StickyBits – barcode scanning

Mobile barcodes are quickly gaining momentum – they’ve been around for years, I’ve tinkered with 2D and MS Colour Tags for years. It’s really only been in the past 3 or so months here in NZ that 2D barcodes are starting to gain movement. Of course in the USA we have Google rolling out 100,000 to restaurants to try and ramp this up.

2D Barcodes are unique in that they hold information within themselves, and the scanner app can decode this and tell you the message.

Barcodes however have been around for many years – are line based and represent numbers. Stickybits has come along and joined the two ideas + location together. Using the Stickybitst app on your iPhone or Android device you can scan ANY barcode and attach content too it.

Try this barcode:
If you scan that with your iPhone/Android you should see some info about Studiowhiz.com.

Here however is where StickyBits becomes fun – it’s social. So you are now welcome to add your comments, photos, video and other content to this barcode. When other scan it they can see the history of items added to this code.

It’s a great fun way to share content & I could see review engines for Restaurants/Venues leveraging this technology to quickly and easily gather social recommendations and share feedback straight from the venue. Barcodes on menus, till receipts, napkins or anywhere really.

The thing is you don’t have to generate a complex barcode – snap any barcode & away you go. StickyBits have the ability to make barcodes like the one above, so what are you waiting for? Start tagging the world around you with barcodes!!

How to deactivate Google Buzz

Hot on the heels of my post on How to activate Google Buzz I bring you a quick post on how to deactivate Google Buzz.

You might have noticed there is a lot of noise in Google Buzz and people are now wondering how to clean up the Google Buzz in their Gmail Inbox. Turns out the Google Buzz item added to Google is a LABEL for incoming notes. Unlike Google Talk you can’t separate Buzz from Email – effectively Buzz is email .. just formatted in a different way.

So, if you use Google Buzz, expect to see crap in your inbox.

Help is at hand

Of course this is also a good thing, because Buzz is basically email, you can set up filter rules within Gmail to find any Buzz item and automatically filter it out to another label (How to set up filters in Gmail)

How to Kill Google Buzz

For some however setting up filters will NOT be enough and they will want Buzz gone. After all if you are already using Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Eventbox etc to manage your life streams, why do you want YET another?

There IS a way to turn buzz off … at the VERY bottom of your Gmail page is a tiny link “turn off buzz”. Simply scroll RIGHT to the very bottom of the page, and there is a row of links. Click turn off buzz and Google Buzz will disappear. (You can turn it back on the same way anytime you like)

NOTE:

This ONLY turns Google Buzz off in your email, it’s STILL in your Google Profile & I’ve not found anyway to turn it off outside of CLOSING your Google Account

UPDATE:

You have to do BOTH – filters & Turn Off … even with Buzz Turned off if anyone @ replies you – it will show up as an email in your inbox. If you are on some marketing list from a Brand, or …. your inbox could very quickly become unusable!

UPDATE 2:

Note: Buzz can re-activate itself if someone adds you to their list – at least that’s what it seems like. I had it turned off, went to lunch, a friend “buzzed” me (I wasn’t following him – yet) and when I opened Gmail again, Buzz was back on!

Stupidity reigns

I’m going to get flamed for this, but okay … !!

I just read a tweet from two of the more respected “guru’s” of the ‘open web’ – Chris Saad and Chris Messina

RT @chrismessina: Someday asking for a site’s API will be like asking which email protocol someone uses. Interoperability FTW!

well .. DUH!

You know what, it’s tweets like this that make me cringe – here are two hugely respected guys, who have done, and do, do great things for the web. Both are huge proponents of the open web & are heavily involved in the Data Portability project (Chris Messina is a founder of said project). Which is why it’s surprises me they put this tweet out.

What’s wrong with the tweet?

I’m all for interoperability and I’m all for open data sharing (in fact I’m all for TRUE data portability – that’s another blog post maybe, if I can be bothered). What irks me is that these two Chris’ think that “one day” we’ll achieve this utopia. For crying out friggin loud, it’s here already. The whole CONCEPT, the whole PREMISE of “API” is it’s a gateway TO another technology.

I find an API, and I leverage it to CONSUME the data. I don’t give a toss what technology is powering it, or what language it was built in. Likewise it doesn’t care if I’m using RUBY or PHP, C# or AS3. It’s an API …

Okay to put it into THEIR metaphore – the API is the email address, NOT the protocol. I don’t ask you if you use IMAP or POP, I simply ask for your email. Likewise I don’t ask if your site is ASP, PHP or .NET, I simply ask for your API.

Interoperability is here now – I can interoperate with AMAZON, GOOGLE, YELLOW, FLICKR, TWITTER and many many more TODAY without knowing anything about their ‘protocol’ – I simply grab their API and go to it. I agree with the last part of their tweet “Interoperability FTW!”

