IPhone

04 Dec

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Tumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I actually didn’t find much that surpised me – I mean, there was Apply trying to bag out Windows on the week of the Win7 launch, but that was hardly surprising at all.  There was some news of more Australian Government sensorship ideas, as detailed below, and a great article about how Microsoft actually one upped Google with an announcement they made for their Bing search engine.  Check it out.

This article does a good job of picking out the hypocrisy in Apple’s never-ending bashing of Windows – the fact that Windows 7 is a solid product and works really well.  It’s disappointing that Apple can’t market their products on it’s own merits – they have a fantastic operating system, sexy looking computers that are rock solid and a very VERY devoted fanbase that grows leaps and bounds by the day.  What this article picks up on is the fact that if Apple really did have good products, they wouldn’t have to resort to bashing the competition if their own stuff truly were worthy of customer attention and I totally agree – especially when their product manager is saying stuff in the press like “At the end of the day, it’s still Windows.” So what? A product with problems has been fixed up and that’s a good thing.  It’s the same deal as Mac OS – I’ve mentioned in this space before that the older versions of Mac OS were horribly backward and couldn’t even multi task of all things (which the iPhone still can’t do either).  So should we not use Mac OSX because the older versions were terrible?  Of course not.  OSX is a brilliant operating system and so is Windows 7.  Apple got a free ride of Windows defectors over the past three years with frustrated PC users and they deserved to have their market share increase from about 3% to about 9-10% – now all bets are off and it’s an even fight, the two companies need to bring their A-game now and compete on features.  It’ll be exciting for the end users.

This is a really bold move by the Aussie Government but I have to say I actaully like the idea.  It’s something that needs to happen considering that the iPhone/iPod Touch is a gaming platform and the Australian Government has their own classifications for console and computer games.  There is an uproar in Australia that there is no 18+ classification for gaming which causes excessively violent games to be refused classification (and therefore sale) in Australia and I happen to like this idea because it keeps all the brutal American stuff out of our country (and the subsequent axe-murderers and school gunman they produce).  Apple have built an over-arching approval process for applications which lacks transparency and there are a lot of developers that have been writing about how they think it’s unfair – at the end of the day, it’s up to Governments to police content, not companies, so handing off this process to the government in Australia is a lot fairer – Apple won’t like losing their total control over their eco-system for iTunes, but.. well.. tough.

  • True, makes good points – Well, What Do You Know: Google Is Actually Nervous About Microsoft Bing http://bit.ly/b8KMp

Competition benefits consumers and finally Google has a legit competitor – so much so that they actually got showed up by Microsoft when they announced their content partnership with Twitter and the first beta of Bing’s Twitter search app which you can find here.  As a knee-jerk response from Google a few hours later produced news that they were going to do the same thing (sort of) and that their toold would be available in a few months.  Not to be outdone, Microsoft announce later that day that they are also integrating Facebook into their search engine.  Google had nothing to say to that – Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook and would never allow Google to get access to it (and neither would Facebook themselves).  This article makes good points in how Google’s “me too” response to Microsoft’s news of innovation was real proof that there is definately chinks in their armour and a reminder that you have to always compete to stay the best.  just ask MySpace all about that.

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02 Nov

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 1 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up I found myself noticing a whole bunch of really handy and useful applications being announced and written about.  I’ve highlighted my favourites of the week below:

  • Great tip about Screencasting – From the Tips Box: Windows 7 Screencasting, Quicksilver, and Recipes [From The Tips Box] http://bit.ly/z47ef

This article has a whole bunch of tips in it but it was the first one in the list that I was really interested in (the rest were boring) – Windows 7 has a Screencaster feature in it so that you can record exactly what is happening on the desktop as a movie.  This is fantastic for getting help with support and we’ve been recommending it to all of our customers – simply hit record and play out a situation that you experiencing so that you can show the video of the problem to an extremely appreciative support technician.  All you need to do is open up the Run window (Window Key + R) and type “PSC” and hit enter.  Voila – you have it open and can hit record to start tracking what is happening on your computer.  Kudos to Microsoft for including this feature in Windows natively.

