I’m learning a few things about Macs these days, and one of them is that free blogging clients are not quite as easy to find as they are for Windows. Marsedit, one of the major options available through the App Store, costs the best part of 30 pounds!
Thanks to the WordPress Codex, though, I’ve found Qumana. Nowhere nearly as powerful as Windows Live Writer and I need to work out the keyboard shortcuts… but its a start, and free!
We should have recovered from the migration issues I mentioned recently now, so thanks for bearing with me.
I introduced Amanda to Evernote today whilst kicking off the gargantuan list of things we want to achieve whilst I’m off on sabbatical. She’s generally a propoenent of pen and paper when it comes to this sort of thing but the write once / have anywhere nature of Evernote appealed.
I have a feature request, though: please can you integrate with Google Docs so I can share an individual ‘note’ with someone else, preferably without forcing them to sign up to Evernote themselves? Would be a nice feature.
I’m dealing with some jetlag after the flight back to the UK so an increased rate of bloggery will return soon. Have a couple of queries out about Outcasts given the massive interest I’ve had in my posts about it, however neither the BBC nor Kudos TV are currently responding to me, so it might be a while…
Given the ludicrous traffic levels I’ve had over the last few weeks I’ve been a bit more than usually interested in my traffic stats, and check both Google Analytics and WordPress.com stats (enabled via a plugin) to get a sense of what people are reading. A bug disabled the WordPress stats and a forum post suggested I email WordPress support – which I duly did, received prompt, polite, accurate responses from a few admins there, and was pointed in the direction of a new plugin set – Jetpack.me – which adds an HTML5 stats dashboard (checkable on iPhone/iPad) and a bunch of other features to a WordPress self-installed edition, powered by the cloud – including URL shortening, sharing tools, embed tools and more.
Good on ya, WordPress folk – thanks! And if you run a WP self-install, you should check out Jetpack – a very useful package!
There are a few features I’d like Google Reader to get that go beyond what the nice people at Lifehacker did with Better Greader. If you’re reading, Google, here’s what I’d like:
Anytime you have a spare 20%, please…! Any more for any more….?
Other than moderate contempt for Internet Explorer, which I’ve found to be slow, tedious bloatware since about IE4, I’ve always tried to be even handed in recommending browsers to people. “Try Chrome or Firefox or Opera, whatever suits you…†I’d say. And people ask me, because, well, that’s the kind of thing I tend to have a view on.
I’ve realised something over the years. People don’t want a choice. Some people do, sure, but most people are happy with the status quo. This is one of the reasons why the Microsoft antitrust ruling giving people a ‘browser ballot’ choice was so meaningless – what’s the bet that the vast majority of people just chose the one they’d heard of – so mostly IE? It’s ronseal name helps it too – after all, why would you think that “Chrome”, “Opera”, “Firefox” or “Safari” had anything to do with browsing the web?
Whilst I do continue to have a fondness for Firefox (and a polite indifference to the nice people at Opera, who I’m sure make a very good browser), I now pretty much just tell people to use Chrome. And when I’ve been fixing my parents’ machines, I’ve:
…and so the guerrilla browser warfare kicks off. We’ll see what happens, if they get stuck or even notice…
Why Chrome? Well, it’s amazingly fast, browser sync is awesome if you use a Google Account, password saving actually works, and you get a bigger browsing area than most. It has an intuitive interface, is regularly and automatically updated so easy for people like my parents to use, and supports the latest web standards. In addition, the extensibility of Chrome (as with the add-on capability in Firefox) amps up its potential massively. The fact that new Google Apps / Google features tend to work first in Chrome is a nice bonus.
