I’ve got 6Gmail invites to share… I’ve been sitting on them just out of laziness. If you want one, lemme know.
PDABuzz Reviews Palm Browsers
Kermit Woodall at PDABuzz does a very comprehensive review of the available browsers for Palm OS though neglects to review Blazer since he used a Zodiac and Blazer is really only used by the Treo these days.
Xten eyebeam released
SIPthat notes that Xten has launched a new video over IP SIP softphone… eyebeam. This is the same, though now enhanced application Vonage uses for softphone. The trick to this like all video phone / conferencing applications is getting someone on the other side. You can buy this for PC today at $60… OS X is coming soon.
I wonder whether the X-PRO software currently available is worth the $50 price. Is there quality that you don’t get in the Free or bundled service? Anyone? I actually find some limitations with the current app – like the address book sucks. I’m pretty content with Skype at the moment, though to be able to receive calls (yes I know I am saying it again) would be even better.
Skype for Mac OS X 0.9.0.1
Skype released a revised Mac OS X client today…
From the Skype Release Notes:
- feature: you can set your birthday in your profile
- change: enabled red close button in main window
- change: Skype recognizes SkypeOut numbers in different formats a la (+44-55-66-77)
- bugfix: auto-login should be much more stable now
- bugfix: “Text” was displayed on My Skype tab, when user logged in
- bugfix: proper handling of simultaneous calls (you are calling to the person who calls you)
- bugfix: drawer refreshed properly in case of multiple calls
- bugfix: contact view icon updated after blocking an user
- bugfix: after changing your password, it will be updated in keychain as well
Whither Windows?
From Steve Jurvetson…
From the local demos of Longhorn, it seems to me that OS X is the Longhorn preview. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is hoping to do a subset of OS X and bundle applications like iPhoto. Am I missing something?
It seems that the need to use a Microsoft operating system will decline with the improvement in open source device drivers and web services for applications. [The J Curve]
Gripes on Skype
Om points to an piece at The Unofficial Apple Weblog which gripes about Skype. I don’t really agree with much Greg Scher had to say so here’s what I started to post as a comment until I realized I was writing more than enough for a real post…
Greg –
I think you are a tad harsh on Skype for a few reasons… First, they’ve designed it purely as a softphone. Vonage makes you pay extra for the privledge of a softphone and it’s not even an extension of the same number, to add a new line. There may be hardward options beyond headsets later, but most likely will not be part of the free computer based service.
- Call quality is excellent. It all does depend on the quality of your connection, but over the exact same connection, I’ve had better success with Skype than Vonage at times.
- It’s free baby. If you don’t like it don’t use it. I’ve been promoting it to friends since the more people who use it enable more free calls…Skype to Skype will apparently always be free.
- You also say that Wifi is not available enough? Wifi is hardly a requirement though it certainly makes things simpler. I don’t think anyone is looking to necessarily replace their mobile though you can get extremely competitive rates when you might get nailed with roaming charges, particularly internationally. You don’t need Wifi either… it works just the same or even better when you are connected through a cable.
I think some of the other things you mention are legit…
- You should be able to send your contacts between machines without having to re-authorize people, but at least we all get it for now. You can be connected and live on multiple machines which makes it easy enough to pass along the info.
- 911 is not really a priority for me since I am far from ready to use Skype as my primary line for anything…
When premium services come it should be very interesting to watch. Voicemail, Video Phone and most likely SkypeIn are all enroute. It’s going to get better not worse.
Jeremy Allaire: The Big Picture, Literally
Nice quick thought piece from Jeremy Allaire over at PaidContent…
Jeremy believes and I agree that soon we will see new models for content distribution based on models and systems being developed now through blogs, aggregators and subscription services. It’s already becomhg very easy to subscribe to audio content through things like iPodder, which download the enclosures through RSS 2.0. Once the tech can be fully hidden from the user, this becomes easier to market and sell to people who get the benefit of more media to enjoy.
