I might be a few days late on this but Paper is an iOS app that seems to have garnered a massive amount of hype recently.
At first glance the app does look beautiful and takes a simple approach in design and usablility. However, once you get past the beauty/hype you realize the app is basically worthless. Looks like they were able to con millions of people into paying for upgrades and not a single one of them are worth even 99 cents or $1.99 or whatever they may be.
I was almost tempted at first to grab one of the tools for $1.99 since it initially only comes with a single fountain pen. But I quickly stopped myself. Then I downloaded Autodesk SketchBook Express. Now this is a drawing program. It comes with a ton of tools to start and the upgrades seem decent. For example, you can buy a pack of 15 pencils plus 15 brushes for 99 cents vs $1.99 for a SINGLE pencil in Paper.
The Paper app doesn’t even support landscape mode and their marketing is
around notebooks. I don’t have any notebooks that only work in landscape mode. There are no layering tools in Paper. There are a ridiculously limited 8 crappy colours available in Paper. Sketchbook is virtually unlimited.
You really can’t compare the two apps. Paper isn’t even worth the free download if you ask me and Sketchbook is worth paying for the Full version or just grab the free version that is 1000 times better than Paper.
Just goes to show you that these days you can still get away with putting out some fluffy nice looking stuff and somehow get the hype machine to make you millions.
Microsoft has never really been very good in the UI design department and over the last number of years they have been getting worse and worse. I’ve called for firing of the UI designers that have come up with the terrible design for Office 2010 that is filtering throughout their products.
Today I’m going to talk about IE 9.
I rarely touch Microsoft Internet Explorer but unfortunately had the unpleasant experience of having to fire up the latest IE 9.
I wasn’t going to be using it for more than a few minutes but the way the address bar and tabs were setup was really bugging me. Even for the few minutes of using this “software” I had to make some changes. The default layout is horrendous. What is worse is that you can’t do much to customize it either.
Fortunately I won’t be using this browser much at all.
This is the best I could do. If you want to display the menu bar that is where it puts it. Any sane, reasonable UI designer would put the menu bar at the TOP or at least give me the option to move it up there. Look at all that wasted space up there.
I can move the tabs to the right of the address bar but then it makes the address bar so small its almost useless to use.
See that command bar with the icons. I can’t drag it to the right of the menu. In fact I can’t move it anywhere even though there is a customize option.
It is really excellent to see Apple advancing the textbook in the form of a digital textbook on the iPad with some interactivity.
I wonder how long it will be before someone hooks online tutoring into the mix.
QuikkTutor Textbook Concept
Checkout the concept we had with QuikkTutor more than 10 years ago that textbook publishers couldn’t understand but I see that we were just way ahead of our time. Note, that QuikkTutor was fully functional as seen in this rough presentation demo. It was just the link from a standard textbook that was the concept. The presentation only makes sense if you run it in presentation mode due to the audio and video embedded.
I rely heavily on the Delicious Firefox extension for daily use as a way to store/search bookmarks and it also provides me with my standard quick links at the top of the browser. Maybe one day I’ll go into how I use that and how it is setup.
In any event with the recent changes at Delicious the extension was somewhat busted in that it wasn’t updating any longer and/or only showing a subset of bookmarks. Which made using the bookmark search feature useless and also made my quick toolbar links worthless as well.
I am not going to get into the changes they made and the features they removed for no good reason.
Anyway, on their beta status blog they have instructions on how to get the extension working again. I really only had to perform 2 steps rather than the heavy handed steps they suggest:
Delete only the Delicious cookies. One can do this by going to options -> Privacy -> show cookies -> and search for Delicious. Then just delete the Delicious cookies.
Log into Delicious within Firefox.
You should then see an automatic re-syncing of Delicious bookmarks. At least I did.
I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about Foursquare for ages but today seems like a good time considering Google Buzz may have just killed it. I’ve read far too many positive reviews on Foursquare over the past month and couldn’t understand where these people were coming from as I’ve attempted to use the app over that time period and it seemed obvious to me that either they never used the app or were paid to write glowing reviews and talk positively about it.
