iPhone Bubble Wrap - Not as Good as the Real Thing
This was maybe the first or second iPhone app I downloaded. It was an interesting diversion at a time where there wasn’t really any other options. It is time for it to go.
This was maybe the first or second iPhone app I downloaded. It was an interesting diversion at a time where there wasn’t really any other options. It is time for it to go.
I was interested in trying to improve my face cognition a few months ago. Of course I looked for an iPhone app that would help me with this. I came across Faces and gave it a try. It’s not even worth reviewing. One star and I’m deleting it now.
I’ve tried two clients on the iPhone, Wikiamo and Quickipedia. They both have their merits but since there is no need to keep two Wikipedia clients on my iPhone I have to choose.
In my five minute review of both applications, I’ve settled on Quickipedia. I like the job Quickipedia does rendering the pages, especially with larger images. Wikiamo seems a bit faster but on my 3Gs it’s not really a factor.
Wikipedia has also just released their own official client. If anyone has any experience with this let me know.
I received an alumnimum Mac Book Pro a little while ago and I began to scour the net to find some great websites for getting the most out of my system. I figured I’d create a list to give back some link love.
Day two of Interval training.
I felt great yesterday, no afternoon fatigue and I wasn’t tired after dinner. These are generally the worst times of day for me.
20 Minutes 1 minute bursts every 4 minutes
I actually pushed those bursts a little bit, probably did more that 1 minute per burst.
OK, maybe not a round up. I’ve tried two. Twitteriffic and Tweet Deck.
photo credit: dantekgeekI’ve used Twitteriffic as my primary twitter application since it came out. It sports a clean interface. Allows you to manage multiple accounts and color codes posts in such a way that they have context.
TweetDeck is a newcomer. If you are familiar with the desktop Tweet Deck, they try to create the multi-pane window effect on the iPhone. This I’m sure was a challenging UI design. For me, it just doesn’t work. If your primary twitter device is an iPhone and you are a hard-core user than this application might be better for you.
My verdict for now is Twitteriffic.
One of the things that always bugged me about Apple’s Weather application is it didn’t know where I was. If I’m travelling in some location and want to know the weather I have to go through the hassle of setting up a city.
That frustration led me to check out the Weather application from The Weather Channel. It does a lot more than what I need and is a great tool for hard core weather junkies. It does provide two click access to weather in my current location. A feature I love.
Check it out and let me know if you know of a better weather application.
photo credit: bradleygeeThe Urinal Test is an advertainment game for the iPhone. The object is to pick the correct urinal to pee in when presented with a group of urinals, some populated with dudes.
Amusing to play once or twice. Doesn’t warrant a permanent place on my phone.
I’m sitting in my car waiting for my sons soccer tournament to begin. While waiting I decided to play around with my iPhone.
I was curious to see how well the 3g network worked in the middle of Orefield, Pa. I was a bit disappointed.
According to the Speed Test iPhone app I’m only getting 256kbps here. I guess I should be glad that I’m getting any signal. What it is telling me though is that 5 bars of service doesn’t equate to fast 3G.
I kind of feel bad for the person who left their lights on.
This great video, used as promotional material for the upcoming book Socialnomics, drives the point home with lots-o-data. Social Media is a force to reckon with, businesses need to understand it or go home.
Card Star is an application that keeps track of your loyalty cards.
I was one of the thousands of people that helped propel this application into the top slots in the iTunes store. It was featured in an Apple ad and I grabbed it.
The point is that you never have to remember your loyalty cards, enter the data and when you go to a store, recall it, and the merchant can scan you iPhone screen. Neat idea. I don’t have enough loyalty cards that I care to go through the hassle of entering them.
Another in the series of articles on iPhone apps I’ve used.
This is the official AIM client from AOL. The latest version adds push capabilities. If you only use AOL for IM this is a great application. For me though, I’m on about three different networks. I’m looking for a better IM client. Any good recommendations list them here.
