I’m not going to lie, I’m still fairly skeptical about the Palm Pre. it’s not that I don’t want it to be a success – I just wonder how anyone can stand up and say how a device is going to be a game changer when at most, they’ve played around with a prototype for twenty minutes. I’m also cautious because we’ve been here before. Anyone remember the Blackberry Storm? Everyone thought that was going to blow the iPhone out of the water; for those not aware, it certainly didn’t.

Over the past few months since CES, when Palm announced the Pre, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the direction that Palm are taking the Pre and I can’t really understand the choices that they’ve made. In some leaked internal material, they implore salesmen not to persuade certain “IT Centric Business Users”  – whatever that means – to buy the device.

I have a few problems with this. Surely, Palm, a company that isn’t doing so well right now should be putting all their energy into a phone that really, if it lives up to the hype; should be able to do ‘everything’ a Treo can do. This suggests to me a very confused product line, and makes me doubt who exactly Palm are marketing the Pre for. After all, surely if this device is so damn easy to use, the Pre should be for everyone. By doing so, like Apple, Palm wouldn’t be alienating a large possible portion of what could be a lucrative market – everyone. Apple is not afraid to say that the iPhone is for everyone. Look at the name of their ad campaign “There’s an app for just about anything”.

There’s one aspect about the whole business focus that Palm is working on that I’m slightly miffed about which Engadget pointed out:

One critical thing to note for business users and frequent flyers: the Sprint version of the phone — the first to be released — will not be a global phone, meaning it can’t be used on GSM networks overseas.

Let me get this straight. You want me to purchase a phone for business that I can’t use in most parts of the world? In other words, you want me to have two phones. One for when I’m at home and one for when I travel abroad. Forgoing to whole logistics issues of having multiple numbers and syncing everything together there’s a very large financial aspect for business to worry about. Seriously now, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to buy one cell phone that happens to cost the price of the Palm Pre (after rebate, I’ll get onto that later) and works in other countries?

I hate pointing out the elephant in the room but… iPhone?

John Gruber put it best: “rebates suck”. They really do. The whole idea is that it’s such a terrible procedure to go and get the money back from the manufacturer – that most people give up and the company doesn’t loose any money. A sucky way to do business if you ask me. There is a silver lining however, Best Buy, are offering an instant rebate. I would be very, very surprised if Pre’s were purchased anywhere else but Best Buy.

I was really, really surprised when I found out that Palm weren’t going to be offering any form of desktop syncing application for the Pre – and slightly worried. Anyone who knows a little about the success of the iPods and iPhone is aware that, really, it’s iTunes that’s behind it. iTunes is the piece of software that allows the experience to be so damn seamless. I am not of the opinion that we are at a point where one can rely on their cell phone completely for contact information, let alone media.

By the sound of things, Palm’s intent on having a “Data Transfer Assistant” which for me suggests a world of hurt. For instance: I want to watch a movie on my Pre. How do I go about doing this? I can’t use iTunes or any other downloadable content store because of this little thing called DRM. So movies are out to the picture. Next up, music – a lot easier now that DRM for audio is a thing of the past. But first I have to navigate through my entire music file structure, copy it over to the “Data Transfer Assistant” and pray that the Pre works out where is should be stored?

Yeah, not quite my cup of tea.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad however, there are a couple of items on the feature set that have caught my eye. If Synergy works, it will be revolutionary. If it doesn’t, then in turn the rest of the experience with the Pre will be a nightmare. I’m also very curious about the WebOS that Palm are pushing – kind of similar to how Apple intended the iPhone to operate. Of course, it didn’t and for now at least, we won’t be running any 3D Games on the Pre.

In the end, no matter how well the Pre does, Palm will have learnt a lot about the current state of the mobile industry, and being an iPhone user, I’m glad someone is keeping Apple on their toes. Because, RIM and HTC certainly aren’t.

Your move, Apple.

When I hear people talking about how many feeds they subscribe to, I’m nearly always astounded by the amount. I’ve seen the number vary from 80 to 500. That’s just crazy. I admire any person who is able to give so much time to their feeds because they’re probably the most productive people on the earth.