Someday is now

I’m ranting, I know it … but really come on guys. Stop making bold statements that sound cool – but mean nothing. You are two guys in a position to really MOLD and SHAPE the web … so get on with it

How to activate Google Buzz

Google Buzz, it’s all the buzz right now and as we know Google are rolling this out to all accounts as they can. There is however a quick way to get Google Buzz into your account.

It all revolves around your Google Profile. Don’t have one? You’ll need one, and you need to ensure it has some information in it about you – this is what Google uses to build up it’s understanding of you.

How to activate Google Buzz

1. Update your Google Profile – make sure you provide some basic information about you, places you lived, work place, etc
2. Ensure you have feeds in your Google Reader – Google needs this to understand your content preferences
3. In Google reader – under YOUR STUFF post some comment
4. Go back to your Google Profile & you’ll see

Buzz is now active in your Google account & will show up in your GMail account within an hour or so.

UPDATE: you HAVE to update your Google Profile with enough information for it to no longer be reporting “need more info” – if on your Profile page you are seeing a YELLOW or BLUE information box at the top – you haven’t given them enough information yet.

UPDATE 2: getting SICK of Buzz in your Gmail? Learn how to deactivate Google Buzz in our follow up post

11 Awesome business tools you’ve never heard of

** UPDATE: now with discount code goodness **

There are so many awesome online tools today to help any business get up and running and work towards that great adage:

Work smarter, not harder

Web 2.0 (and whatever that means), data portability, shared networks and features like Facebook Connect make it so easy these days to have you managing your business time better.  There are some really amazing tools out there that we all know and love the likes of Mint.com and BlinkSale.com that we know of. But there are also a ton of lesser well known yet equally as good (if not better) solutions out there too.

Business Card & Contact Management

Soocial is a brilliant online service for managing and cleaning up your various address books. It works with the address book on your computer, GMail (+ other web mail), iPhone and other mobile devices. It has many nifty features, one of my favourites is the clean up of duplicate records – brilliant.

» Soocial.com – hassle free contact management

Cloud Contacts is one of those web services that is so simple, it’s brilliant. (It’s also one of those …  ’slap your forehead & say doh, why didn’t I think of that’ type services). Built around the often tedious task of data entry from business cards, Cloud Contacts is a service that will digitize the content of business cards you collect. Once digitized, the information can then be imported into Outlook, SalesForce, linkedIn and many many more tools. Fantastic service for those who collect lots of business cards.

UPDATE: use the word ‘studiowhiz‘ when ordering to get a discount (limited to 10 sales to hurry)

» Cloudcontacts.com – for simple business card management

Invoices & Billing Management

Chargify does what it’s name suggests, charges your clients – with it’s simple interface Chargify takes the pain out of recurring billing, credit card processing and all aspects of debt management. Two of the great features of Chargify are it’s ability to help you learn from billing and client history to improve your customer experience and the API which allows you to build it into your own system – very cool!

» Chargify.com – billing management

Curdbee is not as fully featured as Chargify, but it does have a free option & when it comes to a simple billing system, Curdbee does all you need it too. From branded invoices to Paypal & Google Checkout integration and much more.

» Curdbee.com – Simple billing & contract management

Project Planning & Management

Mockflow is a brilliant time saving, real-time, collaborative interface development tool. You can wireframe up concept layouts in any browser while chatting to your team. Anyone can use this to help work out the best placements for elements. Pages can be grouped, and joined, so at a later stage you can link through your wireframes and see the correct user flow.

» Mockflow.com – realtime, collaborative interface design

Slickplan is a more traditional site plan planning tool, that gives you a good set of tools to build a quick site overview document. While not a drag’n'drop type tool, Slickplan is free and very quick to use to throw together flow documents.

» Slickplan.com – quick & simple site overview designer

ProWorkflow (built by some Kiwi folks) helps you manage you projects, time, and resources in one very simple web interface. ProWorkflow is that and more, it has built in invoice management, team management, task management, contacts, reports and so much more. It’s not the cheapest solution, but it’s darn solid and the CEO is on Twitter so you can bug him when you need help. With various widgets, iPhone apps and connectors to Quicken and more, you’ll find almost all you need in ProWorkflow.

» Proworkflow.com – full project management solution

Business Intelligence & Surveys

GoodData is a new but very powerful system that recently launched, that does nothing more than mine your data. It doesn’t collect data, rather it works with your existing data sources to find trends, patterns and more allowing you to better understand the data you have in your business. With integration to all sorts of tools including Salesforce, GoodData is awesome for really getting behind the numbers to the understandings you need.

