Web gems
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Monday, October 1st, 200737signals, the makers of Basecamp, Highrise, and my favorite: Backpack just blogged about the iPhone’s user interface and Apple’s conscious design decisions which favor context over consistency. Personally I trend slightly more to consistency because I’m mildly OCD about organization and repeatability, but the article is an interesting read that rings true.
Happy with EDGE?
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007iPod Observer just posted about an Information Week article about AT&T’s upcoming HSUPA upgrades for their network which will increase 3G speeds up to sixfold in some cases. AT&T’s president Richard Burns commented that iPhone customers are happy with the EDGE (2.5G) network.
We’re surveying them in large numbers week in and week out. They’re telling us their EDGE experience is great.
I’m sorry, but I have to call plain and simple bullshit. The newly improved EDGE network is faster than the old one, and makes browsing the web possible on an iPhone, but certainly not “great”. The fantastic iPhone WiFi experience makes up for it, but whenever a hotspot is not handy life on the EDGE network is barely faster than dial-up internet access in a day when modern web content is designed with broadband network connections in mind.
Apple needs to hurry up and drop with the 3G iPhone - the modern capabilities of the device paired with a more modern network connection would make for the true killer phone.
Skitch: 5 minutes in
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
The geniuses over at Plasq have created another application, and while it hasn’t won any awards yet (it’s still in beta) but it’s certain to do so shortly. Skitch allows you to show the world something on your Mac effortlessly rather than try tell them about it in writing or sending massive and unmanageable screenshots. I’m 5 minutes into my experimentation with it and I already can tell this is one of the coolest applications I’ve played with in a while. It makes image capture and annotation a breeze, and does it all with a highly polished elegance.
Skitch allows you to capture screenshots, windows, webcam images, and all sorts of other media into its editing window. Once you have a base image it’s easy to annotate and edit the image with text, handwriting, or other shapes then one click saves it up to the Skitch site on the web for easy sharing. If you don’t want to go the upload route it’s easy to drag your creation into any other application on your mac, or just save the finished file to disk.
I’ll be writing a much more in-depth review on Gear Live over the next couple of days so stay tuned and check my Gear Live posts for more info on this delicious little software treat.
UPDATE:As amazing as the Skitch application is that’s not everything Plasq is throwing on the table with Skitch. Now that I’ve spent a few more minutes with it the service side of Skitch is starting to shine. The ability to save and upload one of your creations (skitches?) to the Skitch service with a single click is wonderfully simple and well implemented. Once the upload is complete you are taken to a webpage for that creation where you can share it with friends as simply as pasting a link into an IM, e-mail, or forum and you can instantly share what you just created. Check out the Skitch page for the photo above.
Blogging Gear Live
Friday, September 21st, 2007I am pleased to announce my triumphant return to the professional blogging scene at Gear Live. I’ve been busy with other things in my life the last 6 months or so and haven’t had a chance to write up articles and reviews, but now that things have settled down a little bit I plan to be writing weekly columns again and reviewing more gadgets and technology. I’m close to finishing up some final details to confirm I’ll be going CES again next year with the Gear Live crew - yay!
The re-launch of my Gear Live writing career starts with an in-depth review of the V-Moda Vibe Duos. There are a lot more exciting things coming to the site (including a fantastic new site design launching soon) so bookmark Gear Live and stay tuned for more announcements! If you just want to see the posts I’ve written you can always look at the filtered view of my posts on Gear Live.
Site re-launch: Bulimia Resources
Friday, September 21st, 2007I’m proud to announce the re-launch of Bulimia Resources, my very own sadistic satire of the wonderful wide world of beauty. It’s likely the most tasteless thing I’ve ever done and boy am I proud.
Of advertising and social commentary
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007Advertising is an interesting world - companies invading the psyche of the consumer, introducing products and messages with a singular goal in mind: profit. Many companies (AtlasDMT, Google, Yahoo, etc) have been quite successful on the web in finding ways to make contextual advertising automatic, targeted, and easy for both publishers to implement and consumers to use.