In this first of a continuing series of articles of iPhone Apps I’ve tried. I’m doing a quick write-up of Faces. Faces gives you one button access to a list of favorite phone numbers. It’s called faces because the buttons in the user interface can consist of pictures of the people you want to call.
This is my goto dial application. I don’t use the iPhone Phone app directly for most of my calling. All of my friends and family are in Faces.
Over the next few posts, you’re going to see a bunch of lame-o reviews of iPhone applications. This is not so much to wow the reader with my ability to concisely summarize my experience with these applications. It’s mainly so I remember which apps I’ve tried and which, quite frankly, suck.
I wasn’t the only one who was confused by Sarah Palin’s farewell speech. Luckily William Shatner can lend some clarity.
Two days in a row I’ve woken up to a dead iPhone. This isn’t so bad but I generally like to have a working phone while I’m on the road. The first day this happened, I wasn’t sure of the cause. Today, I’ve figured it out. It’s the Pandora client.
I don’t think that the client necessarily is doing anything wrong, I just think it’s not doing some thing right. I was listening to Pandora in my car, when I arrived home, I disconnected the iPhone from my aux jack and didn’t use my phone again until the next day. Pandora, I’m guessing, happily kept open the network connection which ultimately drained my battery.
It should behave more like the iPod client application. When the signal is lost on the headphone jack it should stop playing or in Pandora’s case stop streaming.
Anyone else having strange problems with the battery draining? Post them here.
I like many people eagerly updated the iPhone OS to version 3.0 the day it was released. I did it mainly for the copy and paste functionality. I noticed however, that once I did this my phone no longer performed as well as it did before.
This performance hit has taken a couple of forms. All quite annoying. App loading time has increased, including the built-in Apple applications. Clicking the messages application to send an SMS takes 7 seconds to load. In the previous version, this was instantaneous.
I’ve also noticed that I am dialing wrong numbers a lot more frequently. I’ve finally figured out why. It seems that my brain was programmed to press the iPhone buttons at a certain rate. With the update in the OS, screen changes happen slower than what I am used to so I’m hitting the wrong contact.
All in all, this is a rather annoying circumstance which after searching the Google machine, I’m not alone in experiencing.
I’m going to try one last thing. Wiping my iPhone and starting with a fresh OS 3.0. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to try reverting back to the previous version. A rather disheartening proposition but I’m willing to sacrifice some of the new features for stability and speed.
I have found what has to be the coolest Firefox plugins ever. I often spend hours scouring the web for bits of information that I need to bring into other documents. Many times, I’ll want to bring in a web table to Excel. This is often met with frustration and a lot of manual tweaking. Well, no more. Thanks to OutWit Technologies. They have developed a cool plug-in that extracts various bits of data from websites including images, text, and tables.
[gallery link=“file”]
In the two figures above you can see an example of the extraction engine at work. I’ve loaded a page from Wikipedia that includes a table. I run the extraction on the page and the table is automatically pulled out. I can then copy and paste this easily into Excel. What’s really cool about this software is if you’re a regular expression geek, you can tune the extraction so it pulls the right data.
If you ever needed to pull data out of web pages, get this Firefox add-in today.
Two completely disparate topics but my brain generally jumps from topic to topic almost randomly.
First, I listened to a great podcast this morning discussing how social media companies need to start thinking about ways to leverage the portable social graph.
Second, are short URL services harmful to search rankings? Google uses the context of the text of an anchor tag to help identify the landing link. URL shortners generally aren’t inserted into anchor tags. Also, since URLs are redirected, does it effect backlinking?
John Winsor, Business Week contributor as solicited opinions from the twitterazzi about the phenomenom of crowd sourcing.
Some have predicted that the crowdsourcing phenomenon will accelerate creativity across a larger network. Others, meanwhile, have predicted the practice of opening up a task to the public instead of keeping it in-house or using a contractor will prove to be the demise of many industries. To accompany my piece on the future of the discipline, we decided to open things up. By canvassing opinions through Twitter and through my personal blog, I'm able to give you the crowd's take on crowdsourcing.Commentors include Shaun Abrahamson (@shaunabe), Brett T. T. Macfarlane (@macfarbt), Doron Reuveni (@doronr), Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3), Zeny Huang (@zenydala).
