I recently took up a job that required me to put down my Mac during work hours. Fortunately, I don’t have to fight with Vista or settle for the outdated Windows XP, as Vista came preinstalled on my new soulless Dell. The setup includes dual 22&24 inch monitors, plenty of RAM, and a Nvidia Video Card more than adequate for gaming.
A Layer of Insulation
I brought in my Logitech MX Revolution mouse, Apple Aluminum Keyboard, and Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones to keep me at arms reach from the less than enchanting Dell hardware. This should give me a nice buffer until I can get reacquainted with Windows. Its been a while. I’m going to keep an open mind, and my first impression is “Windows 7 isn’t that bad at all.” The look and feel of the interface is pleasant enough, although not always usability focused. I’ll get more into my first 2 weeks with Windows 7 in my next post.
As a product guy, I do feel the need to stand up for Facebook. They take a lot of bashing from the media for their UI. I myself am guilty for bashing Facebook’s UI/UX, but they have a long laundry list of requirements. Not to mention their user profiles are quite diverse. They have user feedback pulling them in a million different directions, and then there is the other 98% of users that don’t explicitly say anything. Their actions must be measured, translated, and digested for their product team to act. So next time you think about saying “Man Facebook’s UI sucks,” think again. A 200 million user base didn’t show up due to lack of options.
Despite Facebook’s dominance there is room for innovation in the social network space. Facebook is winning the game, but it has not won it. They aren’t happily sitting back with their lead in the space. Their product serves a need, but it is far from perfect and they are well aware of it. Social networking is still in its infancy stages despite its adoption rate.
In regards to competition, I do like Virb’s look and feel, but it does leave me wanting feature wise. I’ll save my thoughts on Virb for another post.
Why A few weeks I go posted a tweet about hoping that the iPhone app Tweetie would be ported to an OS X desktop application. It’s not a secret that I have a love-hate relationship with TweetDeck. I like its functionality, but the UI and UX is suboptimal. Not to mention the memory leaks can end up with 1GB of lost RAM. I must say, every Adobe AIR app I’ve ever used suffers from this issue. Come to think of it, every application from Adobe on my comps (including the entire Creative Suite) is a resource hog. At any rate, this is what ultimately led to a mission to replace TweetDeck. Tweetie is not my first attempt to dethrone TweetDeck from ruler of my tweets. Last week I was giving Nambu a shot. Unfortunately, the stability of that application was questionable. However, it’s a beta release so I will give it another shot in a few weeks.
Too early to tell, but its looking good
At the request of the developers, I won’t disclose much information, but I will say that it does have promise. I’ve had the application open all day and its using up a total of about 30MB of RAM. I’ve got 4GB so that is an insignificant amount. Its responsive and easy to manage. Animations are cool and the UX is where it needs to be for a Twitter application. A big sell point for me is being able to track conversations/threads. Not sure why every Twitter app doesn’t have this, but its a great feature. There are many other cool features that I won’t hit on just yet. I will be sure to publish a more comprehensive review once I get the OK from the developers. For now it will serve as my new Twitter client for the Mac.
My biggest standing question:
What mix of content and profile-based targeting will be used to target me ads?
My doubts
I’m not a fan of preference based content or ad targeting. I think it will only be effective in a “beats a blank” scenario. This is when the ad or content targeting engine has no idea what to target me, which basically means it has no context of my visit. This should be a rare phenomena since I usually enter a site through a link from Twitter, Google Search, or a news feed from my Pageflakes page. My destination is almost always not the front door, aka www.site_name_goes_here.com. This means that with the right technology, my context can almost always be identified.
Profile-based targeting done right
I must admit though that I do like the way Google is going about this profile based ad targeting. It’s transparent and easy to opt out.
Google should stick to it’s Ace in the Hole: Context
Google has one thing that everyone wishes they had, context. Google knows exactly what context their users are in after a search is submitted. So will Google target me primarily on context and fallback on my profile preferences when context is not available? That is what I hope to answer with this experiment. Stay tuned, but if you have an experience with this new initiative from Google, please post in the comments below.
I remember when $100 could barely by a low capacity slow hard drive. This was not even a decade ago. I was reading an article on Seagate’s latest innovation in data storage technology and I came across this ad:
Ensuring that customers get the highest value out of your products keeps them happy and coming back for more. This of course is assuming that you aren’t asking for another large sum of cash for this value maximizing. Well Best Buy is doing just that. They are charging their customers a whopping $300 to perform “calibration techniques” on purchased HDTVs to ensure that customers who purchased HDTVs get the best picture quality. There is some validity in this service as it is important to calibrate your TV’s picture quality, but $300 dollars is a pretty steep price.
