09.17.08
Posted in General Rant at 1:52 pm by Administrator
Remember when the Mac first made its debut in 1984? It was that commercial that opened with an Orwellian “overlord” on the screen with all the enslaved subjects being brain-washed into accepting what was said at face value.
Then, from the back, comes a pretty white woman in a running uniform carrying a sledge hammer and being chased by guards – and throws it through the screen and “frees” the captives. The tag line is “On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Watch the video here.
That is, of course until September 14, 2008 – when Apple brought out iTunes 8.0 and introduced the new “Genius” bar on the right hand side. It’s billed as an “assistant.”
The idea is to suggest music choices you don’t have – based on what you do have. It’s a good idea – like a suggestion engine that you see all the time in other sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. The problem is – in order for it to work – you need to agree to upload ALL the information about your music catalog, play lists and downloads to Apple.
Hmmmm. That’s a pretty big “opt-in” if you ask me. Right before you decide to take the plunge – here’s how Apple describes what you’re about to do:
“Genius is able to make play lists and give you great recommendations by periodically sending information about your iTunes library to Apple. This information will only be sent to Apple if you choose to turn on Genius.”
“The information sent to Apple includes details about the media in your iTunes library such as track names, play counts, and ratings. This information will be stored with an anonymous Genius ID and not linked to your iTunes Account. When using the iTunes Store or Genius sidebar, Apple will also use your purchase history to give you better recommendations.”
Ummm…. yeah. So Apple is now the world’s biggest distributor of music, and it will now also have data on millions of people’s catalogs – including music that was bought elsewhere and “ripped” from CD’s etc.
But it will also get all the other nuggets that are stored along with just what songs you have. It’ll also get the ratings, how many times you’ve played them, what pluralists you’ve put them in, etc.
In other words – Apple will have some of the most up-to-date and complete information in the world to predict music trends and to (potentially) capitalize on that knowledge.
Now I haven’t turned on the feature myself, yet – but I know people who have. They liken the Genius sidebar to an overzealous used car salesman. There are “buy” buttons all down the thing.
Whatever happened to that cool aesthetic, the subtle sell, providing the user with rankings and gently nudging them toward a sale? Now it says “Top Songs You’re Missing” and “Recommendations”.
Top songs I’m “missing?” Really? Maybe I think those songs totally blow – and aren’t worth the $0.89 or $0.99 asking price. Maybe I ripped those songs from a CD I’d made 5 years ago. Who died and made YOU boss?
Sorry, I digress.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: nice try, Apple. You make some good products (I really do like my iPhone), have some snazzy advertising, and have been terrifically successful in selling music and iPhone applications.
Just get your hand out of my data pocket – and keep your distance, less you start to become like all of the other “greedy” non-Mac companies out there. The only reason people like you is because you’re different, not the same as everyone else.
Try to stay that way.
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09.16.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:46 am by Administrator
For the past few days – I’ve made Google’s new browser – Chrome the default browser on my system – just to give it a proper test drive.
Ok, so Firefox 3 was eating tons of memory (it even popped into virtual memory on occasion) because I keep a bazillion tabs open in each of 4 or 5 windows. Now, I’m heavily invested in Firefox – it has all the bookmarks, quick links, certain site passwords, etc. all set up – so making the switch for me was a bit difficult.
I decided to take a man pill – and tough it out – and frankly, I’m glad I did.
I’m not one of those users that has 50,000 plug-ins and extensions in my browser – I use my browser to, well, just browse the web. I don’t expect it to do my laundry and wash my car – just serve up pages quickly and let me have 1,000,000 tabs open in 5 windows and not slow down or crash.
The interface (or lack thereof) takes a bit of getting used to – it’s unlike any browser you’ve used before. It has a tabbed interface (duh!), but the tabs are above the address bar, not below it. There is no “File”, “Edit” menus – and there’s not even a “home” button. There are two icons to the right of the address bar that contain all the commands you’ll ever use (and keyboard equivalents for everything).
One more thing – there’s no title bar (that thing that would normally have the icon and shows the title of the page – with the minimize and maximize buttons on it). NOPE! Not there. Google’s intent was to make the browsing experience as stripped down (UI wise) as possible – but still make it powerful.
Each tab is, in effect, it’s own browser – so if one page blows up – it doesn’t take the whole application down – it just blows that one tab up. Me likkie. The other thing that’s interesting – is that because it was built from the ground up to be optimized for browsing – there are some cool, albeit somewhat hidden, features that give you almost too much information about what’s going on under the hood.
For example, choosing Developer -> Task Manager (or Shift + Esc) – you can see how much memory every open tab is taking – and how much memory plug-ins (like Flash) are consuming and you can kill any process at any time with the click of a button.
If you’re really into code – check out the Element Inspector. Just right click on any object on a page and you’ll see the Inspector window come up with the HTML of the page with the selected object highlighted. It will also show you all the CSS information and JavaScript in a collapsible tree view that you can navigate.
