FriendFeed popped out of nowhere for me. I hadn’t heard or seen of it until I saw a blog post from Robert Scoble. With so many networks out there like Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, etc. it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the people you follow. FriendFeed helps out by displaying what exactly your friends and contacts are doing on other networks. Once you signup (it’s free), you just add as many of your own services as you like, and there are quite a few, and get connected with your contacts.
The interface is nothing fancy, but it serves its purpose well. A clean way to view the activity of all the people you are somehow connected to. I think tonight I got all my relevant services listed, so I think I’m all set now. Feel free to add me to your FriendFeed list.
For anyone who has an iPhone, or an iPod Touch for that matter, I’m sure you know all about web applications that were designed specifically for the iPhone. Apple.com has a dedicated section of web apps where people can submit their own, and it’s a great place to find some of the best. The list is growing day by day, so I wanted to take you through my 5 favorite iPhone web apps.
The included weather widget with the iPhone is nice, but it’s not very informative. That is why I turn to the Accuweather web app. It has a simple interface that you either switch to a 15 day forecast, or an animated radar image of your selected area. It also has your daily forecast, along with a 4 day outlook. One feature that really stands out is that Accuweather will display weather alerts for your area.
If you ever get tired of waiting for your dinner to get to the table at your favorite restaurant, no worries, just fire up the Tic Tac Toe web app and have at it. The kids really enjoy this one, and it has a very simple interface where you just take alternative turns at tapping the area you want to mark.
One of the things that really aggravates me is the fact that the iPhone doesn’t have any native IM application. Hopefully that will be resolved in the future, but for now BeeJive fills the void quite well. BeeJive connects to several of the popular networks like MSN, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, and more. The interface, where has different themes you can set, is beautifully done and you will easily forget this is a web based application.
Ever been to a group dinner, and have to sit around for 20 minutes trying to figure out how much everyone owe’s for a tip? Well I have, and that is why this web app is in my top 5. The Tip Calculator lets you enter the bill amount, tip percentage, and how many people it needs to be split with.
If you like to check your Facebook account several times a day, then this streamlined version made for the iPhone will suit your needs perfectly. You can view your friends list, profile, wall, and even update your current status from this web app. It still needs some work, but it’s far easier than trying to navigate the full site.
Last September I gave a review of the Sena Ultraslim iPhone case. I still think it’s a great pouch for the iPhone, but after a few months of usage, I needed to move on to a solution where I didn’t have to keep taking the iPhone in and out of the pouch. After some research and recommendations I placed an order for the Signature Leather iPhone case from Case-Mate. The case is available in several colors, but it opted for the Phantom Black.
I ordered direct from Case-Mate.com and even with the standard shipping option, the case arrived in just a few days. Upon opening the box, this case includes the case, a screw-in ratcheting belt clip, and a clear protective screen cover.
The iPhone fit perfectly in the case, just snug enough to hold it, but not overly tight. The case has a felt-like inner layer which does a good job of prevent scratches in the times you do need to remove the iPhone. The outside of the case seems to be a decent quality of leather, and is very well made. There is a metal attachment on the back of the case which is where you can screw-in the belt clip accessory if needed.
I didn’t use the clear protective screen cover as I am already using one, but it was nice to have that included. Included with the order was the option to have your name, or any other text, etched into the back of the case. It’s nothing fancy, but adds a nice bit of style to the case. After using the case for several months it still looks as good as the day it arrived, and even though I have repeatedly taken the iPhone in and out of the case, there has been no scratches or markings on the iPhone. I have to give this case a 5 out of 5, and definitely recommend it to anyone with an iPhone. The MSRP is $34.99, but it looks and feels much more expensive, and I know you won’t be disappointed.
With all the hype from Mix ‘08 yesterday about IE8, I completely missed this in the news. I use both Outlook 2007 and Google Calendar on a regular basis. I like Google Calendar simply because it’s easy to share, both publicly and privately, calendars with people from all over the world. For instance, I have a calendar for the Martial Arts school I volunteer for, which allow myself and other instructors to add events to the calendar, and allows students and parents to easily view these events.
Also, just the fact I can view the Google Calendar on any computer is a big plus. The big downside is that is didn’t sync with Outlook. What I would find myself doing is manually exporting my Outlook calendars as iCal files, and then importing them into Google Calendar. Doing that is quite inefficient and really isn’t reliable. Being that I work on multiple PC’s throughout the day, having my calendars synced is a big priority.
Yesterday, Google introduced Google Calendar Sync. This is a simple 2-way syncing application that will sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, and vise-versa. In my brief testing it seems to work very well, but it does have one big downside at this time. It will only sync your primary Outlook calendar, which really sucks because I have several secondary calendars for work, etc. Hopefully this will be a feature that will be added soon though.