Why not Safari? Well, in truth, I haven’t used it that much. The lack of a ‘smart’ search bar offends me since every other browser now does have one, and I wouldn’t know where to start with extending it or browser sync (short of Xmarks, which I’m sad to say I abandoned when news of its closure hit (but before news of its salvation a few weeks later). My general principle against the Jobs behemoth has definitely wavered of late, so it’s not a matter of principle – interest to know if other people would knowingly choose Safari over Chrome…
Disclaimer: My agency represents Google’s Enterprise division in the UK. I’m not directly involved and don’t have any special insights. These views are all my own based on years of being unofficial tech support for people and my general deputy CIO experience.
Can Google please upgrade the Google Translate iPhone app to include OCR so it can do this, but just for plain text on images? I don’t need a video feature or AR capability, or the clever editing that provides the illusion the translated text is on the billboard, sign or whatever, but it’d be awesome if it OCR’ed the text, translated it, and spat out a plain text English (or whatever-language) version of the sign, bit of paper, etc.
I’ve mentioned the coolness of the OCR video translation app (at least as far as the demos go) before, but if you haven’t seen it, check it out. A step towards Star Trek’s universal translators!
One of the other things that trigger my newfound Mac envy was seeing Chris use Sparrow, a lightweight Gmail client for OSX. Now I’m a big fan of the cloud and a big fan of the Gmail UI, so was impressed that an app had been developed that actually made me want to try something else.
Of course, it doesn’t do a great deal more than the web app, especially if you use Chrome (at least as far as I can tell without a Mac to try it on properly), and it would probably be hard to justify the $10 price tag as such, but it does look slick, productivty-lorious and it’s on my WANT list for when I eventually break and go the Mac way (ETA for Armand on Mac – about 3 years).
I’m not the only PC fan to think so, either.
Video here if you’re on Mac / use Gmail.
Sparrow – The new mail for Mac from domleca on Vimeo.
I’m something of a productivity fiend. If something seems fiddly when I’m working on it, in real life or at a computer, I hunt for a simpler workaround, or hack, or shortcut, or whatever’s the appropriate shorthand for it. Hence being a big fan of the Lifehacker blog and Videojug.
I’m also a massive advocate of the cloud. Most of the day-to-day personal productivity tools I use live on the Internet in some way.
So really it’s a mystery that I’ve gone so long without Evernote, a sort of DropBox-like service for text and audio notes and pictures that syncs across iPhone, iPad and any number of PC or Mac endpoints. It took Chris showing it to me on his Macbook to get me thinking I needed it.
Having been resoundingly and repeatedly convinced of the inadequacy of the iOS WordPress, I’m now writing these blog posts on it using my foldaway bluetooth keyboard on the commute home. The posts will save locally into a text file which will sync to my other devices when I fire up Evernote on there. Wonderful.
Now, unlike Seinfeld, when I wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and scribble it down, I not only won’t have to worry about illegible handwriting and losing the punchline, but it’ll pop up on my desktop later on when I’ve all but forgotten I wrote it down in the first place.won’t have to worry about illegible handwriting and losing the punchline, but it’ll pop up on my desktop later on when I’ve all but forgotten I wrote it down in the first place.
The product, for those interested, is intuitive, designed for touch, and works seamlessly. A joy.
If, like me, you have 3-4 browser tabs you like to have open all the time (Gmail, Greader etc), then the Permatab and Faviconize add-ons are for you… unless you use Firefox 3.6, out a couple of days ago, which breaks the former.
A little Googling this morning found me App Tabs, a great alternative. Recommend it.
Whilst I was searching, I also found this info on how to turn on the CTRL-TAB tab preview feature in FF 3.6 – which is pretty awesome.
My desktop is getting increasingly virtual, and I’m happier and happier to flip between browsers and machines, as long as I can get Firefox installed and run Xmarks – a very useful bookmarks synchronisation tool.
Pleased to read today that Xmarks is testing a plugin for Chrome which will let me sync my bookmarks with that browser as well – as much as I love the speed and simplicity of Chrome, I can’t use it as my primary browser until it catches up with the essential add-ons I use in Firefox. These include, but are not limited to, Xmarks, IETab (IE emulation for sites that break in FF/Chrome) and Gmail manager.