a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Let me offer three examples of companies that failed to deliver a good user experience during the holiday season. They failed through a lack of the basic abilities to do thorough design, implementation, quality assurance, and intradepartment communication.
Source: ClickZ
The first Wi-Fi network cards in the Secure Digital Input Output (SD) format will ship soon, and some will contain Flash Memory in addition to wireless connectivity.
PalmInfocenter also covers this one
I have not tried this since I went from Chimera through IE to Safari, but this looks like it will do the trick directly.
Handspring is reportedly making overtures to Research In Motion that would allow it to place RIM’s Blackberry e-mail software on its Treo communicators.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to hit reply to all instead of reply on a message sent to a group of people that asks for individual responses. It does not seem like a hard concept… the buttons are clearly marked in most applications as are their respective menu options. What gives?!
Damn Straight!
Consumers have a right to share music, videos, and other digital content that they have purchased between their computing devices, and a commercial model needs to be developed that allows them to do so, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said at the Consumer Electronics Show here Thursday.
eWeek’s Jason Brooks has written a Safari Review:
Maybe the browser wars aren’t over, after all.
Last June, Netscape’s expedition into the land of open source bore fruit in the form of Mozilla 1.0, a Web browser that arguably unseated Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer—certainly not in popularity, but in overall excellence. At this week’s MacWorld Expo, however, Apple Computer Inc. launched a Web browsing salvo of its own, called Safari, along with a reminder that there’s still plenty of room for innovation in this space.
Last night I received an email from RedEnvelope which read:
Dear RedEnvelope Customer,
Due to an error in our arrival notifier system, you may have accidentally been sent a message on 1/8/03 stating that a gift you ordered had arrived at its destination. We were testing our system and mistakenly sent you the message. Rest assured that your gift was not reshipped, and you were not charged for a second gift. Please accept our apology for any confusion this may have caused. To thank you for your understanding, we would like to offer you free standard shipping on your next order. Simply enter the promotion code
on the checkout page next time you order.
Under normal, just ordered circumstances, this would be great customer service, since they were proactive in communicating with me. The problem is that I have not ordered anything recently. The last order I made with them was over the summer!
This morning email number two arrived…
Dear Jonathan,
We just wanted to let you know that the gift you selected for the person below
has been received. If you selected additional gifts for Next Business Day or
2-Business Day delivery to other recipients in the same order, you’ll receive
a separate email from us when each gift has arrived.************************************
Recipient:
Date Received: 07/31/02
Time Received: 11:27 AM
Shipment #:
Again, great information but almost 6 months after the fact!! I have sent emails in response to each of the messages and have not received any replies just yet. This should certainly prove to be interesting.
Expensive, no screen shot yet… Sounds like home media servers are finally beginning to mature, finally!
Yamaha Wi-Fi-based audio system: For over $2,000, you can get an 80 Gb music server with CD-R that can broadcast via Wi-Fi to a receiver (included) that has its own 20-watt amplifier and support for external speakers. Extra receivers are $800.
The server broadcasts the music to clients, or receiver stations, that contain their own 20-watt amplifiers. Any speakers can be attached. MusicCast uses the 802.11b wireless standard (also known as Wi-Fi), but Yamaha says the signal will not interfere with other Wi-Fi networks (like those connecting the computers around the house) because each receiver station has its own network address. That also lets MusicCast send different music simultaneously to different receiver stations, so Junior can play hip-hop in the den while Mom and Dad listen to jazz in the kitchen.
As I started to use Safari for the first seconds I checked for tabs and pop-up blocking. One out of two covered and while I thought tabs were critical, I am starting to feel otherwise. I realize it is only one day later but I feel good out of tabs again having used only Safari today. Yesterday I did fire Chimera up a few times…
Anyway with the addition of the FullScreenSafari haxie and a nice script my buddy had sent me in the pre-Chimera days I can now quickly launch several windows – maintaining each in the top left of my screen space. I thought I would share this script with whoever might want it so just click here to get it. All you need to do it change (or keep if you like) the sites maintained within. It will open as many sites as you like and you can Apple+` through them to your hearts content. I noticed as well that Safari is kind enough to only cycle through full named windows which means that you won’t have to look at the CheapTickets or Orbitz pop-under which may occasionally sneak through from the NYT.
GPS and navigation company Garmin has finally taken the wraps off of their long-awaited GPS-enabled handheld, and it does appear that good things come to those who wait. The Garmin iQue 3600 comes with quite an impressive array of features.
[infoSync]
You can add Bluetooth through the SD slot… 32MB Ram, jog wheel, beautiful screen…
Could be an interesting path. I wonder what having that preview pane open would do to performance… Certainly seems to impact complex PDF performance in Preview.