I certainly don’t have enough time (sadly) to give even eighty blogs the time and attention they deserve. Because I don’t put any blog in my feed reader. I’ll add a blog in there if I really, really enjoy it and I get excited about a new post coming down the line. If not, then that blog probably just isn’t for me.

Right now I’m subscribed to twenty-eight feeds, I’ve done this by employing a couple of methods that allow me to sort through the noise and get not only the most important news – but also the best opinions in the blogosphere.

Subscribe to Aggregators

I don’t use a folder system in NetNewsWire, but if I did – the Apple folder would contain only three blogs. Daring Fireball and Nobody Wants A Stylus (which currently seems to have slowed down a bit unfortunately) are two of the blogs. What you’ll notice about these is that they both sift through all Apple and iPhone news leaving only the most relevant pieces.

To top that they also happen to offer some terrific opinion articles that I know a large amount of the Apple community values. The third blog I subscribe to in this category happens to be The Macalope – because he’s just plain funny and offers a sometimes very different insight into Apple’s habits.

I’ve been able to do this in a lot of areas, and if I didn’t subscribe to so many personal blogs (not that that’s a bad thing) I would probably be subscribed to a lot less feeds as that makes up a large percentage of what I read.

Visit the Big Boys

Who are the big boys? These are blogs that tend to relay interesting a relevant (in my opinion) news. So, you’ve got the classic examples such as Engadget and Autoblog. But the thing is, I don’t subscribe to them, instead I visit them using my web browser.

Why? Simply because I probably only read about ten percent of the posts that are written, thoroughly. Instead, I visit the site in question and skim through all the recent articles until I see a story title that I find interesting.

Blogs like these tend to post several new pieces a day and all that would do – if subscribed – would be clog up my feed reader and in the end stop me from using one all together.

Feeds are precious things. Sadly a good one is very hard to come by. Right now I’m looking for more: interesting, insightful and thought provoking weblogs.

For those interested, they can download a copy of my OPML file here (right click and save as) and if they have any suggestions for a new blog I should try out or want to share their OPML file – please leave a comment pointing it out.

I’m finally back from my trip to the British Virgin Islands, it’s kind of bitter sweet in many ways. I loved it there and would have easily stayed for longer if the opportunity was there. On the other hand, however, it’s good to be home. After all, the internet connections I managed to pick up were less than reliable.

One thing that I noticed when traveling around the islands is just how cut off one can be. There were islands that people seemed to have spent their entire lives on never venturing off, for instance, one island we came across had several abandoned houses and a shocking amount of graves on the island – a lot of them child size. These inhabitants most likely lived with no knowledge of what is going on outside their little world. A war could have been on and I bet they’d never have known.

Anyways, on a slightly lighter note:

Even though I managed to get some access to the internet, I managed to miss a lot. Here are a few things that caught my eye in the interim period.

MacWorld 2009 is Apple’s Last -
Now that they’ve done it, it makes a lot of sense to me. As Andy Inhatko said; “There’s absolutely nothing in it for Apple”. It seemed like a bit of a hard out though. I would presume that as time went on they would slowly decrease the amount they had to do with the show. Apple don’t like not being in control. From what I’ve heard there was a lot of times were Apple and IDG just didn’t see eye to eye.

As for Steve, don’t look into it any further than Apple’s efforts to separate him from the company a bit more.

Wordpress 2.7 was released -
OK, maybe it happened slightly before I left, but still; I’ve had a little time to play around with it and so far it seems to be doing the job. The interface changes are welcome, and building in automatic upgrade and plug-in installation was a smart move. For the next version however, I think that if themes became installable from within Wordpress, it would make a lot of people, including myself, happy.

iPlayer is now available for the Mac -
It’s been a long time coming. It should have been there from the start.

Google Chrome 1.0 -
I’m disappointed, of course, that the Mac version seems to have taken the back seat. That said, it shows how keen Google are to get Chrome a strong user base. I would expect that in the long run however, a lot more of the Chrome users will be on the Mac rather than the PC – they just need to get it out there.

