This artwork has been around the internet and back again, but I thought this was a cool video slideshow someone put together with decent music and thought I’d share it for those who want to see it again and for those who have yet to have the pleasure of seeing this illusionary art! The art is done by Julian Beever
I don’t know if any of you use one of these services, but I started using all three recently. I like twitter’s ease of use, Jaiku’s feed importer, and Pownce’s posting types. However, what good is having each of these if you post the same thing on all three, or have the same friends on each. My current thought is that I will use twitter like the microblog that it is, and it’ll be my casual posting. I will drop Jaiku as my main service, and have it just import feeds similar to my tumblelog or maybe even drop that community. Last, I will use pownce as a more intimate social presence network to share things among friends in that network.
How do you all use these services?
P.S.: If anyone wants a Pownce invite let me know, I currently have 10 or so
Update: To get an invite I need an email address, you have to use this as your new pownce account’s email
You can always goto Invite Share to get an invite, but you still will have to give an email there as well.
Aza Raskin from the humanized.com team spoke at one of Google’s Tech Talks about user interface design. He starts with talking about user interface and interaction and his ideas on things to avoid and what needs to change. One cool thing he discussed was how there needs to be services, and a universal access interface (basically APIs) that would allow any interface to be used for any service and thus would allow the focus to move from the tools to the content itself and what you are trying to do with it.
The rest of the talk is mainly about how the desktop is useless for the most part as it does nothing for you in terms of content. Content is key, it’s all we care about. We want to create and manipulate content.
He speaks about removing the idea of the application, as they are silos in terms of user interface and content interaction. He presented how Microsoft Word becomes bloated trying to be Mathematica for calculations, and Photoshop for editing images, as well as being a word processor, but it does so poorly. Applications also cause user interface to become stale and toolboxes come along to make development easy but non-innovative.
He showed of Enso a product they have developed that marries the graphical user interface (GUI) with the command line interface (CLI). Non-technical people are used to CLI whenever they use google to search for something. So what Enso does is allow you to select something, then hold down the capslock key and start typing commands to manipulate the content, such as spell check, calculate, flip image horizontally, and many more. It also has a navigation command set so you can open an application or document, or switch to a different window, etc. It’s tough to explain it all, much better to see it in action, so just watch the video. It’s long, but very informative for those interested in user interface and design.
I tried to put these in order of most useful or most used by me.
Add Bookmark Here – This is a great way to add bookmarks in any folder quickly and easily.
DownThemAll! – Download any link or content fast and stay organized as you do so.
IE Tab – Quickly switch to the native Internet Explorer rendering engine while staying in the Firefox experience
Download Statusbar – Shows you download status, and allows you to quickly open files you’ve downloaded.
NoScript - stay safe on the net using this script blocker, allow all and black list, or disallow all and white list.
Adblock Plus – Blocks pesky ads and works really well with the Adblock Plus Filter.G Updater, also can whitelist sites to allow ads on certain sites, Please disable this for free sites you use, as that’s how they stay alive.
Customize Google – a way to change the behavior of many of googles services
Greasemonkey - a way to add scripts that change the behavior or experience of any given website
Tab Mix Plus – Adds more features to Firefox’s native tab experience, not as useful as Firefox improves
Google Browser Sync – Allows you to sync up bookmarks and other stuff from computer to computer, handy if you use bookmarks alot. I’m trying to switch to Foxmarks as it allows a more controlled experience. GBS always syncs, and has corrupted once, but that was cause I used it within Linux.
Clipmarks - A cool service to let you save any portion of any web page, and comment about it and share it.
Google Gears (Beta) – A new offline technology that seems to work decently I’m currently testing using it.
Google Notebook – similar to clipmarks, if you use Google Notebook then this is for you
Sage - an RSS reader that’s useful and good quality, I use Google Reader now though so I don’t really
DOM Inspector – A nice DOM tree viewer for developers, comes with Firefox
Web Developer - a great extension for anyone that develops for the web
Firebug - another developer extension, haven’t used javascript much yet so have only played around with it for fun.
I didn’t think the iPhone would do so well in the opening weekend, but I did expect them to sell most of their inventory. I guess they had more in stock than I thought, and people waiting in line seemed to be very pleased with their new $600 phone. A little too much for my taste, but after hearing and reading from real users of the phone I have to admit that I would love to have the money lying around, and be willing to switch carriers. Alas I do not.
The phone has many neat and cool features, Apple has managed to fit an amazing amount of technology into a sleek slim form factor, and the tests have shown that the iPhone lives up to many of the claims made earlier in the year. Also, as discussed at the WWDC the iPhone has no real 3rd party support, but instead relies on the Safari browser and quicktime to bring users all the good and bad of AJAX and web applications.