That being said I decided to experiment a little bit with advertising on Futurist Now. I’m not really doing this with a financial goal in mind (although having my hosting bills paid for every month would be nice) but more to see how the various contextual algorithms handle my content and what kind of companies they select to place advertisements on.
Obviously they have a vested interest in pushing companies they think my visitors are likely to click on (as their revenue is entirely click based) so seeing the products and services selected provides an insight into the web-browsing consumer, although in a statistically averaged way.
Provided the random nature of my content, and my wide range of topics this experiment has already led to some very interesting results. For instance the Amazon.com contextual advertisement script decided that linking the name Jack Thompson to a product in their catalog which contained a director of the same name as shown by the image below:
Now on the surface this not only makes sense from a technological perspective, but also from that of delightful social commentary. In the post in question I was referring to the now infamous Jack Thompson, legal attack-dog on a crusade against violence in video games. Jack Thompson the ex-attourny (the State of Florida BAR association pulled his license to practice law last year) has spent the last few years trying to ban violent video games as he perceives them to be the cause of almost every ill that threatens society.
Amazon was kind enough to link his name to the movie Feed, which starred an entirely different Jack Thompson, and yet somehow seems fitting. Feed is one of the best trashy C rate movies I am proud to own. The movie revolves around a murder detective who crosses continents in search of a serial killer who lovingly fattens feeds his victims to death. Upon their deaths he liquifies their fat to feed to his next victimlover, thus closing the loop on the food chain and completely disgusting the movies audience.
There is justice in advertising!
Gradual content creation
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007I’ve been experimenting around with Twitter Tools and the del.icio.us auto-post blogging tool. They make for an easy way to gradually add content to Futurist Now without having to actually sit down and write a full post. The web links from the day that interest me can go through a workflow into my del.icio.us account, and inane babble about my day fits quite nicely into Twitter. I’ve placed both of these into the new infobits category to make it neat and tidy.
Not that I’ll stop writing real content by any means - just an easy way to share things that interest me day to day.
Update 1 week later: It was a great idea while it lasted, but I’ve pulled the twitter and del.icio.us posts as I’ve gotten a surprising amount of negative feedback from my users. Lesson learned.
Just a little housekeeping
Monday, September 10th, 2007I did some general housekeeping tonight on Futurist Now. I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, and to a newer version of VeryPlainText. I applied some of the hacks from the old version of the VeryPlainText theme, but made a few other minor typographic tweaks. I’ve added a few new categories and back-added a few posts into them, but that’s mostly a move to help for some future planned expansion.
Overall not much has changed but just in case let me know if you see anything broken on the site and I’ll be glad to take a look at it - you can just leave some information about what you saw and what browser you are using as a comment.
The iPhone: laptop competitor?
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
I just sat down to watch another episode of the Planet Earth on HD-DVD, and reached for my Macbook only to discover its battery was entirely dead. In thinking back I suddenly realized that whereas once I used both my iMac in the bedroom, and the Macbook in the living room on a day to day basis I haven’t actually touched my Macbook in well over a week. Strangely my iPhone is to blame!
Back in my Windows Mobile days I treasured the mobility offered by my cellphone - being able to check my email and do basic web browsing is a modern marvel indeed, but the experience was clearly that of a cell phone - second rate at best when compared to a full blown computer with a big screen and full-blown keyboard. While checking a movie time on the go was possible (and useful) with Windows Mobile and Symbian devices it simple wasn’t the fun, easy experience one looks for in a portable computing experience.
The iPhone makes it easy to browse the full blown web and communicate quickly without getting in my way that it’s overcome the arms reach barrier and become my device of choice for quick internet tasks even with my perfectly serviceable laptop sitting next to me. Since both devices can accomplish the task with similar ease why reach over and open the laptop when the iPhone is already in hand, just begging to be used. The overcoming of the arms reach barrier has reached further than my living room - I now find myself doing almost 50% of my personal communications via my iPhone.
One might say that not reaching for the laptop is the heights (or depths) of laziness, but I’d much rather point the finger at the wonders of engineering that Apple managed to cram into their diminutive ultra-portable computer, the iPhone.
Is the iPhone honeymoon over? It’s more than two months later and I’m still writing blathering blog posts about how great it is, so I guess not!
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