So, after a slight delay, the great Apple tablet launched in Canada today.
Now, I could go off on a rant about openness, Apple’s App Store policies, Adobe Flash and all that stuff but I might as well just come out and tell the truth.
I’m broke!
As for anything else I can say on this topic, Quinn Norton already said it better.
So, here’s another application that has become a must have for me: DropBox.
It creates a DropBox directory and putting files will automatically upload them to a remote server.
Now, there are more than enough online services that do this – what makes DropBox so special?
If you install it on another computer and enter your account info, it will automatically synchronize all those files. So, if I make any changes to a document on my laptop, those changes will be there on my desktop computer as soon as it connect to the Internet.
Now, sure, for an article draft I could just use Google Docs, but with DropBox I can use whatever word processor I choose and the files will be there on any computer I want to access them from.
Plus, saving important files to the directory on my hard drive is easier than remember to do regular back-ups (though, those should be done anyway.)
For free customers, DropBox offers 2 gigabytes of storage space but If you sign up for the service through this referral link, you’ll get an extra 250 megabytes of storage space (and so will I!)
Ah, outliners. The poor forgotten class of software.
At one point in time, there were programs like Ecco Pro and Symantec GrandView that allowed you to organize ideas (or articles) in a hierarchy, expanding and collapsing piece of text and moving them around until they made sense.
These days (at least on Windows) you’ve got Microsoft Word’s Outline View and not much else to choose from.
Although I’m weary about web applications, I am intrigued by Thinklinkr (though I’m pretty sure the Web 2.0 “drop a vowel” naming scheme is a little outdated at this point…)
Thinklinkr opens up, giving you a page to write on like a word processor, but each sentence or paragraph and can have a child section attached to it, which in turn have it’s own child section and so on.
So far the features are pretty bare bones for outlining. For example, I don’t immediately see a hoist function (pulling up one paragraph and it’s children by themselves,) but it does have a lot of keyboard shotcuts, helpfully shown at the bottom of the interface.
However, what Thinklinkr lacks in outlining functionality, it does seem to make up in collaborative features.
The systems allows more and one person to work on the same outline and includes a chat window.
That said, when it comes to web based collaboration, they’re facing heavy competition from Google Wave.
But it is nice see someone doing something new in the outliner space.
Last week, Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by making the game playable from the main search page.
Well, time management software maker RescueTime crunched the numbers.
According to the company’s calculations, users spent a combined 4,819,352 hours on Google’s search page on May 23rd.
Now, assuming the average Google user’s time worth $25/h, that comes out to $120,483,800 in lost productivity.
All that said, calculations like this to tend to annoy me since they assume every single one of those people would have been doing something productive instead of playing Pac-Man.
Still some fun stats, though.
Writing syllables
Nothing to do but write post
Since LOST is over
Ah, Craigslist rants and raves.
While it is frequently a great window into human stupidity, there are some true gems in there that end up in the “Best Of” section.
Today I’d like to highlight a rant in February written by someone whose been unemployed for the past two years in response to his Alma Matter’s request for donations.
While this is about American universities, I think the sentiment echoes that of a shocking amount of people who’ve been through higher education no matter where they live.
Maureen Tkacik has an incredible piece examining modern journalism and “personal branding” in the Columbia Review of Journalism.
Quinn Norton looks back at 1980s software piracy scene
And The Onion brings us news a new social networking app that…ah, forget it.
Pac-Man, the iconic yellow circle that runs through mazes gobbling up white pills, saying nothing more than “waka waka,” while being pursued by ghosts turns 30 today.
The game spawned sequels, a cartoon show and even a breakfast cereal!
As one of the the most recognizable video game brands, Pac-Man in a way came to be a symbol for video games in general.
I think the best celebration of Pac-Man’s birthday I’ve seen has to Google’s. As of this writing, if you go to the main Google page, you can play the game right there, in your browser.
Happy Birthday, you little yellow pill junkie!
So, in 2007, I Can Has Cheezburger? was launched and those involved made buckets of money.
Turns out, lots of people wanted a central site to get their fix of cat pictures with amusing captions.
Now there are 50 sites in the network, all acting as repositories for amusing pictures.
I’m suddenly left to wonder, how far can this go?
Probably further, as I now confess, I almost didn’t get this post up before midnight due to wasting time on Bob’s House of Video Games.
*sigh*
I think my favourite Microsoft product is actually one of their free offerings.
Essentially, it’s a word processor for bloggers. You enter your blog’s URL and your password and you’re ready to go.
Open it up (it loads pretty quickly on all my computers,) write then post. Done.
It pulls in your blog’s theme, so it’s a real WYSIWYG environment. I’ve also found adding pictures to a post much easier using Live Writer than any blog CMS I’ve tried.
Oh yeah, and since it’s a desktop application, I can write posts offline and publish them once I have a connection.
And no, I don’t work for Microsoft, nor are they paying me for this. It just happens that this is an incredibly useful application.
