posted Friday, November 10, 2006 11:26:55 AM by Jeff
Filed under:
Internet
For those of you that didn't see it, Google made some changes to Gmail last night. Most of the changes are largely cosmetic. For example, there are now little icons for the reply and forward buttons. Some different shading has been applied to some of the boxes as well.
The little tweak that I like is the replacement of the long list of links in the "more options" part of a mail message. It has been replaced with a little drop-down list in the upper right corner of the message. The "more options" was replaced with "show details," which shows you just the relevant to, from, date and subject, the only things anyone was really looking for in the first place.
This is the only really significant UI tweak they've made in a very long time. I think there might be a little heat from Yahoo and Microsoft on this, both of which have been refining their systems for some time. Of course, all three call it "beta" still, as if there's such a thing as shipping final software on the Web anyway.
posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:29:00 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Gadgets
I think the new iPod Nano is amazing, and a wonderful size. The first time I picked one up, it seemed just right.
The new iPod Shuffle, though, seems almost too small to be useful, and it feels like it will inevitably lost. Did Apple cross a line at that point on size? I guess it depends on who you ask.
This is a topic I've had some experience on recently with wireless phones. I was sitting in a meeting with a co-worker, and as he squirmed around in his chair, his shiny new Motorola Razr phone kept slipping out of his pocket. He was clearly very annoyed. The next day, he showed up with a wrist strap dangly thing on it to, as he put it, "Give it some bulk."
I've always bought covers for my phones, and when I bought a very typical Samsung last year, did the same. It has a little nub on the back to put it on a rotating belt clip. Today I figured I'd just take it off, because I wasn't sure I really needed it.
Something weird happened then. The very next text message I sent was all wrong. As it turned out, the phone was too small to handle and peck keys on quickly since it was smaller without the phone condom over it. And sure enough, I noticed it wouldn't stay put in my pocket either.
I suspect that industrial designer types are going to need to pay attention to this. Just because you can make a device smaller doesn't mean that you should.
posted Monday, November 06, 2006 7:54:35 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Gadgets
Granted I'm a big video geek, but I'm amazed that consumer HD video is finally just under the grand mark, where regular DV was when I bought my first camcorder about seven years ago.
NewEgg is selling the Canon HV10 for $999.99, which is what I bought my old Sony TRV-8 for. That's pretty amazing.
Sony has produced a few HDV camcorders so far, two of which I've seen at Best Buy, but they're still over a grand. This is a great move for Canon, not to mention yet another failure of Sony to reach the market with products it wants. At this price point, they aren't just toys for the rich.
posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 3:24:23 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Culture, Internet
I was chatting with some co-workers today about the phenomenon of MySpace and, to a lesser degree, Facebook. Among the conversation points was the criteria that indicates a given medium is authoritatively important and more relevant, and by that metric you'd say that MySpace is a clear "winner" over Facebook.
But that assumes that bigger means better, and that's rarely the case. Heck, the whole "wisdom of crowds" nonsense often just shows that crowds can be really, really stupid. So once we take the size out of the debate, which is really better, MySpace or Facebook?
Let's first identify the purpose of these sites. At their core, they are social networking sites that let us keep up with other people. They also give us the opportunity to meet new people. That's just about where the common ground ends.
MySpace is a complete free for all. You can pretty much do whatever you want and post whatever you want. In that respect, it's like a glorified GeoCities site with friends lists. Facebook, on the other hand, has a system of closed networks. Despite the recent protests, opening it up to the world at large hasn't changed that. If you go to Michigan State, a Wolverine can't see your profile unless you allow them to. Ditto a stalker from Cleveland. You can certainly cross-reference your data points to people with similar data points, but at the end of the day, you decide what they can see.
The free for all nature of MySpace also makes it quite vulnerable to spam. I don't care who the company is, but if the pink iPod Nano can have a MySpace page, that's spam. I get invites for "hot pics" all of the time on MySpace. That kind of thing will never fly on Facebook.
Facebook is, on the other hand, limited in the fact that you can only post the kind of media they allow, namely pictures and an endless stream of witty text comments on user walls, pictures and notes. Honestly, I don't find that to be a negative. I hate landing on a MySpace page and getting assaulted with music and the most hideous combination of colors ever displayed on a computer screen. A familiar and consistent look makes it easier to find stuff.
MySpace is heavily saturated with teens, where as Facebook tends to still be very college-centric. In my own experience at least, Facebook is growing up quickly because of the ability to do specific networking with classmates and alumni of your college.
In terms of user experience, MySpace can't even touch Facebook. The user interface elements on Facebook, including the dynamic display of UI, auto-complete features, etc., are top notch and perform very well.
As I said from the start, MySpace is a lot bigger, and you can do more with it in terms of your profile, but the chaos associated with that makes it less useful. For my money (which is none since both are free), I find that Facebook is infinitely more useful for the purpose of maintaining relationships, keeping in touch and networking.