MacHeist starts giving tree promotion –
I’ve only ever bought Mac promotions from MacHeist. Why? Because nearly all of the apps they ever release in a package are worth the money, unlike some which have a couple that stand out. This year for the festive season they’re giving away some applications, check out the site on the 25th for all of the apps.

Is there anything else I should have included in the list? Leave a comment, other than that, Merry Christmas.

I just need to get something off my chest. Ever since August, and the purchase of my MacBook Air the number one comment that I’ve had has been:

“Is that the one without a CD drive? Why did you get that? You can’t even watch DVDs”.

Yes, how observant of you. Have a cookie. If I wanted to watch DVDs on my computer I would have made a sensible move and purchased a computer that has an optical drive. I didn’t buy the computer unaware that it didn’t include one. Please don’t insult my intelligence by assuming such things. There’s a lot more to using a computer than watching movies.

iTunes. iTunes. iTunes. I buy my music from iTunes, I buy television shows from iTunes, I rent and buy movies; from iTunes. Problem solved. Move on.

That is all.

There has been a lot of hype over the last week about EventBox, a new piece of software for the Mac which is designed to aggregate all of the social networks you use and also act as an RSS Reader – all within one application. So not wanting to be left out, I downloaded a copy of the free 15 (why not 30?) day trial for a spin, The verdict so far? I can’t say I’m that impressed.

First of all, I don’t really like writing about software that doesn’t work for me, after all I’m just one guy with one opinion. However, as EventBox is currently in beta I thought it would be best to give them some constructive feedback from some of my experiences with the application. So why not start with the good points – primarily the actual concept behind the application. I’m surprised that it took so long for an app like this to be created, it has all the right elements to make it a fantastic program.

I think that a lot of people have been looking for something to bring together all of the sites they visit of a regular basis. For me the key applications that this would replace are NetNewsWire and Twitterific. So as far as I’m concerned – they are the main competition for EventBox. Don’t be surprised if you hear me comparing them a lot – I think it’s quite fair to.

I’m not going to complain about the amount of social networks, because I’m sure more are coming but I want to talk about why this app hasn’t been earth shattering for me.

Information Overload

Every time I open EventBox up, things start flashing at me and numbers increase rapidly, I just can’t take seeing the number 500 in my dock. So most of the time I’d close EventBox and open up both NetNewsWire and Twitterific because lets face it, information is a lot simpler to digest in chunks. It’s a lot easier to move from doing one task to another; for me it’s Tweets first followed by RSS.

One idea I had was to have a ‘breakfast mode’ in which you can customise what section of EventBox gets your attention first. Let’s put this in context:

I open up EventBox at 6AM (and the apps notices this) and find the Twitter section of the app is all that is available to me. All the other sections are grayed out and there are no numbers alluding to how many feeds there are in the dock or sidebar. Once I’ve caught up on all my Tweets I can press this big button in the bottom of the window saying “Finished!”. From there I automatically get sent on to my RSS feeds, or Pownce, Flickr…. whatever you want.

It may seem unnecessary and infantile to a lot of people, but for people like myself who are easily distracted – this could be a godsend.

Layout

When I see my Flickr images within EventBox I can’t help think what a waste of space it is. A long bar with the image on the left and just space to the right of it across the window is a bad idea. Why not have a grid view, like iTunes, that when clicked on flips around, in a similar fashion to Dashboard Widgets, showing the information and meta-data for the picture?

I believe that there are a few changes that could be made to the layout in the RSS section of EventBox. I only have a 13.3″ of screen real estate. At the moment I’m only able to see about three feed items at once. I’m a big fan of how NNW gives you a list view of just the title and other details in one line – before you click on the post, I think that’s all you need. If the title grabs me I’ll read it. And yes, I have adjusted the preview sizes.

Twitter & Pownce

Both the Twitter and Pownce modules for EventBox were done very well, I enjoyed little touches such as it filling in people’s usernames in the post box if you click on a tweet. Though it may be a good idea to increase the differences in colours for @ and direct messages.

