Dinosaur Adobe Manually Reviews Download Purchases

After years of working on outdated desktop software, I was all set to bite the bullet tonight, and upgrade to the latest Creative Suite family from Adobe. Not interested in cluttering our already-cluttered home with boxes of software and CDs, I was pleased to see I could order a download version of the suite, and potentially have it tonight, installed and running while the twins slept. But for some bizarre reason, probably having to due with an overwrought insecure obsession with piracy, Adobe says it will review the order manually, in the next business day, and then, assuming I pass, I'll get permission to download what I bought.

Crazy. Dumb. Antiquated.


Seriously, Adobe? You're Reviewing a Download?
It's one thing to order a physical item from Amazon.com, the Apple Store, or Zappos, and expect it to ship in a few business days. But downloads? Instant or not at all. This is part of why iTunes has been so successful. Click to purchase, and you are downloading immediately. Same goes for Netflix's "Watch Instantly", and practically every other legitimate software download service.

What if I absolutely needed Adobe's software tonight? What if I were in a creative agency on deadline working the weekend? Could I tell a client that no, I would be unable to open their project in the latest version of InDesign or PhotoShop because Adobe was going to review my order the next day? It's almost enough to make me check out BitTorrent.

There's a reason Web services are replacing the old dinosaur software companies. They are more agile and more forward thinking. Maybe I'll get approved and get the software I paid for by tomorrow. But this is completely ridiculous. The world is moving to a real-time Web, and this is anything but.

Stop Telling Me How to Use Your Products

In recent weeks, there have been a number of incidents where high profile online services have gotten into something of a battle with their users. Be it the on again off again user interface debate between Facebook and its user base, or Twitter's deciding just what is the right way or the wrong way to use their service, both products have ended up telling their own customers that they know best, and you should just suck it up. During these debates, some have said the best way to drive a product forward was to never compromise and listen to your users, while others celebrated the users getting a voice at the table.

But we're missing a major issue that I want to address. I'm fine with companies making changes to their interface, or adding features, or even deciding to prioritize some issues over others. That's business. But don't tell me how to use your products. Don't tell me what is the right way or the wrong way to use a product, when you've given us tools.

Take for example the hubris from Biz Stone at Twitter in his note to individual customers who were relying on their providing autofollow capabilities. Most specifically, he said:

"We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous."

Oh really? What a bunch of junk this is. What's next? Google Reader telling us that there should be a limit to the number of RSS feeds we subscribe to, or that Yahoo!, Hotmail and GMail will limit the number of new e-mails we can receive in a day? After all, couldn't they write that "nobody can actually read e-mails from thousands of people which makes this activity disingenuous"?

Here's the reality - people are going to use products the way they want to, especially if you build a product that is flexible. And they will often use them in ways you never expected, or had even considered when you were first designing. And as you continue to build your service out, the solution is not to tell users there is "one right way", but instead to consider how you can make your product even better to an increasing number of people.

What I have seen from companies like Twitter and Facebook is a belief that you should only be connected to people you know in real life, and that you should only have a small number of people to be connected with. Yes, Facebook's dismissing the 5,000 limit, and yes, they're opening up to companies and fan pages, but they still require you to enter your true first and last name, and demand a synchronous follow.

Twitter's limits are even worse. What's so bizarre about this most recent volley about users being "disingenuous" by using auto-follow is how it impacts their most popular users. Where's the outrage that Barack Obama clearly uses auto-following software? Do you think Twitter is going to tell Obama that he can't actually follow 586,000 users? Do you think they are going to tell Robert Scoble that it is "disingenuous" to follow 85,000 people?

I also use a third party auto-following service from SocialToo (where I'm also an advisor). I use it because Twitter, thanks to other limitations in their product, will let me send direct messages only to those who follow me, and I want to let them contact me directly.

What Twitter and Facebook are doing by trying to tell their users that they know the right way to use their products is putting themselves above the users, and acting in an authoritative, but naive, manner. I think Biz' comment that it was "disingenuous" to follow thousands of accounts is covering the fact that Twitter's infrastructure wasn't meant to support such activity.

At risk of echoing Thomas Hawk's comment that I'm "Mr. FriendFeed", it's worth noting again that FriendFeed doesn't tell me how to or how not to use their products, and they aren't setting limits. They put out a service, and let the users have at it. That's impressive, and a major reason of why I'm bullish on what they do. For the rest of you developers who keep setting limits and claiming it's not your fault, but your users, you're wrong.

Seesmic Launches First Dedicated Client for Facebook Updates

One of the introductions displayed during Facebook's Dave Morin's panel at the South by Southwest conference today was that of a new desktop client for Facebook status updates, delivered by Seesmic's Loic LeMeur. The new app, available for both PC and Macintosh, running on the Adobe AIR platform, lets users view updates from friends and post new status updates to the popular social network, much like the myriad of applications built for Twitter, from TweetDeck and Posty to LeMeur's own, Twhirl.

During the debut of the application, Loic was keen to try and help redefine Seesmic. He said simply, "Seesmic is more than video now, it is about sharing with friends."


Connecting to Facebook With the Seesmic Desktop Tool
I currently update my Facebook status with my updates I send to Twitter, so for those people who use Twitter and synchronize the two, there may be little need for the new tool, but there are many others who have made Facebook their home for social networking with friends and family. With some now 50,000 applications running on the Facebook platform, as Morin mentioned today, the new Seesmic application both has the option to be seen by very many users, but also the chance it could be overlooked, unless Facebook also chooses to push its visibility.


Updates from My Friends and Updating Myself
There is some curiosity as to why Twhirl was not made the conduit for these updates. The product, primarily focused on Twitter, also enables updates to FriendFeed and, of course, Seesmic. It could be that Facebook wanted a native app dedicated to their site, or it could be that Loic wanted to gain the market visibility by building a new category of desktop utilities. (Of course, you could see CenterNetworks' video to learn more)

You can find the new Seesmic Facebook updater at http://www.seesmic.com/facebook. From there, you'll be taken to the Facebook site, upon getting connected, and you can download the AIR application. Loic officially announced it on his blog here.

Apple iPhoto to Integrate Facebook Connect

During Dave Morin's presentation on a search for a more social Web at the SXSW conference today, the senior platforms manager for Facebook mentioned the company would be integrating Facebook Connect with Apple's iPhoto consumer program, in what could be a big step for Cupertino away from their forced vertical integration with Mobile Me, and more toward an adoption of the broader social networking community.

As Facebook grows in visibility, it's no surprise that companies big and small are looking to tap into the service's reported 175 million accounts. As Morin said during his presentation, "The desktop is getting more important in terms of integration with the Web." And the move for iPhoto users to upload their photos to Facebook, add tags and other social data further blurs the line between what is a desktop app or a Web app.

Apple has long considered it one of the leaders of the Web - despite having zero presence in search, portals or social networking in general. The company's long in the tooth iTools to .Mac to MobileMe transition has never really gained traction with the masses, even though the company's iPhone/iTunes and iLife families have been tremendously successful. That they are moving to work with Facebook and support the integration of the service indicates they're trying to dismiss the "not invented here" mentality.

Morin did not indicate which version of iPhoto would include the Facebook Connect option, or a timeframe, but given the presentations by multiple iPhone app developers having integrated the same technology and APIs, it likely won't be too long.

FriendFeed Launches Desktop Notifier AIR Application

In time for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive event, the popular information sharing and aggregation service, FriendFeed, has introduced a desktop application based on Adobe's AIR platform, letting you see updates on any of your friend lists directly on your desktop - essentially bringing the service's real-time feature out of the Web and ever closer to your core.

The notifier is fairly lightweight upon introduction, letting you select to receive updates from any list you choose, choose how long they will display, and where on your desktop they will show. And that's it! So it's not exactly trying to take away your attention from more robust AIR applications, like TweetDeck for Twitter.


If you don't mind the constant notification updates from FriendFeed, you can choose any of the lists you have preset, and individual notifications will pop up. Click on the notification, and you can be taken to the item, or click comment to start commenting on it.



A Pair of Notifications from the New FriendFeed App
The utility is likely best positioned for highly-targeted lists, say of close friends, family, or work. Otherwise, you've got yet another way to drink from a firehose. You can find the notifier here: http://friendfeed.com/settings/notifier. The company's official post is here: Get FriendFeed notifications on your desktop.

What's Growing Faster? Software Bloat or PC Capabilities?

There is an old adage in the storage business. No matter how large you make the hard disk, users will find a way to fill it. The same seems true in the bandwidth and networking business - build a bigger pipe, and customers will find applications that use it up. The same concept extends to me as a consumer, for my traditional software experience. While my laptop is tremendously more capable than its predecessors of 2, 5 or 10 years ago, it sure doesn't seem like the software loads any more quickly, and I still find myself closing applications or forcing them to quit when the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Back in late 1998 after I got a first-generation iMac, complete with a then-acceptable 32 megabytes of RAM and a 4 gigabyte hard disk, I marveled at the gargantuan install needed for the latest version of Microsoft Office. I remember specifically telling a friend to just wait... as the next one would take more than a gigabyte of space. Sure enough, that's practically accepted, and now, it's not too uncommon to see downloads, and even software updates, that are in the hundreds of megabytes.

But the issue is less about capacity and more about the perception of speed. Yes, my laptop can do more than its forefathers. It can do new things with the Web and with video that were never before possible. But booting Microsoft Office, Adobe PhotoShop, FireFox and other products still manages to slow down my system to a crawl. It's gotten to the point that I've even eliminated possible reasons for the slowdown. I hardly ever boot into VMware Fusion any more, to run Microsoft Outlook. I stopped using an external monitor at work, and try to recharge my iPhone only when I don't need full use of my MacBook Pro. And that doesn't even extend to other RAM and processor hungry apps, like one of my personal favorites, TweetDeck.

For whatever reason, it seems that software developers have, for the most part, chosen to add features, and not optimize for speed. I don't think it took more time to boot Microsoft Word 5.1 on my old Performa than it takes to boot Microsoft Word 2008 on my MacBook Pro, even if the Megahertz speed on the processor has increased from 33 MHz to 2.2 GHz, and the RAM from 24 Megabytes to 2 Gigabytes. And lest you think I'm picking on Microsoft, Apple's iPhoto has also been a slow to load memory hog in its own right.

If somebody told me ten years ago that I could increase my processor speed by 1,000 percent, and my RAM by about the same amount, I would have expected to be able to hit "Select All" on my Applications folder and then "Open" to run them all at once. But there's no way. At this point, even with my current machine, I probably can run Mail, iTunes, a Web browser and one more application without slowness. Add one or two more apps to the mix, and we're in spinning wheel city.

In one my recent tirades against how often my machine was slowing down, I heard the all too common reply: "Time for a new one?" but the answer should be no. It's time the pace of the treadmill whereby hardware needs to speed up to handle the new software should slow. Get it to work, and get it to work fast. Please.

TweetDeck to Add Translations, Tweets by E-mail, StockTwits

TweetDeck has rapidly climbed the charts of popular Twitter clients since its debut last July, and with new capital backing, developer Iain Dodsworth continues to add more features to make the product practically indispensable. In the latest update, to debut tomorrow, Dodsworth adds new features that will help you communicate with a global audience, in multiple languages, monitor stock data, and even send your tweets by e-mail. And just think, this is one of Iain's minor point releases, not a major update - which is also in the works.

TweetDeck, as you recall, is a popular AIR application, easily recognizable by its tight multi-column format, which lets you follow all your Twitter data, be it updates from friends, replies, direct messages, search terms and groups. In fact, the success of TweetDeck has spawned different software products to emulate its interface, including FriendDeck, a tool for following FriendFeed, and most recently, Alert Thingy.

Tomorrow's iteration includes the ability to translate tweets you have both received or written into any of nearly 3 dozen languages. If you want to tweet outside of your native language, simply write your tweet in TweetDeck, click the dual-bubbled conversation bubble on the right, and select a language. A few example translations of my "I am not a Twitter addict, but I can see how that would happen." are below.

French: Je ne suis pas un accro à Twitter, mais je peux voir comment cela allait se passer.
German: Ich bin kein Twitter Süchtigen, aber ich kann sehen, wie das passieren würde.
Italian: Io non sono un tossicodipendente Twitter, ma posso vedere in che modo che accada.
Polish: Nie jestem uzależniony Twitter, ale widzę, że jak by się stało.
Vietnamese: Tôi không phải là một Twitter addict, nhưng tôi có thể nhìn thấy như thế nào mà có thể xảy ra.

Also, as not everyone is yet a Twitter addict, you might find yourself wanting to share items from Twitter to friends by e-mail. Now, using TweetDeck, you can mouse over any individual tweet, click "Other Actions", and select e-mail, which will pop open your default e-mail program, and set up an e-mail that says "Tweet forwarded by @yourusername", and includes the Twitter user, the tweet itself, and a little note: "Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com). You can see Iain demonstrate the e-mail from TweetDeck function below on video:


Click to see a demo from Iain Dodsworth
(Opens in a New Window)
You can also translate or untranslate individual tweets from this "Other Actions" menu.

Another interesting function to debut tomorrow is the ability to turn your TweetDeck into a full-fledged StockTwits terminal, showing your Friends, Portfolio, Recommended, Commentary and Everyone columns. If you are a StockTwits user, and have added stocks to your portfolio, you can see what the entire StockTwits community is saying, be it on AAPL, YHOO, GOOG or MSFT. See the screenshot below for what mine looks like (sans friends) following just Apple, Google and Sirius Radio.


The updated point release will hit TweetDeck.com tomorrow. If you're someone who skips point releases and wants a full update, you'll need to keep waiting, but I've been told it's not all that far away. Expect Iain to tackle major issues such as memory, multiple accounts and more then.

Suffering from BeOS Nostalgia? The Haiku Project Can Help.

In 1996, Apple was in freefall and the Macintosh was in trouble. As many Mac fans clung to their Performas and PowerBooks in vain, we prayed for a savior to swoop in and save the Cupertino company from what at the time seemed like certain doom. And before Steve Jobs and Next came in to provide Apple with its next generation operating system, there was a different white knight we expected to keep up the fight against Microsoft and Windows. The white knight was the Be operating system, and its founder, Jean-Louis Gasée. As history now shows, Apple's not choosing Be pretty much killed the OS and the company - as it faded into operating system history, alongside Amiga and others whose time has come and gone. But for its time, it had some intriguing features, which live on in the Haiku Project, which you can try out today.


Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku looks almost exactly like the older operating system, featuring the trademark yellow tabs atop floating windows, featuring a Linux-like terminal, and true multi-threading to take advantage of multiple processors.


And the Haiku project is more than a series of intriguing screenshots. You can actually run the project today, by downloading a virtual image from their Web site, popping into VMware, with or without a full set of applications, from Mail to Firefox to a PDF viewer and a Paint application.


I downloaded the VMware image with the latest nightly build, and sure enough... 1996 all over again. But it wasn't an OS running on a Zip Drive on a 603 or 604 processor. It was a virtual machine running on my MacBook Pro. Quick. Fast. Elegant. Not very useful, of course, but an interesting science project. It works.

So if you want to toy around with an elegant OS and you want to kick the tires or just scratch that nostalgia itch, check out Haiku. See also: OS News: BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses.

Why In the World Can't I Customize Apple's Time Machine?

In March of 2007, when writing for The Apple Blog, now part of the GigaOM network, I openly speculated that Apple would debut a wireless network storage device, combining their expertise in Airport wireless devices with an external hard drive and give users a simple way to back up all their files. Sure enough, Cupertino rolled out the combination of Time Machine software and the Time Capsule backup device to do just that. And while I'm one of those Apple customers backing up my data through the air, you have to color me unimpressed with the flexibility of Time Machine - as its options are so limited, it's practically assumed I'm too stupid to make any decisions on my own. This leads to the application slowing down my computer when I don't want it to and regular bandwidth congestion for me and others sharing the network (notably, my wife).


As with many of Apple's products, Time Machine assumes it is made for consumers who benefit from a limited number of options. The product, in an attempt to backup all your data regularly, comes preset to make:

• Hourly backups for the last 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups until the backup disk is full

And... that's it.

When I am at the office, away from my Time Capsule, I'm not backing up. But when I get home, every hour, for about 10 to 15 minutes, my laptop starts to slow as Apple's Time Machine whirs into action, backing up my MacBook Pro's 200 Gigabyte hard drive to the 500 Gigabyte time capsule. While I've told Time Machine to not back up some folders, to reduce the time and storage space, I can't set up Time Machine to back up with any other granularity. I can't tell it to back up every two hours, three hours or four hours. I can't tell it to only back up after 10 p.m., or in a window from 6 p.m. to midnight, if I wanted to. I can't tell it to exclude certain types of files (like MP3 or PowerPoint, if I wanted to). It's either on, or it's off. And it's on the way that Apple set it up. Not the way I did.


So If I have my Time Machine stuck in the "On" position, I'm doomed to have my computer slow down once an hour and stuff the network full of flowing bits once an hour. I've even switched over to my neighbor's open wireless once or twice just to make sure the backup failed and I could get my bandwidth back. While we've gotten further along than my August post where I couldn't even get Time Capsule to work right, I'm still quite annoyed that Time Machine seems to be designed so simply that I simply can't be happy with it. It's time to get more options.

Wakoopa Is Going to Give Away My Web App Obsessions

I often get comments from people asking just how much time I spend on social networks, writing blog posts, and reading RSS feeds. Most of the time, that answer is hard to get, as I spend a few minutes throughout the day making sure I miss as little as possible, and try to limit the time it takes to write most posts to about 20 minutes or so. But there are software solutions out there to help track all my application and Web service activity, which, in theory, could give away exactly how much time I am wasting allotting to each task. Among the easiest, and growing increasingly popular, is Wakoopa.


Wakoopa, upon registering, provides a small tracker that, once installed on your computer, monitors both your foreground applications, and those in the background. It also tracks most major services, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook, to find out how much time you're spending online.

Beyond tracking your own activity, making you guilty for each minute you might spend at the office on a social network instead of buried in Microsoft Office apps, you can review software you use, see other reviews from fellow Wakoopers, and monitor activity from around the service - including seeing the most popular applications from across the network, and seeing live activity, which streams vertically, much like Twitter's feed.

Wakoopa formally launched in early 2007, and has started to gain traction in recent months. In October, they were added as a supported service in FriendFeed, and according to Compete.com, they grew 12 percent month over month, seeing yearly growth of nearly 300%. (Usual caveat: Compete.com stats are questionable)

Given I already stream much of the social activity I do around the Web, and try and be as transparent as possible, I see little downside to keeping the Wakoopa Tracker on, showing you how often I use Adobe Photoshop or Apple Mail, when I boot up iTunes, or if I'm updating Facebook. Do I expect to meet new friends and peers through Wakoopa just because we share an affinity for word processing programs? Probably not. But if Wakoopa over time starts to tell me that I'm doing way too much socializing, and not enough business, that just might impact my future behavior.

If you get into the service, you can even highlight your own software and Web activity on your blog with embedded widgets, or see what other folks are using around the Web. The image at the top left of this post showing my top ten software apps is updated live based on my own activity, so you can see the service in action. You can find me tracking my activity at http://wakoopa.com/louisgray.

Poll Tracker '08 By Slate Brings Election Updates To Your iPhone

With the United States' presidential election looming next Tuesday, daily polls at the state and national levels are growing in importance, as Barack Obama looks to maintain and increase his lead over John McCain, and McCain and his team hope to repeat the Republicans' success in the last two elections, by securing votes in the swing states and holding their base. While the dual party competitiveness and strategy is not new, the fact I can track the day to day moves on my iPhone is. When not in front of the computer, checking out Electoral-Vote.com or FiveThirtyEight.com, I can see the most recent polls by using an app called Poll Tracker, which runs at only 99 cents.



The Electoral Vote Count, If All Polls Are Accurate, Is Displayed
Poll Tracker '08 By Slate has five major tabs within its application, including "Battleground" for hotly contested states, as well as the national poll, "Recents", showing the most recently updated state results, "A-Z", showing all states alphabetically, and one for each of the candidates, "Obama" and "McCain", represented by their respective party mascots, donkey and elephant. Those two tabs show the states with the candidates' greatest lead differential, from highest to lowest. For Obama, that's Washington D.C., where he leads 82% to 13%, and for McCain, it's Idaho, where he leads 62.1% to 29.5%, according to the last poll.



You Can Display Trends By State Or Nationally
While the latest snapshot of poll numbers is the most accurate measure for how next week's election may turn out, it's the individual state graphs I find most interesting. By tapping on any state, be it Florida, Ohio, Virginia, or Missouri, you can see how the state's residents have been surveyed over time, and get a good idea as to which candidate is trending in the state. Enough blue graphs on the upswing, and you can guess Obama is doing well. But if it's red you see headed up and to the right, it's the Straight Talk Express on the move.

Poll Tracker '08 admittedly has a sort shelf life. It might get a whole lot less interesting in about 10 days, and it won't give you the minute by minute updates we'll all be biting our nails over next Tuesday, but at $.99, it will deliver good value until the last vote is counted.

You can find Poll Tracker '08 By Slate on Apple's iTunes Store.

5 iPhone Apps Your Family Will Enjoy

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

As a father of four, gadgets I buy must be something my entire family can enjoy.

When I got an iPhone, I also got my wife an iPhone, and we're seriously considering iPod Touches for the kids this Christmas (Promise not to tell them, okay?).

The iPhone is not only a tool Mom or Dad can enjoy and use to become more productive, but it can serve as an excellent learning and entertainment tool for your children. There are many apps that are great for both young and old, which are essential for a Dad like me. These five applications in the iTunes App store are some of my favorites, which the entire family can enjoy. And only Koi Pond ($.99) isn't free.

iDoodle2 lite

My sons, 6 and 4, love this one. It's simply a basic drawing program, which lets you select colors, pen size, shape, and background color, and create different pictures by drawing on the screen. You select the background color, then you have the option to select if you want to draw freeform with a pen, draw lines, circles, squares, or blobs, and you can doodle all you want. There is also a pay version that offers ability to enter text on your graphic, and have an image as your background that you can draw on. It's great for the kids when you don't have a pen or paper nearby to keep them busy. It's my 4 year old's favorite app.

Pros: Simple idea, hard for kids to get into trouble. The pay version only adds to that experience.

Cons: Not easy enough to use, at least for kids. For kids that can't read, it's hard for them to know to click on "New Doodle" to erase their image and start over.

Crazy Pumpkin

I saw this one enter the App store, and predicted immediately (check my Google Shared items) that this would be top 5, and sure enough, it got up to number 2 before going down again. The idea is simple. It's a Jack O' Lantern. You can change the face of the Jack O' Lantern by sliding the eyes, nose, or mouth over to make different faces. You can also make spooky sounds by shaking the phone or iPod Touch. It's nice and easy, great for younger kids, and catchy enough even adults can have fun with it.

Pros: Extremely simple, great for younger kids and even toddlers (my 6 month old loves my iPhone!).

Cons: I'd love the option of more faces, and maybe a few more sounds, or additional functionality. However, the idea is meant to be very simple.

Koi Pond

This is a classic. I know few iPhone owners that haven't tried this one. Koi pond is simply a pond with Koi fish and lilly pads in it, which you can slide your finger around and make rippling sounds and motions in the water. It's perhaps one of the most relaxing applications on the iPhone - nothing is more relaxing than the sound of rippling water and birds chirping in the background. Better yet, you can shake the phone, and fish food is sprinkled in the pond and the Fish come and eat the food. Be careful though, if you disturb the water, the fish avoid coming near the area you disturbed.

The part I love most about this is that due to the simplicity, it works great for keeping kids busy, especially infants and toddlers who can't read and have limited hand-eye coordination. My 6 month old loves touching the screen and hearing the resulting sounds rewarding him for his actions. He loves looking at it and seeing the cool colors and hearing the sounds that come from the app. I would say this is my 6 month old's favorite App.

Pros: It's so relaxing! It's my new "stress ball". Nice and simple.

Cons: I can't think of any cons to tell you the truth, unless you don't like Fish.

Memory Match by Jirbo

I had a lot of fun with this one. It's a play on the classic, "Memory" game, giving you 30 cards, all turned over, that you must sequentially turn over and see if you can remember where the matched images are. It's a one player game, but something you or your kids can play over and over and challenge each other on the score it gives you. You can also upload your scores to Jirbo.com, and share your score with others using the app.

Pros: Easy to use, fun to play. Who can turn down a game of Memory? Great for kids, young and old, and helps refine their memory skills.

Cons: No 2-player mode, even on the same device. It's single player only. It would be nice to play with someone else like the real card game, or even over WiFi with someone on another device nearby.

FourFree

This is quickly becoming one of my favorites. It's based on the classic, "Connect 4" game, where you and another player can play to see who can be the first to get 4 of your color in a row horizontally, vertical, or diagonal. You can choose to play by yourself against the computer and track your score, or play against another player on the same device.

As a family we usually take a travel version of the real Connect 4 board game with us on road trips to keep the kids busy. Now we can simply bring our iPhones, and our kids can have multiple options given to them, with no lost pieces, and no mess!

Pros: A classic favorite! Gives easy, normal, and hard levels for all ages. Fun for the child and adult.

Cons: I'd love to be able to play with other nearby phones instead of having to pass the phone back and forth. It may be a little too hard for age 4 and under.

---

Know any other family-friendly iPhone apps that the kids can enjoy? We're always looking for more. Leave your suggestions in the comments.

---

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Stay On Top of the College Gridiron Using Only Your iPhone

Last month, I highlighted an iPhone application that let you see near real-time scores of NFL games in progress, see current game situations, statistics, news, or even exchange "smack talk" with other fans. (See: Is Your iPhone Ready for Some Football?) But football isn't just played on Sunday. Today, like every other Saturday in the fall months here in the States, dozens of college teams faced off around the country, some fighting for a position in the BCS series, others jockeying for a position in the Associated Press' Top 25, and even more, fighting just for pride. And Plusmo, the same company that provided Pro Football Live has made an app for fans of those teams, similarly called College Football Live. It's just as good and just as free.

College Football Live, like its big brother, lets you view the scores of games in progress, select favorite teams, see recent news and talk smack with other fans.


Not Watching the Game? You Can Get Caught Up Quickly.
But given the differences between the pro game and the college game, College Football Live also tracks the Top 25 polls, and standings by conference.


The Week's Polls and Conference Standings are a Tap Away
Within each game, you can dive down into seeing most recent statistics, quarterly play by play, and previous scoring drives. And as with Pro Football Live, you can give a thumbs up or down to each team and see just how many other fans have the same preferences you do.

This Saturday evening, my California Golden Bears are leading the Arizona Wildcats 24-14 at the half, in game they are expected to win. But with the American League playoffs on TV, as well as many other Top 25 college games, the Bears haven't found their way to my TV set. Luckily, I have College Football Live on my iPhone to fill the gap.

i.TV Application Added to Apple's iTunes Store

Three weeks ago, we showed you images from an early access build of i.TV, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you get the latest TV and movie schedules from your area, rate shows, and leave reviews. The application, which is free, was added to the Apple iTunes application store late last night, and is available to the public immediately.

At launch, i.TV bills itself as the "ultimate" movies and TV guide for Apple's portable devices, offering more than 144,000 TV and movie listings, data from 5,000 local theaters, and nearly 6,000 TV previews or movie trailers. It currently works in the United States and Canada, so those outside North America will need to wait.


i.TV Pulled Down My Channel Data in Seconds to the iPhone
As has been said by many, no application is complete without some social element these days, and i.TV, as you recall, is no different. You can engage with other viewers of shows you like by sharing reviews, and you can recommend shows to friends by e-mail. In fact, some of the elements of this app shadow the recommendations I gave TiVo in June. (See: TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.)


You Can Get Show Data and Theater Info on i.TV
I downloaded the new application from the iTunes Store tonight, and the speed is remarkably faster than the first alpha I tried last month. It automatically recognized my location, and based on that zip code, I was pulling down channel listings in seconds. Given its price (free), there's really no reason not to have this app if you already have an iPhone or an iPod Touch. You can find it here: Apple iTunes Store: i.TV.

Still No OS, But Google Takes Over My Desktop Anyway

The Google Mac team seemingly doesn't get to play with all the fun toys its Windows counterparts do. While the Windows team got to use Desktop long before we Mac users did, and thus far, holds a monopoly on the Chrome Web browser, it looks as if their hands weren't completely idle - as on Monday, they announced the release of a tool called Top Draw, which creates complex imagery and has the option to replace users' desktops. While an automatic background refresher isn't exactly innovative, as Apple has had this capability built into its system preferences for years, the new tool offers up compelling images that had me checking out my new desktop time and again.