» gooddata.com – powerful data understanding

Survs is my favourite survey tool of all time. It couldn’t get any simpler really, and yet the power & flexibility of Survs is amazing. It doesn’t do anything other than survey’s but hey, that’s all they claim to do.  Run complex surveys or simple ones, multipage, single page, branded (or not), time based, integrated into your site or stand alone. Within seconds you’ll have your survey running and collecting data. It really is brilliant!

» survs.com – mindblowingly simple yet powerful surveys

Getting things done & having fun

Getitdone is a getting it done tool with a difference – delegate tasks to your team (provided they are on getitdone). Organise your tasks into projects, schedule them for future dates & update your tasks direct from email. Beautiful and simple – oh and of course it has an iPhone app coming soon too.

» getitdoneapp.com – mindblowingly simple yet powerful surveys

Sketchfu is one of those really useful but great fun apps that generally are used for fun. When you need a quick app to sketch out a idea but don’t want to use Photoshop or something complicated, Sketchfu makes it simple. Draw it, share it .. and my gosh, some people can really use it to draw amazing things! I’ve used it a number of times for whipping out quick ideas to send to people for feedback before progressing to full mockups.

» Sketchfu.com – mindblowingly simple yet powerful surveys

Elgato eyeTV in New Zealand

The world is moving, analog TV is on it’s death bed and digital TV is streaming into the world at faster speeds, higher rates, better quality. At home we have a dodgy 21″ CRT tv we bought brand new for $250 – yeap big spenders. It’s not ready for the digital world – sadly my wallet too isn’t ready for the digital world.

Being typical in this modern world I wanted this digital TV, here in NZ we have the Freeview platform that is being rolled out & between now and 2012 we will follow the USA’s lead and turn off our analog signals. So what were my options. I could spend $200(ish) and buy a Freeview decoder to sit by my TV and give me these signals, or I could spend $800+ and get a nice Freeview decoder + Digital recorder to watch one channel while recording another. I could switch to PayTV (Sky) and puchase their MySKY HDi option … but that binds me to monthly contracts.

Enter stage right, Elgato eyeTV. Elgato have a range of (I think Mac only) TV tuners that are as simple to install as a USB plug. I’ve known of their range for a while but never really was sure if they’d work in New Zealand or not. I’ve seen plenty of mixed results from people who’ve tried to install and run these before.

I did a bit of looking around and Elgato themselves say they support the Freeview network – albeit the European version, but it’s Freeview none the less. I found a few kiwi’s who had the Elgato system working and I figured at $155 it’s worth a shot.

What to buy:
Okay one of the more confusing things for those of us not so savvy to TV terms, it can be a bit confusing. I was under the false impression that Freeview in New Zealand needed a satellite dish. This is NOT true, Freeview is broadcast both on satellite and UHF (or is it VHF), so for those of you without a Sky Dish (or Freeview one) on your roof, you can just use your UHF/VHF aerial. NOTE: the eyeTV device will come with an aerial – but trust me, in NZ it’ll be next to useless, you’ll want the big one on your roof. (click product name to go to Elgato site for full details)

• eyeTV DTT – great introductory item for UHF/VHF (DVB-T) signals, just plug in your aerial
• eyeTV DTT Deluxe – same as DTT, with extra aerial & subscription to online EPG (program guides – not available for NZ)
• eyeTV Diversity – same as DTT but with 2 tuners allowing easier watching of 2 channels
• eyeTV Hybrid – same as DTT but also includes support for Cable TV (DVB-C)
• eyeTV 250Plus – DVB-T tv tuner, plus extras for video & TV conversions
• eyeTV Sat – best option for satellite (DVB-S) this unit supports card systems like sky to unlock content. I’ve not used this so can’t tell you if it does or doesn’t work with sky cards.

Where to buy:
Buying is, well interesting. I went to JB Hi-Fi who have the device in stock for $195, I didn’t pay that for it. Ascent Technologies have the eyeTV DTT for sale online for $155, and JB Hi-Fi will match that price. So I picked it up in store for $155!

Setting up:
I got it home, plugged the eyeTV DTT usb stick into the Mac. BTW the stick is about the same size as a USB Memory Stick. You then plug in the aerial (I tried the supplied one first) and run the brilliant EyeTV software. It scanned it’s channels and failed to find anything – oh no.  I had sudden visions of just kissing $155 goodbye.

I decided to then plug into the big aerials on the roof of my place. (As a side note, my house has multiple aerials the past owner put up & has some signal merge units under the house, this means I have both UHF & VHF coming into one place – I think this is kinda common here in NZ, but check your place). As soon as I re-ran the tuner it found all the channels.  Note some tutorials you find say “in New Zealand run the exhaustive scan” – this is over 1,300 channels and it takes a while.  You don’t need too. All of the NZ channels are found within the 88 common channels it scans on the common scan setting.

