The new beta site can be found at http://beta.bbc.co.uk and displays an almost metro’esque sliding panel system with more traditional links in the bottom half of the page.  The whole web needs to move inexorably towards full and complete touch-friendliness in short order.  The amount of people using Tablets to navigate the web is already growing exponentially, and the forthcoming Windows 8 with it’s touch-centric interface will mean that by the end of 2012 touch-screens will be the norm on new PCs and laptops.

I myself am currently revamping my own website to make it completely touch-friendly and will be relaunching the new design within a week or two.  It’s noticeable however that the major players, including Amazon, eBay and YouTube haven’t yet caught on to the fact that traditional drop down menus, text links and crowded lists simply can’t be used effectively with touch.

This does raise interesting questions as to whether website UI components that we’ve come to know and love such as dynamic drop down menus and text lists can survive the transition to touch at all.  Any touch website has to be cross-compatible with every touch device, and many will work in their own unique way.  When it comes to touch on computers a proper standard is yet to emerge, if it ever will, about how swipe and touch gestures are interpreted.

The BBC haven’t got everything right when it comes to touch, but this is still a beta and with a website as utterly enormous as this, with literally terabytes of video, educational and article content sitting underneath it would be extremely difficult to create an interface simple enough and that included everything.

In part this is the biggest challenge that the touch web, and touch-screen apps as well, has to overcome.  For things to be truly finger-friendly you have to limit what is available and make clever use of screen real-estate, this is a challenge I had to content with as I too have ever growing libraries of video and other content on my own website.  For a small site like my own it’s easy to juggle things around, for the BBC and other major corporations however the challenge might simply be too big.

The new design is lovely, I think anyway and a radical departure from the current BBC homepage with it’s customisable and arrangeable tiles (circa Yahoo from some years ago).  The design will no doubt change slightly, indeed I have noticed changes being implemented within the last 24 hours.  It is great though to see this website, deliberately or otherwise being made finger-friendly.  Pressure now needs to be brought on the other major website owners to do the same, and do it quickly.  It is entirely possible however they they won’t even consider this until their visitor numbers begin to drop, and by then it might well be too late for them.

The release is a one year worldwide pilot of the service and in addition to a subscription at €6.99 a month or €49.99 a year, programmes will be preceded by advertisements, something the BBC is not allowed to do in the UK.

At the time of launch there will be 1,500 hours of content available and this will include content from some other British broadcasters including ITV and Channel 4.  The BBC has been very keen to work with other broadcasters in the UK to provide integrated IPTV services.

BBC.com’s managing director, Luke Bradley-Jones is keen to stress “[it] is not a catch-up service: this is a video-on-demand service. We will have content from the last month, but also the best from the catalogue stretching back 50 to 60 years.”

The delay in bringing the app to the USA has apparently been caused by legal issues with the BBC saying they needed to “jump through a few more of those commercial and legal hoops” before releasing it there.  As for a price in the US, a monthly figure of $7.99 has been mentioned which is excellent value compared to the European editions.  The US price is set at a level to make the service competitive with NetFlix and Hulu.

At launch the app will feature some facilities that aren’t available to UK television licence-fee payers.  These include the streaming of shows via 3G.  As with their UK counterparts however, people will also be able to download programs to watch later.

Now rumour has it that the rollout will begin with a subscription-service for the iPad according to Engadget and Broadcast Magazine. 

This subscription model will allow the BBC to accommodate licence-fee payers in the UK who each pay around £130 a year for this public-service broadcaster.

The subscription service will later, it is also rumoured, be followed by an advertising-supported free version (the BBC does not screen advertisements before, during or after any of its programmes, yes, you did read that right!)

This is excellent news for worldwide fans of shows like Top Gear, Doctor Who, EastEnders and erm… Cash in the Attic (maybe not that last one).

There’s no word yet on when the service will be available but the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thomson, has previously said it would almost certainly be sometime in 2011.

But services in other countries are sometimes restricted as well. For the UK it is for instance most contents offered by the BBC iPlayer which is only accessible if the user connecting to the service has a British IP address. This does block expats and Brits on holiday from accessing the contents online. While it is possible to get access to TV and radio contents by connecting to a virtual private network (vpn) that assigns UK IP addresses, it is usually considered to be complicated to setup and not free as well.

Expat Shield is a free service by the makers of HotSpot Shield that simplifies the process greatly. In its core, the software creates a vpn connection that assigns a UK IP to the computer system, thus allowing the user to access UK-only TV and Radio contents from all over the world.

It works with all UK based services, including BBC iPlayer TV (offering access to BBC One to Four) and Radio, ITV Player, Channel 4 and others. And since it is a VPN connection it means that access is available through all programs, including web browsers but also standalone applications.

Expat Shield Download and Installation

Expat Shield is offered as a free download at the official website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Actually, the program is not downloaded directly from the website. A download manager is downloaded first, that then downloads the application to the local computer system. The application includes a custom toolbar that does not need to be installed, so make sure you disable it if you do not want it to be installed.

The program places an icon in the system tray that offers controls to start and stop the service. Starting it actually means that the following window is shown in Internet Explorer that initiates the connection. It is probably possible to copy the url into another browser as well to initiate the VPN connection.

From that moment on the system tray icon shows that the computer is connected to the VPN.

BBC iPlayer

Just visit the BBC iPlayer website and start watching the tv shows that you’d like to watch.

ITV Player

Visit the ITV homepage to watch all available tv shows online from any location in the world. Available are ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 for online viewing.

Expat Shield offers all the additional benefits of running a VPN connection, including protection from network snooping, encryption and a new IP address for increased privacy.

