In my new professional responsibility, I have to keep track of a lot of things. There are things to do, follow up upon, schedule… I gave the good old fashioned notebook and pen method for a while. I did enjoy writing down stuff in the notebook with a nice smooth Shaeffer fountain pen, but it got difficult to manage and lacked the portability.
So I searched for a good solution on the Mac platform and came across Things. Though still in beta, it is rock solid and absolutely stunning. Cultured Code, the developers, have an amazing eye for detail and it shows in the application. I?ve tried other task management systems, both native and web based. but nothing comes close to Things.
The bonus is that they even have an iPhone app, which I promptly plonked down $9.99 for. Now I can manage my tasks even on the go.
I highly recommend a GTD solution / application. It allows one to focus on the things that really matter and ensures that things are not forgotten.
Rarely does something frustrate me so much that I want to smash it to pieces. Right now something did, and since it was not mine all I could do is hurl it on my son’s teddy bear.
But along with this frustration came a revelation. I just discovered the missing link in Darwin’s evolutionary chain. And they are alive today (unless they have committed suicide in shame) and are located somewhere in Redmond. These are the people that designed the Windows Mobile OS.
I have never seen such monumental stupidity in any software ever. Pathetic. I wish I could take a hammer to the HTC Touch I’m trying to configure unsuccessfully to connect to my home WiFi network. If it was mine, I would have first taken a hammer to my head for buying such a thing.
I finally decided to take the plunge yesterday and upgraded my first gen 8 GB iPhone to the 2.0.2 firmware. I used the excellent Pwnage Tool and everything went very smoothly. An issue with Mail not working was fixed using the BossPrefs app’s permissions fixing utility. All my worries of not having all my old apps were unfounded. In fact, between the App Store and Cydia, bar one of my old apps, everything else is covered.
What do I like? The best part by far is the App Store. Since my iPhone doesn’t support GPS, the location features don’t work, but that’s ok. There are some great free apps in the App Store and lots more are expected. In fact, I wrote the last blog post from the Wordpress app on the phone.
The iPhone is most definitely my best gadget ever.
So the prediction turned out to be true after all. But it appears that there was earlier news of it which was more or less a sure shot indication of what was to come.
What am I talking about? What the whole interweb is abuzz about, of course. Google’s shiny new browser named Chrome.
The comic book is sheer genius, and it makes a fine attempt at reaching out to the non-geeks. How much it succeeds, I don’t know.
But for me, Chrome totally rocks. It might even pull me away from my current browser of choice, Safari. The user interface is very well thought of and it really shines at getting “out of the way” and of course, raw speed.
As with Firefox, it’s the plugins that will determine the popularity of Chrome. Let’s see where things go with that. But what is clear is that this is a polished product that has been sweetly developed. And what I’m most excited about is how this is going to be the platform on which the interweb of tomorrow is going to run.
Even before Nazi-gate happened, I had given up on Indian newspapers. The usual male morning ritual of taking the newspaper to the loo was replaced with my iPhone. Google had a great version of their RSS news Reader for the iPhone and I used to catch up on news using that. Notice that I said had.
The new version is all AJAX’y and stuff, with spinning status indicators and in-line reading without page reloads. But is it better than the original HTML static interface? Alotofusersincludingmyselfseemtothink NOT.
The older interface had blazing load times, with the pages showing a snippet of the news which the user could click to read the entire article. The new one actually loads the entire post content in the background so it can snappily display the entire article when the user clicks on it. The older interface allowed quick navigation using relevant links and support for the browsers back button. The new interface greets you with a spinning wheel all the time. To top it all, the new interface defaults to showing the “All Items” view, which obviously means that load times are always high.
The users are clamoring for the old interface. Let’s see if the Reader team gives them what they want. Interestingly, this must be a deja-vu for them since a similar thing happened when they switched from the original scrolling Reader interface to the present one.
It is well known that the openness of the web has fostered many applications that have become indispensable to users. Indeed, most of my every day applications live in the internet cloud, so I can switch machines and operating systems painlessly. AJAX and RIA’s have managed to deliver a great user experience for applications of ever increasing complexity, but there are specialized apps that are tied to specific operating systems.
It’s a tough job for internet application developers, what with the myriad web browsers that have sometimes unique interpretations of published web standards. They have to carefullytweak their websites for each browser so they can keep their vast user base happy. This issue is fast becoming a major pain point for a lot of software developers, who have to waste time on getting their applications to work on various browsers. So what’s the solution?
