mip's scan

midweek update - the "day-late" edition

Hi all,
Busy week and a hectic day filled with chaos yesterday which prevented me from getting my podcast all wrapped up and available.  So I re-recorded it this morning to give you the mid-week update plus a day.  :-)

Join me in today's show where I talk about:

• Google Apps for Your Domain
• AllPeers
• Relate a cross platform test that I did in Parallels
• and shamelessly plug my mip teevee experiement

Thanks again for listening.  You can obtain today's show by clicking on the link below or subscribing to it in iTunes.

Download midweek_a_day_late.mp3

Do We Need This Many Flavours?

I recently sent Stephen Hayward over at Coffee Conversations an article about Starbucks and he did a post on it.  The article had an interesting theme of offering customers less choice.  The more choices you offer a customer, the less likely they are to buy.  The less choices you offer, the more likely they are to buy from you AND buy the items you most want them to buy.

So when I read this over on TechCrunch about Microsoft's pricing for various versions of their next generation OS Vista, I thought to myself....whoa...too many choices.  What do you think?

FULL versions (all prices Canadian)

    Windows Vista Ultimate $499

    Windows XP Professional w/SP2 $429

    Windows Vista Business $379

    Windows Vista Home Premium $299

    Windows Vista Home Basic $259

    Windows XP Home w/SP2 $259

    UPGRADE versions (all prices Canadian)

    Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade $299

    Windows XP Professional w/SP2 Upgrade $259

    Windows Vista Business Upgrade $249

    Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade $199

    Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade $129

    Windows XP Home w/SP2 Upgrade $129

Is It Just Me or Is Bloglines Broken?

I've been patient. 
I love using Bloglines.  It has always been my RSS reader of choice. 
It seems to have been having problems, but still I've been patient.

What I'm experiencing is this.  When I select a feed item from bloglines, let's say one of my feeds like Digg.com all my items become read.  That means that if there was an indicator that there were 10 new items, they all disappear.  That's ok...that is the way I set mine up.  Then as I scroll through articles, I have the choice to keep them new by checking a little box that says "Keep New".  This is a feature I've used a lot as it lets me keep an archive of items I may want to go back to in the future.  Well this is what seems to be broken.  For instance, when I look at my feeds now, Digg is showing that there are 0 new items and 27 old items that I've asked to "Keep New", but when I click on the feed all I see is an empty channel.  This is happening to many feeds where I've saved things.  It is very very frustrating. 

Is anyone else experiencing this behaviour?

If anyone from Bloglines is reading this, can you let us know if this is going to be fixed?

Desktopia

This is a fun one.  For those of you using a Mac (welcome by the way to those co-workers of mine who have recenly made the switch from a PC to a Mac) I've been using this awesome little application called Desktopia.  I had my Mac previously cycle through various pictures for my background image on my desktop.  There are so many beautiful background available that I liked to have them change throughout the day.  I had mine set to change hourly.

What Desktopia does is allow you to set the background image of your choice based on the time of day. This is pretty cool because it allows your desktop background image be reflective of the time of day.  For instance, my background image for just before 4am is showing a great picture I'd shot of our farm in the very very early morning.  Then my image for just after 6:30am is of a gorgeous sun rising over the lake.  So as the time changes throughout the day my background image changes as well. 

Ok, I admit, this is eye candy without any real value, but I must tell you that I find it interesting how you can gauge the general time of day just by glancing at the background image.   Most importantly, its fun and that is what part of using a Mac is all about. 

Google Apps

I knew this was coming. A lot of people did.  I'd signed up previously to beta test Gmail for corporate email and I waited.  I got approved.  And now Google has launched Google Apps for your Domain.  What does it mean?  To be honest, I haven't really managed to get my head around what this will mean.  Ok, before going too far on the "what does it mean" question, how about we start with a "what exactly is it" question first?

Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's website, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

My initial feel is - awesome.  Finally Google is making that move to establishing itself inside the enterprise.  They are offering Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Google Web Pages all for your domain.  That means you can have your corporate email now leverage Gmail rather than using for example Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes as your email platform.  Sounds intriguing.  But it is risky to get your toe in the water with this one.  You see, to do so, you need to modify what's known as an MX record so your emails to yournamehere@yourcompany.com will no longer go to your corporate email servers but to gmail.  That makes this service impossible to pilot because you can't take a handful of employees and move them to this service and see what they think.  There are ways around it but it isn't easy.  That will make this a huge stumbling block I think for Google to get this into companies.  Now CIO, CTO or Director of IT is going to risk moving all the corporate email to Gmail for your Domain as a pilot.  It ain't going to happen.