There are a ton of other features in there – like when you open a new tab rather than it being blank it shows the 9 most visited sites. Also, when you open a new tab manually – it goes to the far right like you would expect, but when you click on a link in a page and have set it up to open a new window in a new tab – it will open the new tab directly to the right of the selected tab. This really makes it easy to hop back and forth – and is just one example of the neato features that just work.
There are a ton of other features in there – if you’re interested you should have a look at the ComputerWorld article by Preston Gralla – he goes into terrific details about how to use them and where they are.
If your idea of what a browser should be is just a browser that’s optimized for browsing – and you’re on Windows (for now) – then I would highly recommend you check out Chrome.
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09.15.08
Posted in General Rant at 10:52 am by Administrator
In going through all the interesting (and questionable) new business ideas coming out of TechCrunch over the weekend – I stumbled on one of them – iSearch – that, like other sites, will comb the web and allow stalkers of all sorts find out all the information they need about just about anyone.
It’s really nothing new – there have been information “aggregators” around for years. They would troll the public sites of local government databases, and sometimes just perform Google (or Yahoo back in the day) searches to put together a “profile” of the person you’re trying to stalk locate.
The interesting thing about iSearch is that it allows you to search by not just name and city or state – but also by phone number, or screen name. The site itself isn’t “all that” – and it seems that there it’s linked in large part to Intelus who appears to be the big aggregator of the information.
On thing I found quite fun – was the fact that it showed basically my LinkedIn profile, including a lot of the people I was connected to – and with a single click – you could get more information on them as well. I think this is just the start. If you leave a big enough digital, public profile – it’s just a matter of time (and web services) until anyone will be able to get a full profile of you, your tastes, your music preferences, who your friends are (and their profiles, music tastes, etc).
It’s also interesting that according to eWEEK, about 22% of hiring managers look to a person’s online profile during the hiring process. When you have basically free access to “people” search engines that will aggregate a bunch of information together on a single person – this will definitely be a trend that is only going to get worse, not better.
The bottom line is that if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Tumblr, Rejaw life – expect it to be aggregated, analyzed and dissected by anyone at any time. For the paranoid of the group – you may want to have aFacebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce Tumblr, Rejaw “alter ego” where you can “be yourself” and keep your “actual” public profiles clean and fresh as the morning rain.
In the “old days” (even today) – I can pay a little extra extortion fee to the phone company to keep my phone number unlisted. I wonder what we’ll have to do to get “unlisted” from sites like iSearch…
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09.12.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:05 am by Administrator
Ok, ok, so it’s really more commonly referred to as “private browsing” or in Chrome it’s called “Incognito.” The basic concept is that rather than having to dump all your history, cookies, passwords, etc. after visiting a “questionable” site – you could just open a new window and none of the stuff would be saved in the first place.
It’s a feature that the Mozilla people had planned for Firefox 3.0 (and 3.1) – but decided to pull. It’s also rumored to be in Internet Explorer 8 – and it’s already been in Safari since 2005.
People have really been wanting more granular control over their browsing history, temporary Internet files, cookies, passwords, etc. for a long time – even people from Microsoft want it.
Here’s a quote from Mary Jo-Foley’s “All About Microsoft” blog. She’s quoting Nick Davis who posted on a IE blog back in 2006:
“I *hate* clearing my history, because lots of history is useful. What’s that new supplier’s site I went to last week and forgot to bookmark, etc. I hate losing all that info, just to cover up the fact that I, ahem, bought a gift for a loved one.
“Selective history. That’s what we need. Or a way to selectively delete browsing history after the fact. I mean, we’re only over 10 years into this whole web browser thing, and we have basically the same feature since v1.”
I would agree with Mr. Davis. Now, maybe it’s because he works at Microsoft and can’t install another browser – but I mean it’s not rocket science to use another brand browser (where you don’t have all the stuff you want to keep) as your own personal “private browser” – and then just blow away all that info when you’re done… ahem… “buying a gift for a loved one.”
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09.11.08
Posted in General Rant at 7:14 am by Administrator
So, I was bitching about social media sites a while back – and I was bemoaning the fact that since I had a “real job” – it was difficult for me to keep up on all the sites.
Well, I do still hold that opinion, however – I did find a tool that makes updating stuff (at least your “status”) a helluva lot easier: ping.fm.
This nifty site (still in beta – but just request a login and in a couple of days they will give you one) – has made life so much easier when trying to post to all those media sites. Basically, it’s an aggregation service that will allow you to input all your logins for all the social media sites you’re a member of – and then blast your update to them in realtime.
It will also let you post to any single service by adding “@” and then a two letter abbreviation – e.g. Twitter = @tt. Not only will it allow you to do status updates and microblogging – but it will allow you to do full blog posts as well. To post a blog entry to blogger – you would use something like this: @bl This is Cool!^Body of my blog. Ping.fm would then post a new posting to your blogger account with title^posting.
I also ran across some very interesting other stuff when looking at the APIs of LinkedIn (still not public yet) and Twitter.
