Cognited » Technology

CloudApp Brings Drag-and-Drop Cloud Uploads to the Mac – Amazing

Warren — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 07:05:23 +0000

DropBox rocks, but one thing it’s lacking is the ability to upload files and share them quickly. Yes, you can drop files into your public directory in DropBox, but then you have to go to your dropbox web interface, navigate to the file then select copy url location. Yeah, I know I’m splitting hairs, but if I can remove parts of my workflow to streamline file sharing I will!

Here’s one use case.
Select a song in iTunes or photo in iPhoto, hit keyboard shortcut, file uploads to Cloudapp, shortened URL is copied to your clipboard.

This works with any file on your mac under 50MB. WOW.

Check it out at getcloudapp.com

Posted via web from Warren’s posterous

I’m calling it now: The laptop starts dying tomorrow

Warren — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 08:24:17 +0000

via superamit.tumblr.com

I was just speaking about this with my cousin who made a very similar statement. A similar comparison would be te introduction and domination of laptop computers over desktops.

Before dismissing this claim as ridiculous. The current iPad is version 1, so do not be fooled by its current limitations. Doing so would be the same as ignoring the evolution of laptops from barely portable hunks of plastic to the elegantly designed aluminum MacBook Pro I’m using to write this post. But as Amit says “The laptop starts dying tomorrow” and I’m a believer.

Posted via web from Warren’s posterous

Skitch a free app for screen captures/screenshots

Warren — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:37:38 +0000

Applications like Skitch really spoil you. Taking screenshots is an easy task on the Mac. Command + Shift + 4 lets you take a screenshot of a specific area on the screen, while Command + Shift + 3 takes a screenshot of the whole display and pastes the image right on your dekstop. But when you want to share that screenshot with others, or mark it up, you have to start adding other applications to your workflow. Skitch puts an end to that. No longer a well kept secret, Skitch has been covered by many blogs and I suspect will not be in beta much longer. The product feels rather complete, despite the other competitors out there like Layers and littlesnapper. Both of these apps are stacked with more features than Skitch, but Skitch just works. If you want to take a screenshot, make some minor edits, mark it up a bit, and post it to the web all in one swoop, Skitch has you covered. I couldn’t imagine this workflow more economically streamlined. By the way, it’s free.

Xbox 360 gaining USB storage support in 2010 update — Joystiq

Warren — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:10:11 +0000

Xbox 360 gaining USB storage support in 2010 update

by Alexander Sliwinski

{ Mar 18th 2010 at 12:59PM }

Documentation obtained by Joystiq – and subsequently confirmed with two separate sources – reveals that “USB Mass Storage Device Support on Xbox 360″ will soon be a reality. The document, authored by a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, states that due to “increased market penetration of high-capacity, high throughput USB mass storage devices, a 2010 Xbox 360 system update” will allow consumers to save and load game data from USB devices.

via joystiq.com

Upon seeing the headline for this article I got really excited. The new Games OnDemand feature is cool, but without a robust storage solution it felt incomplete. Unfortunately, this is hardly a robust storage solution with a cap of 32GB storage.

Posted via web from Warren’s posterous

Skinput turns your body into a touch screen – Seriously

Warren — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:24:32 +0000

via news.com.au

There’s cool and then there’s cool but wildly strange. This would be the latter of the two. Even as the techie that I am, this strikes me as a bit strange. This is the bleeding edge technology that looks ridiculous now, but is a stepping stone to what will one day be a norm.

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Sigourney Weaver’s Stanford Avatar Shirt

Warren — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:34:16 +0000

via stanfordalumni.org

I’ve noticed more and more movies referencing Stanford which is pretty cool, and the latest, and perhaps most notable, is James Cameron’s “Avatar.” How many schools can say they’ve had a CGI blue alien/human hybrid synthetic lifeform wear their school colors? Yah Sigourney Weaver went to Stanford, so the film is biased, but if it wasn’t believable Cameron would have never had that in his film. Any true Entourage fan knows how anal James Cameron is when it comes to messing with his movies.

As a side note, did any other Entourage obsessors think about Aquaman at all while they were watching Avatar? My wife and I both couldn’t get it out of our heads, .

Posted via web from Warren’s posterous

Steve Ballmer hints at more Xbox form factors | VentureBeat

Warren — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:54:00 +0000

via games.venturebeat.com

I like to refer to the Xbox as Microsoft’s white knight. It’s the only product they produce that I really think is good through and through(minus the red circle of death of course). The user interface is quite usable indeed, and it doesn’t try to do too much while still bridging many different media services.

Posted via web from Warren’s posterous

Dear Armchair Product Managers, Facebook Ain’t Easy

Warren — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:55:17 +0000

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.

Tweetie, my savior from TweetDeck?

Warren — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:01:12 +0000

Why not just stick with TweetDeck?

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.

Giving Google Personalized Ads a shot

Warren — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:43:35 +0000

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.