Using eyeTV:
I have to say, watching TV on my iMac just seems wrong. Beautiful, crystal clear … but wrong :) Anyway, that aside, eyeTV is software that just works. It will find the channels, it’ll use the DVB information where it can to tell you whats on and give you program information. The interface for setting recording schedules etc, is simple and the playback is brilliant. I am still impressed with how clear it is.

Another couple of terms you want to get your head around. DVB & EPG … DVB, I think stands for Digital Video Broadcast – it’s really the signal, and as part of this the providers can send some of the information about what’s coming up, what the show is etc. EPG stands for Electronic Program Guide and is an external solution for getting a guide as to what’s coming up. The DVB that comes over VHF shows you maybe the current day’s details if you are lucky – nothing more.

New Zealand doesn’t have any formal or paid services, however the underground community has some EPG solutions & some people have set up ways of making this work with your eyeTV system. I found this video & it had shows how to add the EPG for NZ & get a weeks details in one shot:

Extra bits: – Multi Channel Support
One of the things that I had to learn after I got this was that the eyeTV DTT doesn’t let you watch more than one channel at once. Okay well actually that’s not true. See digital channels are often Multiplexed (yeah it was a new word to me too) – this means they send more than one channel on the same frequency. For example, TV one, TV two, TV 6 and TV 7 are all broadcast to Freeview on the same frequency. You can easily watch (or watch & record) these channels at the same time. EG: Watch something on TV One while recording something on TV 6.

To do this, you need to be watching your channel, then using the file menu, open a new window – BUT – you must hold the CONTROL key down on your keyboard. (HINT: open the file menu, then toggle the CONTROL key and watch, one of the menu items changes – click that one!) You’ll see a new window open with one of the multiplex channels in it.

However, you can’t watch PRIME and record TV3 – they are on different frequencies. If you want to do that you either need 2 eyeTV DTT units OR you need eyeTV Diversity.

Extra bits: – iPhone
There is a nice iPhone app for eyeTV which allows your iPhone to access eyeTV on your Mac (provided it’s running) so you can watch TV on your phone. This is brilliant and I find myself using this a bit already. For example the other night my wife was watching CSI, while recording NCIS and I was watching a pre-recorded episode of Mythbusters on my iPhone in another room of the house.

You can stream live TV to your iPhone over wifi with eyeTV converting the signal to H.264 on the fly for your phone. You can set eyeTV to convert (or export) recordings to H.264 for iPhones once it’s finished recording – meaning your content is available all the time. If it’s not converted, the iPhone can’t watch it.

NOTE: this is a slow & CPU intensive process – if you do this lots, invest in a Turbo.264 HD device from Elgato to help speed up this process.

The iPhone app is NOT a remote for your computer, and if you change channels on the iPhone, you will change channels on the computer, running the risk of annoying whoever is watching TV there. One annoying factor is there is no way from the iPhone app to tell what channel is currently playing on the computer.

You can look up the guide, schedule recordings and watch any recording over wifi with your iPhone – it’s great. Also if you use the FREE Elgato MyEyeTV service, you can remotely get access to your TV & content over any WIFI & internet connection. Yes that means I can watch LiveTV or my recordings, over WiFi here at work – from my mac at home. Of course bandwidth will be expensive and I’m sure my employer would “love it” – but hey, I can :D

Summary

So there we have it, my thoughts on using eyeTV in New Zealand.
In Short:

• eyeTV works great in New Zealand
• eyeTV supports NZ Freeview
• eyeTV DTT is a good introductory TV tuner for mac’s in NZ
• JB Hi-Fi stock eyeTV DTT’s & will match Ascent Technologies $155 online price
• Ubertec (in Parnell) carry a wider range of Elgato gear
• eyeTV 3.2 supports multiplex channels (watch one, record another – as long as they are on the same frequency)
• eyeTV 3.2 is required for iPhone support (some routers will not support uPnP required for remote access via MyEyeTV)
• eyeTV supports pausing & resuming live TV

Any questions, throw them in the comments & I’m happy to answer where I can. I’m still learning with this stuff, but I have to say I’m pretty impressed at really how simple and easy this process was.

Why Facebook sucks

You might think that I’m not qualified to write a post about why I think Facebook sucks – and rewind two weeks and you’d be right. Sure I’d created some account many moons ago for me to dabble with, but after rumors of CIA involvement and other “conspiracies” I decided that was enough for me.

Recently however I have once again joined up, as more and more of my friends were online I began to be missing out on happenings in their lives. Facebook had become their means of primary communication. Photos were no longer added to Flickr or Picasa accounts – they were simply added to Facebook. Without a Facebook account I was left out.

So after much thinking and discussing with  my wife we decided to plunge into the world of Facebook and our lives haven’t been the same since – and NOT in all the ways you think.