For LinkedIn there is a webservice widget called “Company Insider” that you can call that will see if there is anyone you know in any company. It’s VERY easy to insert into any HTML page.
If you’re into Twitter – there is some great documentation on their RESTful API here. Basically, a RESTful API means you can call it with simple URLs. For example – enter this text into a browser (Firefox or IE work best): http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml. You will be prompted to enter your username/password (use your Twitter login and password) – and you’ll get back an XML string of the last 2 people that posted to you.
You can also get it back in atom, rss, or json formats as well – simply by changing the “xml” in the url to one of the supported formats.
It’s basically the same thing for Tumblr, Rejaw, Pownce, Plurk, etc. They all offer a RESTful API that you can get XML or JSON files out of. This means that you can add all of this social media to whatever site you have. In fact, if you develop applications – it’s conceivable to create a really cool social networking mashup/dashboard type of application…
Servoy developers – can you hear me now?
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09.10.08
Posted in General Rant at 6:46 am by Administrator
Yesterday was a big day in terms of the tech world – with the TechCrunch 50 in day 2, and Apple getting all fresh nanos and an update to iTunes. So, I thought it would be a good time for me to get caught up on my reading and to get “with” the day’s happenings.
So I broke out my Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Design Premium) Installer (what the hell committee thought that was a GOOD name?) – and since I know that installing anything Adobe – and especially anything to do with Photoshop – would take forever, I planned accordingly.
For example, I had a separate computer all set up with my social network logins and browsers (including the new Chrome browser that I’m test driving) and I was all set to go. I even “allowed” myself 2 full hours (1 before lunch and one after) to read and get caught up. I even took a full 1 hour lunch (usually I snarf a sandwich at the desk) in between – to give it 3 full hours to do its thing.
I put in the installer CD – accepted all the defaults – and let ‘er rip. An hour later, the progress bar was about 1/3 of the way (”Installing common components”) – so I left to go to lunch.
I even WALKED to the nearest Whole Foods (about 3/4 of a mile away), ate, stopped in Best Buy, then walked back. The installer was now 2/3 of the way done.
“Great!,” I thought to myself; “it will be done in just 3 hours.” Well, sort of.
The installer got to 100% (there are two progress bars – just so you REALLY know how far you are) – and then just sat there. The hard drive would twinkle every now and then, but the “Cancel” button was still lit.
So I let it go for another hour. Still, nothing – progress bars at 100%. Then I let it go one MORE hour. Still, nothing.
Then, I get all “Bob Cusick” on it – and hit “Cancel”, then just force quit the damn thing. Then, I thought – “Hey, it probably got some of the stuff installed – so let’s just try to ‘repair’ it!”.
What a good idea that was… NOT.
This time it took only 3.5 hours to “repair” all the stuff… and it just sat there doing nothing at the end. Again. So, this time I just did a restart – and it looks like everything is there… we’ll see.
The whole point of this post is this:
- Make your progress bars accurate as to the real progress
- If you don’t know how long it will take – say so – in text – up front
- ALWAYS tell the user, in text, what is happening
- Do not make such bloatware that it requires 3+ hours to install – or tell the user it will take 9 days when they choose the option to install that piece
- Have the “repair” function actually just repair – NOT blindly re-install
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09.09.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:11 am by Administrator
Ok, so I am probably the only person on the planet that hasn’t seen the pre-release of Microsoft’s new $300 million advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld.
On the off chance that you haven’t seen it – check it out first.
The first thing thought I had was “Are you kidding me?” I felt a little dirty, stupid and just plain confused. THIS is supposed to compete with the “I’m a Mac” commercials?
Ok, ok – so maybe I missed something. So, I watched it again. And again.
Nope – I missed nothing from the first view. Then, I thought – hey, this is one of those cool in-house movies that Microsoft always makes for their conferences and stuff. So I searched the Internet for other copies – and much to my dismay, it was the real thing.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I always thought that advertising was supposed to make the person watching the ad want to buy your product or service. I thought it was supposed to strengthen the brand, promote “new” features, while at the same time putting a positive spin on the company doing the ads.
The scariest part of all is – there will be more of them!
You just know that there is a whole series of these things shot and in the can, just waiting to be unleashed. There’s been “only” about 700,000 or so views of the video – and already there are people who have made their own scathing, mocking videos in response (I’ll bet 50% of them are Mac users!).
I guess the end of the video sums it all up. Jerry says to Bill Gates: “Just wondering, are they ever going to come out with something that will make our computers moist, chewy, like cake, so we can just eat ‘em while we’re working?” Then Bill Gates shakes his ass – acknowledging Jerry – and then Jerry says “I knew it.”
Here’s the BIG payoff – the branding – the screen cuts to “The Future,” “Delicious” and the Windows logo.
Ching! That was the sound of the $10 million Jerry got for the commercial hitting his bank account. If that’s the best that Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Microsoft can do – then I’m DEFINITELY a Mac.
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