Top Draw comes with integrated scripts with many preloaded image types, from Grid to Plasma to WavyGlow, for example.

The small viewer simply lets you select what Script type will run and how often it will refresh. For me, I have it running on randomly chosen scripts, every two minutes.

While not all the resulting images are postcard-perfect, a great deal of them surpass the bundled desktop patterns and pictures provided by Cupertino. A few examples are below:







It's one of those small products that piques the interest throughout the day. Also piquing the interest is wondering just what the Google Mac team is working on that would require this kind of engine, and if we'll soon get to see some serious Mac software and not just flashy toys that hearken back to decades-old screensavers.

Is Your iPhone Ready for Some Football?

For much of the United States, and increasingly, other countries, Sundays in the fall and winter months are dominated by one thing - football. And just because you happen to be of a geeky mentality doesn't mean you can't nurture your jock side through using your iPhone to get updated in near real-time to all the happenings in the NFL. One of my favorite free apps on the iTunes application store is "Pro Football Live", which provides score updates, play by play, current game situations, photos, news, and even the ability to talk back to other users through a feature called "Smack Talk".

Apple's most recent iPhone ads have highlighted the application store, and specifically, some of the games that have been developed for the nascent platform. But there's more to entertainment than video games and high scores.


You Can See Updated Scores from Around the League

With Pro Football Live, I don't need to go to ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports to get all the scoring updates, and even if I'm away from the TV or radio, I can get the feeling of watching a game, by seeing the current game situation, including who has the ball, yard markers, downs and yardage.


You Can Talk Smack And Check Current Standings

And while I'm not getting streaming video, by using the Pro Football Live app, unlike TV, I have access to all the games at once, not just those being broadcast in my area. So if you're a fantasy football junkie, like me, you can toggle between today's Raiders/Chargers contest, and that of the Texans/Jaguars or Jets/Cardinals. You can, with a couple clicks of the phone, be on top of your game, and you can jump into "Smack Talk" to share your thoughts with other fans.


You Can View Recent Photos and News from the NFL

Pro Football Live also features "News" and "Photos" feeds from the leading sources, letting you get updated on which starters are expected to play or which players set personal records.

iPhone applications like Pro Football Live and MLB.com's At Bat have helped me be closer to all games when away from home, taking pro sports mobile. It's all part of how products like the iPhone can better reach across the digital divide and get into America's living rooms, or at least, entertain those who would rather be in their living rooms, instead of slogging along behind their significant other who won't let them watch the game.

iPhone Application Review: Mobile Fotos

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

---

Author's Note: Louis and I share an interest in the iPhone / iPod Touch platform, and all the new applications being developed for it for release on the iTunes Store. Realizing this, I offered to write a series of 'mini-reviews' on applications I really like, and if applicable, their impact on the social media space. I'm going to start with Mobile Fotos, an application developed by Karl van Randow, a freelance New Zealand developer who has (according to his blog) been actively working on a 'web debugging proxy' called Charles.

---

Mobile Fotos

Mobile Fotos, like several others in the iTunes store, specializes in connecting the iPhone and iPod Touch to Flickr, a popular photo-sharing web site. While I tried several others but I found Mobile Fotos to be the most feature-complete and easiest to use. The application costs $2.99, and there is no 'free version' available. However, I believe it is well worth this small price, considering its functionality.

Features

• Mobile Fotos Uses the Flickr API and supports authentication with the Flickr server.
• Flickr sets, groups, favorites, tags, contacts, photo search and explore by most recent and 'interestingness' are supported. Collections (groups of groups) and historical display are not supported.
• Uploading from the iPhone 'camera roll' archive and from a live picture are supported.
• Photos taken from within Mobile Fotos are also stored in the camera roll.
• Adding a title and description as well as adding a new photo to an existing set (or creating a new set) are supported at time of photo upload.
• Geotagging of photos after upload is supported, and controllable for each upload.
• With the 2.1 firmware update, uploading from the camera roll at full resolution (1200x1600) is supported.
• Easy-to-use interface follows a rigorous 'drill-down' methodology that, once learned, makes navigating through all the different browsing options very easy.
• Portrait and landscape modes.
• Searching for nearby photos using GPS is supported.

I should also mention some drawbacks I have encountered.

First, when browsing through photos at full size, the interface does not support 'sliding' a finger to navigate. You must click on a right or left arrow to move forward or back. Second, there is no batch upload feature. Photos can only be uploaded one at a time.

Usage

In practice, the one photo upload is not as much of a limitation as you might think. First, when you are out and about, you generally only need to take a photo, set a description and get it started. By the time you are ready to set up another shot, it is ready.

As for using the application as a mobile gateway to Flickr, the developer has gone to great pains to preserve the sort of free-form exploration that makes Flickr such fun to waste time in. You can search for a tag, for example, then bring up details on the photo, click on the photo's owner and then browse through their photostream, favorites or even their contact's photos. Each level you delve down is pushed on to a stack so that you can back up whenever you like.

Performance on both WiFi and 3G is very snappy. Uploading only takes a few seconds and pulling up photostreams and images is almost instant. If you use the app on the slower GSM network, be prepared to wait a while, especially for full-sized photo uploads.

Upshot

Mobile Fotos has become a valued tool for me when I only have my cell phone on-hand to take a picture and I want to get it on Flickr right away. Sure, there may be a few free apps will do this without geotagging. But, considering all the other features that are in this app, it is worth the three bucks.

Update: The latest version of Mobile Photos (version 1.3) adds support for 'swiping' through a photostream, as well as support for uploading from the full iPhone photo library. There also seems to be double the number of options that can be performed when viewing an image fullsize, and new even on a thumbnail, including assign to contact, open in Safari, email a link, and even Twitter support!

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

The iPhone App Store Should Let You Try Before You Buy

With only a few exceptions, it's been universally accepted that Apple's move to sell iPhone applications on its iTunes store is an unqualified success. In fact, it's widely believed that Microsoft will soon follow suit, offering a centralized place to acquire and download applications for Windows Mobile. But in speaking with other iPhone users, I've heard concerns voiced that there is no way to use an application on a trial basis. We know Apple has the capability to use DRM to limit the amount of time a customer can rent a movie, so why not use the same technology to let users try apps for days or weeks?

Software developers outside the world of the iPhone have a number of ways to try and gain compensation for their work. Some give it away via freeware. Others use what's called donationware, which essentially means the product is free, but they provide a way for you to donate money, should you want to. Even more popular is shareware, which has a listed price, but lets you download it for free, and pay later, often limited to a number of users, or through repeat annoyances that make you want to upgrade. And, of course, you have software that's only available at full price, or in retail packages.

But so far, Apple's iPhone App Store only offers two options - free, and paid. And if you've paid for a premium application, and it turns out you don't like it, tough luck.

Practically the only way an application developer can offer users a way to "try before they buy" is to offer a free "lite" version on the iTunes App Store in addition to a premium version. Customers who want the additional features of the paid application would try the lite version and then buy a second, parallel, application, and need to delete the old.

This inflexibility is unnecessary given Apple's experience with setting DRM to give users a limit to how many times they can burn playlists to CDs and how long they have to watch movies rented from iTunes. Given that a text description and small pictures displayed on the iTunes store isn't always a great representation of the user's experience with the software app, it makes sense for the company to work with developers to offer time or use-based limits to software, which would first be free and later prompt to be paid for. The ability to try applications before buying them wold reduce consumers' concerns and still offer developers a way to make a return on their investment. DRM doesn't always have to be bad - it can help both users and content creators.

Apple's "Ease of Use" Fails Me Again, Time Capsule the Culprit

Two of the major reasons I've been an Apple Macintosh fan from just about my first introduction to computers have been the systems' ease of use, and product quality. There was a time when I would be happier using a decade-old Mac than the latest-generation Dell or HP, and that I felt absolutely sure buying AppleCare would be a waste of money. But over the years, it seems product quality has slipped, and I'm almost as likely to get a bum product as one I can expect to be perfect.

This most recent Saturday, I was delighted to pick up the long-awaited iPhone 3G, and also, a 500 Gigabyte Time Capsule, for backup. Now that the twins are here, I've been thinking to back up all their photos and videos would be a good idea.

So far, the iPhone 3G experience has been outstanding. I returned my Blackberry to IT today after transferring my phone number yesterday evening. Now that a friend of mine passed along a Bluetooth-enabled Jawbone headset, I can even make all those calls in the car without violating California's hands free law and being one of the thousands ducking below the dashboard to dial.


But the Capsule is an entirely different story. I unpacked it yesterday evening, installed the necessary software on my laptop, and plugged in the Capsule to my cable modem, as expected. Then I told Time Machine to find it, and start my first backup to the device.

It failed, saying, "the backup disk image could not be created".


So I checked out the settings and tried different things. I had the Capsule run the wireless network. I even tried plugging into the device directly, using Ethernet. No dice. And if I tried to drag and drop any files to the Capsule from my laptop over the network, they failed too. So, I took a paper clip, reset it to factory settings and started over. More shades of fail.

Try after try... failed.

Today, a friend on FriendFeed suggested that maybe the Time Capsule wasn't to blame, but instead, that my hard drive might have some permission issues. So, I tried that too. Why not?


Trying again this evening, I thought I had more luck, as the backup was "Preparing" for some time. But it too failed, saying "An error occurred while creating the backup directory."

Wandering through Apple's support forums shows I'm not the only person who has had issues like this, but after years of expecting Apple's product quality and simplicity to be a cut above the rest, I'm, like others, growing a little fatigued by products that don't just work right away, or making one of many trips to the Genius Bar to replace batteries, frayed power adapters, or laptop hinges.

I haven't yet decided how long I'm going to keep pushing to try and make this product work, but if it doesn't end up working out, and I end up returning it to the Apple Store, I'm not so sure I'm getting another one. I'm on Apple products all day long, so getting the entire experience down right is a must. I'm geeky enough that just getting an Apple product to work for me shouldn't be this hard.

There's No Whale, But Apple Mail is Trying to Fail

Over the last dozen years, I've amassed more than 36,000 stored e-mail messages in my Apple Mail. Through upgrades from Mac OS 8 to 9, OS X and all the ensuing system updates, and from Eudora to Microsoft Outlook Express, Entourage and eventually Apple Mail, I've managed to import all the items, losing almost nothing in the process. And I've been a happy .Mac customer (now MobileMe Mail) since almost the day it debuted. But now, I'm beginning to think I need to start making more frequent backups and deleting old messages, as my index is threatening to die.

Since the update to MobileMe Mail, at any point during the day, whether I am receiving new mail, or moving mail from the Inbox to hierarchical folders, I've sporadically gotten an error saying Apple Mail needs to "repair its information", then forcing me to quit. This has happened practically every day over the last week-plus.




When trying to reopen Mail, I get a note saying I need to reimport all my messages, which takes about 20 minutes, and then, all should be well.





So far, as much as I can tell, no messages have been lost. But some of the metadata is definitely awry, as old folders long left untouched show that messages sent several years ago are now marked as having gone out today, with the timestamp of when my index was rebuilt.

Over the years, I've rolled up a lot of messages, and my e-mail archive is a great resource for me to find old conversations with family members (going back to 1996), or searching keywords to find the first time something came to my attention. My e-mail folder with my father, for example, has more than 3,100 messages in it. My "Blog" top level folder has 3,600 messages, "Commerce" has 3,200, "Comments" another 3,000. There are about 2,500 in the folder for messages to and from Mom, and between 2,000 and 4,000 apiece for Twitter and FriendFeed.

There's no question that alerts from the social services I use have accelerated my e-mail glut, and I'm a pack rat when it comes to saving my mail. But now that I'm starting to see more failures on my Apple Mail, which has been rock solid for more than a decade, I'm starting to "think different" about saving everything. I just might backup again and then go on a deleting run. Hopefully, I can get this solved before it's too late and I lose anything significant.

Me-Too Software and Web Apps Often Find Their Own Niche

As the price to develop Web applications and communities has decreased, and investment in people is less-demanding, it's no surprise that we've seen a boom in sites with significant similarities - be they social networking, lifestreaming, status updaters, online file storage or virtual worlds. While the rule holds true in software as it does in Silicon Valley, that the vast majority of products may meet a less than optimal fate, the potential payout continues to draw development, with new brand names hitting our RSS feeds on a daily basis.

The seeming onslaught of new services had the omnipresent Chris Brogan asking frustratedly yesterday, "Who's writing all these me too software apps? Do they feel accomplished?" Brogan later gave the services Kwippy and Yokway as examples of two services that had recently come across his view, adding, "(I) just dont' see why we need yet another of something we have in spades. Where's the innovation?"

Sometimes, in this age of instant analysis, determining the differentiation and purpose of a new site can be hard, especially as the bloggers and technology reporters try and grasp the new site and place it in the context of existing applications that are more well-known. (See: Inquisitr: Yokway: Sort of FriendFeed Meets Del.icio.us for one example)

Whether it's in the name of differentiation or competition, it's rare that a developer or startup team will be aiming to make a carbon copy of an existing site. RSSmeme debuted, after ReadBurner, to show the most shared items in Google Reader, and progressed differently, offering a custom FeedFlare and featuring deeper index with more linkblogs than ReadBurner, while ReadBurner partnered with multiple RSS engines, including NewsGator and Netvibes. Facebook was like MySpace and Friendster before it, but initially just for the college set and later high school, before opening up, and later adding a development platform.

There is a long history of services and software that have striking similarities to one another. That a product exists doesn't mean that any potential competing product should walk away and cede the market, delivering a monopoly. As Disqus' CEO Daniel Ha told me back in June, the existence of competitors like SezWho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit help let him know he's in a worthwhile market to pursue, even if it's a rare blogger who has plans to implement multiple commenting engines. The existence of Digg didn't stop Mixx from debuting, and the existence of HotBot, Lycos and Excite didn't look like too much of a hurdle for Google to get going.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek, in the FriendFeed comment thread spawned by Brogan's question, said, "Until someone dominates the space you will see a lot of similar applications," while Clint Ecker wrote, "The market will bear out the niche products and the unsatisfactory ones will fade away and disappear until the community has selected the 'best' service."

