I’m spending part of my morning looking through tech specs on various desktops and laptops for use as exemplars for our new building. Finding, deciding, and then sending links to our architects for the systems I’m interested in, so that they can track down heat loads and such for HVAC calculations.
Tell me…which of the following URLs shows a company that cares about User Experience:
Apple iMac
http://www.apple.com/imac/
I’ve been testing a new Google Reader app over the last few days called Reeder, and noticed a UI piece that I hadn’t seen before on the iPhone. Check these pics:
On the first one, check the small dot in the upper right. If you swipe it, it folds to the left and shows the text on the second pic. Swipe back, and it goes back to the standard connectivity/time message. This is the first time I’ve ever seen an app take over the title bar…some make it go away, but this is the first I’ve seen with this behavior.
Are there any others that do something similar? It says something about the tyranny of the Apple UI guidelines that this shocked me so much.
There, I said it. Zotero should warm the heart of any academic, but somehow it escapes me. I’ve been loath to admit it for a long time, especially since I was part of the beta, and tried it for a long time. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of tool that I should really love.
Except I don’t.
Why not? Well, after examining my prejudice, I came to one conclusion: I no longer have any patience with applications that are local. Unless the application I want AND my data live in the cloud, I just won’t use it. I’ve found myself, over the last 6 months to a year, moving nearly everything I do online. Documents are created with Google Docs, I prefer Gmail to any local mail client I’ve tried, heck, I’ve even started using Flickr’s editing deal with Picnik to do my photo edits, and I luuuuuuurve me some photoshop.
What’s up with this change? I really only use two computers; my work PC and my Macbook. It wouldn’t be that hard to use local programs, and sync my documents. The problem is that it’s any effort at all. Syncing my documents shouldn’t be something that I think about, it should just happen…Mac nearly has it right with their .mac syncing, but the PC world just doesn’t operate like that without some serious effort on the user’s part. If Apple would move hard into this space, perhaps with Google as a partner…I think they could revolutionize computing yet again, especially if they leveraged their media power as a part of the cloud storage.
But I digress…
After using Zotero for awhile, I found myself cursing the fact that I had two different databases of information…the “macbook” stuff and the “desktop” stuff. This is why the third lobe of my brain is del.icio.us…I don’t have to think about where I might need that information. It just goes to the cloud, and I pull it down no matter where in the world I may be. I know that Zotero has listed on it’s homepage:
Remote library backup
Shared collections
Access your library from anywhere via the web
Give me that, and maybe it becomes a tool that is useful to me. But until then, local just doesn’t cut it anymore.
My favorite iPhone reaction:
…but rockin’ on the blue note.
I’m going to miss my lime green iTunes icon…but the new blue makes up for it:
New iPods! New iTunes! Movies! The new iPod shuffle is seriously the size of a quarter…it’s amazingly tiny. And we’ve got a space jump up to 80Gig, which is double the storage of my 3rd gen iPod.
And the biggest thing isn’t even out yet…iTV, the much-rumored set-top box from Apple that will stream wireless video signals to your television.
Lots of questions, like: what codecs will the iTV support? Can I play my divx videos across it? Will it support 5-channel sound wirelessly?