The quality of the VPN solution has been excellent during testing. All tv shows that we watched in the time streamed without interruptions or buffering issues. All in all, an excellent free solution to access British TV and Radio contents as well as other UK-only services and sites. (via, thanks Maik for the tip)

The programme will be available live online at this link or also through the BBC’s listen again service here.

It will take the format of an interview with regular presenter Rony Robinson about the period in Mike’s life when he switched from working in IT Support to become a teacher, but how this led directly back to first self-publishing his Windows 7 Power Users Guide, and then on to a book deal with Microsoft.

If you’d like to hear more about Mike’s work in IT and writing, including for gHacks, then tune in tomorrow.

The malware takes the form of a game that spies on the smartphone’s owner and was built using the standard software toolkits that are available  to everyone.  In a report on the experiment today, Experts says that this makes the malware much harder to spot.

There is evidence that criminals are now beginning to target smartphones with their complete lack of virus protection, in order to gain personal details that can be used for identity theft and other crimes.

Chris Wysopal, the co-founder and head of technology at security firm Veracode, who helped the BBC develop its malware, said that smartphones are not at the point PCs were at in 1999, at the birth of the popular internet.

“At that time malicious programs were a nuisance. A decade on and they are big business, he said, with gangs of criminals churning out malware that tries to steal saleable information.”  He said.  “Mobiles offered a potentially more tempting target to those criminals.”

Simeon Coney, of mobile security form Adaptive mobile said…

“In a mobile network the device is intrinsically linked to a payment plan, to a user’s credit,” he said. Nothing happens on a mobile network, no call is made or text is sent, without money changing hands.  Criminals have tapped into that revenue stream by getting phone owners to dial or contact premium rate numbers. Now they are turning their attention to applications and the lucrative information they scoop up.”

The Java application from the BBC was put together in only a few weeks and  gathered contacts, text messages and also gathered the phones’ location.  IT then sent this information to a specially set-up email address.

The malware was only 250 lines of code, with the entire program only 1500 lines of code.  The BBC say in their report that there can be benefits to the way some phone OS manufacturers vet programs.  Apple vets every program for the iPhone and iPad and Blackberry maker RIM and Google can easily switch off malicious applications through use of a code-signing system.  Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system will also see all programs vetted.

The last time the BBC conducted an experiment like this they took control of a botnet, but when the experiment was over left a message on the screens of the infected PCs worldwide and instructed the botnet to self-destruct.

This is a special programme from Sheffield, Mike’s adopted home city, and he has been selected to form part of a select panel because of his experience as a teacher of English, Maths and ICT.

It will be hosted by Kirsty Wark and see the panel putting questions to top politicians from the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition, and from the Labour opposition.

You can catch the programme live from 10:30pm or for the next two weeks on the BBC iPlayer.

Mike is the author of the Windows 7 Power Users Guide and the forthcoming Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press.

Mike has yet to decide what his questions will be but if time allows they could include questions about the Digital Economies Act and the case of hacker Gary McKinnon.

Users who want to download radio and TV programmes from BBC iPlayer can use the portable software program iDownload to do so. The download manager has been programmed in Java and is accessed in a web browser. The interface provides access to a content search that includes all supported BBC radio and TV programmes.

Available radio and TV shows are shown and can be marked for download by either double-clicking them or using the download button. All selected TV and radio shows are moved to the Downloads section of the web interface. Users from the United Kingdom can start to download the TV and radio shows right away while users from other countries need to find an anonymous web proxy (or VPN from the UK) to do so.

Download BBC iPlayer TV and Radio programmes can be launched directly from within the web interface. The TV programmes are downloaded as Apple Quicktime files (.mov) and the radio shows as mp3. The iDownload software to download BBC iPlayer programmes is available from the developer’s website.

Most of the content on the website is audio content which can be downloaded as mp3 files to the local computer and from there on the mp3 player so that you could learn on the trip.

You also find Grammar Tips and interactive games that test your language skills. The quality of the spoken language is excellent but the courses remain pretty basic from what I can tell. I think it’s a great way to get a first impression of a language but one has to use additional courses to fully understand a language.

I personally prefer Mango over BBC Languages.

He was using Flashgot for this purpose but since the BBC changed their website he was not able to download those streams anymore. I did a quick look at the BBC World website link that he send to me and found an efficient way to download the media streams from there.

It comes down to using Grab++ and Orbit Downloader to download any of the streams mentioned on this website. It does not really matter if you go for the low, medium or high definition content all can be downloaded the same way. Please note that this method is only working for the Real Media streams and not the Windows Media Player streams.

Download Orbit Downloader and install it on your computer. Open the software and click on Tools > Grab++ in the menu to open Grab++.

Grab++ scans the system for multimedia files and will report any that it finds. Once Grab++ is running go to the BBC website and click on a Real Media stream that you would like to download. Grab++ will recognize the stream and display several files that it found. Make sure you select the right one which should be the only one with the extension .asf.

Check that stream and click on download. This sends the download to Orbit Downloader where it will be downloaded as any other file.

“The pilot is part of the BBC’s plans to eventually offer more than a million hours of TV and radio from its archive. Our audience increasingly want and expect to dictate how, when and where they get our services,” he told the conference.” said BBC’s Future Media boss Ashley Highfield. He said the corporation’s end ambition was “one day enabling any viewer to access any BBC programme ever broadcast via their television”, and highlighted the need to bridge the divide between TV and content with online connections.

The test phase will make available about 1000 hours of content from various TV and radio programs. About 50 hours will be made available to the public to give everyone a sneak peak at what is to come.

I think that this is a great opportunity for everyone living in the UK to get some free TV on your computer and eventually help shape the service into a viewer friendly one. The trial will also be used to determine the line between free and paid content. If you thought everything will be available free you must have been a bit delusional.

Apply at the official BBC Archive site if you like.

I know that this article is a little bit short but the real one is not here but at his website, go there now and enjoy the read.