And so I find myself in an odd place in my thinking.  On the one hand I think that this is the future.  It moves towards this concept of a web based OS, a web-based suite of services that we can leverage from an device connected to the web.  On the other hand, it leaves you exposed, somewhat "losing control" of your data, your apps.  The inability to test this on a small scale first will make it hard to overcome that second set of feelings.

mip's midweek update - aug 23

Good evening everyone.  It is a late night edition of the mid-week update.  Thanks so much for joining the show where I cover off things like:

• my further experimentation of using video online with services like YouTube, Google Video and blip.tv and my new web property called mip tee vee
• Microsoft invites the firefox team to come out and work with them on getting Firefox Vista ready: what do I think that means?
• my experience over the past week in getting some Apple hardware deployed inside a mid-sized company - switching from the PC to Mac, things to consider with Parallels (like leveraging Bonjour to facilitate file sharing between the Mac OS and the guest Windows XP virtual machine)

Sounds like fun eh?  It is, so what are you waiting for, download the show and get listening.  You can click on the link below or subscribe to the mid-week update in iTunes.

Download midweek_august_23.mp3

TrafficLand - Canadian Beta Cities

I hate being stuck in traffic.  Who doesn't?  I've been waiting for a service like this one from TrafficLand which provides a visual of how congested our highways may or may not be.  Toronto is still a beta city but you can see the info regarding major highways like the 401.  Now of course this is similar to what we already have via the COMPASS Traffic Camera system, but TrafficLand promises to go beyond just finding a traffic camera on a map.  If you look at their services page, they are going to let users setup their own type of dashboard page with specific cameras grouped on the page.  Very nice.  The other thing they are doing is delivering the info to your mobile device.  That rocks!!  That is exactly where consuming that kind of info makes the most sense!  I love how real time data allows us to modify our behaviour - see a traffic jam 6 exists ahead, get off and take an alternate.   That is the downside to traffic reports on the radio.  Because they can't be heard "on-demand" you often hear them when it is too late!!  With near real time data available to a mobile device you can find out the traffic conditions well before you find yourself past the point of no return on the highway. 

Check out TrafficLand and you'll be home for dinner in no time.

Google Releases Writely

Remember Writely?  I wrote about it back in December of 2005 and then again when Google acquired them back in March 2006.  Well it seems that Google has opened up this good ajax-based online word processer to everyone now.  If you didn't have an account before, you can now register for one.  In my mind it is a bit disappointing that they haven't integrated the gmail-account-login-id-thing for access.  It still feels like it isn't a part of the Google family of tools.  That's not to say that what Writely currently is isn't good - I like it.  It is a good WYSIWYG editor, good for collaborating, able to post to blogs and accepts uploaded files from many formats including Word, PDF and PDF.  It is a solid online app, but it looks & feels completely different than Google spreadsheet.  In my mind, there needs to be some user interface synergies between these two applications like you find in an office suite like MS Office or OpenOffice.  If people need to learn different interfaces from tool to tool it makes it much harder to drive adoption. 

If you hadn't checked it out before, check it out now - you'll be surprised how robust a tool it is.

mip's midweek update - august 16th

August is more than half over...summer is winding down.  Boo-hoo.  Well, let's cheer ourselves up with some of my tech-experience antics shall we?!?!  Thanks for joining another show here at mip's scan and I've got an informative and entertaining one for you today.  Join me as I talk about:

• my OQO posting and what I think of YouTube as a tool for delivering video
• an update on BBTV now that I've been using it for a week
• after a long time of not talking about AJAX-style, flash-enabled online operating systems I talk about DesktopTwo which is similar to Goowy
• I relate a recent and very important experience with regards to using Parallels on a Mac to create and use Windows virtual machines.  If you are using Parallels or are planning to...then you must listen to this
• my thoughts on the Xbox360 encouraging and enabling the creation of "homebrew" video games

See I told you it was a fun filled show!  So get listening already.  Ha!  You can download today's show by clicking on the link below or subscribing to us in iTunes.

Download midweek_update_august_16.mp3

5 Days with The OQO

A co-worker of mine who recently acquired the OQO was kind enough to lend it to me.  I've carried it around for the past 5 days and here are my thoughts on this little device.  You can see me showing it off in the video clip below with my post continuing after that.

The OQO is a wonder in engineering devices that are small.  It is amazing how they've packed so much into this little device.  Despite that, there are some problems I find with the device but overall I was surprised by how much I enjoyed using it and found it an effective way to augment my computing use.  Let's look at the pros and cons that I found over my 5 day trial.