This is an idea that I was just talking about last when when I was talking about the possibilities of Augmented Reality – This iPhone app lets you use the iPhone camera to hover over something written in a foreign language and it’ll show you what that means in English written over top in what the camera sees – super handy when travelling overseas or when your computer manual is only written in Korean.  I was slightly disappointed that Japanese wasn’t supported at this stage (I’ve been learning it lately) and it’s a tad inconvenient that you have to download each language supported seperately, but once you’re set up you’re setup and it’s extremely convenient.  They are charging people $1 a language – $1 to buy the app and then you buy all the languages you want support for.  They say that more languages will be supported soon and Asian languages are the obvious ones missing from it but it’s got ALL the European languages covered which is pretty good.  Highly recommended.

This is a pretty exciting development – There are a number of applications available that allow you to run Windows on a Mac but this one is my favourite – Not only can you install Windows 7 as a program within Mac OSX and get full support for the aero interface and enjoy all the fun things that comes with Windows 7, but you can actually install programs within Windows 7 and then run them outside of Windows – so much so that you can attach them to the dock at the bottom of OSX and it runs like it is a native application. This effectively allows you to be a Mac user and then run any Windows program just like a Mac program and it’ll work every time.  This is quite exciting and I’ll be looking to create this exact setup for myself when I upgrade a little later in the year (I hear the new Macs are lemons and have problems that need to be fixed – see this week’s Thumbs Down article for more details).

  • Good on ‘em for doing this – Microsoft’s Official USB/DVD Download Tool Helps you Upgrade Netbooks to Windows 7 http://bit.ly/Ozh1M

This is great – people who own netbooks will know that there is no DVD drive in it, so if you want to upgrade Windows you don’t have a disk drive to put the installation CD in – fortunately, Microsoft have released a free tool which allows you to move the Windows 7 installer onto a thumb drive and you can use that to upgrade Windows to 7.  I have two netbooks at home and am doing that this week – Windows XP is too crappy and freezes a lot to not want to upgrade to a stable operating system.

  • FANTASTIC idea Microsoft should copy it (like everything else) – Aerofoil Keeps Your Laptop’s Battery Alive http://bit.ly/1maRls

Windows 7 already has a whole bunch of stuff built into it which helps preserve battery life in laptops significantly, and using this application will better your battery life even further.  The concept here is that Aero Glass, which is the Windows feature which animates your windows shrinking down and up and go 3D when ALT-Tabbing and all that jazz, is quite the battery sucker so this program will automatically turn Aero Glass off when you unplug the power charger to your laptop and only run it on battery.  You don’t have to do anything at all, this program will just auotmatically switch that Windows feature on and off as needed when you plug the power in and out.  Simple, easy and a brilliant idea.  If you have Windows 7 then you will definately want to install this program – check out the link for download details – OH and did I mention the program is FREE??  Very cool.

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28 Sep

Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 26 Sep

Welcome to my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read.  If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I found myself tweeting a significant amount this week – there was a Game Show in Tokyo where a lot of companies were showing off a lot of cool upcoming gadgets.  In addition to that, it seems that all the tech titans were stabbing each other in the throat to take advantage of a high news week – Google for example were announcing a new feature each day of the week, some of which were pretty bad actually (as I’ve outlined below).  Microsoft on the other hand were the reoccuring theme in the majority of my good posts this week, who would have thought?  Our friends in Redmond are actually bringing out a lot of cool stuff over the next 12 months and there well be plenty more to talk about as they keep making announcements (and other things “leak” to the press, yeah right – rumours are the new advertising).

