Although the reports of Macworld’s might be spot-on

Once again, the sky is falling in Apple-land. The Cupertino giant’s announcement yesterday that Macworld Expo 2009 would be its last and that Phil Schiller would deliver the final keynote rather than Steve Jobs sent the rumour mill into a frenzy. Clearly, Steve must be at death’s door, right?

Alternatively, rumour-mongers, think about it for just a second, using your brain. Apple is quitting the Macworld Expo, but not its own (increasingly frequent) announcements and launch events. It’s not prepping for Steve Jobs’ death—it’s prepping for Macworld’s, and in a fairly spiteful manner. Consider this: Jobs doesn’t do this keynote, thereby massively lowering expectations and downplaying the event. You can bet he’ll be fronting the next ‘Apple keynote’, though.

Game turns child into evil swearing little shitbag

As part of its long-standing quest to vilify every videogame ever produced (in fact, everything fun ever created), righteous hatemonger ‘newspaper’ the Daily Mail earlier this week published a story about a mother’s fury over a Nintendo DS Scrabble game that taught her son “vile swear words”. (And in the Daily Mail’s usual sterling reporting, it’s amusing to note that the game in question is Scrabble 2007—there’s nothing like getting the scoop on a new product, and this article is nothing like getting a scoop on a new product.)

Of course, it’s implausible that Mrs Carrington’s eight-year-old could have discovered these words by any other means. Although it’s not mentioned in the article, it’s safe to assume that he’ll now need life-long counselling having been exposed to ‘toke’, ‘tits’ and ’shit’. (Choice quote: “Shit had come up as well. I was absolutely mortified.” I’ll bet. You don’t want shit coming up when you’re playing a videogame—it can really knock you off your stride.)

Following Britain’s typical dive into knee-jerk reactionism, the mother has now banned her son from playing the virtual wordgame, which has been linked to people becoming slightly more educated, and is therefore reprehensible and evil. Publisher Ubisoft’s response about the ‘junior’ option that removes naughty words was met by a typically Daily Mail-style retort from Carrington: “I read the booklet that came with it, and there was no mention of a junior version. It should be made much clearer.” This is fair enough—after all, it’s really hard to spot the ‘Junior mode’ checkbox that’s directly under the player’s name when you’re picking a profile on first launching the game.

Translation: “I can’t be arsed to play real Scrabble with my son, so I threw this game at him, without actually bothering to in any way check it first. And now my little baby is surrounded by tits and shit, and the only way to deal with this is to get those true bastions of public decency and morality involved—the Daily Mail”.

My opinion: it’s a fucking disgrace. (Now, had she moaned at length about Scrabble 2007’s lack of single-console multiplayer support, I’d have been right behind her. IN A NON-OFFENSIVE MANNER.)

Although Internet Explorer’s marketshare slide isn’t proving steep, it almost seems irreversible at this point. Latest trend charts now put IE’s share under 70% for the first time in many years. Interestingly, Chrome’s near-1% doesn’t appear to have been at the expense of Safari and Firefox either, since both are well up on January 2008.

It remains to be seen how Internet Explorer 8 will affect these figures, but for designers still mulling over whether to make the leap to standards compliance and stop designing for the largest market, the path is now clear. Once, you might have been unconvinced by the ‘one in ten using something other than IE’ argument, but with a third of users now browsing with something other than Microsoft’s giant, it’d be absurd to author web pages in any other manner.