Everybody talks about Tabbed Browsing (the Mozilla way), so here is my proposal for a Safari tabbed browsing experience. Looks more cocoa than tabs.
[JY’s weblog]
An interesting alternative… [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo’s Weblog]
This is a great overview on how we got to the Public Beta for Safari along with some good technical background info. Thanks, John!
Apple’s Safari marketing is heavily focused on performance, and rightly so. Even in beta, Safari is kicking ass. Application launch times, page loading, JavaScript execution — if you can put a stopwatch to it, Apple has Safari at the front of the race.
Methinks the keynote announcements of iLife and Safari were not unconnected, or at least on the level of subtext. We (meaning the Mac pundit brigade) have talked about an Apple-branded browser for years, and now that it’s here we are (naturally) distracted by compatibility, standards adherence, bugs, GUI, etc. But let’s step back for a second and look at the larger picture…
[MacSlash]
The $99 Home Media Option will be downloadable to Series2 recorders from TiVo in the spring.
The new service will allow subscribers to remotely schedule the recording of shows over the Internet. Subscribers will be able to play music and videos as well as view photos from devices connected to the network. The new service also lets subscribers with more than one recorder share content on both recorders. For example, a show seen on a recorder in the living room can also be played on a recorder in a bedroom.
In related TiVo news, the company said that it has developed a DVR reference design that supports recording in high-definition television formats. In addition, the company has teamed with DirecTV to develop an HDTV DVR with TiVo service. HDTV offers higher quality video and audio playback over standard analog broadcasts.
Other manufacturers at CES also announced DVR products. TiVo licensee Toshiba said Thursday that it would begin shipping a combination DVD and DVR product in the second half of the year.
Consumer electronics maker Pioneer said earlier in the week that it would release two DVD recorders, including one with a hard drive. The $999 DVR-002H will come with an 80GB hard drive. The DVR-002H and the $625 DVR-001 will be able to rewrite to DVD-RW and record to DVD-R discs. Both will be available in the summer of 2003.
Source: News.com
The Danger Hiptop, offered only through T-Mobile at this point is now only $49 with rebates at Amazon.
I am planning a business trip to Amsterdam next week and immediately thought this would be a great new toy to take with me and be able to connected while on the go. The problem though is that the Sidekick is single-band 1900 GSM only and will only work in the US.
What the price cut leads me to believe is that the next generation sidekick is not far behind. You can count on at least a CDMA version, but I believe that a color, multi-band aka world capable device is coming. It is CES week and Danger has a booth, but no announcements just yet.
(The Sidekick needs to learn to sync to make it much more ideal as well, but that can always come as a software patch.)
If you’ve enabled the status bar option under the View menu in Safari, you can see the link target as you mouse over a link.
If a link will open in a new window, the status bar says:
Open “http://www.domain.com/” in a new window.Also, if you’re holding down the Option key it changes to:
Download “http://www.domain.com/”The Command key forces the link to open in a new window, and so the status bar displays:
Open “http://www.domain.com/” in a new window.Hold down the Control key and the status display again changes to:
Display a menu for “http://www.domain.com/”
[Source: Mac OS X Hints]
Cory Doctorow’s brilliant novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is out today. Buy it early and often. Cory’s book is also the very first to be offered initially both for sale and under a CreativeCommons license. That means you can also download it for free. As Cory describes it,
“The entire text of my novel is available as a free download in a variety of standards-defined formats. No crappy DRM, no teasers, just the whole damned book.”
But as he (and I) expect, once you start the book, you’ll see you want it in its bound form. So again, you might as well buy it too.
Cory has been defending the rights of creators at EFF for sometime now. With this experiment, he is putting his money where his heart is. I’ve had enormous respect for him for a very long time, but I’m quickly discovering new heights of respect.
Congratulations, Cory, on a great novel, made available to the world freely — comments; and with great CC metadata to boot!
Check out the CC Weblog later today for an interview with Cory about the novel, and his ideas about licensing.
Thanks to marketingfix for the pointer here…I used to read ICONOCAST regularly, then they slowed down publication and it seemed to become less relevant. Hopefully the new venture will turn out to be worthwhile.
ICONOCAST has been gradually adapting its proposition over the last year culminating in this week’s relaunch under the banner of Trendsetters.com.
The inaugural issue simply highlights some of last year’s top trends, so it is difficult to fully gauge how good this publication is going to be, however it does look as though it could be very useful.
During his ” Power of X ” presentation at Macworld Expo today, Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller announced that Safari , Apple’s new Web browser, has broken the company’s single day download record. Schiller said that since its introduction on Tuesday, Safari has been downloaded 300,000 times. The previous download record for Apple was held by iTunes with 100,000 downloads. He also noted that the public beta of X11 for OS X has been downloaded 25,000 times since its release yesterday.
Source: MacMinute
