I think I’ve figured out why last week’s iPod FireWire
cable
hysteria struck such a nerve for certain Mac users. It’s an
unfounded fear that as the iPod succeeds, the Macintosh will —
somehow, in some unspecified but surely dreadful way —
suffer.
This is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time and I
recommend it unequivocally. One of the most amazing things about
Touching the Void (among many amazing things) was how engaging,
gripping, and suspenseful it was (much more so than any fictional
drama or horror film) even though you know from the very start how it
all turns out. No M. Night Shyamalan Law & Order twist
needed...just a great story and solid storytelling.
(Rating:
96/100)
I'm Not Touching It, YOU Touch It! (Reuters)
I'm Not Touching It, YOU Touch It! (Reuters)12/19/2004 03:22 PM Reuters - Colombian police seized 292
voodoo dolls but were reluctant to inspect the black,
hand-sized talismans for fear of witchcraft.
Touching new interfaces for mobile phones03/24/2005 02:22 PM David Pescovitz:
My latest article for TheFeature is an interview with Nokia's "oracle"
of concept development, Matt Jones, about tangible interfaces and
embodied interactions.
TheFeature: Can you give a concrete example (of a
tangible interface)?
Jones: We're looking at how touch can be used to
execute a number of tasks or interactions so you don't have to switch
contexts from the real world to the world inside the screen. For
instance, one person could touch his device to someone else's and give
them a "digital gift," to borrow a phrase from our old boss Marko
Ahtisaari. That digital gift might be something as simple as a URL or
a photo that I've taken of a moment we just shared.
TheFeature: Awww. That's sweet.
Jones: Well, I don't want to get too Hallmark about
it. All joking aside though, the touch technology provides measurable
quantitative differences in the efficiency by which people can
complete that kind of task. In terms of the measurements that people
wearing white coats take inside usability labs, touch technology could
reduce the number of interactions required by an order of magnitude.
To set up a swap over Bluetooth might take twenty or thirty clicks.
This completes the interaction with one touch. Although, for security
purposes, we also have a confirm button. There's something very human
about giving someone a gift while looking them in the eye and touching
the devices together instead of both people squirreling away in the
interfaces trying to do the data exchange.
Court rules against touching strippers (Reuters)02/01/2005 09:24 PM Reuters - A California city's regulation requiring some distance
between exotic dancers and
their audience during a performance is constitutional, the U.S. 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday.
Another touching, sad, chilling account of obesity in America.
boingboing.net/2005/03/30/train_sign_touching_.html track
this site | 4 links
First Impression
First Impression01/07/2004 01:57 PM "We needed a Nobel prize for
business."
-Norman Lear , Founder,
Business Enterprise Trust
First impression: JOE
First impression: JOE01/09/2004 09:57 PM As work on my books moves into a higher gear, I've just installed the
open-source Java Outline Editor, or JOE, on a Windows XP box.
Interestingly, my collaborator knew all about JOE already even before
I mentioned I was considering...
Impression 1.0 released03/19/2003 10:44 PM Impression is a low-cost backup utility for Mac OS X which can be used
to back up and restore data. Impression incorporates various OS X
technologies, including AppleScript, to perform its tasks, and it
allows users to burn archives to CD-R, CD-RW or DVD-R discs.
Dan Glickman's Bad First Impression
Dan Glickman's Bad First Impression09/02/2004 03:56 AM Well, you can be sure of one thing: there's still going to be plenty
to talk about concerning how the MPAA continues to shoot itself in the
foot now that it's under new management. Just days after everyone
went around trash
ing Jack Valenti for his clueless statements about technology, we
now have Dan Glickman, talking about how Valenti gave the MPAA
"enormous credibility" in a new interview that should give you a sense of
just how bad things are likely to get. He talks excitedly about
his experience in international trade issues in saying he wants to
"further market-opening free-trade discussions," by which he
apparently means "market shrinking, innovation killing discussions,"
as he praises the recent export
of the DMCA to Australia as somehow being a good thing. One good
thing, is that while Jack Valenti denies fair use exists, Glickman at
least seems to realize it's there -- though, only in the sense that he
hopes to kill it off. When asked about Boucher's DMCRA bill that will
help clarify fair use to make sure it's not taken away by the DMCA, he
says: "it goes way beyond what we think is necessary to protect fair
use." That's because the MPAA doesn't want to protect fair use at
all, so any protection is too much. He also goes down the ever
popular trail of saying that "piracy" is the biggest threat to the
industry, and pulls out the "it's pure, downright theft" quote while
also calling it a "plague." Of course, the Supreme Court has already
made it clear that copyrigh
t infringement is not theft, and as many times as the
entertainment industry declares it so, it does not get any closer to
being theft. As for moving the industry forward in face of these
things, he says they have a "multifaceted strategy," which includes:
"aggressive law enforcement by state and federal authorities, use of
litigation, civil litigation (and) education." Obviously embracing
new technologies, innovating, and keeping up with the times have no
place. The only bone he tosses to the tech industry is telling them
that he wants to make sure he gets to approve advances first, by
saying he wants to explore with technologies how to "permit" new
technologies to "flow and develop." There we go with the permiss
ion to innovate again. At what point did the technology industry
become some flunky to the entertainment industry where they need to
ask for permission before creating the next great technology? And,
for good measure, he makes sure we realize how important all this is
by letting us all know that "nothing creative will be produced -- in
the intellectual sense, the creative sense and in the hard-goods
sense," if our intellectual property laws change towards being more
open. Ah yes, because all those examples of innovation
and economies thriving in the absence of strong intellectual property
laws and reports showing how overly
broad intellectual property laws are slowing down innovation and
development are simply figments of our imagination. Welcome, Dan
Glickman, and good luck holding back the tide. It would be nice if
you learned to surf, instead, but you have a long legacy of clueless,
ineffective tide stopping to continue.