The trick with crowd sourcing is finding out the types of tasks that are appropriate for the crowd. Once you do that, the next challenge is figuring out a way to leverage the crowd in a cost effective way. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to filter images for porn is a great way to effectively use the crowd to solve a problem that could not be solved as cost effectively in-house.
I read a post recently about how everything we publish online becomes a decision point for someone. The author, Scott Monty, was talking about this as it pertains to a businesses social media strategy but I think it’s great advice for our kids.
A few months ago, I met a young woman in her early twenties that was interviewing at our company. She presented herself very professionally and we brought her in to consult with us. After I met her, the first thing I did was search Google about her. Quite easily, I came across her Facebook page. There wasn’t anything particularly salacious on her page but it was easily found. As employers wrestle with this technology, I’ve often wondered about the future 10 years from now as our children have moved into the workplace. What influence will their social networking footprint have on their employment opportunities? Will the Facebook users of today understand that drunken frat party pictures do not necessarily reflect poorly on a 30 year old teacher looking for a job?
However it shakes out, it still is important to stress to the kids that are driving social media that there might be consequences to the digital footprints they leave behind.
I hate dumping stuff needlessly into landfills. I had an old PC sitting in my basement for two years because I didn’t want to get rid of it.
I recently discovered that Staples has an electronics recycling program that allows you to bring in old PCs and for $10, they will dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way. For me, it was worth the money.
I just came across The Electronics Recycling Superguide on the PCMag website. They talk about Staples and BestBuy recycling programs. They also highlight some online trade-in programs that will give you gift cards for your old gear.
The Consumerist website noted that Facebook recently changed their Terms of Service (TOS) so that they now effectively own all of the content you post on their site. I verified this on their Terms page. I’ve copied the relevant section below.
You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
While I’m not a lawyer, what I read in this is if you post content, like a song you’ve written and performed, on Facebook then you’ve relinquised your ownership rights and they are free to use it as they wish.
Sort of scary and maybe an argument for distributed social networking, something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last few weeks.
I came across this on Overstock tonight. I find a few things amusing about this picture. First, I appreciate that I’m only being charged a dollar for shipping but if I paying close to 100k for a watch you think they’d throw the shipping in for free. Second, there’s only one left. Who’s buying this stuff online?
I just downloaded the recently release Open Office 3.0 productivity suite. On first launch of the software, I was prompted to register the software in order to help Sun determine the global market share. I didn’t mind doing this so I clicked the Register button. What transpired was a very long process requiring me to fill out a form for the Sun Developer Network, receiving a registration email which I then had to validate. After this registration process was complete, I still had to go back to the original Open Office registration page which, in the end, didn’t actually work. Sun in one stroke ticked me off before I had a chance to even see the software. I’ve given up my time and my email address and our mutual goal (registering the software) wasn’t achieved. Not a great first impression and very poor customer service. However, it is valuable to reflect on this experience when designing your own software.
The point is, determine what the most significant thing that you want your users to do and give them the shortest path to achieving this goal. Goal driven design is nothing new and agile developers tend to already think this way. If Sun’s goal is to determine market share, here is one alternative to the process.
<li>Clicking Yes takes you to a <strong>simple</strong> form that asks for email address and password and a submit button.</li>
<li>Customer fills in email address and password, clicks register.</li>
<li>Sun could then send a single email to me explaining the benefits of the more full fledged program. If I do not choose to opt-in to the full program then Sun still has what they want, a registered user of Open Office, with minimal hassle on my part.</li>
On further thought, Sun could make this simpler:
This is a gross example but represents some real world UI lunacy we are often faced with. Make sure you give your customers the easiest path to achieving their goals.