Facebook: we aim to annoy

I’m coming into Facebook with over 14 years experience in online user interfaces (read: web design & development). I’m utterly amazed at how Facebook has met and overcome many hurdles facing technology – getting those that are non-techy to use their site … esp considering the Facebook interface is a great big pile of steaming crap.

How on earth do the Grandmas & Grandpas that are now flocking to Facebook ever keep up, let alone understand what their grandkids are up too?  My wife and I are pretty computer and web savvy – and we struggle to get our heads around the mess that is Facebook.

Why do I see my friends, friends comments?

This question was put to me by my wife after day one with Facebook. She’d added her sister to her friends list and suddenly her “home page” was full of comments to her sister that were completely unrelated to her. All my wife saw was a page full of utter crap. I see since we joined Facebook have now added 3 little buttons allowing you to fine tune this a little – but it’s still a mess.

Why do I get email notifications (again you can turn this off but when you login your notification box tells you) telling me that someone who is friends of my friend, has commented on my friends photo. I could understand if that friend was a mutual friend of mine too … but 9 times out of 10 they are not.

Okay … wooo up for a second.

I really do like Facebook

Facebook has been very good for me, as I’ve reconnected with some very good friends of mine who I’ve not talked too (in depth) for a good number of years. I’ve caught up with the amazing growth of their kids, seen a mates photos of a recent trip to Ireland and much more … but I swear I’ve become so frustrated with the idosy…crap that Facebook puts you through.

Reasons I hate Facebook

• URL has serious flaws
  Not sure if you noticed but Facebook often puts a # in the url, and simply appends page structures to this. For example I recently was on a fan page, then navigated to my profile, Facebook simply added # to the end of the fan page and then took me to my profile. As I navigated around I notice Facebook simply adds more # and pages to the URL.
  This has bad consequences when you try to add a new app, as the app assumes a certain URL structure & I frequently have apps failing to install.
• Uploading Video PI
  Today at work I looked into adding some video to a fan page created for one of the sites we manage. Sounds simple enough. I head to the video page – btw: we host all our videos with Vimeo. I was expecting to be able to select either UPLOAD or EMBED. Nope, Facebook forces you to upload any video to their servers. Why? Why can’t we simply pass a Vimeo or YouTube URL and have Facebook put this into the video page – it’s not that hard!
• Uploading Video PII
  During the upload process we ran into countless issues. The video upload progress bar actually only worked once out of the 8 videos we uploaded. When it did work it meant the Save Info button would kill the upload and drop you out to the video page. Clicking back to video took you to a page saying “You’ve uploaded no videos” – when we already had 3 videos uploaded.
  After each video we had to go back to the fan page and start the process again – otherwise the video wouldn’t upload.
• Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress … Integration
  Why should I have to rely one some 3rd party application to integrate Facebook with my existing online media? I should be able to go to my Photos tab and select UPLOAD or EMBED (or LINK) and be able to simply copy and paste a Flickr URL & have Facebook show the image as if it had been uploaded to Facebook.
  Likewise Twitter should be a heck of a lot easier to integrate than it is. Again there should be a native integration allowing Twitter & Facebook to be closer tied together. Afterall “status” on Facebook is really just like your twitter “What are you doing”
• Twitter & Pages
  I have a number of Twitter accounts – one is a personal account that I have linked to Facebook so my tweets can update my status. I have another account that is .. well another account. I’ve set up a Facebook page for this & I’d love to have that Twitter account (which has 1 post a day) to update the status of this page. Nope, sorry can’t do it – already have a Twitter account associated to my profile and Facebook/Twitter app can not handle more than one account at once – how stupid?
• Link integration
  There are a number of online bookmarking (or link saving) solutions. The most popular of course is Delicious. Great news, there is a Delicious Facebook app (which doesn’t really seem to work). This app will publish your links to your BOXES tab. Well this is just dumb. Why can’t Facebook itself allow me to tell it to fetch my LINKS from my Delicious account (or other) and populate them into my LINKS tab.

Summary

I could go on and on I’m sure. Facebook as we all know is huge & my little rant is unlikely to change anything. However I do feel that Facebook could build into their system far greater native support for many of the existing tools that are already used. You can only expect developers to do so much with your API – many of these apps are so full of crappy adverts they are useless.

Facebook expect us as developers to build solutions, share our bandwidth so that Facebook users can leverage their existing content OR force users to upload into multiple locations so that those with Facebook accounts and those without can share the media.

I think Facebook should take a leaf out of Wordpress’s books – make things simpler – not more complex. Wordpress makes adding media so simple – Facebook makes adding media .. too difficult.