Now that video can be produced cheaply and with reasonable production values, and now that it can be affordably distributed and perhaps even easily monetized, will we see an emerging new class of “video site producers” rather than classic textual content. In 1994 when the Web really emerged, it helped bring forth an explosion in the amount and richness of text that was produced and available globally. I believe we’re at the front-end of a very similar curve in video, and this world / opportunity is not going to look very much like how we as consumers find, acquire and view video today. [paidContent.org’s ContentNext Series]
Warm and Mozzy
Last night I decided to tempt the fates and update both my email client and browser to the latest nightly builds… For whatever reason every so often I just get the urge to push things and this time I was very happy to find that both nightlies for Thunderbird and Firefox were nicely enhanced.
Junk messages now block images much more effectively than my previous runs. Thunderbird also gives a bit extra control to the number of connections happening within the advanced setting within an IMAP account. This is good to see since occasionally you might move faster than the computer is capable of keeping track of and you get a server disconnect error. Moving the default from 5 to 4 connections (I had subscribed to the bug in bugzilla and saw that was the suggested tweak) does change the frequency, but it still happens. This doesn’t change my view of Thunderbird… I really like using it a lot. My main gripe is the spam filter. I wish it had a much better method for learning. I’d also like better support for new message notification, which frankly has never worked for me – now on two machines. Works great on Windows but not Mac.
Firefox seems to have some nice UI enhancements in the latest builds. First, instead of getting a small and easy to miss icon in the bottom left of the browser window when a pop-up has been blocked, you now get a message in the window just above the page content. I have a feeling quite a few people are not going to like this change, but I believe it makes the browser more user friendly for more people. There is also a very cool new RSS orange icon in the bottom right of the window which notifies the user of an auto-detected feed. You can easily bookmark any of the feeds (my own site lists 3 versions) and after you save the bookmark, Firefox neatly creates a folder of the more recent posts. This folder maintains a current list, so people can easily stay on top of sites of interest right within the browser. (I personally have been using this feature to call attention to feeds I might not have added to bloglines)
A bonus of both apps is that on launch, any extensions loaded previously were detected and newer versions if available were downloaded. Moz made this very easy to do, I just clicked next and things worked.
Helpful tips for Chatter Email
First of all, if you have not read the manual, I would strongly suggest you do so in order to take advantage of the application to it’s fullest. Marc Blank, the developer, has written a very user friendly piece and it’s included with every download — unless you’ve just been downloading the updated .prc files.
When I first read it I saw that there were some secret codes you could type into the console – Menu / Pref / Console (/W) like Turbo and Log. Turbo enables a much more rapid loading of messages as it allows for larger groups of them to come through at once. Log is something really only to be used if you are having a problem and need to submit a report…
This week, in addition to adding attachment support, Marc has posted a list of codes you might use in the console and I thought it would be helpful to re-print them here…
You’ll need to be running at least 1.0b10.3… though as of this post, the latest is 1.0b10.4.
- chatterclassic – enables IM support; account required
- chatteremail – disables IM support; the default
- indicator
, color = green, red, or orange. Sets LED msg indicator. - log – toggles logging
- memo
– annotates a log - note
– same as memo - profile – SMTP profile debug info
- register
, code= assigned registration code. Registers ChatterEmail. Confirmation is done when the next email arrives. - reload – Deletes all messages in the current mailbox from the treo and starts the reloading process.
- turbo – Toggles “Turbo Load” which loads messges in groups of 2-15 at a time (depending on load size)
Yahoo! Travel Search Beta
Here’s what I think… Search has to work on more than a single platform.
As you may have heard, earlier this summer Yahoo! acquired FareChase, a travel search company. FareChase’s technology enables people to perform real-time searches against more than fifty travel sites.
Tonight we began testing this new travel search engine. It’s still in beta but we’re hoping you all can bang around on it and let us know what you think. [Yahoo! Search Blog]
Making use of the Data
I was listening to some audio samples of voice talent today for work and it occurred to me through a simple change in how the samples were created I could get much more out of the experience. As you probably know, ID3 tags contain all sorts of helpful information about the track of music, or the audio book, or the whatever happens to be in the format.
I listened to about half a dozen MP3 files which had been emailed to me and a few others as links… when I clicked them iTunes opened up, though it could have been any media player…As is my habit, I looked over at the album art / now playing area but saw nothing. It probably would have taken the talent house about 30 seconds to add the head-shot of the person whose voice I was listening, but they clearly did not do that and I am guessing it’s because they just did not think about it.
