifiers, radios, network streaming products and more. And of course there's a free service that offers limited ad-supported listening.

The company hasn't yet proven that it can make its business model work, and there is much scepticism in the music industry about it - some record labels would be very happy to see it fail, so little income does it bring them per play. But it's worth having while it lasts.

3. Yes, it's the iPhone

It's a cliche to pick the iPhone as an iconic piece of transformational technology but I'm going to have to do it. It's really changed the way we use phones and handheld devices. Yes, of course there were smartphones before, but they weren't easy to use, they didn't do much and downloading programs (or 'apps', as they became known) was a pain.

The first iPhone wasn't much cop either. It was easier to use, and it worked very smoothly, but there was no app downloading, no 3G data access, no GPS or mapping and its text message handling was terrible. But Apple soon started to get it right, and almost every other phone maker soon started copying Apple.

Whether you use one or not, the iPhone and iPad have made phones and handheld computers easier to use. They're not perfect, but they're a good start.

4. Siri, or not: the rise of Nuance

The big feature in Apple's most recent iPhone release, the 4S, was the 'personal assistant' Siri. Essentially this is an upgrade to the iPhone's existing, pretty ropey voice command interface, which has been bolted to other bits of the operating system such as search and mapping.

That means users can press a button on the phone and 'ask' Siri: "who is Barack Obama" and it will return a search query on-screen as the answer. The cleverest part of all this is the extremely good voice recognition, which comes courtesy of a company called Nuance.

Nuance makes a PC speech recognition product called Dragon Naturally Speaking. We reviewied the most recent edition, which was rather good. Over the years it has been getting steadily better, to the point at which Nuance's technology is embedded in all sorts of systems.

If you call a cinema, tell a sat-nav your destination or indeed talk to Siri you're spekaing to a Nuance product. Although they're much maligned (those cinema systems still don't get it right) this kind of accurate speech recognition really does make people's lives easier, particularly people with impaired vision.

5. Miniature memory

Two or three years after I joined Computeractive I went to a meeting with Sandisk, which had invented the SD memory card, among other things,. One of the things it was showing off was then called Transflash, and is now known as micro-SD. It may seem prosaic to speak so warmly of a memory card, of all things, the most everyday of modern technology.

But the Transflash card was really something: the card Sandisk showed off held maybe 512MB, but it was the size of a fingernail - the nail of a little finger, at that. In September this year Sandisk announced its 64GB micro-SDXC card, which can hold 16,000 songs on, again, a card the size of a fingernail. That's progress.