Facebook – it is what it is, you love it or hate it – but I’ll keep using it.

updating to WP 2.7 beta 3

Hey all, I’m about to update the site to wordpress 2.7 beta 3 – why? Because it’s just so much better for everyone. 2.7’s changes seem to be mainly from the backend, the admin system, which makes managing the site & content so much better.

I highly recommend updating (provided you’re comfortable with beta software), it’s auto update features are worth it – just these on their own.  It’s improved interface is just bonus.

So, go have a coffee – we’ll be back shortly.

Update: and we are back, 2.7 installed and running

Battle of the Twitter Clients

Twitter – very addictive, and not a complete waste of time (well not always anyway). Twitter by default as we know is a website which allows you to post comments in 140 characters or less.

But websites are clumsy things and Twitter is probably one of the best known services that can be consumed anyhow, anywhere. This post is taking a look at 3 of the more popular Mac Twitter clients – I’ll write a similar review of a couple of iPhone ones over at www.iphonesource.org in the weekend.

So which three are we looking at?

Twitterific | TweetDeck | EventBox

Twitterific

I was introduced to Twitter & Twitterific at the same time. A number of friends were starting to use Twitter and buy’n'large they all recommended Twitterific.

Twitterific Interface

Crafted buy icon designers Iconfactory, Twitterific presents very cleanly and very simply. As you can see from the screen shot above, Twitterific is nothing more than a list of incoming tweets, gray for usual tweets and coloured to show replies or direct messages. That’s it, there really isn’t much else to Twitterific. It’s simple, it works, and it looks the same on Mac or iPhone.

Twitterific has both a free & paid version

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR app, meaning it will run on any computer that has AIR installed. You can install it for the Mac, PC or even Linux.

TweetDeck interface

TweetDeck is very flexible in the way it’s interface works. By default you have 3 columns showing All Tweets, Replies and Direct Messages. However you can customize these into almost infinite groupings. This is were the power of TweetDeck really lies. You can customize groups of data (columns) to show search results, to show favourites, tweets by one person, or tweets about any topic (or hashtag).  The TweetDeck team are constantly on twitter chatting about the app, offering advice and support, and the interface is customizable (colours) to your desires.

The TweetDeck team tell me that multi-account support is coming, this will be another awesome power user tool. If you have a personal twitter and a twitter account for your blog, and your company, then you know managing multiple accounts can be hard. Having this in one place would be great.

TweetDeck is free (still in beta)

Eventbox

Twitterific and TweetDeck are single use applications, that is they work on Twitter and nothing else. Eventbox however is a multipurpose apllication.

EventBox interface

EventBox currently supports, Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr, Reddit, Digg and any RSS Feed (feed reader), it’s about managing your lifestream, rather than just your tweets.

As a native Mac OSX application EventBox is (IMHO) the sexiest application for twitter. It too separates out Replies and Messages from your Twitter Stream – making it super easy to reply to those communicating with you. It’s support for Flickr and other feeds is brilliant & I find having just one application rather than 3 to do the same job, just great.

I would like to have some of the advance features of TweetDeck, ie: ability to set up a search pattern for EventBox to find in incoming streams and separate out. Eg: find any mention of iPhone in incoming Flickr, Feeds or Tweets, and show in a group in left sidebar.

Summary

How you use Twitter is an intensely personal thing, each person will use it differently and as such the particular application they use will be that which best fits their Twitter style.

My thoughts are that Twitterific is ideal for those getting into Twitter with less than say 50 friends they are following. It’s simple no nonsense interface makes it super easy to use. For those who want to use Twitter for finding content, finding links, learning about how others are talking about them, their brand or their products, then TweetDeck is the application for you. It’s ability to group incoming tweets, or even to group search results based on particular criteria is almost unmatched in Twitter apps.

For me however the winner is EventBox, it’s elegant design blends in with other Mac apps It’s ease of use means using it is simple and effective & the fact that it manages more than just Twitter for me is the factor that pushes it over the edge in my book. Yes I’d love custom grouping & I’d love multi account support, but for now, EventBox is the Twitter App that will remain installed on my Mac (I’d best go buy it now ey!)

Links

• Twitter
• Follow Mr K on Twitter
• Twitterific Application (twittterific on twitter)
• TweetDeck Application (tweetdeck on twitter)
• EventBox Application (eventbox on twitter)

budurl – how & why

I’ve started using a URL shortening service called budurl.com recently to enable me to quickly and easily add short URL’s to Twitter. But budurl.com is more than that & I thought I’d show you a quick video taking a look at how & why I use budurl now.

You’ll see I’m starting to use the system more and more here on Studiowhiz, not just on Twitter.

Exploring BudUrl from Mr K on Vimeo.

Summary

There are many url shortening services out there, budurl.com is not the cutest, but I find it’s features are fantastic. What would make budurl even better would be a plugin for wordpress to auto-convert links in blog posts to make tracking outbound links easy.