As Adam Curry recently mentioned on his daily Source Code audio blast, there is simply too much focus on the music …speaking about devices and licensing. I agree though certainly music is the sexy part of portably players much more so than audio books and way more so than audio talent, but since we use the same interfaces for these things, there’s no reason not to take advantage of the tools.
Dave Winer has been broadcasting morning coffee notes and while he’s been driving across the continent, he’s included a nice photo (yes I know that link was for a video, but he left a still on the audio, which was the same) as the art behind each file. It’s a nice way to contextualize the experience and squeeze get a bit more flavor out things.
Chatter Email now does attachments
If you’ve been enjoying Chatter Email or waiting to use it until attachment support arrived, today is your day. Chatter Email, in case you’ve been sleeping through things lately, is a IMAP (IDLE required) email client that can PUSH email to you in the background. It’s a very efficient email client and can manage up to 8 connected mailboxes, either folders on an account or 8 different accounts.
The latest version is 1.0b10.2 and fixes an early attachment release issue, but is stable enough to use daily if you like.
The Temboz RSS aggregator
This looks very nice… Might be a nice option for FOF users looking for more, but who don’t want Bloglines… I’ll stick with Bloglines for now, but like the way this looks.
Temboz is a RSS aggregator. It is inspired by FeedOnFeeds (web-based personal aggregator), Google News (two column layout) and TiVo (thumbs up and down). [Fazal Majid]
Skype Beta quick report…
One thing I noticed right away after installing Skype on a second computer is that none of my contacts and no info from my profile seemed to find there way to my system. This is a tad frustrating since I had to resend the Skype hello message out to the people I’ve listed. I’ve also had some issues connecting as the app starts up, which seems to be solved by simply going offline, while leaving it open. Definitely beta…but working mostly working well.
Apple needs to fix iPod limitations
Something that bothers me about the limitation of the iPod is that I can’t easily put music on my iPod from multiple computers. I know I am not alone in this, but it’s continually frustrating.
I manually sync since my digital collection is way larger than my 40GB iPod and I use iTunes now on 3 computers (Powerbook, iMac and now a PC laptop). I’d like to just connect to each of them when I want to push new tracks to the iPod while on the go.
My main collection is on the iMac but my main computer is the Powerbook and now with the PC Laptop thrown in — plus iPodder, I need an easy way to add tracks to the iPod from any of my systems.
I appreciate the copyright and DRM issues, but still don’t get why if you play within the limits of the iPod / iTunes licensing you still have to use a single computer to sync or update the iPod.
UPDATE —
Clearly I was wrong in my understanding that this was impossible… I have to get a cable now though to sync with the PC – at least transfer tracks at will. I’ll also be looking forward to doing this on my Powerbook.
I was definitely under the impression that you were not able to move tracks to the iPod from more than a single system even in manual sync mode, which is actually how I use it to sync a single large playlist from our desktop at home.
iPodder is very slick
I passed on a link to iPodder yesterday and mentioned I was unable to use it since it was Mac only. Well Pieter Overbeeke posted a link in the comments that he’s coded up a windows version.
I am using it today and have to say it’s totally cool. The code automatically connects and downloads audio from feed sources and creates nice playlists in iTunes when it’s done. You get alerts when each feed is downloaded so you know when to switch over to iTunes and give a listen.
Checking out Adam Curry’s Source Code right now…
Thanks Pieter!
iPhoto to flickr plugin
IE is Relentless… News at 11
Even though Firefix is set to my default browser, if IE is running (works best for remote Exchange access and some other Intranet stuff) it picks up the link I click on from any app… Bad IE, down!
iPodder
Can’t try this yet… out of town on a PC laptop, but can’t wait to get it going on my Powerbook when I return.
iPodder automatically downloads new mp3 files when they become available from any of 5 sources (you can change these if you wish) and copies them to playlists in iTunes based on the channel name. If you have an iPod, connecting it to your computer will load the songs automatically. [Adam Curry’s Weblog]