journal: toy

Saying Is Believing

By shempzilla, May 5, 2008

About a year ago, I wrote an article here on DT analyzing the high-def DVD war and predicting an eventual win for Blu-ray.  Despite the fact that I was completely and totally correct, I am not here to brag (although I won’t pass up the opportunity, either).  In the course of that article, I poked some fun at the world of technology analysts:

So, here’s the part where I play “tech analyst,” which is to say that I will make something up and present it to you as fact. I will even put it into blurb form so that newspapers can use it and quote me as an expert.

Ironically, it seems that this has worked far better than I had imagined.  For reasons I won’t get into, I was recently visiting the online directory site ZoomInfo.  While I was there, I decided to have a little fun and search for my own name, just to see what might come up.  Among the accurate results was this tidbit:

Now, to be fair, they use some kind of automatic crawler bot to aggregate a lot of their information, which appears to pretty much take at face value anything it is told.1…
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Who’d’a thunk it? Most facebook apps are pointless

By Nick, May 2, 2008

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. wtf

And besides, who visits Facebook to get anything done in the first place? raspberry


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Adobe Photoshop Express

By Liam, April 19, 2008

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

By Liam, April 13, 2008

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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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iPhone event roundup

By Nick, March 6, 2008

Earlier today Apple held an iPhone-oriented media event, covering topics including the iPhone in enterprise to the long-awaited SDK. Here are some of my initial thoughts on the announcements made today.

And yes, I wrote this as I followed the announcements, so they’re very, very early first impressions. wink

Enterprise

First of all, it seems strange to see Apple even discuss the enterprise market, considering their focus has been on the consumer for years and years. But considering almost every other smart phone out there is designed to be enterprise-friendly, it makes sense that Apple would do the same with the iPhone, especially since some corporate users are already using the iPhone.

Apple announced the addition of a good number of enterprise-friendly features for their next iPhone software, ranging from push email support and better calendar integration to better VPN support to the all-important Microsoft Exchange support. And as it turns out, Apple licensed the ActiveSync protocol for use on the iPhone. As Macworld reports, “With ActiveSync, the iPhone talks directly to Exchange. So the iPhone will get push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, global access lists, and remote wipe, all while talking to Exchange. And it’s built into the existing…
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