Here are some others should you wish to try them

• budurl
• moourl
• tinyurl
• is.gd
• bit.ly
• tr.im
• shrinkify
• w3t
• shrunkin
• Shrinkster

Canned emails in Gmail

Gmail Labs keeps getting better and better. With new features being added here it’s a great way to keep the email landscape changing.

One of their new items is “canned email” which is a great way to cut down on the repetitive nature of replying to bulk email. If you find yourself often writing the same email response over and over, you can save this as a Canned Email, and then using Gmails filters you can automate the reply – or simply have Gmail preload the email for you to tweak and send.

Lets take a look at how this in action:

[vimeo width="600" height="500"]http://vimeo.com/2034416[/vimeo]

Downgrading Flash

Recently Adobe released the latest update to the flash player – something that was well overdue. However in doing so they have introduced new security features that means many sites do not work correctly with the Flash 10 player.

I found myself wanting to upload images to my local auction site, and videos to vimeo and neither work with the flash 10 player.

So I needed to find out how to downgrade. It’s actually surprisingly easy

• Using the Adobe Flash uninstaller remove flash from your machine
• Head to this page at Adobe and get the flash player you want
• Install

Done, that’s all there is too it.

Website owner?

If you are a website owner and you make use of YUI’s image uploader (which seems to be affected by this) Yahoo! have some tips for updating your site here on their support page.

MobileMe – an alternative?

I’ve had my iPhone for a while now and my really enjoying it. It’s a great little device, that seems to work as expected most of the time.

I was looking forward to it fully replacing my JasJam iMate and with the latest version of the OS having the phone at enterprise level got me excited. I could connect it to our work Zimbra server and sync contacts and more over the air.

Sadly there is an issue with the iPhone and Zimbra, so that’s not going to happen. No worries I thought, I can use something else to push my contacts, calendars and such like to the phone. After all I don’t “really” need to get work email on the phone all the time.

MobileMe

I joined up to MobileMe for the trial, and yeah okay so it kinda works the way you would expect it too.

MobileMe

It’s by no means quick, and instant syncing is not something that happens without some hacking in the OS for the settings. MobileMe’s “Automatic” syncing happens every 15 mins, which I guess is okay, I mean when do you really need to sync something instantly?

All in all it seems to work well. I can sync from my iPhone to MobileMe. From my Mac to MobileMe and then from my Mac to Zimbra using the ZimbraSync.

However having to spend around $120 (AUD$108) a year for the service I’m not too sure if I can justify that. It’d be grand when we have a decent machine at home and my wife can add diary events that sync to my computer/iPhone. But right now I’m having to contemplate replacing my truck that was stolen on friday, and the list of things at home that need replacing is getting bigger and bigger – including the kitchen sink.

So what alternatives are out there?

From what I can see, not a lot. Sure Yahoo Mail has a full push gateway which is great, if you use Yahoo Mail. Google’s Gmail doesn’t support push, and they don’t seem to have any plans to do so – which really sucks, considering their push into the enterprise market with Google Apps.

Sugar Sync

SugarSync is billed as a MobileMe replacement, but I’m not sure it really is.

SugarSync (click to visit sugarsync.com)

Their iPhone page begins with Push Sync for all your files, which after looking at their demo video is true. SugarSync seems to push file changes between PC, Mac and your iPhone. Wonderful for your documents, photos and such like. However there is no mention of true Push Sync – which is sync for your email, Calendars and contacts.

SugarSync also costs, upto US$250 a year so that’s off my list for now, for the fact that costs too much and doesn’t do what I want.

Funambol

Is also billed as a MobileMe replacement.

Funambol (click to visit funambol.com)

Now the thing here about Funambol is that it does actually sync your contacts with your iPhone – that’s great and it can sync with webmail and more. But for me soocial.com kicks it’s arse so hard it’s not funny. Funambol is let down by it’s clunky look and lack of push. soocial.com also lacks push and doesn’t have an iPhone app, but I’d rather use soocial.com anyday.

Summary

So what’s the answer? I have to say I just don’t know, I really don’t. What I want is a full replacement for MobileMe that allows me to push over the air calendars & contacts between my iPhone and my Mac. I may want to have email push, and having the ability to sync photos & files, well that’s a bonus but I’d rather use AirSharing for that.

What have I missed? Have you found an alternative? Do I really have to subscribe to MobileMe to do this?

Links

» MobileMe
» SugarSync
» Funambol
» Soocial.com

The iPhone – improvements needed?

I like my iPhone, really I do. I’ve had a number of phones in the past few years, some called phones, some called smart phones. None though have really captured my attention (nor yours) as much as the iPhone.