But even the selection of a "best service" doesn't mean there won't be more developers trying to crack the market. Plurk and Identi.ca are two recent approaches to microblogging, taking on Twitter. And Cuil's entry into the search market came at a time when Google's enjoyed its largest market share ever. The likelihood of these challenger sites to replace the market behemoths is very small, both short term and longer term, but just about every site and service can develop a dedicated community who swears by it - arguably making the developers' efforts worthwhile. You recently saw this happen when the niche community sites of Ballhype and Showhype, arguably Digg clones, were acquired for $3 million.

From the outside looking in, developers don't see themselves as copycats. Instead, they likely see opportunity, finding weaknesses in a competitor's offering, or finding a new way to seemingly offer the best of both worlds. And just because they aren't enjoying a majority market share in a given metric by a certain time period doesn't mean their efforts were in vain. There's no hard and fast law saying you need to sign up for every lifestreaming service, every social network, every microblogging client and every RSS reader, but as more options and alternatives are out there, there will be a small group of people who prefers the new entrant, whether it be for its GUI, its compatibility with plug-ins, widgets or extensions, or implied productivity.

As an early adopter, I'll usually be checking out most of these services, and I welcome more. It's not about finding how much they're all the same, but determining the differences, and seeing what I can do that's new. I might, sometimes, never use a service again, if I don't find it to do what I had hoped. But often, when I check back in a few months later, I'll find a small community that's calling it home, or see the development didn't stop at day one, making it a richer experience. So, development community, keep it coming. Let's see those new apps, the new innovation, and the new services. It will never be enough.

Posty's Single-Window Microblogging AIR App Adds Identi.ca Support

Adobe's AIR platform is seeing a rise in applications designed to bring Web activity to your desktop. From TweetDeck to Twhirl, Alert Thingy to Feedalizer, a host of new apps have debuted in the last few months, offering the ability to view or post to one or more services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Pownce, Jaiku and lately, Plurk or Identi.ca.

But not every AIR app gets all services, and those that support more than one service usually require more than one window to get the job done. A newer entrant to this space, Posty, authored by Cesare Rocchi, offers support, as of today, for six different Web update services, all in a single window, allowing those with accounts in multiple places to send simultaneous updates to more than one location.

Posty, from a single black square window, lets you post updates to six different services, including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and as of this morning, Identi.ca. And if you have logins at more than one of them, you can simply use the checkboxes to make sure your updates go to multiple destinations at once.

While the application is rather spartan in its ability to be configured, it simply gets the job done. At the top is a horizontal bar featuring each of the six individual services, a posting window, and a settings window, where you can add your login information.

Key to making the application useful is that for each service, be it Twitter, Identi.ca or FriendFeed, for example, you can view your own entries, entries from your friends, the public feed, see replies, or you can use integrated search.

As with other AIR apps, you can take appropriate actions per service. For FriendFeed, you can like or make comments. On Identi.ca, you can reply or go directly to the update. And on Twitter, you can reply, mark as a favorite, or open the note in your Web browser. This wasn't always available, as in the very first release of Posty earlier this month, you couldn't see your friends' updates, only your own and public timelines. After I traded e-mail with Cesare a couple weeks ago, he was quick to respond with a new version incorporating the update.

Unlike more well-known AIR applications, like Twhirl (which Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called a "killer app" today) Posty handles all these services in a single window, utilizing the icons. Instead of monopolizing screen space with multiple parallel windows, Posty takes an all in one strategy.

When I first reviewed TweetDeck, some people said they were "tired of black" when it came to AIR applications, so if you're not a big fan of black, Posty isn't really for you, as that's how it looks, period. There are options to change the text color from "Sunny" to "Snowy", "Icy" and in between, but it doesn't actually change the app.

Cosmetics aside, Posty has given us a strong single-window application to both consume and send updates to multiple microblogging services at once. Identi.ca is rising now, and gaining momentum thanks to Twitter's occasional issues, and its open source roots. With services like Posty making it an equal player early on, the new kid on the block gets another boost.

To download Posty for yourself, find it here: http://tinyurl.com/getposty.

iPod Touch As An Apple TV Remote? Cooler Than I Thought.

When Apple's iTunes application store opened up last week, I, at first, skipped over the free Remote application that offered the option to manage iTunes or the Apple TV from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It just seemed stupid at worst, or a proof of concept at best. Why would I want to duplicate the Apple Remote's capabilities with a much more functional device, I thought? But after checking the application out the last few days, I can attest to the fact I've been pleasantly surprised, and am now taking my iPod Touch with me around the house, acting as a DJ on the move.

As the screenshots included in this post show, the Remote application on the iPod Touch or iPhone does more than just meet the same capabilities offered by Apple's miniscule white remote. Benefitting from the wide touchscreen, I can browse thousands of songs, albums and artists quickly, and see a mirror image of what's playing on my Apple TV, letting me change the song with a single tap of my finger, anywhere in range of the Airport wireless network that both my device and the Apple TV share.


In contrast, the white remote has always been painstakingly slow to browse large libraries, practically forcing an indent into my thumb as I held the down key just to pass the letter "M". Given my library has almost 6,000 songs on it, and 23.6 days worth of music, that can be a frequent problem.

Once the Remote application is synched up with your Apple TV, using it is very simple. Choose "Playlists", "Albums", "Artists", or search for a song or any band. Unlike the white remote, you can actually type on your iPod Touch or iPhone, making this very quick.


Now, instead of relying on my iTunes on the laptop, and just turning up the sound to full blast, or resigning myself to not listening to my music as I move around the house, I can leverage the sound system on my TV set, and play DJ from room to room. I can even go to the "More" tab and select what the Apple TV was always intended to do - play movies and TV shows. But overnight, this little would-be useless application has become a must-have. I'm not leaving my iPod Touch laying around any more.

TweetDeck Twitter Client Gains High Profile Amid High Expectations

On July 4th, I had the opportunity to help introduce TweetDeck to the blogosphere as a fully-featured Twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform, with Summize integration, and the option to show Tweets in multiple columns, including dedicated screen space for replies, and customizable grouping. While the Twitter client space has already seen good penetration by Twhirl, Feedalizer and others, TweetDeck has gained a strong following over the last ten days, with many testing, and a good number, including me, using it as our default interface to Twitter's microblogging platform.


Tweetip Shows the Boom in TweetDeck Use and Discussion
In fact, the blog Tweetip, which watches Twitter closely to capture inflection points of when one term or another rapidly changes on the service, captured the boom in TweetDeck commentary last week, showing how much more mindshare the application got following our first post. But just because a lot more people know about the service doesn't mean it has a free ticket to application stardom. I asked people on Twitter and FriendFeed yesterday if they had made the switch. (See the FriendFeed discussion)

For every "Yes, been using it since launch+1, and still using and loving it!" and "Yes... And yes. Like it a lot" I received, I also got a few responses like "No. uses too much real estate" or "Use tweetdeck but prefer twhirl because it gives me Friendfeed and multiple twitter user accounts at the same time."

While I like TweetDeck's ability to display in multiple columns as a full-screen application in the background, others prefer the single-column look of alternative applications. Also, over the last week-plus, I heard calls to separate Twitter replies from Twitter direct messages. And in both cases, developer Iain Dodsworth delivered. Both the single-window feature, as well as a single column for DMs are available in the latest beta.


TweetDeck Added Support for Direct Messages

TweetDeck Added Support for a Single Column View
With such a healthy debut, users are expecting TweetDeck to grow up and do even more, including incorporating FriendFeed streams, as Twhirl and other newcomers do. I don't know that Iain has these plans, but if he did, the crowd which uses both might find the service even more intriguing. I'm also curious to see if TweetDeck would make any sense in an interface like the iPhone. With Twitterific debuting on the iPhone and iPod Touch on day one, it will be hard for competitors to make headway, especially those that use the AIR platform.

TweetDeck is in public beta, and can be found here: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. Other reviews so far of TweetDeck include those from ReadWriteWeb, /Message and The Download Squad.

Apple's Own iPhone Apps Create Concerns for Small Developers

Apple takes great pride in the fact the company controls both the hardware and operating system for its Macintosh line of computers. In theory, this tight-fisted control can lead to higher product quality and an improved user experience. But as Cupertino expands its array of software titles from the desktop to the iPhone platform, independent developers are feeling the squeeze that comes when competing with the hometown team.

Yesterday night, just a weekend after Apple unveiled the AppStore for iPhone and iPod Touch, I got an e-mail from Kevin O'Neil of Candywriter.com, the creator of Imagine Poker, a Texas Hold 'Em game for the Macintosh. O'Neill wrote with excitement that the application had now also been released for the iPod Touch and iPhone platform for all of $4.99. But included in the good news was a foreboding note:

"When the App Store opened last week, it was revealed that Imagine Poker's rival Texas Hold 'Em game on the iPhone was actually created by Apple itself. We encourage you to check out their version of the game too (you can't miss it) but, as an independent developer, we hope you can come to appreciate the same solid game-play and sense of humor in Imagine Poker Touch that has made Imagine Poker Mac a success."

You can read between the lines and see the worry the small independent developer has with facing the Apple machine, just like Karelia Software saw when Apple introduced iWeb in parallel with their development of Sandvox, and of course, famously, when Apple embedded capabilities in Sherlock that closely mimicked their desktop search engine, Watson.

Microsoft got in all sorts of hot water when they embedded Internet Explorer in Windows, and forced third party hardware manufacturers to include the browser as part of their package, or face de-licensing. Apple, enjoying its minority position in just about all markets, has not always faced such scrutiny, even as they rolled out Apple Mail (eliminating the need for Eudora and Entourage), Safari (as IE languished), and an array of productivity offerings for free, including Preview (versus Adobe Acrobat), iCal and iPhoto. While the iPhone doesn't share the market position Windows does, it is taking an increasing share of the pie from Windows Mobile and Blackberry, and there could come a time when Apple's embedded apps or competitive apps gain more scrutiny than they do today.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Profy has discussed the seeming non-balance she's already seen at the AppStore in a pair of posts: iPhone App Store: Eliminating the Competition and Advantage App Store: Two Paths to iPhone User Adoption. As she writes, "People are generally lazy, and will opt for the easiest and most convenient choice." For Candywriter.com, the easiest choice for customers just might be to keep Apple's Texas Hold 'Em game, and not seek out Imagine Poker, and this just might be the tip of the iceberg. If a small developer believes Apple will crowd them out of the market, then why try?

As for me, I did buy Imagine Poker. It's been a fun game on the Mac, and I'm looking forward to wasting more time with it on my iPod Touch.

Do you know any other third-party application developers on the iPhone who are now feeling the heat from Apple?

After Slow Start, My iPod Touch Is a Happy 2.0 Camper

As far as dedicated Apple fans go, I think I've had to turn in my "First Class" ID in exchange for a "Second Class" ID ever since the iPhone came out. The reason? I still don't have one, and no matter how many days in a row I wear my Apple logo watch or my Apple logo shirts, it won't make up for the fact the rest of the digerati have moved forward, and yet, I hold on to my two or three-generations old Blackberry.

But my so far steering clear of the iPhone doesn't mean I didn't get the chance to benefit from Apple's releases on Friday. While the reports from Apple Stores across the country poured in about long waits, activation delays and software bugs, I was at home trying to find some way to get my iPod Touch software updated, to benefit from the newly introduced iTunes Application Store. I had jumped the gun on Thursday, purchasing several of the apps, and yet, the 2.0 software package was playing hard to get.

Virtually all of Friday, the 2.0 upgrade for the iPod Touch was out of reach. Apple's Web site said it was a click away, but iTunes would continually fail, saying the upgrade was unavailable, putting me in a seeming infinite loop of futility. iTunes said I had an OS upgrade available, but it wouldn't even take me to the page where I could pay my nominal $9.95 and take my iPod Touch from trailing edge to leading edge.


Alright, I can Upgrade!

But Wait, This is Taking Too Long!

Ack! Failure Again!
But finally, after midnight last night, the trains started to run on time. I downloaded the more than 200 megabytes needed, over a half hour's time, and let my laptop and the iPod Touch spend some quality alone time, while data and settings were backed up and synchronized.

When all was completed, I not only had the 2.0 software, but several new applications for the iPod Touch, both free and premium, including:

• AOL Instant Messenger
  
• Baseball
  
• Facebook
  
• Google Mobile App
  
• MLB.com At Bat
  
• Salesforce Mobile
  
• Twitteriffic
  
• WeatherBug

I also added a handful of games, of course, from the basic SuperPong to Air Hockey, BlackJack, ZEN Pinball, and 300 Bowl.


The upgrade, despite the first day snafu, is absolutely a gem. Having push e-mail to the iPod Touch, and the addition of Twitterrific already has the iPod Touch playing a much more significant role as a communications device, and I'll be setting it up for full Exchange synchronization later today for sure. I'm also looking forward to working with the Salesforce.com tool, as Salesforce.com is one site I use constantly at the office to track leads, opportunities, reports and revenue.

And I can't overstate the geeky fun of the Baseball application. I was checking it out late last night, and what it delivers for any true sports nut is every statistic - ever - from the beginning of professional baseball through the 2007 season. You can browse by team, by year and by player to get all the data you'd need to win trivia games, or just to annoy your neighbors at the ballpark. Used in tandem with the MLB.com At Bat service, which lets you see game highlights on video throughout the contest, and after its completed, and you've got the potential to be a real seamhead as well as being a geek.

As for eventually crossing the chasm and finally getting that elusive iPhone? Trust me, it's tempting. The iPod Touch does a lot for me, but I would love to get it down to one device. But if your work paid for the BlackBerry service on Verizon, wouldn't you stick with that, instead of moving to AT&T and paying out of your own pocket?

TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups

For many, given the up and down status of Twitter, the search functionality of Summize has become a must-have to find conversations, replies, and topics. A new AIR app, debuting today, called TweetDeck, features full integration with Summize, and lets you customize your Twitter experience, through dedicated columns for your feed, your replies, searches, and even the ability to create custom groups of those you follow on Twitter for a micro-feed.

Authored by Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck (available here), could give other AIR options, like Twhirl and Feedalizer some new competition. While I'm not typically a huge fan of AIR apps, I found TweetDeck to offer a great number of customizations that have me keeping it open and on the desktop around the clock.


The TweetDeck Interface (Click for Larger Image)
TweetDeck offers four major columns in which to organize Twitter data: "All Tweets", essentially your friends' timeline, "Replies", showing replies to you, the equivalent of Twitter's replies tab, "Search", which will keep a running search window open for a term you've selected, and "Group", which lets you make a sub-set of those you follow on Twitter, and make a miniature timeline.