Brad Wardell has written his yearly assessment of the state of skinning. It’s a very good and in-depth look at the up’s and down’s of skinning (desktop customization). 2007 was a bit rocky because of Windows Vista, and Brad gives a good insight of what some of the problems were. He also gives us a look at what is upcoming in 2008, which seems very exciting.
I read this PressPass article this morning from Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft plans to reduce the prices on several versions of retail editions of Vista with the launch of SP1.
Since its release, Windows Vista has seen solid sales through the first year of availability, primarily through the sale of new PCs. Stand-alone retail sales, while not representing a large percentage of the business, represents an area of opportunity for additional growth the company sees based on the new editions introduced in 2007. To help reach that goal, Microsoft today announced price reductions on several consumer stand-alone editions.
The price of the upgrade version of Windows Vista Ultimate will drop from $259 to $219.
The upgrade of Vista Home Premium will drop from $159 from $129.
There doesn’t appear (at this time) any information about the full retail version of Home Premium, which seems to be the choice of many consumers. When I buy a Windows operating system, I want the full version not an upgrade, but that is just my personal choice. Vista’s price point is one of the biggest faults of Vista, and we can only hope Microsoft has learned their lesson with this.
Microsoft needs to take all this into consideration when the next version of Windows is ready. Forget all the different SKU’s that most people have no clue about the differences of. Make one version, price it reasonably, and get it out there. Also, give consumers a family pack of 3 or so licenses for a discounted price. There is no value for me to upgrade all the PC’s in my house to Vista.
Well earlier in the day I told you my story about having to install and reinstall Vista a few times, so now that the day is coming to a close I wanted to report on the progress I have made.
Vista installed and working on both PC’s
Most applications installed
Data transferred back to PC’s
Disk image made of laptop.
Application setup nearly done.
Tomorrow morning I just need to do a few small things to get Parallels setup with XP, make an image of my desktop drive, then that should be it.
I also want to take a moment and tell you how much I appreciate software like Stardock Central. I really can’t say how many applications I had to reinstall, and some (like Office 2007) take a bit of time to install. Windows Vista itself takes only about 25 minutes to install, it’s the other applications that take hours and hours to get done.
It’s just so easy to load up Stardock Central, select the applications I want to install, and just forget about it.
This past Sunday I discovered a trojan on my main desktop PC. Later on that day I discovered it had also made it’s way to my laptop. It had disabled some Windows applications, and just to be on the safe side I decided to just backkup my data, and restore a disk image with Acronis True Image. Doesn’t sound too bad? Yeah right..
The disk image for my desktop appeared to install correctly, but after a few hours of working with it, it appeared something got corrupted in the process. This of course, after I spent hours updating, installing applications, and updating again. So I just said forget it, and did a clean install from my Vista Ultimate disk and started from scratch.
Next, I tried to restore my laptop image, and of course the disk image was corrupt. Something must have gone wrong on my external drive at some point which screwed up both disk images. It’s now Monday and I’m going a clean install of Vista on both my desktop and laptop PC’s. The amount of reboots between updates is just incredible.
So here we are on day 3 and I almost have my laptop ready to take a new disk image. While that is being done I will finish installing applications and setting up my desktop PC, and then image that drive again as well. So 3 days of nothing but installing and reinstalling. I can’t do a bunch of things I was working on because I need the computers, so all I pretty much have to work with is my Mac which I’m writing this on now.
I guess that’s just the way it goes in a Windows world.
Since it has been over a year that Vista has been released, we have seen the customization of Windows Vista slowly, but surely start to take hold. Skinning had a rough start with Vista for several reasons, but one of the main ones was that not everyone was rushing out to put Vista on their PC’s. Then of course, people had to learn how to customize Vista, which at the time it was a bit limited. I would get so many questions on a daily basis from users from dozens of forums asking about what Stardock “had up its sleeves”.
WindowBlinds 5.5 was launched in March of last year, and finally gave those users a means to change their visual styles, and even use their favorite ones from XP. When WB 5.5 was released I heard from hundreds of users who claimed Vista will be the end of WindowBlinds because Aero is so “perfect”.
At the same time we had the .msstyle advocates drooling over a hack that allowed non-signed Vista themes to be used. While Vista .msstyles had a brief period of popularity, people seemed to quickly lose interest in themes that were nothing but re-colored Aero mods. That really wasn’t the fault of people who were making the visual styles, it’s just that the limitations of Vista really doesn’t allow much beyond that.
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