Flash holds great promise, and Adobe’sdonation of the ActionScript runtime to the Mozilla foundation has very exciting ramifications, one of which might be the ability to run C and Python code in the browser. But Flash is not an open platform - developers have to wait till Adobe can fix bugs and implement new features. Google tried their hand with GWT, that promised to take away the issues related to cross-browser compatibility, but in reality that too doesn’t hold up every time.
So, do we need an open runtime environment supporting a rich API that will work on all platforms and browsers and will be available in various form factors? I think yes. Adobe’s already got the Open Screen Project running, which has the mission of “enabling a consistent runtime environment across desktops and devices”. But given its slowness in opening up the Flash platform (which forms part of future milestones) and the difficulties regarding search indexing, usability etc., it may make sense to have a competing platform from a heavyweight like Google that provides a consistent, high-performance runtime environment and is community developed.
I think they might just be doing an Android for the web.
Gmail is my email aggregator of choice. I use it to consolidate all my different email accounts and it works pretty well. Since it’s got a lot of storage, I also use it as my online briefcase, mailing links and attachments to myself. But since the Inbox is stuffed with thousands of emails, finding these mailed items can be a bit of a chore.
The awesome search feature allowed me to find these items by giving a search criteria of “from:me to:me”. But I wanted to save this search so that I wouldn’t have to type it over and over again - something like having a permanent link to click. I had submitted this wish to the Gmail team long ago and with their new Labs features, they have introduced “Quick Links”, which allows me to do exactly what I want.
Now I have a neat link which I can click to instantly get all the items I emailed to myself. Now if only I could get the Quick Links box to sit above the Labels box.
I’ve never been a fan of gaming consoles, what with their joypads that work effectively at getting Mario to jump around but otherwise hopeless at sim racing and first-person shooters. Then the Nintendo Wii came along and breathed fresh air into the whole console market with its innovative input system. Even then, I didn’t give in to the temptation of buying one since I believed in the ability of a PC to be the better platform for gaming.
Recent news has vindicated my belief and it looks like 2008 is going to be an amazing year for PC gamers. There are two aspects that show promise of great changes - the GPU and the Input system. The two biggies in the GPU (graphics card) market - nvidia and ATI (AMD) are both entering a new battle with their latest generation products, the GX 280 series and the RV770 respectively.
Contrary to the nvidia product, which seems to be an upgrade of the last-generation technology, AMD seems to have a technological breakthrough on their hands, which they are calling the Cinema 2.0 experience. Showcased in this video, the RV770 is expected to deliver performance over and above all the other graphics console systems available today combined. Let’s hope they can both live up to the hype.
The other area of interest is the input system. OCZ, a well-known manufacturer of memory modules, recently started shipping their NIA product which aims to augment the keyboard and mouse as a third input system. NIA, which stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, uses brain signals and facial expressions to provide input to the PC. For instance, to move your character forward you can relax your facial muscles and tense them to move the character back or stop. Similarly, you can think about glancing and it is supposed to actually move the on-screen camera. As you may imagine, training the system to recognize your inputs is a very difficult task. The Overclock3D guys have been at it for some time and have a running review about their experiences with the product.
But the most interesting technology is potentially also the simplest for the user. A new startup named Camspace aims to enable users to use basic household objects as input devices, requiring a bog standard webcam! The demo is just mind-blowing and the best part is that they are planning to give away the software for free! If it actually works like the demo shows PC gaming will never be the same again. The entry barrier for games that require complicated hardware for correct inputs, like flight simulators and racing games, will no longer apply for the casual gamer. Of course, the enthusiast will still stick to his G25 and more exotic hardware, but Camspace promises to be a massive breakthrough nonetheless. Don’t miss the video -
Recently I was looking for a way to create a tag cloud and found TagCrowd, which did a fairly decent job. But yesterday I stumbled upon Wordle via Digital Inspiration and it knocked my socks off.
Wordle calls it a text cloud, and I’m itching to make a huge one and plaster it all over a wall. Jonathan Feinberg is the geek world’s Picasso. Here’s a cloud that I generated from my defunct del.icio.us account.
But I wanted to save this search so that I wouldn’t have to type it over and over again - something like having a permanent link to click. I had submitted this wish to the Gmail team long ago and with their new 
Now I have a neat link which I can click to instantly get all the items I emailed to myself. Now if only I could get the Quick Links box to sit above the Labels box.