So, as I mentioned I do rather like my iPhone, however there are somethings that I feel could be tweaked, adjusted or simply changed to make the experience  just that much better.

Suggestion One:

The keyboard has been the item of much debate and all in all I quite like it. I do however have a couple of points that I’d like to change. I like to use the UK english keyboard, because we do spell things correctly (unlike my USA friends). However when I do this the $ is now 2 steps away from the primary characters, with the pound sign showing instead. This is annoying! Why can’t I have an Australian/New Zealand keyboard?

The other bizare thing that ticks me off is the fact that the space bar reverts the keyboard to characters. So if I’m typing in 10 000, you flip over to numbers, type in 10 and hit space and badda-bing you are back at the character set.

Where is the .co.nz or .com.au?

The last thing here I want to point out is again to do with the lack of a local dictionary. There is no option to have .co.nz as a domain shortcut. Why can’t I customise this list to domain types that I frequently use. I hardly ever use .net and .org and I don’t remember the last time I went to a .edu – so let me change it.

I would like to:

• have more english keyboards
• have the keyboard change only when I say “change”
• customise my .com shortcuts

Suggestion Two:

Auto-correct, is a nice feature but sadly it’s flawed, espcially for us here in New Zealand. Again what I’m about to say could be fixed with a localised keyboard/dictionary.

So lets say I’m typing an email and I want to tell you to visit http://www.finda.co.nz/ (disclaimer: I work here). So I begin typing, now as I get to the .nz part the iPhone thinks I want .ms – not sure why, but it does. So as I hit space or / or any other character it automatically changes the copy. I have to stop typing and click the X button to say no I don’t want this. Really really anoying.

It happens in TXT messages too. I often type “ey” as in “funny ey”. Well the iPhone likes to change that to eu, and so my friends are like “you are stoopid ey”.

I would like to:

• have an auto-correct that is location specific
• have an auto-correct that learns from your usage

Suggestion Three:

Camera features, or should I really say, photo features.

I'd like more options for the camera

The camera in the iPhone has been talked about enough – not enough resolution, better controls etc. I’m not going to talk about that. What I want is more Photo options. (although I would like a faster camera for taking shots of baby with)

I take a lot of photos of my darling little girl, along with various other shots. I use iPhoto (iLife ‘06) to take the photos off the iPhone and onto the Mac. I have the option to import all, import new (as in don’t duplicate) and delete all after import.

Well I don’t want to do that, I want to keep this cute photo, and that one .. and . … this one. But the rest can go. Why don’t I have the option either in iTunes/iPhoto or directly on the iPhone to select a handful of images and delete them?

At this stage it looks like I have to take all the images down to iPhoto, copy the ones I want to keep on my phone into my pictures library and have that sync back up to the phone – crazy.

I would like to:

• be able to select and delete multiple images on my iPhone
• be able to move images from the Camera Roll into my Photo Library for keeping, directly on the phone
• where is the video support (nuff said)

Summary:

I probably could go on and on, like many others do. All in all I do love my phone, it’s great for 90% of what I have to do. I do find myself checking gmail more on my phone now than on my Mac, I use Twitter from the iPhone almost exclusively now. I’ve bought Things so I can keep my task list sync’d with the Mac and I watch movies and listen to podcasts all the time.

There will never be a perfect phone, but I would like just some of the rough spots to be polished out a little more.

Bonus Comment:

Okay just one more … and it’s more to do with an Apple App rather than the phone. Apple Remote – fantasticly (useless) app for controlling iTunes over wifi. This is great if you want to drive your local version of iTunes, while not standing right by your computer. Great if you have say a Mac Mini set up as your home stereo or you are at a party and are playing DJ.

In the real world it’s pretty much a “show off” app. To me, what would make it a KILLER app, would be if it integrated with Keynote. See I’m speaking in a weeks time at an event, and I’ll be presenting using Keynote. I like to walk around when I talk – get out and amoungst the peoples. I need something to control Keynote from a distance & my iPhone would be perfect, except in Apple’s wisdom they don’t let the Bluetooth control work correctly (my old Sony had a cool bluetooth multimedia control option for Macs), and Apple Remote doesn’t support Keynote.

So I’m left looking into iPhone Remote or Remote Buddy that require using web & ajax to control Keynote – which is messy and frustrating!! *sigh*

Check out iPhonesource.org for more iPhone news & commets.

Portable apps

I did something today I haven’t done for ages and now I feel dirty. Not only did I do it once I did it again and again.

I downloaded windows software … Agggh.

At church I am taking over the multimedia system which sadly is a PC (because they didn’t take my recommendation for mac). The machine has issues and needs to be sorted out. So I decided that I would try out Portable Apps.

I will write later what the apps are but let’s just say I was surprised at the volume of portable apps for exactly this sort of reason.

I still feel dirty!