Some of the Cool Features
The photo experience is very good with the touch capabilities making it seemless and intuitive to use. Visual Voice Mail is a neat feature that allows you to treat voice mail just like you do email and play any individual message and manage them through an inbox. Using the Safari engine and having a great interface to navigate the internet experience is very good as well. The touch screen itself is an amazing feature, and will continue to invade other areas of our lives as the technology progresses, it allows both innovative UI like the pinch and slide, but also allows such things as the keyboard to change over time with software updates. The last cool feature I’ll mention is google maps, even though no GPS is built in, having a map available anywhere is a great feature in my opinion. Maybe in the next generation of the iPhone we’ll get a real mapping experience with GPS.
Real World Tests
According to CNET’s German the iPhone has a very good battery life, with talk time around 8 hours, and video and music playback times around 7 and 24 hours, respectively. This is very good in my opinion, and is close to the limit with the current technology, only efficient utilization can extend it much further until new technology arives. The WIFI device drains the battery, so beware of using it for surfing all day long without a power source near by. I’m sure an extra battery accessory will be available shortly.
Also people are raving about the photo experience on the iPhone, especially showing off the photos. The intuitive nature of the experience is what makes it actually fun to show people photos on your phone. The camera is okay, but not great. It’s only 2 Megapixels, and there is no optical zoom, or flash (not that phone flashes work), but it does take decent photos in daylight, and you can always bring along your hefty camera for any real photography work, as I’m sure no one is using their smart phone yet for any real photography.
Applications
Steve Jobs introduced the SDK for the iPhone at the WWDC Keynote. He said that it is the web standards, bleh to that! No native 3rd party support from Apple, but instead all of the technology used to create web applications can be immediately used with the iPhone.
Even though this makes it much easier for people to develop for the iPhone, at least if they’re currently in the web space, it doesn’t allow for any creative, and ingenious uses of the full technological capabilities of the phone. I support the use of AJAX and web standards, and even think this is a strategic move, but I’m not sure that such a capable media device is benefited by limiting technology.
Currently, you have to use Quicktimefor any video content you want to share with iPhone users; except for Youtube, which is converting their videos to use the H.264 standard that natively plays in Quicktime. No Flash, Java, Silverlight, AIR, or any other media and rich application technologies are currently incorporated into the iPhone and probably won’t be for a while, if ever.
All this said, web applications are powerful and even without these other technologies the iPhone will indeed have a decent if not excellent application experience, especially since anyone can put up a website in a few days or weeks and have a fully capable application that works on the iPhone and on any browser. Once you start to see the apps that are coming out on lists like Rev2.org’s Top 25 Web Apps or iphoneapplicationlist.com you realize that Apple’s move wasn’t such a terrible idea or strategy. It makes sense to want to have people be able to make and use the apps as quickly as possible.
Shortcomings
There are a few drawbacks to the iPhone currently. The price is high, but comparable. You can only use this with AT&T for now, at least in the US and this will likely be true for a year or two until people make Apple break their contract with AT&T. Hackers have already claimed that they have made an iPhone unlocked and didn’t need to activate it through iTunes.
The display is great, but be careful as it is made of glass and can break easily from a hip height drop [link]. Another thing that’s tough to use is the keyboard, as it provides no tactile feedback. It would have been great if they used a little vibrating device to have each keypress give a slight haptic feedback to the user. No real 3rd party applications will be allowed for now, unless partnered with like YouTube. Finally no GPS is a downfall, but would have hampered battery life as well as the size and weight of the device.
Conclusion
As a final thought I believe that the iPhone is an amazing and even revolutionary device, with some shortcomings that will hopefully be resolved in the near future through firmware updates or hacks. If you already have an iPod, and use iTunes regularly than this phone will definitely be a great device for you. If you are a hard core Apple fanboy, or a disciple of Steve Jobs, then I you already have one of these and you shouldn’t have read this post.
I will, however, stay away until the following generations before I’d purchase this phone, and I’ll probably never switch to AT&T so hopefully there will be a way to get an unlocked version eventually.
Resources
Info
http://www.iphone.com/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
http://www.cnet.com/apple-iphone.html
http://www.everythingiphone.com/
Video
Will it blend
WDDC Keynote
A look at the iPhone @ WWDC enclosed in glass
Funny Conan Spoof
Audio
Macbreak Weekly on the iPhone
Revision3′s Systm Cracking the iPhone
The Apple Phone Show Podcast