One way that I think EventBox could really set itself apart from other Twitter clients such as Twitterific, is by having filters for certain subjects. I suppose this could be done in a similar way to how Apple’s Mail works with rules. A good example for this would be all those times when you get someone tweeting: “New Blog Post…”. It would be great to have those not appear in the main feed – just a separate folder.

At The End Of The Day

Eventbox is one of those pieces of software that with a bit of time and a strong community behind it could really flourish. And I hope it does. But I just can’t say it works for me… yet. I hope that if anybody from EventBox is reading this; they post a rebuttal. I’d be interested in hearing more from them.

PS: Does anybody know why I keep accidently referring to this software as OpenBox?

I’ve always had a problem with managing my mailbox, I just didn’t have the determination or patience to be organized and I couldn’t even understand how it was meant to help me in the first place, I’d read a lot on Inbox Zero, from Merlin’s writings on 43 Folders, and finally realised what the problem was and how it would soon start effecting me, here’s the page turning quote:

Here’s the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don’t have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven’t responded to — that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you’re just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can’t possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It’s all reasonable and it’s all accurate, but come on: something’s gotta give.

Though I must admit, it was not a blog post or article that inspired me straight away to clean up my inbox – but the fact that I couldn’t (and still can’t) find my invoice for the software application, Pukka. In the end I decided that I wasn’t going to let that happen again, so adopted a method: instead of having one master inbox, have several smaller ones that filter out the noise. In the end I settled on using some aspects of Inbox Zero, more specifically having an Action, Reply and Hold mailbox. These three folders are all manually added to. I decided to not set any rules (more on that later) for these folders for a couple of reasons: first, so I have a more active role in deciding what is important in my workflow and secondly because I don’t trust Mail to get it totally right. A computer isn’t quite good enough at setting my priorities

I’m not going to go into some of the intraccies of Inbox Zero, Merlin’s covered that pretty well, but I do want to talk briefly about rules within Apple Mail.

All of my other inboxes have one, if not more rules associated with them. A rule is a set of parameters you assign to an inbox. Below is a screenshot of my Bacn mailbox rule, which I stole of Michael Mistretta after it was mentioned in his interview with Chris Bowler:

As you can see I have the email addresses that Flickr, Facebook and Twitter use to send me updates. The ‘From’ refers to what it will look in – in this case the email address. ‘is equal to’ means that it has to be exactly that. And the final box is for whatever you are referencing the rule to. Rules however, aren’t limited to the email address it’s from. You can choose keywords, dates and subjects. Now that a lot of the noise is filtered out; it is far easier to get to the more pressing correspondences.

I of course, also have an ‘Archives’ folder for those emails that aren’t relevant to my day to day work – but may come in useful in the future. For instance, I have a copy of the email containing the final version of this blog’s theme and the instructions on how to set it up.

From there it really depends what I’m working on at the time, so right now I have a Desktop Vibes folder that all comments left on posts go to – or any emails I get from it’s editor Chris. This is all accomplished with rules that have been set up earlier. I’m not going to lie, it took me a while to get exactly what I wanted from them and at one point I got totally lost, and worried that I’d accidently deleted four months worth of important emails.

But what has been the outcome of all this comprehensive email management? I at least feel a lot more satisfied and less overwhelmed when I open up Mail every morning. And of course, I’ve achieved the objective that I set out to reach when I started – I know where things are kept! What’s next? I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are working right now so I don’t see any immediate changes that that I’d make straight away.

If you’re looking for a good guide for setting up rules in Mail. There aren’t any (at least that I could find!). So in an effort to solve this, I’m in the process of writing up an article for Desktop Vibes on this very subject. I’d be interested in hearing how you regulate your email. Do you think you have to get a certain amount of email before it becomes necessary or is it a good habit to get into?

When you think of Microsoft you pretty much always picture a global conglomerate, a company with many diverse aspects – unable to say what “business” they are actually in. Why is this a bad thing? I think it’s because customers don’t know who they’re talking to. They’re got this idea of a big not caring company in their head; and frankly Microsoft aren’t really helping themselves drop this image.

