Today I'm sad to announce that I'm leaving Computeractive - a great magazine that's brilliantly focused on the needs of its readers, produced by a fantastic team with whom I've enjoyed working immensely. However, I'm also excited to announce my new role as CTO* at the brand-new Apptitude Media.

Apptitude is a new company that we've created following a management buyout of the British Journal of Photography, Popular Science UK, and the team that I've been working on for almost two years, producing digital magazines for the iPad and iPhone. We will continue to publish both magazines, while expanding to build on our work helping other publishers – such as 125 Magazine – make the leap from print onto touchscreen devices.

More details are in our press release, here.

If you're a reader of one of our titles, rest assured that publication will continue without interruption. If you write for me, and I've been unable to warn you in advance – apologies – it's business as usual and I'll be in touch to talk commissions soon. And if you know me, and I've been slightly distant or evasive when discussing work in the last few months, then apologies: I've been unable to talk about any of this stuff until today – lawyers, etc. Sorry.

So, that's my exciting news for the day: new company, new start. Watch this space.

You can reach me at: tom -at- apptitudemedia.co.uk

* Cats, Tea and, er, other stuff. No?

So imagine you sell an entertainment product. Ten years ago it was very popular, with millions of customers prepared to pay decent money to enjoy the product you made. These days, sales have shrunk – in part because people are getting something similar, cheaper, on smartphones and the web – and some suggest that your product might die out entirely.

Sound familiar?

The other day, courtesy of the 8-4 podcast, I came across this interview with Nintendo's Satoru Iwata, in which he discusses the 3DS and mobile gaming. And he makes the following point:

"I think within games you have two needs that people fill. One is the time-filler need. The other is that it's a very important time for me and I want to have a rich experience. Those are two separate needs, I think."

"The other thing is how much are consumers willing to pay to play. I think that consumers who are willing to pay money for a gaming experience are looking for something that is more rich and are willing to spend some of that valuable time on that experience. I believe that as environments change and as the world progresses we're going to have different ways in which people want to spend their time. That being said, I don't think we're going to see the desire to have, again, rich and deep sort of gaming experiences… we're not going to see that vanish. That's not going to go away."

Which, as somebody currently buried 30 hours into Tales of Graces F on the PS3, but also worryingly addicted to Super Hexagon while riding the train to work, makes a lot of sense. Many people will only ever dip in and out of video games, and 69p apps that can fill five minutes (or before them, those pay-to-download mobile games) will suit them perfectly. Other people want to enjoy splurging 50+ hours on a big immersive experience that sucks them in, and won't mind paying £30-50 for the privilege. And many of us like both. See also: The Simpsons vs The Wire on TV, or supermarket fiction vs, say, Infinite Jest on the bookshelf.

Or, yes, magazines.

About ten years ago I first started writing for magazines. That first year, the mag I was working on recorded an ABC figure (Audit Bureau of Circulation – essentially, your monitored, verified sales figures) higher than the one before. And we celebrated, of course. Since then, year on year, sales have declined. Not badly, of course – I've been lucky enough to work on some great magazines that have held up comparatively well – but always slightly declining. Not something to celebrate, especially as you see, year on year, other magazines shutting around you.

So you can see why some are convinced that magazines are doomed entirely. But, while the audience might have shrunk, that doesn't mean that no audience remains. And what good, thick magazines* provide is not the same as, say, a news website or blog** or cyclone of words, poorly aggregated from the web. Like a sit-down-and-play video game, a big novel or following the same godawful football team every week all season,  it's a decision to spend a chunk of time doing something you actually enjoy. Or, to borrow some words, one where it's "a very important time for me and I want to have a rich experience".

And that's not, I believe, going to go away.

So, money where my mouth is, on Friday I'm launching a new magazine. It will be big, will take time to download and – after the first issue, which is free – will cost money to read. And it will only be available (from launch, at least) on the iPad, because the concept of a magazine is no more tied to print than novels are to paperbacks. But I hope that it will fit into the "very important time" audience that Iwata-san describes, and that readers will enjoy it enough to want to set aside a few hours, and around £2, each month. I guess what we're aiming for is the 50+ hour RPG experience of publishing.

Might not put that on the cover, though.

* There's no doubt at all that some magazines are, at best, cheap time-filler – I assume these will survive only as long as their audience lacks cheap access to the same material online

** I like news websites and blogs, and spend a lot of time reading them. I have never, though, set aside a few hours of my weekend to do so

I've written on a number of occasions about the fascinating-but-flawed 'Facebook causes x% of Divorces' story that pops up in the media every year or so.It first lurched around in 2011, and then crawled back out in January. I anxiously await the next outbreak in January 2013, summing up the results of a survey conducted online in a few months.

Well, Mark Zuckerberg just got married (Mazel Tov!), which is reason enough for another outbreak. And in the Wall Street Journal, no less.