Unlike some applications, whose preferred mode is single column, getting me only my Twitter stream, TweetDeck is actually very well built for being used in full-screen mode, of course, running in the background. Now, with one glance, I can see all updates, see all replies, and keep my eye out for keywords. And rather than force me to go out to Summize to search a keyword, TweetDeck has integrated Summize's search capability and also its ability to find replies, although, in version 0.15 beta, released just this morning, Twitter replies now have precedence, should there be duplicates.

You can also, of course, post your own Tweets from within the app, just by hitting the "Tweet" button at the top and entering what you want to say. TweetDeck counts down the number of characters to make sure you don't exceed 140.

The recent strain at Twitter has resulted in the service reducing the number of API calls developers can make to get Twitter updates, and there, TweetDeck has you covered as well, so you learn if there's any slowness, where to lay the blame.

In the bottom right corner, TweetDeck reports: "Twitter Status: Pretty much ok" or "Twitter Status: Rate limit exceeded" when there's a problem. It also provides a status as to when it was last updated, how many tweets were received, and when the next update is expected, polling every couple minutes.

In addition to the integrated search functionality, I was most impressed by the grouping function. I was able to create a group called "Lady Digerati", and could hand-pick which Tweeters would be followed, including @corvida, @sarahintampa, @veronica, @TheMacMommy, @NicoleSimon and others. You could, of course, make your own sub-groups to get a different subset.

While Jesse Stay and others have said Twitter's major issues have decimated the developer community's efforts around Twitter, there are still some looking to innovate, TweetDeck being a good example. Of course, given it's early status, there might be some issues, but it's worth taking a look, as the application has some great potential.

Crowdsource Software Payments to Reward Alert Developers

Not all software is free, and not all of it should be. Unless you are the type who can break out your C and Python manuals with ease, the time may come where you have an idea for a great application, and you're going to need someone else to do it. Why not leverage others who have the same need, and combine to provide a bounty, by which, if your solution is delivered to satisfaction, the developer or developers can reap the rewards directly from the end-users who will benefit from their product?

As a visible, active, FriendFeed user, I grew jealous by the success WordPress bloggers were having with Glenn Saven's nifty plug-in to show if items had received comments or "likes" from the popular social lifestreaming service. He had single-handedly developed a tool to unify conversations from disparate sources in an elegant way. But, for me, a long-time Blogger user, I was basically faced with a rock and a hard place. Migrate to WordPress, or keep my conversations separate.


This clearly wouldn't do. So, on May 25th, I said I needed a solution, writing:

Needed: FriendFeed Comments + Likes for Blogger (Old and New)

Thomas Hawk and I need your help. The WordPress bloggers are having way too much fun with getting FriendFeed likes and comments into their blog, and we using Blogger (both the old or new) can't yet do it. I am offering a $250 bounty to the developer of a solution good enough I can integrate into my blog. This would not replace Disqus, but go alongside it, as seen at the Inquisitr. Thomas and others, feel free to add to the bounty...

As much as the WordPress advocates wanted me to just switch blogging platforms (and I respect their views), I was looking for somebody to develop a solution that could help other FriendFeed users in the same predicament I was. After all, what was more likely? That you would see a lot of people make an exodus to a new platform for want of a widget, or that many people on Blogger would find the FriendFeed widget useful? I was willing to pay $250 to make this happen, and I wanted others to pay as well.

By June 16th, Pat Hawks had a solution worth paying money for, and Thomas Hawk agreed. He wrote, "I'm good for a match."


In the space of less than 30 days, I had helped spur an alert developer to create a fantastic solution which I have in place today, and one that continues to improve. Pat, for his efforts, not only gained at least the $500 from Thomas and me, but now has a great deal more awareness and respect across the FriendFeed community and the blogosphere at large. I bet that with platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter and others having direct, immediate, connections to people on the "demand" and "supply" side of the fence, this won't be the last time you see a crowdsourced method for getting software developed.


I am all too happy to give Pat $250, and I'm headed to PayPal now. In this age when you have developers trying to compete with free software and Web services, why not encourage them to build something that you would use, and offer them real cash? If you get enough friends together, you could end up with a serious code competition on your hands.

See also: WinExtra: Crowdsourcing a tech interview

Broadband Put to Test With 410 MB of Apple Software Updates

It doesn't seem all that long ago when it could take upwards of an hour to download a 4 megabyte update to Netscape Navigator. And in 1996, I once maxed out my best friend's 1 megabyte e-mail cap by sending him an IRC client as an 800k attachment, forcing him to beg and steal space from the UCLA IT administrators, just to get his e-mail functioning again.

Times change. Tonight, having heard Apple released an update to its Java support in Mac OS X 10.5, I opened up my Software Update, and was astounded to see the number of requested system enhancements, and their size. All told, there were 14 different updates available, totaling 410.069 megabytes - an eyebrow-raising amount, considering that in junior high school, I was comfortable tooling with HyperCard on a Macintosh IIsi with a 20 Megabyte hard drive, with an 80 Megabyte LaCie external drive.


Tonight's Available Updates (Click for Full Size)
In a great example of how far we've come in terms of hard disk space and consumer broadband, Apple's casually requested me to download the equivalent of twenty times the capacity of that same Mac IIsi. And I'll do it. As some of the items require restart, I won't hit the button just this second, but I know my MacBook Pro, with 200 Gigabytes of hard disk space, ten thousand times larger than the old Mac IIsi, is capable of handling this workload.

In the era of terabyte hard drives, 160 gigabyte iPods, and downloadable movies, maybe I should stop being impressed, but every once in a while, it's worth looking backwards to see how far we've come. Now if you don't mind, I've got some Mac updates to install.

My TiVo and My Mac, Finally on Speaking Terms

With two Tivos in the house and a pair of Mac laptops being on almost 24 by 7, you'd think we'd be earlier to the game as far as getting the devices to talk to one another was concerned. But, despite my occasional protestations, we've sometimes taken the slow adopter route, and not forced ourselves to be exactly cutting edge. That's why, more than a year after Roxio first announced Toast Titanium 8, with full Tivo2Go support for Mac OS X, I'm only now enjoying the benefits of taking my TiVo'd shows anywhere I like.

I couldn't ask for the process to be much more simple than Roxio has devised. Their Toast Titanium suite comes with multiple applications, focused on CD burning, and a TiVo Transfer application. After entering in my TiVo's DVR ID, and connecting the TiVo to our wireless network with a simple USB adapter, Roxio scanned the TiVo's disk and showed me the TiVo's contents, including show name, description, duration and how much space it would take up on my hard drive to download it.


The TiVo Transfer Interface (Click to Enlarge)

To grab a show, all I have to do is click it, and hit "Start Transfer". I can even choose "Create Auto Transfer" for a specific show, so that every time my Mac is connected to the network, it'll download it directly to my hard drive. Now, if my wife is monopolizing the TV, or if the house needs to be quiet for whatever reason, I can take the show directly to my Mac, plug in my headphones, and watch on my laptop instead, with quality no worse than on my set.


Downloading from TiVo Transfer (Click to Enlarge)

TiVo changed the game on television networks by shifting when we watched shows, or how we consumed advertising. The option to take the shows with me on my laptop changes the location where I watch my entertainment. While the downloaded TiVo content isn't set up to play on my iPod Touch, or at least without file conversions I haven't tried yet, I appreciate having this new, fun, feature. Now, I intend to slink off and catch up on a few Daily Shows with Jon Stewart.

Dave Winer Launches FlickrFan, Synching Photos With TV

Dave Winer, a true Web pioneer behind many of the major innovations of the last decade, including blogging, RSS and podcasting, to name a few minor ones, has fallen in love with the ability to bring a stream of photos via Flickr to your big screen television. Now, he's released a new app, in beta, for you to enjoy the same.

The new product, called FlickrFan, essentially connects your Mac screensaver with a stream of Flickr photos you have subscribed to, like RSS, and displays them on your TV or your Mac desktop. Of course, to get them to your TV, you need to attach your Mac, as he and Robert Scoble have done with their Mac Minis.

As with RSS, the possibilities here are wide-reaching. You could subscribe to photo streams from famous photographers and artists. You could follow friends or family, or famous people. But now, beyond the little screen of your computer, you have a new target - the big screen. Scoble swears by it.

It's only available for Mac users now, and we don't mind. Should be fun to watch its continued development. (Download it now)

Oh... and my boring photos are here.

Even Virtual Windows Can Drive You Nuts

I've been a very happy VMWare Fusion customer for a few months now. Getting into the world of dual operating systems on my MacBook Pro has been almost universally rewarding from day one - starting with ditching my old Dell laptop, and being able to use Microsoft Outlook, use Internet Explorer 7 and other applications unavailable to us Mac folks - but in a single virtual window, letting me use the Mac the other 95% of the time.

Yet, the other day, while working on e-mail or catching up on RSS feeds, I heard the familiar "Windows is shutting down" chimes, and confirmed it by looking at my VMWare Fusion application. In full text, Windows was informing me my settings were being saved, and indeed, the operating system was shutting down. And no, I didn't tell it to, and no, I don't have any idea why. I told a friend at work, who laughed and said, "Windows needs a reason to shut down?"


I caught Windows in the act of bailing on me this morning...
It happened again yesterday morning. Going to my VMWare Fusion application, I sent the Ctrl-Alt-Del command to the Windows virtual machine, and it didn't come up. I closed Fusion and reopened it. Still no dice. I went to my virtual machine library, selected Windows XP and hit "Run". Nothing. It actually took rebooting the Mac for the Windows virtual machine to launch correctly again!

So guess what... 10 minutes ago, I heard the chimes again. Windows is shutting down. Again. Without rhyme or reason. Again. Now, I have to see if I can trick it into relaunching without making me reboot my Mac. Again.

I'm happy I'm not using Windows as my primary operating system, but even this is annoying. How do people live with themselves day to day in this type of OS hell? Ridiculous.

AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best

While many in the blogosphere discovered AideRSS upon its debut back in July (see: Read/Write Web, Mashable or Mathew Ingram), I've only recently come across the interesting tool, which analyzes specific feeds, and based on their social activity, whether through the number of comments, Diggs, bookmarks on Del.icio.us or Technorati links, determines their "quality", in a ranking of Good, Great and Best.

The idea behind AideRSS is that you can subscribe only to the "Best" or "Great" posts in a particular feed, rather than getting all of the feeds, in effect, slimming down your reading material - a lot like iTunes' option to buy single tracks from an artist's album without also having to purchase the filler.

According to my pointing AideRSS at my own feed, it tells me that of the 197 posts it found after July 8th of this year, 23% rate as "Best", 47% as "Great" and 63% rank "Good" or better. I'd expect they try to follow a quintile rule, showing a common 20/40/60 tiering. But this grade is obviously on a curve. Given that I often have posts without any comments at all, a pair of comments or handful of external links can vault my post into the "Great" category. I'd venture a guess that the bar is a lot higher for more popular A-List blogs.




Over the last few months, I can't argue with AideRSS' analysis to my top stories, including "What is the Future of MyBlogLog?", "Alexa Web Statistics Show Old Media Influence Nosedive", "Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control", Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved and yesterday's "Feedheads Approaching 10,000 Active Facebook Users".

Despite this, I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of filtering my RSS feeds. Waiting for the reactions to already occur pretty much guarantees I would get to the stories after all the activity has occurred, and if I jump into the conversation, I won't be first on the scene to participate at all. I'd rather get all the news fast, make the determination on my own, and keep going. For me, AideRSS just becomes another toy to play with my blog and RSS feeds in general, not a catch-all sieve.

Feedheads Approaching 10,000 Active Facebook Users

Feedheads, the Facebook application that adds Google Reader shared items to your profile, and displays the most shared items and feeds in a way Google still hasn't figured out how to duplicate, is growing rapidly. At its current pace, the application should reach an installed base of 10,000 by end of day Sunday, or early Monday.

As of 10 p.m. PST on Saturday, the total number of subscribers sat at 9,991. (See Mario Romero's stats)


The Graph as of Saturday Night Showing 10,000 Imminent
While Facebook's come under significant fire for its controversial Beacon program, and the vast majority of applications still seem trivial and childish at best, some developers, including Mario, are finding success by leveraging the social network's platform to deliver tools that big companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are not.

Feedheads seamlessly ties in my Web activity with my Facebook profile, breaking through its walled garden. In fact, it not only tracks the feeds I share most frequently, but also has created a tag cloud of those topics I share.


You can see my profile here:
http://apps.facebook.com/feedheads/sharer.php?fbID=589638695

Congratulations to Mario on building a successful application that's gaining real traction and real benefits for users. I'm happy to include myself among the 10,000.

Previous Coverage:
LouisGray.com: Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads
Scobleizer: Feedheads: my Favorite Facebook application

UPDATE: Feedheads, thanks to a boost from this story, and Scoble, reached 10,019 Total Users as of 7:30 a.m. Sunday. Also you can Digg this story to push that number higher!

That Error Message Isn't Helpful!

One of the best things about having a Mac is being able to laugh when there are occasional surprises. That they're so few and far between helps us tolerate the occasional eyebrow-raising bug. Take a look at the above error message I received last week. I found it amusing enough to screenshot and share. Now just how is that helpful?

Whatever I was doing... I guess didn't work and I guess I won't be doing again. If only I knew what it was or why it didn't work!

My Desktop Says I'm Up too Late

When Europe is fully lit, and the sun's rays push through the Atlantic Ocean, threatening to light up the Eastern Seaboard, I know I'm up too late, and it's time to shut down. This screen capture is courtesy of the EarthDesk application.

Facebook Fast Becoming a Game Platform

When Facebook offered developers the opportunity to write applications on the company's API, the fast-growing social network set up an opportunity to break out of its friend-finding, networking roots, and become something entirely different - a platform for real interactivity, not just learning what a friend has done in a passive sense, but to engage directly, either in real-time or in more a "taking turns" mode.

While Facebook's initial applications have been much maligned for their absolute uselessness, enterprising developers are quickly finding Facebook is a great place for casual gaming.

While games similar to those offered on Facebook are available in a myriad of other places, like Pogo or Yahoo! Games, Facebook has built-in benefits. After all, you can challenge friends in your network to a game, instead of being asked to play complete strangers. And while Scrabulous has achieved the highest share of coverage, other games, including the Boggle-like Scramble, and the Risk-like Attack, are gaining traction.

