Before and after. Yum.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Why Google Wave is Revolutionary
I'm gonna keep this short cause the world series is on, but my point is that Google wave will revolutionize communications.
I just had a lengthy discussion about Chinese politics with someone in a university in China. It did not dawn on the significance of this until he said "cya, I have to go eat lunch." It's midnight here. I challenge Facebook to do that!
I just had a lengthy discussion about Chinese politics with someone in a university in China. It did not dawn on the significance of this until he said "cya, I have to go eat lunch." It's midnight here. I challenge Facebook to do that!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
My iTunes Ordeal
A few days ago I acquired a lot of music, and I mean a lot of music off an old HDD. Sadly the music was horribly unorganized, so I have spent the better part of the last two days deleting duplicates and editing song info.
The first thing I would like to cover is the "Show Duplicates" option on iTunes. It's pretty much a worthless piece of crap. When I first clicked it after importing the music, it game me something around 10,000 registered duplicates. This overwhelming number was compounded by the fact that it gave me duplicates, the originals, as well as songs that had no duplicates! It also tagged as duplicates songs that were the same, bu from different albums. I was expecting the ability to do a Ctrl-A -> Delete -> Done! But I was shown a daunting mess of information. After initially reviewing the library and cleaning out a significant amount of duplicates, a faced another annoying challenge.
Around 7000 wma files had been queued for converting, 6000 were already in my library. I had to wait out a 2 day long conversion process only to go through through another manual duplicate hunt. My point is iTunes, please give people who don't exclusively but from your overpriced store some actual options to manage their libraries. Or free my iPod and let me convert the m4p protected music files to mp3's, your choice.
The first thing I would like to cover is the "Show Duplicates" option on iTunes. It's pretty much a worthless piece of crap. When I first clicked it after importing the music, it game me something around 10,000 registered duplicates. This overwhelming number was compounded by the fact that it gave me duplicates, the originals, as well as songs that had no duplicates! It also tagged as duplicates songs that were the same, bu from different albums. I was expecting the ability to do a Ctrl-A -> Delete -> Done! But I was shown a daunting mess of information. After initially reviewing the library and cleaning out a significant amount of duplicates, a faced another annoying challenge.
Around 7000 wma files had been queued for converting, 6000 were already in my library. I had to wait out a 2 day long conversion process only to go through through another manual duplicate hunt. My point is iTunes, please give people who don't exclusively but from your overpriced store some actual options to manage their libraries. Or free my iPod and let me convert the m4p protected music files to mp3's, your choice.
Google Twitter Search Already Implemented?
I just did a search on Google for "Twitter Hump" (the current trending topic) and the first results are a bunch of tweets! Has Google already implemented twitter search or has this been there of a while?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Facebook is Broken
Facebook is broken. There I said it. Now some Facebook fan boys are probably going to come and make a snit. They can stuff it though, cause Facebook is broken.
Let me start with the simple problems, my Facebook is literally broken. When ever I click off the homepage I somehow lose all my friends. So, for example, if I click on a friends profile to write on their wall, I am suddenly not friends with them anymore!
a return to the homepage then shows a homepage without any of my friends updates. Rather useless I would say, not to mention that this is the situation that happens when the pages actually load. The past few days for me on Facebook have been a series of broken links and database errors, along with the ocasional "your account is undergoing maintenance.
Really? Maintenance? So why can I log in now? I think this is revealing the bigger problem with Facebook, it's bloated.
Bloated, Boated, Boated.
All the applications and PHP graphical crap they have shoved into the site have left it a beached whale swimming in a sea of it's own features. They need to stop trying to make the site an all encompassing user experience and stick with what their good at, status updates, wall posts, and pictures. Imagine what Google would be like if everyone of their services were on the homepage. It would be a slow hulking mess. Instead, Google's homepage has the Google logo and the search bar. If you want to do something else you click a link at the top.
Facebook needs to take a page from the Google play book and separate their services into different, interconnected entities.