Facebook by a landslide.
posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:13:25 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Apple, Culture, Internet
I know that this will annoy some people, but here's a video of the 37signals guys kissing Apple's ass:
http://www.apple.com/education/whymac/compsci/video.html
Forget about the content... look at the office. It's reflective of their Web apps. It's sparse, functional and simple.
I'll admit that I'm sick of hearing about these guys, but why am I so drawn to what they have to say? Why did I buy the Getting Real e-book? Sometimes I'm annoyed at myself for being into their world.
I think to answer this obsession question, we have to look at the two sides to the life of a developer. On the user side, simple is better in most cases. Who uses more than a fraction of the features in Word, right? I just want to write a damn letter! So the fact that Backpack or Ta-DaList does something fundamental in a fundamental way allows me to "just do it." You can't beat that appeal.
From the programmer view, they do what many of us only dream about. They build stuff quickly, it works, it delivers, it generates income for a company that consists of less than a dozen people and we're jealous. How hilarious is it that we all want to build The Next Big Thing and have it used by giant companies (or have your company bought by said companies), and these guys build something simple for the millions of small customers that don't buy products from IBM or Oracle.
I hate those guys because I'm not them!
posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:55:02 AM by Jeff
Filed under:
Computers
Like a lot of self-named dorks, I do a podcast. I'd like to think that I have some excuse, seeing as how I used to be in radio and TV, but it's a bug that doesn't easily go away.
There are a lot of little tweaks that you can do to clean up the sound too, before you put it out there. Adobe's beta of Soundbooth intends to help you with that. I downloaded the beta and looked around. They warn you that a lot of formats aren't yet supported, so it's a little crippled in its current form.
First off, the user interface is surprisingly straight forward. You can select sections of audio (displayed as waveform) as you would text, and cut it as you'd expect. When you select a section of audio, it makes a little slider that allows you to adjust the level of that section. That is very, very cool. I've often recorded a podcast and wanted to boost a section for one person talking, and this allows it to happen in two clicks based on the visual representation of the sound.
There are also buttons right on the bottom that allow you to fade, adjust the overall level and normalize. These are some of the most common tasks you'll ever do, so it makes sense to put them right out there.
The app is super simple, and very elegant. I know that it's not supposed to compete with its bigger cousin Audition, but it would be nice if the app would let you multi-track music in at least.
If the many formats it promises are delivered in the final version, it will be a nice program to have if it's inexpensive. I've used Audacity in Windows and it's too simple. GarageBand on the Mac is really cool, but the editing is a little goofy, level adjustment isn't straight forward, and forcing you to export as AAC just because you declared a project a "podcast" is incredibly stupid.
I want to watch this one closely. Lots of potential for the application.
posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 2:49:59 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Internet
About a month ago, I got an invite to try out Google Apps For Your Domain, a system that allows you to do semi-private label Gmail, Calendar, Chat and Web page stuff using your domain name.
Honestly, I didn't even mess around with the Web page tool, and I haven't enabled it. I can't tell you if it's any good. I don't really bother with the chat service either. However, my main focus was to get e-mail service that I didn't have to host, and to that end, Google Apps is like a dream come true.
The reason for its positive impact should be fairly obvious: Gmail rules because you search for e-mail and you find it. Doesn't that sound radically obvious? But seriously, when have you ever had an e-mail program that could do that, and do it from anywhere? You never had such a thing, and that's what makes it so cool.
If you've hosted your own Web server, you've probably either used your host's e-mail system, or ran your own. I was using SmarterMail, and I give it very high marks for being an excellent product. The truth is, the only reason I no longer wanted to use it was that I didn't want a process handling a couple thousand e-mail messages every day (mostly spam) on the same box as my Web server, and I didn't want to keep everything there on the server either for searching purposes (disk space issues). Gmail solves these problems for me.
Now when I need to find or keep some kind of information, I just tell people to e-mail it to me. So when I need to know "Catherine's address," I type it in and find it. When I need the link to my vacation photos, I type in "Mackinac Island photos."
What seals the deal is that Gmail does enable POP access, so you can still "own" your e-mail and download it. It even keeps the messages you send from your e-mail client on the server in your "sent" folder. That's pretty smooth. The only weirdness is that it lumps together all of your inbound and outbound mail together when you get it via POP, so you need to set a filter on your program that moves it to the client's "sent" box and marks it read, simply by applying the rule to e-mail from whatever your address is. Works great in Eudora and OS X Mail.
Side note: I recently migrated all of my Windows-based Eudora e-mail, lots of it dating back to 1997, to OS X Mail using this awesome little mailbox cleaner app.
I'm actually using the Calender app now too. I was skeptical that I would have much use for it, but I find myself using it pretty frequently to keep track of my junk. It's only a link away from my mail, so why not?