While I've not been overwhelmed with many of Facebook's features, I have taken to playing Scrabulous against family members, including my brother, who's about 2,000 miles away, in Tennessee. While game play is relatively slow, to the tune of 2-3 moves a day, it's something we can do together, regardless of distance. And believe it or not, the competitors on Scramble are pretty sharp, making me work just to get in the top 5 (with more than 100 players per game) and displayed on the leaderboard.

The earliest days of the Web featured easy access to research, but also leisure activities, like porn and gaming. The rise of social networks looks to be doing the same thing. With Facebook trying to keep adult material out, it's no surprise the first successful apps are for passively watching videos and playing games. As for real-world business apps, it will be some time yet. Facebook has got a lot of work to do before they "get serious".

Two New Apple Blog Posts Cover Software Apps

It's been too long since my last entries on The Apple Blog - about a month. Obviously, I've been using my Mac every single day, so there are plenty of things to write about. Today, two small items I use frequently were highlighted: iAlarm, a program that gets your Mac to act like an alarm clock, interacting with iTunes, and a desktop utility called EarthDesk, which makes your background look like a real-time satellite image of the Earth.

I recommend both for any Mac users who like good software.

You can see both posts on The Apple Blog at iAlarm Wakes Me Up to iTunes and The World Is Your ... Desktop. Enjoy.

So... I Deleted Excel

Sometime in the last week, I removed Microsoft Excel from my computer. You might think I went on some weird, Mac OS X Leopard-inspired anti-Redmond bent, but that's not the case. I honestly have absolutely no idea how it happened, or when I did it, but one day it was there, and the next, it wasn't. And while it's certainly annoying, it's forced me to check out Apple's Numbers application, and while it's a "passing" spreadsheet app, it would certainly take some getting used to for any spreadsheet junkie, myself included.

I found out my Excel was missing after downloading an .xls Excel file, double-clicking and surprisingly finding it opening in Numbers. At first, I thought that Leopard had made Numbers the default application for .xls files, but then, when I clicked on the Excel icon in my dock, I got a transparent question mark over the icon, the universal symbol for "This application doesn't live here any more".

Oops.

Nowhere near my Microsoft Office CD, nor near an older laptop where I could copy over my Excel, I had to give Numbers a twirl. The first task? Taking that .xls document, making changes, and then saving it as a comma separated value file, or .csv. So, like any good Excel pro, I hit "Save As", and added .csv to the extension, but Numbers wanted no part of it. In fact, Apple wanted me to instead use the extension ".numbers", which makes absolutely no sense, even if I weren't raised in a DOS-like "8.3" world.



Instead, I had to go to File and choose "Export", and decide if I wanted a PDF, Excel document, or a CSV file. Not very intuitive. Later, when I went to sort the columns alphabetically by "First Name" and found myself looking for the "A-Z" option so common in Excel, instead, I found a "Sort & Filter" button which was okay enough, but didn't have a way to indicate it had a header row. Annoying.



The OpenOffice crowd has learned that the best way to have users learn their office applications quickly is to closely mimic the market leader. And while I'm not suggesting Apple copy Microsoft's every move, even a computer-savvy geek like me has so far been left wanting more from the company's would-be Excel replacement. Over the last week, my occasional interactions with Numbers have had me looking forward to getting Excel back. While if forced to live only with Numbers, I now know I could do it, I have yet to see the one killer feature from Numbers that would make me switch, and the little glitches now and again that run contrary to my expectations make me, for once, ready to crawl back and feast from the Redmond table.

AppFresh Keeps My Mac Apps Fresh

Apple's Mac OS X Update does a great job making sure I have the latest Apple operating system updates and associated software, including iTunes, iCal, Mail and the like. But when it comes to third party (a.k.a. not Apple) applications, there isn't one central location to be sure I am caught up with the latest and greatest. That's where utilities like AppFresh come in.

Most modern applications have the ability to connect to the Web and offer the opportunity to pull down the latest point release, but many don't. And if you have dozens or even hundreds of applications, as I do, there's no chance I'll be going from site to site to keep current.

AppFresh automates the entire process. After downloading, it scans the Applications directory on my hard drive, and then checks with a partner database at iusethis.com to see if I'm running the most-recent build. (See the image below for the first pass)


In my case, I had 135 applications, of which 28 were confirmed to be up to date, 27 had the opportunity to update, and 80 were not registered. I would expect over time that this number would decrease, as applications are added to the database for just this purpose.

From there, I was able to selectively update my applications, and AppFresh would either download the new disk images directly, or link me to a registration form where I could do so. Below, you can see the application in process. Notice how it doesn't just download one app at a time, but can do many concurrently.



While the application's database isn't covering 100 percent of my applications, it's a definite kick start to getting synched up with the best software developers have to offer, and it didn't cost me a dime. Additionally, if you find you actually liked the previous version of the software better than the new one, AppFresh has your back. Like Apple's Time Machine, the old copy can be stored in a safe place for later retrieval. And that's pretty solid.

Using AppFresh in parallel with Apple's Mac OS X Update should keep my machine and its applications up and running and humming for the foreseeable future. If you're a Mac OS X user on 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard), give it a spin and see just how far behind you really are.

Leopard Bug Fix Debuts In Less Than 24 Hours

That sure didn't take long. Leopard went on sale at 6 p.m. on Friday, and by 5 p.m. on Saturday, we already have a software update recommended for all users, which also requires a restart. It's one thing to be secure in knowing I'm 100% up to date, and quite another thing to have to update my computer on a daily basis.

At least they didn't call it Mac OS X 10.5.1...

Leopard's First Day: Highlights and Lowlights

The new Leopard dock - a bit smaller than "real world".
Yesterday, we let our Mac geek flag fly. Around 6:30, I donned my black Apple logo baseball cap, put on a black Apple logo polo shirt, topped by an Apple logo black fleece jacket, complete with one of my two Apple logo Think Different wrist watches, and headed to the Valley Fair mall in San Jose to pick up Leopard.

While I expected bedlam, complete with long lines and the potential of finding Leopard sold out, we were quite lucky. Though the store was near capacity, I was able to put my elbows out and muscle forward, grabbing a copy of Leopard from the shelf and heading to the register, behind only one or two people. Though it turned out I was too late to get a commemorative t-shirt, it was pretty obvious I already had enough Apple gear, and could live without yet one more homage to Cupertino.

Finding that transaction quick, my wife and I caught dinner, and then headed home - where I was surprised to find what should have been a seamless installation experience become anything but.

After unwrapping the Leopard installation DVD and starting it up, I had begun the installation process, when, dramatically, I was met with a bright yellow attention icon saying the installation had failed, and to restart. So I did.

I tried a second time, and on this occasion, after selecting my hard drive as the destination disk, I was greeted with another bright yellow attention icon, saying that in order to install Leopard on this disk, I would need to erase it and that I would lose all my data. Yikes. So, obviously, I said no, and restarted, back to 10.4.10, racking my brain to see if I could figure out the issue. So I went to System Preferences, applied any outstanding Software Updates, and even went into my Disk Utility, running it against the hard drive to find any bugs. Nothing.

Stubbornly, I rebooted again into the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD. And THIS TIME it worked. It took about an hour, and though I was nervous from all the warnings that my data could disappear, we finally had success. Below are a few highlights that over time will make the evening's nonsense worthwhile.


Spaces lets me have multiple virtual desktops.
If there's one thing Steve Jobs doesn't like, it's clutter. Well-known for his minimalist bent, the concept of moving folders and icons off the desktop, and moving multiple windows or apps to separate screens falls along those lines. While I haven't yet found the ideal formula, I'm aiming to have 4 windows: One for Windows XP in VMWare Fusion (primarily for Microsoft Outlook), one for Web browsing and blogging/bookmarking in Safari, one for Mail and iTunes, and one for the Finder. (See above)

Though I have seen some wierdness, like the Apple Mail window disappearing, or applications clicked on one screen opening in another, I'm sure I'll get the hang of it and find this among the most useful features.


Using Coverflow, I can browse my applications.
I didn't have high hopes for taking Coverflow to the Finder, but surprisingly, I really like it. It's aesthetically pleasing to thumb through folders, images or applications. While it's still faster to just type the first few letters of an application and open it, the eye candy is worth the wasted seconds. Above, you can see my browsing applications in Coverflow, and below, it really shines when viewing folders with many image. The below image is a folder full of Oakland A's photos intended for future ANtics comics.


Thumbing through my A's player photos using Coverflow in the Finder.
Stack also seems like a easy feature to use, to grab documents from frequently-accessed folders. For my convenience, Apple created a new "Downloads" folder, and put my Documents folder on the Dock. Below, you can see Stack in action, one way to click and find the document rapidly.



When buying Leopard, Apple's sales staff helpfully tried to say the OS was a lot faster than Tiger (OS X 10.4) had been on his machine, but I wasn't looking for more speed. My 2 GHz MacBook Pro is pretty darn good. I was looking for new features and new apps. Though I don't have screenshots, I tried out the new iChat theater, Stationary in Mail, and have become familiarized with Quick Look, which makes my documents look like their contents.

Apple has extended their lead over Microsoft Windows with this release for sure, but it's not something earth-shatteringly dramatic. If your Mac can run Leopard, by all means go get it, but don't expect the singing of angels. Just know you'll be using your Mac in new ways you couldn't before - more efficiently, faster, and more productively.

No Sneak Peek at Leopard for Me

It's more than Silicon Valley legend that if you find the right misguided tech shop, you can sometimes purchase items before their manufacturer wants them released. Whether its a game console, like Microsoft's XBox 360 Arcade, or an operating system, the retail shops just might not know or might not care.

On my way home this evening, I had a hunch that the Fry's superstore here in Sunnyvale would be one of those shops. Fry's is notorious for either putting an item on a shelf with no fanfare (the situation when I bought my wife a 2nd gen iPod Shuffle on the 2nd day it was available), or just flat-out not having an item at all, weeks after its debut. It's a serious hit or miss.

While I've already made up my mind that I'd like to hit up an Apple retail store tomorrow and be there for Leopard's unveiling, if I could get my hands on Leopard a day early thanks to Fry's, I would have purchased it tonight. But, no such luck. As I bee-lined my way to the Mac section of the store, they were all too prepared for geeks like me, with signs saying Leopard would be available for sale not today, but tomorrow, at 6 p.m. There wasn't even a box in sight. If there were, I would of course have played dumb and walked it up to the front register with intent to take it home.

So, I left the store empty-handed. I guess I'm not a real geek if I could get into Fry's and leave without buying anything, but today I'm willing to have that shame. Tomorrow however, is Leopard day. Meow.

Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads

One of the more useful Facebook applications out there, enabling you to integrate your Google Reader shared items with your Facebook profile, and view most frequently shared items, has recently, quietly, undergone a rebranding, to "Feedheads".

While the application's author, Mario Romero, hasn't said anything about the change, it's possible that he made the change to avoid confusing people into thinking the application was produced, or endorsed, by Google. Another possible reason for the change? It now appears that Mario has added the option to include shared items from NewsGator, in addition to Google Reader.

Previously labeled as a "Google Reader" application, the application changed names sometime in the afternoon on Sunday, October 14th, to "Feedheads". You can see the change transparently occur on the right in a screenshot from my Facebook mini-feed.

The application, one of the few useful applications on Facebook, as has been well documented, says it has 348 daily users (myself included). Should Robert Scoble's hopes ever come true, and enough people use the program, its aggregate power could be very strong, in effect becoming a democratized Digg of sorts, where you could opt in to view your own friends' shared items, rather than that of the mob.


A Tag Cloud of My Shared Items in Feedheads

If you're on Facebook, and you're an avid Google Reader Shared Links user, sign up for Feedheads. To see my shared links in Google Reader without getting into Facebok, click here. To view my Facebook profile instead, click here.

Windows XP On My Mac!

With VMWare Fusion, I've now got the option to run Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X, all at once, on one single speedy MacBook Pro. I've had the software for about 24 hours now, and can't say enough good things about it. With that said, I tried to post a quick summary over on The Apple Blog.

See: VMWare Fusion On Mac Delivers My Best Windows Experience Ever

Our Intel Mac Is Back

My first week with my Intel-based Apple MacBook Pro is a bit of a misnomer. After all, for just about the full duration of the week, it spent some quality time in the repair shop, not with me at all, after the laptop bizarrely stopped responding to any of my keyboard or trackpad input. (See Prior Post | The Apple Blog) But this evening, as I was wrapping up at the office, I got a call from the Apple Store saying Cupertino had resolved the issue - after replacing the keyboard, the trackpad, and mysteriously, dabbling with the machine's internals.

The good news? The repairs cost me nothing. So, all I was really out was 4-plus days of MacBook Pro goodness, and the annoyance of once again synching up my data between the new machine and the older PowerBook G4.

Now, after a second, more complete, migration from the old machine to the MacBook Pro, we've managed to reduce the available hard drive space to a mere 125 gigabytes - which I'm looking forward to consuming with all sorts of new applications and virtual machines on VMWare Fusion - enabling me to run both Mac and Windows programs side by side.

The bad news? I don't exactly trust the machine at this point. It's fast. It's responsive. It's bright, and the keys feel great. But I'm just a little less secure, knowing we already ran into a major issue with the hardware in the very first day. Now, I'll be absolutely sure to routinely back up my most important data, and just maybe, I won't sing Apple's praises for hardware quality all that much for a while.

Geeking Out With a New MacBook Pro

Today, I unpacked one of the most-anticipated items to reach our shipping facility in the last few years - my new Apple MacBook Pro. Aimed to replace a 7-year-old Power Mac G4 desktop and a frustrating Dell laptop at the same time, I'm ready to migrate all my major applications over, and start using this magnificent machine for both Mac and Windows work - as soon as I can get hold of VMWare Fusion or another OS emulator, which would let me run Microsoft Outlook, Project, Visio or any other Windows-only apps alongside my Mac environment without hassle.

For the last hour or so, I've had my two laptops sitting side by side, the first in FireWire Target Disk Mode, as I migrate files, applicatins and preferences from my PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz/80 GB) to the new MBPro (2.2 GHz/200 GB). Yes, that's right. A whopping 200 gigabytes - enough room for all my applications, and all my files, including the more than 30 Gigs of music I've ripped from my CDs and downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.

