journals
A quick look at Times 1.0
If there’s one product category where there is no shortage of options for Mac users, it’s newsreaders. NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsLife, and company are being joined by Times, a newsreader that takes a different approach.
Many of the existing newsreaders approach news feeds like an email client handles emails: you have a list of headlines and you click on each headline to read on. For the most part, these newsreaders do what they do well.
Times approaches feeds differently. Times looks and feels less like a desktop app, and more like a physical newspaper. The result is a newsreader that, like a newspaper, allows you to quickly glance over the headlines and article blurbs all at once. So how well does it work? Let’s find out.
The main Times window. The page headers in blue indicate new
unread articles. Click thumb for full-size image.
Times’ user interface isn’t exactly standard, but it isn’t overdone either. The visual effects are subtle natural extensions of the user interface. And the non-standard interface reinforces the newspaper metaphor that Times uses, which works well for more visual people.
By default, Times breaks down articles into five “pages” — World, Technology, Science, Entertainment, and Sports. You…
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Who’d’a thunk it? Most facebook apps are pointless
According to a recent study, most Facebook apps are pointless silly time-wasters, according to a CNET blog post. The blog post cites a new study from Flowing Data, which tabulated the nature of the 23,000+ Facebook applications. Roughly 9600 are categorized as “Just for Fun,” while many more are labeled as “Gaming,” “Sports,” “Chat,” and other productivity-killing categories.
Now wait just a second. Why on Earth did Flowing Data research the number of pointless Facebook apps? Anyone who has spend any time on Facebook and has been bombarded with endless application invitations could tell you that most Facebook apps are pointless. A pointless survey on the pointlessness of Facebook apps. Hard to believe someone actually got paid for that. 
And besides, who visits Facebook to get anything done in the first place? 
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Adobe Photoshop Express
Adobe Flex is a Flash-based user interface builder and scripting language, and Adobe’s contribution to Macromedia’s Flash technology. Adobe is faced with a problem, however; although many companies are buying in to Flex for creating web interfaces, people just aren’t as excited about the possibilities of Flex than they are, say, about AJAX. At present, most of the web applications that are making headlines are ones that aim to replace their desktop-based brethren. Most of these applications, such as all of the Google applications, are built on technologies like AJAX. Few are using Flex for these purposes, and because Flex, in conjunction with Adobe’s Integrated Runtime, is essentially positioned as the next generation of Flash. Adobe, of course, would like to change that.
Thus, they created Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express (or Px, as the favicon will tell you,) is actually an online-photo manager similar to Flickr or Picasa Web Albums. You upload your photos, organize them, touch them up, and then share them. Besides being built entirely on Flash, the major talking point of Px is the photo editing functionality, which provides a few nice features not found in other services. Though currently in beta, anyone who wishes may sign…
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Quick Tip: Improve Locate Me’s Accuracy
>The iPhone’s map application got a poor substitute for a GPS chip when the 1.1.3 firmware update was launched, and iPod touch owners got that same poor substitute in the January Software Upgrade, which I noted in that review places me right in America’s Heartland - I obviously live in America’s Bowels, thank you very much.
The problem is that the Locate Me feature works by detecting all WiFi hotspots (and cell towers on an iPhone) and running that against a list maintained on the servers of Skyhook Wireless. The process to build this database is essentially wardriving, and is a very time-consuming and location-limited process. Thus, if you happen to live in an area where the WiFi hotspots are all residential ones, the chances of being correctly located are slim. This issue is exacerbated for iPod touch users, who don’t have the luxury of cell towers, which have a much higher range than WiFi access points.
Someone at Skyhook evidently realized the problem. He probably asked, “Why pay for people to drive around and map hotspots when people will give us that information for free on the internet?” As a result, this page was created. You simply find…
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Blogging may be hazardous to your health?
The New York Times posted an article discussing stress-related health issues that can go along with professional blogging.
At least one blogger, Marc Andreessen, ridiculed the New York Times article. Marc, buddy, I think you missed the point. As someone who has blogged prolifically for the past few years, I can tell you that the New York Times article isn’t necessarily that far off the mark.
First of all, the Times article isn’t saying that “Blogging causes death.” No, what they’re saying is that highly-competitive blogging can cause heavy stress. Heavy stress can lead to health problems, some of which—such as heart attacks—can lead to death.
Let’s think about the real idea behind the article before shooting off about it on a blog next time.
Many bloggers today put themselves under a shitload of stress. As a blogger for DT, I’m not as hard core as some are, but I can tell you that I’ve suffered under the stress of blogging too. I’ve deprived myself of sleep. I’ve suffered burnout. I put DT before studying as a college student; it showed in my grades, and now I regret it. At times DT became an obsession, and I just coudn’t handle…
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more stuff
- A quick look at Times 1.0
- Who’d’a thunk it? Most facebook apps are pointless
- Adobe Photoshop Express
- Quick Tip: Improve Locate Me’s Accuracy
- Blogging may be hazardous to your health?
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