The mystery of the famous Silverback app that nobody knew what it did is finally over. A post in their blog says this:
You can test your websites anywhere, without having to lug microphones or video cameras around. You could pop into Starbucks with your Macbook and run a usability test with a click of your fingers. You’ll keep your testers happy too — no need to wave a camera in their face or keep the microphone close to hand. In fact, for them it’s no different to using the web as they would anyway.
I’ve already signed up for the beta, and you can to at the link below.
(Via Silverback App.)
Many have complained about the facebook chat, while other think it’s just awesome(couldn’t find a link for this post…lol). I don’t really care much about it to feel strongly either way, but do think there might be some serious consequences down the road.
The whole purpose of a social network is to keep in touch with friends(social graph) in an unintrusive way. After you’ve added a friend to your network, it is up to you how much you want to interact in the site. For years(no more than 4), people have created events, wall posts, groups, and even messages to interact with their social graph. These are all “structured data”. They are easily searchable by the community and interactions are opt in, just like email. Email is “trackable” in your home page through feeds(just like an inbox) and responses are asynchronous. This means you answer/interact when you want, in you own time.
With the introduction of Facebook Chat, people no longer have a choice on whether to opt in, since they are getting messages once they log in. What I think will happen is that people might stop using some of the services like wall posts or creating events for small stuff since they can just chat it.
I know I might be exaggerating a bit with the “death of structured data” title and all, but really: do we need another IM protocol? I already have Adium set up to handle 2 Gtalk accounts, MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Bonjour. This is just cruel to users, who are probably already using their IM client/protocol of choice while visiting facebook.
Where does the policing stop and the great user experience start web TV show? NBC is already giving the TV shows for “free” on TV. Why not have a version with ads put up on the torrent sites and profit from that as well as iTunes sales(at a reasonable price). I would love to see a TV studio do that. There are over 1 million downloads per week on sites like mininova.org for shows like Prison Break. Why not get into it. Make it easy for your viewers to get their hands on their content and watch it wherever they want. Get a cut from national advertisers on shows that are put on torrents, just like streaming shows of their sites. Instead NBC want to take the bumpy road and resist change:
Since Apple already embeds digital rights management (DRM) software within each audio and video file it sells, it appears that Kliavkoff is requesting that the company go a step further and police every piece of digital media a user imports into his or her iTunes library, regardless of its origin.
How stupid are they and when will this crazy thing stop?
Since MediaTemple’s Grid Service started suffering outages, I started using downforeveryoneorjustme.com to check my website availability.
I know they are not indestructible, but the irony of them being down when I wanted to check if my site was down, left me wondering where can I check to see if downforeveryoneorjustme.com is down so that I can test my site? duh
(By the time I finished writing this post their site was already up and running, but mine wasn’t).
(this is probably the dumbest article I’ve written here)
Since the iPhone was announced people have been criticizing all the different features or lack of and defended contenders like the Blackberry or N95. Apple has followed every single request and obeyed in promptly fixing everything:
-Price too high: cut after just 3 months
-No 3rd party applications: SDK announced shortly after, released in March and apps in June
-No corporate features like the Blackberry: all coming in the upcoming 2.0 release expected in June
-No MS Exchange support: Also part of the 2.0 release
-Space too small when compared to the touch: there is now a 16GB version and probably a bigger soon
-Battery life: I’ve honestly have had no issue with this
-Screen scratching: before the actual release in June, they changed it to a special glass. Also no problem here.
-No 3G: According to new rumors, this should be in place within two months
If you look at early reviews they all criticized the lack of some or all of the features above. Apple has addressed or is planning on addressing them sometime in the near future(within two months). They have probably been reading blogs and reviewers and providing that feedback to engineering. So in part this is the only phone out there by the people, for the people out there.
Once 3G and v2.0 are out, what excuse will people make up next?
Dev Corvin from the beta guy claims to have an exclusive on Windows 7:
In Windows 7, Microsoft will break from the Windows’ norm by breaking previous API compatibility, offering new API frameworks as a native solution, and providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL, .NET Framework, etc) through monolithic libraries designed to provide the functionality of all previous revisions of the modules in question.
If this is true Microsoft would be taking another play from Apple’s playbook(Remember Mac OS 9 to X transition and emulation?).
So just to summarize recent Redmond photocopies:
-Microsoft buys Bungie to get exclusive Mac game: Halo
-Zune copies iPod model after their Play For Sure fails
-Vista copies Tiger’s feature(Dashboard, Spotlight, Expose, Aqua, etc)
-Windows legacy emulation in Windows 7 just like the Mac.
-There is probably more but I suck for memory stuff
P.S. I don’t care who this Corvin guy is, (found him on Techmeme). I was just looking for an excuse to trash talk at Microsoft after Friday’s letter. What pisses me off the most is that the letter was sent on Friday afternoon, in order to hurt Yahoo’s stock on Monday heavily as a form of punishment. That just being assholes.
To Microsoft: Don’t mess with the Valley cause they’ll get you!
Ryan Kuder is up and running with his new blog at www.ryankuder.com. Being an ex-Yahoo Marketing guys with tons of experience, his blog is bound to have interesting insights:
I plan to write about social media and marketing, people and companies, things I like and things I don’t.
He is an article on him from the L.A. Times.
Playboy.com’s iPhone website just launched. Judging by the screenshot it’s more of a guy’s portal than a pr0n site.
Missing: Sports scores(hopefully Colombian Soccer) and games!
(Via TechCrunch.)
John Gruber has written an interesting post on the future of Adobe Carbon apps and their lack of 64 bit support because of what seems like time constraints and a whole lot of work:
If Apple had shipped Leopard with the 64-bit Carbon support promised at WWDC 2006, Photoshop CS4 would run in 64-bit mode on the Mac.
The unfortunate coincidence is that WWDC 2006 — when 64-bit Carbon was announced — was right around the time when Adobe was hitting the home stretch on CS3 and planning for CS4. (Photoshop CS4 is currently in beta testing, and so the CS4 suite is probably slated to ship soon-ish.) If Apple had announced then that the only 64-bit path was going to be Cocoa, would it have made a difference? It probably wouldn’t have made a difference for CS4, given that it was only nine months, but it would saved Adobe nine months of wasted time.
This all comes at a time when Photoshop CS4 was announced to support 64-bit in Windows but not Mac OS X. The real interesting though that proves that some companies release stuff just because they can, rather than because they should:
It’s also the case that unlike Leopard, which is a single OS that can simultaneously run both 32- and 64-bit apps natively, Windows Vista comes in wholly separate 32- and 64-bit versions. And as far as I can tell, the vast majority of Windows users use the 32-bit version. (If anyone can find market share information regarding 64-bit Vista, please let me know.)
(Read full article at Daring Fireball.)