Enter the churnalists:

• Facebook Now Mentioned in More Than One-Third of Divorces (The Inquisitr)
• Is Facebook responsible for your divorce*? (Metro)
• Lawyers say Facebook a growing factor in divorce (BizJournal)
• Facebook: The Marriage Killer (EETechNews)
• Incriminating Facebook Photos and blah blah blah blah (Daily Mail)
• .. and hundreds more.

Notice how, yet again, most cite previous variants of the same story – usually the AAML  2011 version, which was itself pretty garbled. It's amazing how far a bit of simple PR research (presearch?) can go.

* To which the answer is "No. Hang on, shit, what divorce?"

Comment is free, but reading below the line could cost your sanity. So here's how to remove the temptation.

I've now been asked a few times about a version of Kitten Block to remove below-the-line comments from news websites, and the Guardian's Comment is Free in particular. The good news is that it's generally very easy to zap comment areas out of existence using CSS, although you do have to do it on a per-site basis. As an example, here's how to erase the stupid from CiF:

1) Install Stylish – a clever tool that lets you add or override CSS on websites. Firefox here, Chrome here.

2) Stylish adds a small S icon to the browser (Chrome – top right. Firefox – bottom left). Select it and choose 'Write new style'.

3) Call the style something appropriate ('Don't read below the line..')

4) For Firefox, copy and paste this in:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("guardian.co.uk") {
#discussion-comments{
display:none;
}

5) For Chrome, set the 'Applies to' rule to 'URLs starting with' and enter 'http://www.guardian.co.uk', then paste in this rule:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
#discussion-comments{
display:none;
}

6) In both cases, save the style and reload any CiF pages you have open.

.. and that's it. Stlyish applies this CSS when on a Guardian article, overriding the page styles to hide the comment box. It's very easy to create similar rules for other sites – the key is to find the class or ID of the comment container. As this is often added dynamically after initial page load, you'll need to inspect the DOM using a developer tool such as Firebug.

Oh, and by the way – you can also use Stylish for all manner of useful and important internet business..

Newsworthiness is hard to define. Web traffic is simple to measure. I wonder if the Telegraph website has run anything about the iPad 3 launch?

Telegraph, 9th Feb: Apple iPad 3 announcement 'in early March'

Technology blog The Verge, citing "people familiar with the product", says that the new iPad will have double the screen resolution of the iPad 2 and as a result will be about one millimetre thicker. It will probably be powered by an A6 chip – the iPad 2 is powered by the A5 – but The Verge says that chip will be dual-core and not quad-core as had been suggested elsewhere.

Telegraph, 1oth Feb: Apple in 'crunch mode' as iPad 3 approaches

The new tablet is expected to have double the screen resolution of the iPad 2 – enough to show a Blu-ray movie in its native resolution and still have pixels to spare … It will probably be powered by an A6 chip – the iPad 2 is powered by the A5 – but one technology blog yesterday claimed that the A6 chip will be dual-core and not quad-core as many had predicted.

Telegraph, 14 Feb: Apple 'to announce iPad 3 on March 7'

A flurry of rumours, from a range have sources, say that the new iPad will have a 'retina display' – that is, an improved screen resolution delivering 2048 x 1536 pixels … Even the name is in question, with some suggesting that Apple could choose a name that reflects the improved screen resolution, such as 'iPad HD'.

Telegraph 28 Feb: Apple announces March 7 event

It is thought that the new iPad will have a vastly improved display, with double the screen resolution of the iPad 2, and a faster processor.

The iPad 2 is powered by an Apple-designed A5 processor but it is thought that the new iPad will feature an A6 processor, which is either a new dual-core chip or a quad-core chip depending on which rumour you choose to believe.

Telegraph, 2nd March: Apple iPad rumours increase as event approaches

The latest rumour concerns the name of the next Apple device. Though most people are assuming that the successor to the iPad 2 will be the iPad 3, bloggers have speculated that it will be called the iPad HD – a reference to the higher resolution display that the device is thought to have.

(Note: see 14 Feb, above)

Telegraph, 6th March: Apple iPad 3 event: A guide to the rumours

The new iPad will almost certainly have a much-improved display compared with its predecessor. It is expected to have a so-called 'retina' display and be capable of full 1080p HD. That has led some to suggest that the new iPad will be called the iPad HD, rather than iPad 3 or even, as others have suggested, the iPad 2S.

Whatever the new iPad is called, it will probably have a faster processor than the iPad 2. The current iPad is powered by Apple's A5 chip. The new device is expected to have an A6 chip, which might be a quad-core processor, though some sources suggest that it will be a dual-core chip like the A5. Leaked photos purporting to be iPad parts (see above) also suggest a smaller space for the logic board and more room for a battery.

Telegraph, 6th March: Apple event poll: which iPad upgrade do you want most?