THE GOOD

I installed this little app on my netbook last night and I was really impressed.  Whilst I mostly focus on suggesting apps that are productivity related, I found that this really did give a nice, glossed and polished touch to Windows XP – considering my main workstation is a Windows 7 machine this was welcomed eye candy for my little guy.  There are different choices for what icons and themes you want to change in XP and you can even change the welcome screen to something more glossy looking to, and I’m glad I put it on.

  • The evidence keeps mounting, you can’t ignore social media – Social Networking Use Triples from Only a Year Ago http://bit.ly/oynUF

We continually communitcate via our company Twitter account @makinglifeezy and this blog the importance of social media as the new most important advertising platform for your business.  This article is just some of the supporting evidence you’ll continue to find on the net regarding the rapidly growing community in the social media space and the amazing opportunities social networking provides for your business as a way to comminicate to your potential and existing customers like never before.

  • WOW! This is a fantastic idea – TechTracker Scans Your Computer for Outdated Software [Downloads] http://bit.ly/6wvcx #Lifehacker

Frankly, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t thought to do this earlier.  One of the biggest problems in computer security is that people just don’t keep their software up-to-date even as vulnerabilities and the like are discovered in these older editions.  It’s understandable that people don’t have the time to be scouring the web looking to see if their software has been updated, and now they don’t have to.  I ran this on my own computer and it found updates for software that I had forgotten I had even installed let alone a few programs that I didn’t think would have been updated.  Really handy tool.

  • Good read, the best about WordPress I’ve seen – The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress] http://bit.ly/TNH9Z

We here at Making Life Ezy are VERY big fans of WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog, in fact), so much so that we recommend to all of our HireEzy.com customers to create their own WordPress blogs as a pivital part of good Seach Engine Optimisation techniques and for creating link backs to their own website content.  This article really dumbed down the concept of setting one up, summarised the really awesome themes there are out there and recommended some of the really good plugins.  I found it really useful even though we’ve already set up our blog.  Of course, HireEzy.com customers can get a WordPress blog set up for them by our technicians for free as part of our web optimisation pack we sell with HireEzy.

  • Highly recommended plugin for #IE, I like it! – Printee Enables Selective Printing in Internet Explorer [Downloads] http://bit.ly/s8QNK

This plugin addresses one of the major problems with the web browser, being that people like to print web pages and they find that the text is split up over multiple pages in an unreadable format.  This plugin addresses this problem by smartly reading the text on the page and creating a printer friendly version of it before sending off the print request to your printer.  Voila, your printing out text all nice and formatted for simple reading off of paper.  Best of all, this plugin is free!

  • OH MAN!! This might just be the most amazing handheld gadget I’ve seen – Announcing the Microsoft Newton [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/6E4kB

Being a tech person I can’t help but add a gadget to this list, but this device is seriously awesome. There is a video you can view which demonstrates the potential of the device – basically the Microsoft Newton/Courier (there seems to be different codenames used for this device at this stage) is a dual screen device held like a notebook and has iPhone like multi-touch capabilities for treating the device like a real notepad, complete with realistic writing recognition (having come a long way since the original Palm Pilot-style handwriting input) and with instant integration with your calendar, mail and tasks to become the ultimate companion.  I see this device and I imagine the possibilities afforded to software developers and their customers – we LOVE the idea of putting customer’s information immediately in their hands when they want it.  I’ll be watching the evolution of this project with great interest.

THE BAD

  • Shocker! Power Twitter can protect you from this though – Video Demonstrates the Danger of Shortened URLs [Security] http://bit.ly/31b3qA

URL shortening services have become a really handy tool but this demonstration video makes a good point – URL shortening services don’t show to you what website you are being redirected to.  The article basically says that you should only open a shortened URL from a person that you trust, as you can potentially be tricked into going to a malicious website (a technique referred to as “phishing”).  Of course, there are ways around this – firstly, if you are a Windows user, Internet Explorer 8 has excellent anti-phishing technology built into it so even if you opened one of these webpages, IE would warn you that you are going to an untrusted website in the first place and help you beat a problem before it happens.  Also, if you are a Twitter user (this is where a lot of people are being targeted), consider using Power Twitter which scans your Twitter posts for shortened URL’s and auto converts them into their long addresses when showing you your posts on screen so you can see where the link will really take you – this is a really good idea and predictibly other Twitter clients (and perhaps Twitter themselves) will follow suit and offer the same solution as this problem continues to happen.