Get it for FREE!
If you want to get the most out of your TV, but you DON’t want want to fork over your savings to Best Buy, check out the AVSForums. This site has been around a long time, and has a ton of audiophiles and videophiles. If you have a question about your specific model, just post a question and usually you’ll get an answer quickly. Chalk another one up for Wisdom of the Crowd.
Will this battle ever get old? I think not. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of beef between the two camps, and people keep creating flammable content to feed the fires of war. Best of all is the creative stuff. The Mac Vs. PC music video was great, but this is taking it to another level. I’m not sure how long it takes to put something like this together, but its surely not a project to take lightly. These guys did a great job. I look forward to the sequel.
As a recommendation system geek at Baynote, I always love to see funny product recommendations. I loved the “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay” write up a few years back. Most of the wacky recommendations I have seen has been from Amazon. I’m not sure if that’s a function of their methodology or popularity. Here’s the latest I saw on a blog post:
For those of you non-gamer geeks out there, Neverwinter nights is a medieval fantasy game with a very similar look to that of Lord of the Rings. Not exactly a close match to “Paws and Claws: Pampered Pets.”
If anyone has had any funny or strange recommendations, please let me know!
Typically the hardware I buy has many bells and whistles. I love products that can do a lot of things very well. My iPhone is not an exception to the rule, but the Flip MinoHD is. Unlike the iPhone, the Flip MinoHD does just one thing really well, and thats OK with me. It takes great movies without a lot of fuss. I love intuitive interfaces, and thats what this camcorder has, and not much else.
Here are a few reasons why I love it:
The smaller the better. The form factor is very similar to a candy bar cell phone. It slips right into your pocket or, in my case, my wife’s purse. It claims to be the world’s smallest HD camcorder weighing in at only 3.3 ounces.
Simple & Intuitive. There is no menu system to get lost in, and no need for explanation. I picked it up and immediately knew what to do to get it going. You power it on with a power button on the side and hit the big red button to record. The other controls are primarily for playback.
No wires or loose parts. For someone who has a serious problem with misplacing wires, this is a great feature. With the press of a button, a USB adapter pops out of the top of the camcorder for immediate use. I know there are some people that like expandable memory and removable batteries, but I am not one of them. It has 4GB of flash memory and a rechargeable battery built in.
OK, this is more of a assumption than a fact. If one plotted revenue and development time on an app, the
I’m Rich” app would have the highest profit margin of all. I don’t know how many apps were sold, but at least one is believed to be on a special iPhone. Here’s the “proof”:
I feel for this poor guy, but thats a pretty creative way to make a buck. I’m sure there are plenty of individuals out there looking to make a point with a thousand bucks just laying around. With that said, shame on you developers for trying to take advantage of us Apple Fanboys.
Updated!
According to the LA Times, 8 people purchased the “I am Rich” app. $8,000 for a few minutes of coding? Sounds like a win to me.
I recently took up a job that required me to put down my Mac during work hours. Fortunately, I don’t have to fight with Vista or settle for the outdated Windows XP, as Vista came preinstalled on my new soulless Dell. The setup includes dual 22&24 inch monitors, plenty of RAM, and a Nvidia Video Card more than adequate for gaming. 
Ensuring that customers get the highest value out of your products keeps them happy and coming back for more. This of course is assuming that you aren’t asking for another large sum of cash for this value maximizing. Well Best Buy is doing just that. They are charging their customers a whopping $300 to perform “calibration techniques” on purchased HDTVs to ensure that customers who purchased HDTVs get the best picture quality. There is some validity in this service as it is important to calibrate your TV’s picture quality, but $300 dollars is a pretty steep price. 
Typically the hardware I buy has many bells and whistles. I love products that can do a lot of things very well. My iPhone is not an exception to the rule, but the 
The smaller the better. The form factor is very similar to a candy bar cell phone. It slips right into your pocket or, in my case, my wife’s purse. It claims to be the world’s smallest HD camcorder weighing in at only 3.3 ounces.
Simple & Intuitive. There is no menu system to get lost in, and no need for explanation. I picked it up and immediately knew what to do to get it going. You power it on with a power button on the side and hit the big red button to record. The other controls are primarily for playback.
No wires or loose parts. For someone who has a serious problem with misplacing wires, this is a great feature. With the press of a button, a USB adapter pops out of the top of the camcorder for immediate use. I know there are some people that like expandable memory and removable batteries, but I am not one of them. It has 4GB of flash memory and a rechargeable battery built in.