It’s sad that people think this way because, believe it or not, Microsoft, actually make some very cool products. The Xbox 360 for instance – at the end of the day a success, and is still my choice for gaming consoles.

It certainly isn’t an easy thing to change your public image and by no means will it happen over night, but I believe that there are a few things that Microsoft can do that can be at least stepping stones to having the general public have more of an understanding for what Microsoft are here to do, and how it can help you – the user.

The Solutions

Feedback is one of those things that is easily taken but given very little, that is why it is so important – because if you get a feature request, they probably, really, really want it! Microsoft have a history of not using the feedback from users that they get.

What better way is there to get people to use your product then putting in everything they want to see?

Microsoft is a very large company, and they’re making an absolute fortune. I think it may be best for them to pull out a few weeds and drop some of their smaller, less successful projects and focus on what is actually working for them and bringing in money. So, drop Surface and MSN TV and start putting more resources into Windows, Live and Xbox.

From there it will be a lot easier to see what Microsoft are all about. I would try having a different colour scheme for each sector of the industry Microsoft are in. Maybe red for Live, green for Xbox and blue for Windows and so on.

My next point really leads off well from what I just covered. I want integration, no, seamless integration between all that Microsoft does. This is key because if a user can buy a game for their 360 that they saw while using Microsoft Search, then walk over to the Xbox and play it. They’ve got a winner. People don’t want to care.

If that worked perfectly, nothing less, I would start using MS search today. It doesn’t take a couple more innovations like that to make me switch back to Windows.

I think that for the past two years the words ‘Windows Vista‘ have meant nothing but problems. With Windows 7 Microsoft are solving half the problem – but I think that it’s time to retire the Windows name and move on to something totally new.

What do they gain from this? Well, to start off with, no preconceptions about that they will produce. They can think completely out of the box. There’s no need for legacy support; one of the things that has been holding Windows up for the past few years is that they feel they need to support older software, hardware and users. So the back end of Windows is old and crumbling.

In the end, it’s less about dropping the Windows name, but more an excuse to move on completely from what people expect from their OS. Obviously there are some marketing advantages to this as well, this really encapsulates what I have been talking about – this is Microsoft’s big chance at recapturing the essence of what Microsoft and their OS is about.

Finally, I think Microsoft should get a bit more excited up in front of people. For better or worst they’re changing the way people think and work – not many people have that sort of opportunity. Embrace it and I think you’ll find you’re working a lot better and producing better products on the whole. If a coder can be excited about getting up and writing a log-in script – so can a user be excited about using it.

Today Revision3 announced that they were cutting their losses and canceling some of their programming and also (more importantly) laying off some of their staff. For me this really shows the global economic crisis has reached the tech industry. I’m aware the Mahalo had to a couple of weeks ago, but for me – it’s only just hit home.

We’ve had a number of great successes here at Revision3, including Diggnation, Tekzilla and The Totally Rad Show. But not everything pans out. Just as in the past, when we ended shows that just weren’t building audiences or driving revenue, we had to make changes. As you may have heard, today we had to make some tough staffing decisions as we ended the run of a few of our shows.

I didn’t expect the economic downturn to hit the tech industry until 2009 at the earliest, it really shows how unpredictable these things are.

Sadly, this is just the start, I’m not looking forward to seeing the inevitable changes throughout the internet as more and more companies are affected by the changes in the economy. It’s quite shocking to see people who I thought held such a solid role within Revision3 loosing their jobs.

But how does this effect us? What are we going to be seeing from tech companies when they begin to start laying people off? Well, apart from a very vibrant discussions of Twitter I guess that there is going to be less changes over a longer period time. All those brand new releases that you were expecting probably won’t come as soon as you’d like – but when do they ever? On the Rev3 side of things, a few shows got cancelled, including one of my favorites; PixelPerfect.

This show I think might have a bit of hope, it was originally produced by the Pixel Corps for Revision3 – I could quite easily see Alex and his team picking it up again. It’s so sad to see so many people from Revision3 leaving the company, I wish them the best of luck in finding a new job.