VoIP & MSN on the iPhone!

What a great time to be getting on board… my new iPhone is ordered and will arrive on Monday. I can’t wait… and now I can’t wait *even* more. My one hold-back was no native solution for MSN chatting and VoIP was something that seemed as obvious a service to feature on a 600MHz processor-wielding phone as there is!

Now, on the very day that I ordered; this appears to solve all our VoIP and IM woes. I’ll be sure to post a review of that and other things iPhone some time after Tuesday when the initial excitement decays.

Photo courtesy of Engadget, Video after the break!

Chris

What our industry needs

Two words: Editorial & Accountability.

There are hundreds of ‘blogs’ out there, 99% of which report the exact same stories, sometimes with a slightly different twist, or humour added, but rarely is there any editorial added; a dialogue that transcends the facts and places the pieces together to make sense of the story in context.

I feel the urge too; to copy and paste an Engadget story, add that joke that you think makes it funnier, wittier, better, and then post it up. It’s easy & it’s fun, but it adds nothing (well little) to the sum total of information out there.

When I started to create this blog I thought that I would try to use the fact that I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years of my life both involved and deep in reading of the technology industry to create this editorial that I feel that technology so needs. I don’t know how well I’m doing; scanning the main page there’s a mixture of editorial pieces and ‘replogs’ (replicated blog posts).

Speak of the Devil, and the devil he doth appear

I posted earlier on poorly designed error messages and the very next message I opened rewarded me with this error message.

A brilliant error message I’m sure you’ll agree; telling you nothing of the problem nor giving you any suggested course of action to solve it!

I think that’s been in Outlook Express for 7 or more years now and has managed to migrate on to Windows Live Mail. Congrats MS!

Chris

*Edit: didn’t it have the title ‘Error’ too in Outlook Express?

Microsoft Update pushes 10 updates this Tuesday

I turned my computer on yesterday to find a barrage of updates from MS Update… you can see this both ways.

a. It’s great they maintain their products
b. How do they find so many updates each week; and also why do we wait (at worst) a week for an update that’s done?

To be fair, in a world of broadband, 10 updates totalling 36MB took no more than ~1 minute, although anyone on a dial-up must have real problems keeping a Windows Vista / Office 2007 combo up to date!

Chris

Wonderful Success Message

Error messages have gotten a lot of flack over the years for unintuitive wording or programatic creation (causing odd succesions of phrases to the effect of ‘there was an error’) to which all you can reply is ‘okay’ implying that somehow it is acceptable for the computer to erase all your data. Today, however, a new level of brilliance was achieved by a success message; a friend of mine is building a download manager that reports:

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris

Tips for a succesful startup

I came across a guide to creating a successful startup today and it makes an interesting read. Any of you budding entrepreneurs should definitely check it out! I know I’ll be bookmarking it for reference.

Tips include using Macintosh computers to save on IT department costs, free in-house lunches to simulate meetings and purchasing a professional coffee machine to save on coffee-trip time(I don’t need to be told that one twice!).

Find it over on calacanis.com.

Chris

Windows Vista + Windows Onecare = A girl’s best friend?

In a desperate attempt to replace Beach House Barbie on top of the most wanted list for young girls toys, Microsoft has (apparently) decided to grace its Japanese customers with a Pink-boxed bundle of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Live Onecare.

The competition commission should be interested, as they are blatantly using their supremacy in the Operating System market to get a hold on the young-girls’ toy market.

(I also feel there’s a joke about ‘If apple can make pink stuff, so can we’ somewhere. Suggest yours in the comments…)

Chris

*thanks to istartedsomething for the heads-up

 

Mahalo : Best Fictional Brands

Mahalo has posted an interesting (and somewhat comprehensive) list of the best fictional brands as featured on Television.

http://www.mahalo.com/Best_Fictional_Brands

Mahalo is a project by Jason Calacanis seeking to hand-index the web relying on both the work of a strong in-house team and the community to create a search engine that provides reliable results that make sense to people, not web crawlers.

If you like Mahalo, you can get involved using the Mahalo Toolbar or join the Greenhouse to begin contributing; if you write a page, you will even get paid!

Check it out…

Chris

 

*Edit: this post got featured on Mahalo’s Press Coverage page.

Apple’s EULA Paradox

Today Neowin reported on a slight paradox in the Apple EULA for Safari which states “…may be installed on one Apple-branded computer”.

A slight irony considering the recent controversy regarding Apple’s pushing Safari to all (now EULA-violating) iTunes users.

Made me laugh…

Chris

Brand Awareness

There was once a time that you (I would say ‘I’, but alas, I’m not old enough) could go to a store and purchase a pair of Wharfedale speakers and know that you were getting a quality piece of audio equipment. This was the same day that you could also purchase a Sony television and know that it would contain a well-engineered tube and a NAD amp safe in the knowledge that, well, it would actually work (personal experience).

While most of those above statements may be true some of the time and some of the above statements true most of the time; all of the above statements are never true all of the time (I think  Abraham Lincoln said that…).

We’ve now entered an age that due to a system of supply and demand, all brands have found it more profitable to produce products to compete in all areas of the market. This isn’t an inherently bad thing; I agree that competition in all areas is a good thing, that a large player entering a lower-key market will most likely serve to raise the quality bar in that market and that a company exists to make money; so of course they should take whatever course of action leads to the best return. The very fact that they’re producing the product for any ‘class’ of the market makes it dramatically cheaper to compete in lower or higher priced electronics in the same area.