We're just getting started, but there is no question the new machine is faster, the keyboard is more responsive, and even the speakers sound much better than my 2-year-old laptop. I can't wait to run speed comparisons between it and the year 2000 model I've got at the office...

PhotoCrank Adds a Little Fun to Web Photos

At last week's PlugandPlay Expo, one of the highlights, in addition to Spokeo, was meeting the CEO of PhotoCrank, and being introduced to a playful, if not yet particularly useful, tool to mock up Web photos, adding pictures and comments throughout the Internet. Much like the ANtics comics have been powered by ComicLife to add thought bubbles to the A's players heads via software, PhotoCrank lets users tweak and "crank" any photos they bump into on the Web.

The service, currently in beta, encourages users to "unleash your blah-blah-blah on photos...everywhere," and to "make the entire web your playground". With a quick download of the PhotoCrank browser extension, available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox (sorry - no Safari version yet), you can begin "cranking" photos, and adding them to a list on the site, called the "crank list".

I installed the PhotoCrank extension to my Firefox browser on Mac OS X, and after a quick restart of Firefox, I had a new PhotoCrank toolbar, and in the corner of each photo I ran into, there is now a blue PhotoCrank image. Clicking on the button opens the PhotoCrank toolbox. Click on the "Crank It" button, and you're given a whole array of preloaded sayings, ranging from "Your Mom!" to "Them's fighting words." as well as a host of preloaded images and clip art. When you select the desired note, you can expand or contract the size, and make your own pithy saying, as you wish. Below, you can see the steps I took to modify my colored iPhone image from Monday.




(You can see not only the "Woot!" thought bubble, but the addition of a radioactive label to my blue and gold iPhone.)

Assuming I keep the browser toolbar installed, and assuming I keep using Firefox, instead of Safari, I can see myself doodling with PhotoCrank on some sites, and adding my mischief to the crank list. After all, somebody already posted their own "worm in the apple" cranked version of my iPhone for the world to see.

When in picture cranking mode, the toolbox window contains a small ad. In the above screenshot, you can see an ad for the T-Mobile Sidekick. While the role of Internet advertising can always be up for debate, I doubt users will stop mid-crank to click on anything. I'd be more useful to get the advertisement at the conclusion of the photocrank, or just after, or even as an interstitial between making the edits and submitting to the site. If the goal to make money is to show as many ads as possible, then they're all set. If it's to get high click-through rates, changes would likely have to be made.

I added a link in my sidebar to PhotoCrank, as the only way the service will thrive is through viral adoption and sharing of user's creative edits of photos. Through massive use and sharing, the service could be fun to watch develop over time, whether they try to stay independent, or if they are purchased and folded into a bigger offering from some social network out there. Until then, I'll leave the badge up and keep adding my own Web graffiti to the world at large.

Early Reaction to PlugandPlay Expo

The biggest problem to trying to navigate a few dozen startups in a few hours' time is that there's only one thing guaranteed - I won't get to them all, especially when I'm trying to vie for attention in competition with early-stage investors who could mean the difference between their seeing another six months, or looking for work. I did manage to talk to 10-12 of the companies at reasonable length, and found some services I'll definitely use, while others just simply weren't built for me as a consumer.

The conference, organized by the PlugandPlayTechCenter (yes, all one word) in Sunnyvale, aimed to put entrepreneurs in the same room as VCs and have them make their case in rapid fire. A representative from the three dozen companies was given all of two minutes to deliver their elevator pitch, and based on a vote, four were selected to move to the next round, where they got all of ten minutes to elaborate on their offering, and business model. (Most, of course, were ad-based. Others looked to take a portion of revenue generated from their own users' sales.)

I showed up to the conference around 4, as soon as I was able, and tried to catch up for lost time - visiting many displays and talking to CEOs, CTOs, co-founders and the occasional VP of Marketing. And while some were very pleased with the close quarters and rigid schedule, I did hear complaints. As one exhibitor put it, "If you're the 28th presenter out of 37 companies, the audience is pretty glazed over. You don't even know who the investors are!" You can be sure that he hadn't been selected as one of the final four, and was all too eager to pick apart the process.

Two highlights for me were speaking with Spokeo's Mital Poddar, the company's VP of Marketing, and Jeffrey Tannenbaum, CEO of PhotoCrank. Mital, only a month or so into her new role at Spokeo, did a great job demoing the social network data aggregator, and were we in another situation, I'd have tried to recruit her away from her current job. Needless to say, I'll have a follow-on note around Spokeo shortly. Jeffrey also was all too happy to demo his photo and image annotation tool (now live on this site), and thought of some unique applications for it - which I'll discuss in a bit.

I also enjoyed talking with Leonard Backus, CEO for Datamash, Tomás Zeman of Wirenode, Steve Gibson of CCube.com and Ernstjan Albers of Headr.com, to name a few.

Depending on who I talked to, you could see differing levels of strain or excitement on the exhibitors' faces. Some were hard core geeks who didn't like public speaking and couldn't wait for me to stop asking questions. Others, after finding out I had no money to give them for an "A" round of funding, were all too happy to cut their pitch short. But the good majority seemed to enjoy demoing their service and walking me through, screen by screen, how they planned to change the world. Maybe some will. Many won't. But it was a unique Silicon Valley experience. More soon.

Microsoft PowerPoint Chews Through My Hard Drive

Anybody who has used Microsoft Office products for a significant period has likely perfected the keyboard shortcut to auto-save repeatedly through the creation of critical documents - whether in Word, PowerPoint or Excel. It's quite possible every single one of us knows the pain of seeing the application crash, taking our critical data with it. To avoid complete data loss, over the years, Microsoft has instilled "AutoSave" and "AutoRecovery" features, so if your Office app inevitably does crash, you don't lose all that much.

While I appreciate that "feature", I was amused late tonight when I looked in the folder of a PowerPoint document I was updating earlier today, only to find Microsoft went out of its way to save my hide, archiving no fewer than 17 different temp files, with snapshots taken anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes apart. All told, these 17 backups absorbed 99.2 MB of my precious hard disk space, while the original document is a comparatively slim 5.9 MB. (See below)



Thanks Microsoft for going the extra mile to keep my data safe!

New TAB Post: Living One Mac Generation Behind

Being an early adopter in the tech world has its perks and its drawbacks. So can being a late follower.

For all the times I've sprung early on new Apple products, like iPod, Apple TV, iLife, etc., I've similarly lagged on the hardware side. My first computer I didn't share with the rest of the family was quickly lapped by Apple's 68k to PowerPC chip line transition. Now, I'm sitting here with a G4 laptop, without Intel Inside. While the machine works great, I'm already seeing interesting apps, like VMWare Fusion and Joost, just outside my reach. It can be quite frustrating!

That's the background behind my most recent contributions to The Apple Blog, titled Living One Mac Generation Behind. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

Your Blog Statistics May Vary, Widely

Try as I might, I can't settle down with a single reliable service to track Web statistics. While I have been very happy with SiteMeter's premium offering for more than a year now, I have found the service often misses a great number of visitors, resulting in significant undercount - made more glaring by the addition of statistical tracking capabilities to other services, including Feedburner and MyBlogLog, giving me multiple sources from which to compare my own statistics.

Last week was among the most-heavily trafficked periods for louisgray.com since the blog's initiation more than eighteen months ago, led largely by a pair of referring links from popular Macintosh destination site, MacSurfer.com, who posted references to two of my Apple-focused stories, "iPhones Aplenty in Silicon Valley Geek Mecca" and "Attention Newbies: Not All Apple News Changes the World". But while it was clear site traffic was up much higher than normal, the varying statistics trackers had significant variations in how they accounted for the spike.

For the purposes of comparison, I'll highlight traffic from Tuesday to Thursday of last week (August 7-9):

Service	Unique Site Visits			Total Page Views
	Tues.	Wed.	Thurs.	Tues.	Wed.	Thurs.
SiteMeter	244	255	320	314	325	375
Feedburner	552	542	617	684	625	716
MyBlogLog	235	261	310	317	329	386

Looking at the data side by side, it seems Feedburner, for whatever reason, counts upwards of two times the visitors as do MyBlogLog and SiteMeter. While each of the services accurately reported the most popular pages, and most popular referring sites, the total counts vary. This could be because some visitors have voluntarily blocked "*.sitemeter.com" from their ad blocker software, or it could be that one service handles duplicate visits or self-visits (a.k.a. mine) differently than others.

Additionally, running the downloadable software application "Summary" against the same log files confuses the issue even further. While SiteMeter and MyBlogLog report between 230 and 320 or so visitors from Tuesday to Thursday, Summary says those days were more in the range of 2,000 individual visitors, serving nearly 3,000 pages daily. Like with Feedburner, I believe those stats to be high. Unlike the other services, however, Summary reports "hijacked" page graphics, including the ANtics comics, as individual views, and may report visits from search spidering software, like Google or Yahoo! on par with "real" people.

All I really know is that blog traffic is consistently in the hundreds of visitors a day, that it's more likely toward the 200-300 person range than 700-2,000, and that there may be no one right answer to "How many visitors did I get today and how many pages did they read?" What statistics package do you prefer, and am I overlooking anything that could make this process more simple?

New TAB Posts on Classic and Microsoft Office Mac

5 or 6 years can be a long time when it comes to software and operating systems. Back in 2001, Apple debuted Mac OS X, and by the next year, told us all that Mac OS 9 (Classic) was dead. But some have hung on to the old OS. In parallel, as Apple has made that shift, Microsoft continues to update the company's Office suite, but at a seeming snail's pace. That's likely due to the suite's near-monopoly position, and no real driver for users to upgrade, in my opinion.

So, with those things in mind, out of curiosity, I asked The Apple Blog readers: 1) Is Classic really dead? and 2) If you were the product manager for the next generation of Mac Office, what would you do?

That's the background behind my most recent contributions to The Apple Blog, titled Is Classic Really, Seriously, Dead? and Design Your Next Microsoft Office. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided links. Enjoy.

Flash Banner Ads Are Evading My Web Filters

Nobody wants to see ads any more. We skip commercials on our TiVo, mute commercials during live ball games or events, change radio stations during breaks, and can generally ignore ads in magazines or billboards. On the Web, there's also plenty of software out there that can help us ignore crass commercialism, such as plugins for FireFox and Safari Web browsers, and junk mail filters built into most modern e-mail clients, including Apple's Mail. But as advertisers get more hip to the simple "right click and add to filter" practice, it looks like their move is to use Flash in their ads, and so far, those ads are slipping through.

For the last few years, I've used the PithHelmet ad filter program on Safari to weed out DoubleClick, Federated Media and more. But as Apple introduced Safari 3.0 beta on Mac and Windows, PithHelmet hasn't kept up. With the ads back, I downloaded SafariBlock and have been starting over, right clicking on all ads I see, and adding a * asterisk for wildcards so I won't see anything like them again. But if I right click on Flash ads, that option isn't there. I also don't have any way to hide Google's text-based AdSense advertising, which pollutes many blogs and media sites.

I expect there to be a continued war of development between the advertising community and those of us consumers who want to decide for ourselves, without pervasive marketing. Today, Flash and AdSense are the filters' achilles heel, and are driving me a tad nutty. I wonder how long I have to wait until the filters catch up...

New TAB Post: Solving Software Purchases the iTunes Way

Using iTunes to download movies, music or TV shows is incredibly easy. While logged in, all I have to do is click "Buy Song" and the tunes will be downloaded rapidly from Apple. So this got me thinking, why is it so difficult to find access to good software, and wouldn't it make sense if Apple used that kind of platform to showcase shareware? I have to imagine that small software developers would be ecstatic at the opportunity to use a platform like iTunes to introduce their wares to new customers.

The question is - does Apple, or anybody, want to seek after this type of business? It's one thing to offer links, like many do, and quite another to host and deliver the software and simplify the transaction...

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Solving Software Purchases the iTunes Way. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

Addicting Games Sure to Reduce Productivity

With the improvements in Web browser functionality, Flash adoption, Java and high-end graphics cards commonplace, simple games no longer need downloadable software, dedicated consoles, or other equipment. Instead, game developers can create in-browser applications that, with few exceptions, work in every browser on any operating system. Now, instead of worrying about whether to make the PC version before the Mac version, or if Linux support is crucial, developers can write once and play anywhere.

While some of the most popular online hangouts include Yahoo! Games and Pogo (an Electronic Arts subsidiary), other sites without the big bucks behind them are creating simple games that are hard to stop playing once you've begun. Among them are the aptly named Addicting Games, Cognitive Labs and One More Level. I can hear the kids' cries now... "Mom! Do I have to go to bed? Just one more level!"

My favorite by far is Addicting Games' Pinch Hitter. Having been introduced to it by some subversive friends at Athletics Nation, I've shared the links with family and colleagues, and am never satisfied with my results. While capable of hitting the occasional home run, I still have a tendency to strike out, which can severely damage my score. I strongly suggest you take a few swings yourself. If you do play, be sure to post your high score in the comments. Only on rare occasions can I top 25,000.

Google Reader Back Up By Morning

It turns out the Google Reader crew jumped into action after their alarm clocks went off this morning, restarting the service after six a.m. Pacific time, following what was an approximately eight-hour outage. There hasn't been any notice as to why the outage occured on the company's product blog, but Mihai Parparita, here and elsewhere, apologized for the outages, saying feeds should be refreshing again. And they are.

The outage came at a less-impactful time for those of us based on the West Coast of the United States, but for those in Europe, India and elsewhere, it couldn't have come at a worse time, staying down throughout the day. Google Reader's news group lit up with reports around the world of frustrated techies who couldn't get their feed fix.

It's clear the redundancy held so dear by Google's mainstream apps, like search, hasn't yet trickled down to the individual apps and lab projects. For those of us who have been early adopters and made these projects part of our daily routine, we can only hope that practice is resolved shortly. Until then, we'll keep backing up our feeds, and watch for future bumps.

New TAB Post: Surf on the Edge with a Nighly Build

With Safari 3.0's recent introduction and new cross-platform functionality, the browser may see higher levels of scrutiny, both good and bad, from fans and hackers alike. But what few know is that Safari relies on an underlying technology called WebKit, which Apple uses as the browser engine for many of its applications that render Web content (i.e. Mail, Dashboard, etc.)

