A growing trend to "bring the web to users" signals a fundamental change in the way we're using the web

The launch this week of Google Desktop 2 (and if you use a Windows PC but don't have it yet, I thoroughly recommend it) is part of a growing trend to "bring the web to users". And this trend signals a fundamental change in the way we're using the web. Let me explain what I mean.

First there was email. It "pushed" information to people. In many ways, it's more important than ever. However, it's actually been overtaken by the "pull" side of the internet - the web - where people choose which information they want to see.

But that's the two options covered, right? Well, no. A couple of years ago, along came RSS. This "pushes" web content of interest to us as readers (with the crucial advantage over email that we choose which web sites we want to have "pushed" to us). No longer do you have to go to websites to see if they've updated - a constantly-updated alert on your desktop shows you what's changed on your monitored sites.

Until recently, I've been sceptical about whether this technology would get widespread acceptance. It was all a bit geeky, to be honest. But I'm beginning to change my mind. Software such as the Google Desktop and Google's personalised homepage make so easy to put these "RSS feeds" on a PC that people might just actually do it.

One demonstration of how RSS might change the way we use the web can be seen by looking at what many Apple Mac users are already doing (I'm one of those people!). All decent websites have RSS feeds now, and I monitor about a dozen of them. You add them just like adding bookmarks or favourites. When I fired up my Mac this morning, the browser showed that all my monitored feeds had about 100 new articles between them. I opened a few, and here's what I saw.

As you can see, all the latest news at a glance. Most interestingly of all, it's presented in a consistent format. RSS was originally just for snappy headlines and short descriptions, but many sites now have complete multi-page articles, with photos, in their feeds. At Engineeringtalk, we've provided over three thousand such feeds, updated daily, so you can monitor news in particular product categories, or from individual manufacturers.

Whilst the RSS readers available under Windows are somewhat less elegant than the facilities built into the Mac OS, expect to see some major progressions over the next year. Like me, you may well find yourself looking at RSS feeds more than the conventional web on a daily basis. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get the ball-by-ball cricket commentary set up.

Why have engineering courses always mysteriously required so many more hours of study?

Here in the UK it's been A-Level results day, when tens of thousands of our best and brightest find out if they've got the grades they need to go on to university. As usual, conservative commentators will be full of "it-wasn't-like-that-in-my-day" stuff, claiming that standards are falling and the qualifications aren't worth the paper they're written on any more; however, we should remember that this sniping from the sidelines has always been around.

I really don't know what sort of sad thrill these people get out of denigrating the efforts of the young people coming through (and their teachers), but they were doing it when I got my A-Levels some 25 years ago, and they'll be doing it in 25 years' time. It seems to me that the kids I know who were hoping to get, say, B and C grades today, are about the same academic standard as the kids who got B and C grades when I was at school. Whatever other changes have happened, that's good enough for me.

One of the few aspects of education which hasn't improved, as far as I can see, is at university level, and that's the continuing disparity between different subjects in terms of commitment required. Engineering courses have always suffered from this, mysteriously requiring three or four times the number of hours of study as certain other courses - and the students choosing their future careers know this. With most of them now being forced to juggle study with part-time jobs, who can blame them for leaning towards courses where the demands, in terms of study time, aren't so high?

I'm not suggesting that engineering courses at university should be "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator. But the playing field does need to be levelled if the UK engineering sector is to get a fairer share of the best our education system has to offer.

Cool technology, but really it's only streamlining the design process

A few weeks ago, I asked the question: "Where else is there to go for CAD technology?" and most of the suggestions seem to involve better ways of transferring ideas and visualisations from the mind to the screen. Whilst the latest generation of 3D solid modelling CAD is awesome to work with once the product has been defined, it still has to be created using a mish-mash of adding blocks and extruding lines.

However, this week I read of one interesting area of research into making this easier, and I'm sure there are many more going on behind closed doors. At NRC-IMTI in Canada, they're working on improving the way in which hand sketches on a tablet PC can be converted into CAD data. The idea is to allow a sketch drawn directly on the tablet PC's screen with a digital pencil to be intelligently cleaned-up to reflect the designer's true 2D intent. Roughly straight lines are transformed into truly straight ones, and corners are created even if the lines don't exactly intersect. Questions would try to piece together the designer's 3D intent too.

This is cool technology, but really it's only streamlining the design process, taking out the intermediate stage of entering a beermat sketch into a CAD system. This is a stage which might be a nuisance, but it isn't one which is a fundamental problem in the design process. I'm still looking for that revolutionary idea which will change the way we work.

When I studied engineering at university in the 1980s, "Designing for Quality" was a hot topic

The headline in this year's "Which?" report on car reliability was the ascent to the top category of Ford, joining the various Japanese brands which have been camped there for years. It can't be a coincidence that Ford's reliability has coincided with a period where its design in general has been held in such high regard. All of its mainstream models, such as the class-leading Focus, have been major hits with motoring journalists and the public alike. But it would seem the good design was not limited to the driving experience.

When I studied engineering at university in the 1980s, "Designing for Quality" was a hot topic, alongside "Designing for Manufacture". I don't hear as much about those topics today; perhaps that's just because they've been so assimilated into the engineering culture, but I'm not so sure. It's more likely that the consultants have found other things to move on to. Yet outside the Far East, the need to cut manufacturing costs is more critical than ever. Design has a crucial role to play here.

Whilst the popular perception is that quality is a manufacturing issue, we know that in practice, it stems from design and engineering. Get the design process right, and exemplary product quality should be as much of a result as good product performance.