Archive for December, 2008

There are good reasons for some start-ups to run in stealth mode for months or years of their early existence. I was reminded of a few as I was reading Chris Maxcer’s review of Joost for the iPhone. Check out this gem, about the desktop version: I had briefly used Joost’s client-side Mac video...
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I’m having a horrible Rip van Winkle moment. Flickr dropped PayPal support in June 2007. I had always paid for my Flickr Pro account with PayPal … some extra cash that I get from ads on this site, in fact. So when they dropped PayPal, I dropped Pro. Just now I discovered that PayPal...
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It’s been a little more than 2 months in the new job, so it’s about time that I’ve got the new business cards. Here’s a sample … with a holiday twist.
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OK, so you’re on Twitter and you’re telling everybody the minutiae of your life. Thanks for the one about the toenail gunk, by the way. Or, you’re a little smarter and you’re actually providing meaningful, relevant information that other professionals like you would find interesting and useful. This, actually, with just a dash of...
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I’ve been hearing more than a few things about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers. Wayne Hurlbert (gotta love that last name) just read and reviewed it on Blog Business World. As a good Canadian, he pulled a good Canuck anecdote out of the book: Malcolm Gladwell begins his book with the seemingly innocent observation...
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I recently saw this snippet as I browsed through my old files from a previous job: There’s a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside. “I must see which way the crowd is headed,” Robespierre...
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A few weeks ago I went searching for a simple, quick image annotation utility. I annotate images and PDFs every day, multiple times a day. And most tools currently in use for it are expensive or user UNfriendly, or both. So I couldn’t have been happier when I found Skitch. Skitch is a dead-simple...
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It’s a little dated, but I ran across this today and couldn’t help but laugh: Microsoft is clearly out to wed the Zune with Windows Mobile in a effort to get the two failures to prop each other up in its “I’m not dead yet!” fight against the iPhone. Of course, it’s really only...
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You have to love this comment by an analyst on the new that Steve Jobs won’t be keynoting MacWorld this year: “It’s like the first time in a long time he hasn’t spoken in Macworld,” said Samuel Wilson, an analyst at JMP Securities. “Why is he not speaking this year would be the question.”...
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Usability is the new motherhood and apple pie: unquestionably good … and almost as hard to find. Everyone agrees that software should be user-friendly. But what does that actually mean? I’ve been architecting a LOT of desktop software in the past few months, and I’ve been revisiting some of my ideas about usability. While...
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There’s been a very interesting little “discussion” going around what we used to call the blogosphere. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spent the previous week at LeWeb, in Paris, where in response to some questions, he said that Europeans love life too much to generate the biggest technology success stories. They have too many 2-hour lunches...
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For some unexplained and probably unexplainable reason I was thinking of Netscape this morning. It was the time of the morning when unconscious sleep is inching reluctantly toward conscious wakefulness … and the subconscious has free rein to dream up all kinds of irrelevant nonsense. I have to say, I felt some nostalgia for...
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I knew it would happen in my lifetime: Google Calendar and Apple iCal syncing simply, quickly, effortlessly: Google calls it Calaboration … and yes, that’s the way they spell it. The software is a thing of beauty. Download, install, enter your Gmail account information, and you’re done. In my initial testing on two Macs,...
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