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Love or hate Apple you have to admire their turnaround from 2007 to date.

So how did they do this, with the iPhone revolutionising the way we interact online and with each other. I was an early adoptor with the iPhone 1 which I still have. I wish I’d had the foresight to buy Apple shares at that point but I didn’t. Here’s a great infographic showing just how the iPhone effected Apple as a business in just 5 years.

It’s fairly rare for me to see a video I think is worthy of sharing, but last week I saw exactly that.  It’s actually 18 months old but it’s beautifully done and very interesting.

Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson, enjoy!

Lorraine and I recently went on holiday for a week which was brilliant, but the down side of living in Scotland is that flights to long haul destinations are usually from an airport in England, in this case Manchester.

If you fly from Manchester I’d highly recommend the valet parking, it was just £13 more the off airport parking and you just dropped your car 2 minutes’ walk from departures and collected it from the same place, brilliant!  Sorry I digress.

We arrived early and the airport was very quiet which was a nice change, so we were left with some time on our hands.  After a delicious breakfast we did a bit of shopping.  As you may know I’m a bit of a petrol head and I decided I’d give the raffle for a car a try.  You know the ones you see at all the airports.

Well £40 later (or so I thought) I’d got 10 tickets for a car and another 10 for a holiday.  The draw for the holiday was done and I’ve not won but the draw for the car is in a few days, fingers crossed.

The point of this story is that it was not £40.  Firstly I was asked to pay 50p for the transaction which was fine as it was disclosed. However I just got my credit card bill and I found I’d been charged £3 for a cash transaction fee and 89p for cash interest.  I called Capital One to be told that spending money on gambling was considered a cash transaction even though I’d not received any cash. They talked to me like I should have known this, do you? I certainly didn’t but I do now.

So the £40 ticket is now £44.36, a 10% surcharge that I was not expecting.

I am extremely unimpressed at this charge and my feelings towards both “Best of the Best” and “Capital One” have taken a severe knocking.

Of course if I win the car all will be forgiven but it demonstrates the breach of trust and my disappointed at being penalised for making what I thought was a standard card transaction.

I’m saddened to have seen this happen to LinkedIn but after this type of incident its good practice to change your password for LinkedIn immediately.  See the full article here http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/06/06/bad-day-for-linkedin-6-5-million-hashed-passwords-reportedly-leaked-change-yours-now/

Those of you that know me are probably tired of hearing me bang on about passwords.  They are a serious issue and hard to maintain and remember, but there are solutions, really easy solutions.

I HIGHLY recommend you try RoboForm.  It’s a silly name but it’s a web site and online password manager and is just excellent.  It costs $20 a year and will save you hours of time and effort as well as solving your poor password issues in a second, so it could save you a lot more.  They have a 30 day free trial, I promise that you won’t be able to live without it.

It syncs with a RoboForm App on iPhones, Android, iPads and other tablets, so wherever you are you will have access to your web sites and passwords.

It also fills in forms automatically.  You can create different identities so I have a person one, a WSI one, etc.  These can even include card details so no more filling in forms, one click fills it in, all you have to do is check it’s correct.

No I don’t earn anything from selling RoboForm but I do get more secure client logins which is better than being paid  Go on, treat yourself, you’re worth it…

Sometimes the incompetence of government and EU bureaucrats makes you want to weep, well quite a lot actually.  The implementation and advice offered to us as web site owners and designers has been frankly unbelievable.

JUST 24 HOURS before the law came into effect on the 26th May the UK’s ICO (Information Commissioners Office) released new guidelines, UNBELIEVABLE.  This is after a one year grace period to allow the web designer community time to look at its options.

So much has been written about this that I don’t want to add to the tsunami of comments but in essence the ICO has said VERY VAGUELY that it doesn’t consider a cookie dropped onto your device from Google Analytics as intrusive whereas previously it was.  Also they are suggesting that “implied consent” is reasonable.  This is a huge change which seems to pass responsibility to the user not the web site operator. There’s a good article in the Guardian that’s worth a look if you’re interested in the detail.

So do you need a cookie notifier on your site?

The short answer is yes. Although the law has been diluted it’s just opinion from the ICO, you will still be in contravention of EU law without this as it clearly states an opt in policy includes cookies from analytics packages.

In reality it’s a tough call and one that’s down to the individual web site owners.

What you MUST do is add a cookie paragraph into your privacy policy, see our Privacy Policy here.  You should also get a cookie audit done on your web site or Blog so you can list the cookies you use in your privacy policy.

I’ve seen many implementations of a cookie opt in system and haven’t liked any of them until now.  I’ve installed a simple system onto my own blog which you might have seen. It’s not intrusive and does not stop you using the site if you can’t be bothered to click on the button. If you’d like to have this installed on your site please drop me an email at alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk  It costs a £50 onetime charge to install and removes any worries about getting caught by the EU bureaucrats .