So I'm finally in a world where I can access and search my e-mail anywhere, and own it on my local computer, and not have to host it myself. Big thumbs up for Google Apps.
posted Tuesday, October 10, 2006 11:41:30 AM by Jeff
Filed under:
Internet
The Internet has been a more exciting place in the last year or two, and I think we can largely credit that to RSS, podcasting and the stupid journalist-named "mash-up" phenomenon. The idea of the Web becoming more of an application platform has become very common place.
But this is not a perfect arrangement. Those of us that run Web sites, especially those that address a niche community, need people to visit our sites and interact. RSS is a great tool for pushing out information, but it has two significant flaws.
The first flaw is that it's a single-direction medium. RSS talks at you. Because RSS was not intended to listen, it's not some great means of communication, which involves two sides to a conversation.
There are hackish ways to make RSS work as more of a two-way medium, but they aren't very good and don't look much like RSS. Let's face it, we solved these problems on Web sites ages ago, the issues of security, authentication, identity and rich functionality.
The other issue is that it's not well-suited to advertising. I realize that all of the free love feelings about sharing content and such gives people the warm fuzzies, but I need to monetize my content. It's not just about wanting to be paid, but also about wanting to pay for all of that bandwidth, more and more of which is being consumed by RSS readers that don't respect TTL (time to live) values. That's why I don't syndicate full text from this site.
Looking at it from the user side, and I admit I may not be representative of any kind of majority, I miss a ton without going to the site that is hosting the content. I need to go there to get the comments, to Digg the content if I find it interesting, often to see pictures, to see cross-referenced data, etc. For me, RSS serves as little more than a notification that there is new content. If you agree that's the primary reason for it to exist, great, but don't be one of those people who claim it will cure cancer.
This makes you wonder if it's time for a new standard that involves a bi-directional scheme. Really we already have this in a general sense in the form of Web services. I have all kinds of experience building stuff that allows two different machines to talk and exchange data, but we probably need a defined and simple standard that everyone agrees on. That's no easy task. And if you think that the mechanical spamming of blogs and forums was bad now, imagine how it would be in a purely XML world without some checks in place.
I'm not sure what the future holds, but RSS has very much reached the limits of its usefulness.
posted Tuesday, October 10, 2006 10:45:04 AM by Jeff
Filed under:
Apple
First there was "Mini Microsoft," now Apple has "The Masked Blogger" to talk about the company from the inside. Given the control freak nature of Apple's marketing and public relations, it should be interesting to see what happens with this guy. I think Apple being more open about what goes on inside is something that is long over due, but I suppose this is all we can get for now.
Check out The Masked Blogger here:
http://www.activeconversations.com/mask/
posted Monday, October 09, 2006 10:00:53 PM by Jeff
Filed under:
Computers, Gadgets
A friend of mine recently asked me to convince him not to buy a new Tivo unit. Despite my own experiences, it seemed like a difficult task at first. Let's face it, the Tivo experience is easy enough... you plug it in and it works. It works really well, in fact.
But this is a guy studying computer science in college, and I know he's fairly savvy, so I figured it was OK to pitch to him the wonders of Snapstream Media's BeyondTV. I've been using it for about two years, and I absolutely love it.
The idea is pretty simple: Create a digital video recorder with a simple interface that can utilize as much hardware as you're willing to throw at it. When I built mine, I spent almost $500 on a computer parts, including a 250 gig hard drive and an Athlon XP 2400+ (overclocked, of course). I also spent about $200 on a nice case that looked like a stereo component, but I wouldn't consider that a legit part of the expense. That $500 included the first analog tuner card, the software and Snapstream's remote control.
Since then, I bought the inexpensive version upgrade, as well as an HD broadcast tuner card bundle. The machine I built has no problem recording 24 off the air in HD while recording something on Discovery Channel from my DirecTV receiver.
The issue here for the geek who can handle all of the computer hardware is really a financial one. Yes, this box cost a little money up front. What I've saved in those two years is over $400 in subscription fees to Tivo. Snapstream handles the program guide for you. You can also login to their site and look at listings, and choose to record something from any Web browser anywhere. Your box will call in to see if you've ordered any remote recordings. Pretty cool. My infinitely flexible machine remains so without having to pay money to Tivo. People always seem to forget about that cost in the long run.
And like Tivo, once you've built your machine, BeyondTV just works. It has never failed to record anything in the two years I've been using it. If I was a serious dork, I could buy more tuners too, and the machine would handle them no problem. Of course, there isn't that much on TV worth watching, so I probably wouldn't do that.
People bring up the free open-source stuff as alternatives frequently enough, but those don't get you commercial-grade support, or steady development, or a wide range of hardware support. And for better or worse, many of them don't run on Windows either, and that's a roadblock for people like me that could care less about ever booting Linux.
If cheap hardware from two years ago can work as an HD DVR, imagine what you could do with today's stuff.