WebKit, like FireFox and other open source apps, is updated on a nightly basis, and for those who want to have the very latest features, and don't mind putting up with the occasional browser hang, there are nightly builds available.

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Surf on the Edge With a WebKit Nightly Build. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

New TAB Post: Seeking .Mac for Windows Safari

Last night, I got out the Dell laptop from the office and decided to finally do two things: accept all Windows updates I'd been neglecting, hopefully speeding up the device, and more importantly, add Apple's recently introduced Safari 3.0 browser for the platform. After a quick download and reboot, we were using what I believe to be the best Web browser out there on a decidedly sucky platform. While the application is great, and I've already made it my default browser for Windows, I was disappointed to see I couldn't log in to my .Mac account and retrieve all my bookmarks. I hope Apple plans to soon integrate this feature into the Windows browser.

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Seeking .Mac For Windows Safari. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

Google Reader Feeds Restored Following Outage

Turns out the missing feeds and trends data in Google Reader will look more like a blip than a calamity, as the company rapidly responded and restored all previous data in about an hour after customers first started noticing their RSS feeds and shared link statistics had been obliterated. I went back from having only 4 feeds to 190, and my trends data shows 400 shared items in the last 30 days, not zero. This gives us incredible relief, and reduces our level of frustration which hit mid-day.

Some circles define the Web 2.0 movement as being where the Web functions as an application. Instead of photos being stored on iPhoto, they can be stored on Flickr. Instead of Outlook, e-mail is on GMail. Instead of using NetNewswire, we use Google Reader. And while the portability of data from computer to computer and browser to browser is excellent, it does raise the fear that my data is outside of my immediate reach, and therefore, subject to the security of the third party. If Google Reader has an outage, my data is lost. If my blog platform goes down, I shut up for a while. And so on.

So what should we do? The common answer seems to be: Back up your data. After today's outage, many Google Reader users rapidly backed up their OPML files, in case it happened again. But there are a ton of companies out there actually offering backup services through the Web, from Apple to Google (GDrive anyone?) and others. What if those services go down? Are you S.O.L., or will a simple user agreement bail you out when the time comes? You honestly can't be too safe, or have too many backups of your data.

I absolutely appreciate the speed in which the Google Reader team responded to today's data meltdown. They even just posted a note on their official blog about the outage, which they called "brief" and within the "response time that we strive for". But before we saw this post, we genuinely thought our data was nuked and that we would have to start over, and that feeling was uncomfortable indeed. It's amazing how reliant I've become on the Web to give me my information as fast as I can get it.

Google Gears Another Utility That Won't Work With Safari

Ratcheting up the company's applications battle with Microsoft today, Google debuted a new platform called Google Gears, a new developer API that lets Web developers also develop for offline use. Some are calling the introduction a game changer, and the service's cross-functionality on multiple platforms is lauded. But in what's too familiar a story, if you're a Mac user like me who prefers Safari as your Web browser, you're locked out.

The Google Gears page says in its system requirements it supports both Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ browsers, with no mention of Safari. This despite recent close interaction with Google and Apple to deliver YouTube for the AppleTV, Google Maps for the iPhone, etc.

For some reason, being one of those on Safari today is akin to being a Mac user in the 1990s. Developers are coding for the major browsers, and we're lucky to be thrown a bone. Below are a few more bigtime apps that refuse to work under Safari:

1. The Alexa Toolbar

Alexa always, always dramatically undercounts Macs because Mac users site visits aren't counted. Despite years of knowing this was an issue, Alexa has made no move to offer anything but a toolbar for Windows users with Internet Explorer.

2. StumbleUpon

Although StumbleUpon has achieved success, recently making news for being purchased by eBay, the service is mostly mystery to me. The StumbleUpon toolbar is available only for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Safari users are not invited.

3. Google Pack

The Google Pack is available only for Windows users, period. Forget about any Mac version.

4. Google Toolbar

Making Safari 0 for 3 in the toolbar battle, Google Toolbar is only available on Firefox for the Mac or Internet Explorer. Safari users need not apply.

5. Yahoo! Toolbar

Aha! 0 for 4. The Yahoo! Toolbar is only available for Windows Internet Explorer or Firefox. Got Safari? Got no toolbar.

So whose fault is it here? Is it Apple's fault for creating a Web browser that wasn't extendible or developer friendly? Is it instead that the developers are ignoring the Mac OS X Safari market? Or further, are Web standards not being followed? I'd assume Google has the manpower to provide Mac OS X Safari capable Web applications, but they are putting resources somewhere else. For me, Safari is the very best browser. That these popular sites and programs are unavailable is extremely frustrating.

For $33.75, I Could Ditch DRM from 130 iTunes Songs

Apple's iTunes Plus project launched today, giving me the option to strip digital rights management (DRM) from a select subset of my musical library for 30 cents per affected song. As the promotion only covers a fraction of the total available iTunes Store, I was curious to see how many I would be offered, and at the end of the first day for this promotion, I could upgrade 130 songs for $33.75, Apple says.

What would I get?

With iTunes Plus, I would remove the iTunes and iPod-only barrier from these songs, letting me pass songs to friends, copy to multiple computers, or in theory, play on other, inferior music devices. Additionally, the songs would be offered in higher quality bit rates.

On the first day of announcement, bands in my purchase history that are available include Coldplay, Beastie Boys, Royksopp, The Chemical Brothers, M83, Fatboy Slim and Cosmic Gate.

While others are excited about the move and hate all things DRM-related, I haven't seen Apple's limitations as much of a hindrance to the way I enjoy music. The iTunes and iPod combination work for me, and I won't be paying a premium to convert my library to iTunes Plus any time soon, whether it was $3.75, $33.75 or $337.50.

Google Reader Team Adds Trends to Main Page!

It's the little things. A little over two months after I put together ten suggestions to help Google Reader improve, we're starting to see some of the proposals implemented. Very quietly, I noticed this evening that Google Reader has added the trends button to the main column, meaning I can keep tabs on my statistics without having to go to my bookmarks to retrieve the data.

Being a stats guy, I always appreciate any way that helps me get to and make sense of the numbers quickly and easily. While some are making more noise around Google Reader's other announcement - that you can now read feeds offline, this little trends logo is much more important for me. After all, I have no intentions of being offline if I can help it.

Application Stability is as Important as OS Stability

Just last week, I set off a bit of a minor firestorm over at The Apple Blog by my complaining about having to restart my PowerBook after installing Apple software updates. But what's even worse than the occasional restart is the issue of locked up applications, which can dramatically impact productivity. With the expanded move toward Web-based applications, the opportunity to lose in-progress activity looms large.

It's common practice for any seasoned computer owner to frequently save work in progress, especially when working in Microsoft Office applications, like Word, Excel and PowerPoint (sorry, Microsoft, but it's true). Hitting save while penning long e-mails isn't a bad idea either, although most modern e-mail applications, including Microsoft Outlook, have an auto-save feature. It's as if as users, we anticipate the applications will be less stable than the operating system, and could go down at any time. It's not too infrequent for me to be in the middle of launching a new application only to see it hang, and require a force quit. It's not too uncommon for me to force PowerPoint or Word to quit and hope that the next time I open the application, that enough of my work has been automatically recovered.

But now, the Web poses a new problem, and last night, I got bitten by the issue in a big way. As Web 2.0 applications move toward the Web, for example, my moving to blogging within the Web browser instead of a desktop application, hitting the Save button isn't really an option. Hitting save won't capture the state of my blog post, but instead will drop an HTML file on my desktop. Last night, near 1 a.m., I saw the Sacramento Kings had released a list of seven candidates for their head coaching position. Keen to post that to Sactown Royalty, I had written up a detailed summary, including links to Wikipedia for all seven candidates, relevant background information and recent articles. During this process, I was writing in one browser window, and opening new window tabs to confirm correct URLs and find more data. Sure enough, as I got near completion, my hard drive started to whir, my cursor locked up and my Safari Web browser was completely useless. Waiting 10 minutes didn't bring it back to life either, as I was eventually pushed to force quit and lose everything. Instead of starting over from scratch, I closed up the laptop, and went to bed.

While it's true that Apple's operating system has excellent stability, and no longer locks up the machine when apps crash, as it did in the 1990s, part of an excellent user experience certainly is the applications themselves. A buggy application that can't be relied to stay open, and threatens to lose my data, dramatically impacts the total computing experience. As more applications move to the Web, Internet application vendors should put their best engineers on the case to ensure stability.

Sun vs. Microsoft, Round #293

The Sun vs. Microsoft wars in the 1990s were a delight to watch. While Scott McNealy has yielded his throne to the ponytailed uber-blogger Jonathan Schwartz, the company's distaste for all things Redmond has not changed much with time. As Microsoft sees its monopoly crumbling around it, due to poorly developed software, distaste for security and a poor user experience, it has taken to grandstanding and puffery against all things which threaten its Windows kingdom.

On Monday, a Fortune article revealed that Microsoft stated free software, including the popular Linux operating system, violates up to 235 of its patents, and it wants to get paid. In fact, Microsoft was to bold as to say the reason people are flocking to free software is due to the quality of the Microsoft software they allegedly copied. If successful, the free software would cease to be free, eliminating a very powerful differentiator from it and the software Borg.

The lines have been drawn, and once again, you see Microsoft on the site of litigation and sabre-rattling, and Sun on the other, arguing for openness and anything that doesn't smack of Windows. That's why Schwartz jumped in with a lengthy, intelligent post titled "Free Advice for the Litigious...", where he recounts how Sun adapted to a world of open source software when their Solaris operating system was under attack. Amusingly, Schwartz manages to teach Microsoft a lesson without mentioning the words "Microsoft" or "Windows" even once.

But he offers this warning: "You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark."

Customers are always happy to pay for premium quality. Witness the iPod, the Nintendo Wii, LCD televisions and the like. If customers are trying to get around using Microsoft products, it's because they are unhappy with their quality and feel they aren't getting their money's worth. While it'd be foolhardy to claim Sun is without blemish, Schwartz is of course right. Microsoft can only lose by taking the free world to court.

1000+% Traffic Growth Year over Year? Summary Says So.

Thanks to some experimenting with a new Web log analysis tool, called Summary, I've downloaded all my Web log files and can run all sorts of reports to see where Web traffic is coming from, what pages are being read, and how that compares to last week, last month or last year. While SiteMeter does a great job covering cumulative data and most specifically for the last 4,000 visitors, there's something to be said for taking a walk back in time.

While this site isn't really intended to be a world beater in terms of traffic, as evidenced by the fact I barely make a blip on Alexa's statistics, growth is good as far as I'm concerned.

For me, the most important metric isn't total number of users or hits, but instead the page view - for now. I tend to get a lot of traffic from Google Images and Athletics Nation to download the ANtics comics, so I have to filter out those who have siphoned off the graphics without reading the context. You'd be surprised how many places I've found the ANtics all over MySpace and other forums...

Looking at page views, April 2007 reportedly had more than 99,000 in the 30 day period. In April of 2006, that number was less than 9,000. March 2007 comes in second place, with 82,000 page views. March of 2006 clocked in at less than 8,000. Both months show growth of about 1000% year over year.

Summary also offers a metric called "Total View Time", which I can only assume tries to add visitor time spent on the site in aggregate. I guess in this case I'd be given more credit if I had slow readers, but regardless, April checked in with "72 days" worth of Total View Time. That number is trailed by March's 63 days, February's 30 days and January's 24 1/3 days. April of 2006 had less than 5 days worth of traffic, meaning total view time was up nearly 1500% in this metric.

As I've continued to post on the blog with solid frequency day in and day out, the total number of pages available for visitors and search engines alike is growing. As any SEO specialist will tell you, the more content available, the better Google, Yahoo! and the rest like your site. As a result, the numbers there are startling.

Visitors coming from search engines to louisgray.com numbered nearly 10,000 in April, up from 5,500 in March and 2,700 in February. In April of last year, I had even less than 300 visits from search engines, less than 3% of today's activity. To be honest, a significant amount of that traffic has come looking for R-rated material, but they're most likely disappointed when they find out how boring I am.

Summary, despite being a robot, also tries to offer up analytic detail.



For instance:

On 04/23/07. There was a spike in visits, about 4,906 extra visits or 266% above average. Bytes (+733.36M/+458%), hits (+60,198/+1,200%), pages (+9,349/+936%), downloads (+200/+2,857%), errors (+589/+316%), unique hosts (+4,315/+388%), 1 page visits (+4,547/+1,040%), robot visits (+1,254/+269%), and total view time (+279,152/+402%) also spiked. Possibly related to referring domains 'digg.com' (+2,511/+251,100%), 'techmeme.com' (+374/+18,700%), and 'doggdot.us' (+160/+16,000%) based on visits. Possibly related to request '/live/2007/04/googles-earth-day-logo-makes-splash.html' (+153.08M/+4,880%) based on bytes. Possibly related to request '/live/2007/04/googles-earth-day-logo-makes-splash.html' (+3,904/+4,880%) based on pages. Possibly related to requests '/files/lgraycom_widget.zip' (+140/+1,272%) and '/files/antics07_bg.pdf' (+51/+1,700%) based on downloads.

It's not quite the Queen's English, but it's close. I was particularly amused by the fact it said it was possibly due to the jump from Digg, TechMeme and DoggDot, who checked in above 15,000% of normal. Yeah, that's a spike.



It's just fun with numbers. For a stat geek like me, I like diving into the reports and seeing what, if any sense I can make of things. If you run Mac OS X, and want to take a run at your own stats, give Summary a spin. As for me, I'll be seeing what other tricks I can pull off to push us up another 1000% by April of 2008.

Google Desktop for Mac Is Finally Here

For me, just about the only real benefit to using my Dell laptop at the office is access to Google Desktop and its thorough search capabilities through my six-year Outlook archive. If I've written the message or received it at any point, Google Desktop can find it for me quickly. For nearly everything else, I use the Mac. Now, it appears that after 30 months of neglect, Mac OS X users finally can get their hands on Google Desktop.

While Apple highlights its integrated Spotlight search capability as part of Mac OS X, in reality, Spotlight is a program I try not to use all that often. It's slow, and doesn't present a Web-like interface in the way that Google Desktop does for Windows (or for the Web, of course).

While we're installing the new program and indexing our hard drive, you can check out a pair of writeups from a pair of bloggers with early access, at Ars Technica and TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog). TUAW also offers a screenshot gallery.

To download, visit Google's Mac software downloads page.