Foursquare doesn’t do much right and there are basically a handful of people using it (at least close to me). I thought, ok, perhaps it just hasn’t taken flight in my area. But after trying Google Buzz (mobile edition), it is obvious that was not the case. In less than 24 hours I see a massive number of Buzz users in my area vs. Foursquare. In a month there are seriously maybe a handful of people that have used Foursquare with nothing worthwhile posted at that (I can go into detail but it isn’t worth my time). With Google Buzz, I’ve seen hundreds of posts already with useful feedback and chat going on.
Can you say this is the end of Foursquare? Definitely. I would bet that those who wrote glowing reviews on Foursquare are now writing some negative things about Google Buzz. If so, you definitely know their hands were greased.
I usually don’t bother blogging about these simple based chat systems that are similar to BlogChat since there are just too many to mention these days. There are so many of them out there these days that you can find one around any corner of the Internet. Most are done pretty well and are free.
Here is yet another one called HipChat but I was surprised to see that they are actually charging a monthly fee to use this. Can anybody seriously be paying for such a thing? With all the other free chat services out there as well as a ton of other tools that do the job even better like any instant messenger program, Google Wave or the like, why would anyone in their right mind pay for such a thing.
Granted it might be hip but other than that it doesn’t do anything an existing service already does.
And the pricing is not even that cheap!!!
I should mention that this one is NOT web based but rather an Adobe AIR application. But the idea is the same in that it is pretty simple and made to work across a wide range of operating systems.
It seems that Ray has been drowned in the Microsoft Cool-Aid and has been assimilated by the MS Borg.
Ray Ozzie created Lotus Notes and Groove. Two very well respected and useful collaboration tools. However, a number of statements he makes in the article are just absurd.
First the anti-web statement. No idea where he is coming from here. There is nothing anti-web about Google Wave. They are using open standards, open source and I believe the whole damn thing works in a web browser. How is this anti web?
Second, he says “Ozzie said the open web relies on open data formats and protocols, not opaque packages and payloads being tunneled across the web”. Well, Wave is based around XMPP protocol which is an open web standard.
Third, I have no clue what he is trying to say here: “He did not explain exactly how he believed Wave to be complex. Instead he suggested that Wave would rely on open source – because without it, Google’s collaboration platform would be too complicated for those outside the company to implement.”
Fourth he says “”Google Wave and Mesh are basically the same thing”. That is another ridiculous statement. If you look at the Wave beta and the Mesh beta you won’t see much at all that is the same. All I see Mesh doing right now is syncing files. (perhaps the full release will do more). Not very exciting and hardly anything to do with real-time collaboration at all. Lets get real Ozzie.
So, to sum up, I’m with Brent on basically saying that Ray Ozzie is irrelevant. To quote Brent Ashley via IM message: “but yeah, I’m afraid Ray Ozzie is no longer relevant after that”.
You would not think that the most used tool of a poker player would be Twitter but it seems that is the case these days especially since the WSOP (World Series Of Poker) is well under way in Vegas right now and goes for another 5 weeks or so. Just about every poker pro and any other poker player are using Twitter to update their status during tournaments with their chip counts, hands and other miscellaneous stuff going on.
Poker news outlets are also using Twitter to get their updates out and they are building sites and tools around Twitter. For example, see PokerRoad Nation (#nation).
PKR Poker is live streaming a lot of the action that will not be televised and they stream Twitter messages across the screen that are sent to their address (@WSOPLive).
I’ve been reading what I can about Google Wave and it looks to have some really nice features for collaboration on so many different levels. I’ve missed a real collaboration tool since Groove was purchased by Microsoft. I used to use Groove on a daily basis with a number of different people and different projects to collaborate effectively. The problem we always had with Groove was that its data store was proprietary and it was difficult to get things out of it when needed. When Microsoft purchased Groove Networks things seem to stagnate and we stopped using it regularly to the point where I only open it maybe once or twice a year for the past few years. For all I know Microsoft has made some improvements to it in their 2007 version but I never bothered looking. It just became an old rusty tool we no longer bothered to want to use again. The only reason I still keep it around is I have data in there I reference every now and again. Somehow I have to extract it and uninstall that application!!
I think Google Wave will definitely pickup where Groove left off. The fact that it will be an open system is fantastic. The reason they are announcing it early is that they want developers to start creating apps with their API for it now so that a ton of stuff is available for when it is released.
You can get an idea of how I guess folks can add on to Wave through the API during their demo of spell checking, linking and searching. They may have just redefined how spell checking works as well. Basically it looks at your potential spelling mistake by the context of the word. Very nice.