  • ‘Nuff said right there #FAIL – Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s-Era Hotmail Every Day [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/cnbmG

You know, I’m really not a fan of Gmail AT ALL.  What I really resent is the fact that Google indexes your mail, trawling your messages for the things that you talk about to people to optimise their targeted advertising and this alone disgusts me and leads me to NEVER recommend its use to anyone.  What this article delves into descibing though is the recent failures of Gmail’s servers, leading to downtime and people not being able to get into their mail.  The comparison to Hotmail from the late ’90s stems from the fact that it took Microsoft three years to figure out how to convert Hotmail’s servers to a Windows NT based platform (it was Unix based at time of purchase back in 1997) and there was a lot of downtime from the service as Microsoft tried and failed multiple times to make the conversion.  Of course, they figured it out eventually and Hotmail continues to be the market leader in web based email – plus you keep your privacy in the meantime.

  • ROFL! It’s open warfare now – Microsoft blasts Google over Chrome Frame plug-in http://bit.ly/tBeub

At first, when I read about this being released I reacted enthusiastically to the idea – old versions of Internet Explorer are slow, a security risk (read: bugs/vulnerabilities) and lack in offering the goodies afforded to people with updated browsers such as fast AJAX rendering for truly software-like browsing experiences, for example.  The problem here is that Google are beginning to try and exclude IE users from their web solutions – the upcoming Google Wave will stop you in your tracks and recommend you use anything other than IE, or install this Chrome Frame plugin for IE before continuing and this is appalling.  Furthermore, There is a new tag that web developers can include in their site which makes IE use the Google Chrome Frame plugin to render their website if a user has the plugin installed – what’s next?  Will Google start punishing websites in their search rankings who don’t have this tag in their website to force people to use Google’s plugin for IE?  Google are already well known for doctoring their search results to spruke their other own online offerings over others in the search results.  If Google did this, secretly or intentionally, I would image there would be an anti-trust suit from the US government for sure.  We really need greater competition in the search market.  Personally, I use Microsoft Bing for this exact reason.

You know, Google just want you to throw all information via them to continue to grow their database of information, as I’ve touched on earlier.  What I don’t like about this tool, whilst a good idea, is the fact that a website administrator has no control over what comments are being attached to their website.  I mean, if you have a website trying to project a positive image of your products and people are posting malicious messages about your company and its services, this can totally ruin your online image.  There might be companies that deserve it, but there will be plenty more that don’t.  Most frighteningly, your competitor could comment against your site that you’re crap and they (fakely) experienced bad service/offerings from you.  What then?  You can’t even program anything into your website to block its use against your site so you’re stuck with praying for the mercy of the internet’s community.  Yeah right.  All the tech websites are bagging this idea and it’s likely that no one will use this service and it will die a deservedly painful death over at Google HQ.

  • ROFL! RT @alleyinsider: Google Can’t Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail $GOOG $AAPL by @fromedome http://bit.ly/ZnhUY

I’ve already touched on the failures of Google’s GMail service but this article touches on the fact that Google are trying desperately to pitch their mail service to corpratations and launched this tool to trick Outlook and mobile devices that can sync with Microsoft Exchange to make them thing that you are adding an Exchange account for instant email notification (known as “push services”), when really it’s a GMail account.  This would be particularly handy for iPhone users.  What happened after launch was a whole bunch of people tried to use the feature and GMail went tits up and no one could download their mail.  Just another example of why GMail has no place in the workplace and why you shouldn’t use it at all anyways.

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