They need to get their act together and streamline the homepage, or I may start using Twitter a whole lot more.
Let me start with the simple problems, my Facebook is literally broken. When ever I click off the homepage I somehow lose all my friends. So, for example, if I click on a friends profile to write on their wall, I am suddenly not friends with them anymore!
a return to the homepage then shows a homepage without any of my friends updates. Rather useless I would say, not to mention that this is the situation that happens when the pages actually load. The past few days for me on Facebook have been a series of broken links and database errors, along with the ocasional "your account is undergoing maintenance.
Really? Maintenance? So why can I log in now? I think this is revealing the bigger problem with Facebook, it's bloated.
Bloated, Boated, Boated.
All the applications and PHP graphical crap they have shoved into the site have left it a beached whale swimming in a sea of it's own features. They need to stop trying to make the site an all encompassing user experience and stick with what their good at, status updates, wall posts, and pictures. Imagine what Google would be like if everyone of their services were on the homepage. It would be a slow hulking mess. Instead, Google's homepage has the Google logo and the search bar. If you want to do something else you click a link at the top.
Facebook needs to take a page from the Google play book and separate their services into different, interconnected entities.
They need to get their act together and streamline the homepage, or I may start using Twitter a whole lot more.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Can Wave Get Better?
As Google Wave tutorials continue to poor in, the hype seems so be turning against Google. In this post, Scobleizer gives a brutal representation of the innovative new service. I frankly have no idea whether this is true but his arguments make sense.
"But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people," he says.
The main problem right now seems to be that most of the people you know are not on the service. The implications of this seems to be that most activity will have no relevance to you personally. Scobleizer gives this advice, "Do not everyone," in all caps for emphasis.
He says that that will cut down on the volume of crap that gets pushed to the top of your inbox. Sadly that means you'll have to wait for your friend invites to go through, but that seems to be a small price to pay for sanity.
That got me thinking about how we can improve Wave. Wave already has been hyped as a merger of email, IM, docs, etc. I think that we need a another integration of email. You should be able to send a wave to someone's email and either have that wave embedded in the email with the ability to fully interact with the wave client, or have email messages get sent to wave.
The later would be the less favorable option, but much easier to implement. these changes would have the effect of opening up the wave client to every friend of the users on it. It really would replace email. The version as it stands only has the potential of displacing email if EVERYONE gets on it, something which cannot happen.
"But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people," he says.
The main problem right now seems to be that most of the people you know are not on the service. The implications of this seems to be that most activity will have no relevance to you personally. Scobleizer gives this advice, "Do not everyone," in all caps for emphasis.
He says that that will cut down on the volume of crap that gets pushed to the top of your inbox. Sadly that means you'll have to wait for your friend invites to go through, but that seems to be a small price to pay for sanity.
That got me thinking about how we can improve Wave. Wave already has been hyped as a merger of email, IM, docs, etc. I think that we need a another integration of email. You should be able to send a wave to someone's email and either have that wave embedded in the email with the ability to fully interact with the wave client, or have email messages get sent to wave.
The later would be the less favorable option, but much easier to implement. these changes would have the effect of opening up the wave client to every friend of the users on it. It really would replace email. The version as it stands only has the potential of displacing email if EVERYONE gets on it, something which cannot happen.
Apple Tablet?
Apple recently filed this patent that describes a hand-gesture recognizing multi-touch interface. If this is the technology behind the rumored Apple Tablet, I'm exited. This means that the whole thing will be much like the muli-touch table interfaces we have seen on various windows platforms, and hopefully not just a very large iTouch. The display also looks promising for things like user-profile specific keyboards and and very customizable interfaces. Nothing is confirmed yet, but the tablet at least is in the 90% probability range!
Apple insider link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/01/evidence_of_apples_tablet_like_input_interface_reappears.html
Apple insider link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/01/evidence_of_apples_tablet_like_input_interface_reappears.html
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