My First Impression of iTunes 4.504/28/2004 10:18 AM Movie trailers in iTunes? No idea why it's there. Where's the value?
Unless, of course, the next version of iPod is capable of playing
videos? Haven't updated QuickTime, so I cannot try out the new
Apple codec. But, seeing that I am mostly tone-deaf, I doubt I can
tell the difference from MP3 and ACC. Link to Music Store?
Initially, I thought there will be close integration with the music
store, allowing the store to analyse what I have on my hard
disk and make recommendation. Turns out it's just a link to the search
engine. Which is useless anyway because firstly I can buy from the
music store (duh!), and secondly, half of my tunes are in Chinese.
Just like any good geek I like to dig right into a service or
software package to see what surprises it holds for me. Geeks usually
portray this type of behavior and we only go to the manual when
needed, if your lucky enough to have one. But some people are not as
technically blessed and many people either want or need to read the
manual before using a product.
So when I evaluate a product, I also evaluate the documentation and
look to see if the author has created examples of how functions are
intended to work.
As I reviewed the online demo of Marqui I quickly clicked through the
different tabs which contained functions that on initial inspection
looked to flow well and were laid out in a way that a typical computer
user would understand. A question did arise about a function in one of
the tabs, I loaded the online help file and was impressed. So often
today companies race to put a product together and skimp on the
documentation which is beyond aggravating when you have spent your
hard earned dollars on a advanced program or product. What I found on
the Marqui demo was a concise explanation of the tool and a real world
example on how to use it.
Wanting to test a theory, I had my wife take a look at the function
and had her read the help file. Folks she has been a stay at home mom
since we were married 10 years ago, but used to work at a major travel
firm in Japan and has not been around modern business software tools.
As she clicked through some of the other functions she mentioned it
would have been real nice to have this tools available when she was in
the workforce as it would have eliminated mounds of paper and
increased productivity.
Case in point, one of the functions in the console tab is called
Task Manager. This function is designed in such a way that a office
staffer can create a document that needs to be reviewed at several
levels before it can be approved for release to the general public.
The creator loads the document onto the content management system and
initiates a approval task to his superior. Upon initiation the
superior will get a e-mail that their is a task for him or her to act
on. Opening that task in e-mail will load the CMS Console allowing him
to review approve/disapprove the document and add notes. If further
review is needed by a superior the task can then be re-assigned to the
next level. This keeps the approval process flowing and allows for
quick changes to be made in order to get the document on the
street.
As I dig deeper into Marqui over the coming weeks I will definitely
refer back to the documentation. On a scale of 1-10 I think they have
scored about a 8 in there online documentation. I did notice a couple
of referral links that did not re-direct perfectly so I deducted a
couple of points for that. It is important for companies to insure
that all links in their online documentation take them to the intended
link. The only thing I could see that could use improvement in the
task manager section would be to develop automated routing rules for
standard documents.
Most organizations go to great lengths to develop approval chop
chains, most organizations use a folder with the document tucked
inside to route it through the chop chain which is time consuming and
wastefall of resources. Most approval chains are well established and
do not change from day to day so introducing a chop chain routing rule
in the task manager would be the icing on the cake. Or even being able
to create one on the fly.
You can get more information about Marqui at www.marqui.com and if you are
interested in becoming a developer for Marqui drop me a line at
geek@geeknewscentral.com as I have the direct line to people who count
at Marqui. I will ensure you get a call back. For those companies
sitting on the fence about a Content / Communications Management
System make sure you check back here often as I will be reviewing all
of the features of the Marqui CMS platform. [www.marqui.com]
Update: Impression 2.6
Update: Impression 2.607/13/2004 10:03 AM The backup utility adds a new 'imps' hfspax-based restorable archive
format that improves backup and restoration speeds, plus full Unicode
support for all catalog, log and session files.
Update: Impression 2.505/14/2004 10:37 AM The backup-to-disc software adds "a tremendous speed boost for backup
operations," selective file restores, an enhanced interface, and other
improvements.
Update: Impression 2.0
Update: Impression 2.001/07/2004 02:09 PM The backup utility adds a completely redesigned interface,
bookmark-based backup management, full compatibility with FileVault,
an option to add individual files to the backup list, and other
changes.
First Impression: Be Herd
First Impression: Be Herd06/17/2005 03:40 PM "People aren't going to listen to you
unless you're part of their
world."
-Cherri M. Musser ,
Chief Information Officer, e-GM
Entrepreneurs: Don't Second-Guess your First Impression
Entrepreneurs: Don't Second-Guess your First Impression04/18/2005 02:24 AM Attention entrepreneurs- while you're trimming costs and allocating
precious cash to build your company's infrastructure, you may be
neglecting a vital area: your logo. Charlotte, NC marketing firm
Asterisk Creative has created brand identities for over 20 firms since
2001. Their nationally-recognized design team discusses how to create
a logo that makes the right impression right away. [PRWEB Apr 18,
2005]
Seth Godin posted
this funny sign from the Newcastle Tramway Authority on his blog.