Brian McNitt’s Blog

Today Amazon introduced the Kindle, a lightweight and powerful electronic book reader that features a new display technology that reads much like paper. Three years in the making, the Kindle has built in wireless connectivity and can display books, electronic newspapers, blogs, or just about any type of syndicated content. Weighting 10.3 ounces, the Kindle weighs about the same as an average paperback yet holds approximately 300 titles and retails for $399, about the same as a high-end cell phone or 2-3 college text books. Is this the beginning of the end for paper bound books? Read more at Amazon.

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We just had a bit of a shaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Magnitude 5.6
to be exact. No damage here but it was certainly felt across the twittersphere.
You know you’re a technology geek when…

Neat to see the real time responses, and glad everyone is alright. Picture
below of the shake map.

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5.6, earthquake, twitter, twitterrific, san francisco, trendmedia, mcnitt

Above is a video from Google demonstrating how to setup IMAP email on the iPhone. The primary advantage of IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) over POP (Post Office Protocol) is that IMAP maintains the state of messages across email clients. For example, if you delete an email at Gmail.com, then that email is automatically deleted from your iPhone and vice versa. This means that you never have to deal with the same message twice and can save a lot of time when it comes to filing and deleting messages.

With IMAP, folders are also synced across email clients. When you switch to Gmail IMAP, the Gmail spam folder will appear on your iPhone. This allows you to flag messages as spam directly from your iPhone, something you couldn’t do previously with POP.

Follow the video above or these simple instructions to make the switch.

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apple, iphone, google, gmail, imap, pop, email, trendmedia, mcnitt

Is been only a day since Apple released OS X Leopard and already hackers have found a way to install Leopard on PC. Not for the novice PC user and most certainly illegal, the hack makes use of a modified install CD. Hackers say the install is still experimental and things like sound, video settings, and wireless will most likely not work until new drivers and system workarounds can be developed. (At the current rate, I predict this will be a matter of days.) Details at DailyApps.net.

(Image by: rbeforee.)

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If you work in technology or a related field and are not Twittering, start. If you own a small business, be sure to reserve your business name on Twitter immediately; like your URL, it’s important that you claim your business name before someone else does. (Some organizations on Twitter.) Not updating your company site or blog as frequently as you should? Twitter. It’s the easiest way to start micro blogging and to stay top of mind with customers and colleagues, at the same time in a relaxed and social way. Want to know what others in technology and design are doing, eating, thinking about, or where you can join them for a beer at this very moment in time? Follow them on Twitter.

What should you be doing now? Twittering. I won’t waste any more of your time so you can get started. Oh yeah, and if you’re on a Mac install Twitterrific.

Need someone to follow? Start with me. http://twitter.com/mcnitt

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Apple announced today that Mac OS X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders.

Leopard is packed with more than 300 new features and introduces a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac.

A special good luck to my friend Greg Heilmann who has patiently been waiting for the release of Leopard to make the switch to Mac. Greg currently uses the same model Dell D600 I used to use before jumping ship. Like mine, he is also fighting a myriad of software and hardware issues including hard drive clicking noises, frequent Windows system freezes, and the occasional BSoD. After having my Dell laptop’s motherboard replaced twice while under warranty, my Dad’s replaced once, and hearing Greg’s plight, I can say that I am so happy not to live in that world anymore. Hopefully Greg’s machine will make it to the 26th. Reminds me of the final chase scene in the Blues Brothers when Jake and Elwood exit the old car and every piece falls to the ground.

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For the techies in the crowd, I have been playing with glTail.rb for the past few days, a new ruby-based log file visualization script. Installed locally on a PC or laptop, glTail.rb SSH connects to and tails multiple Apache, Rails, or IIS web server log files and provides realtime site traffic visualization. (Instead of trying to explain the interface, see the movie above or demo on the glTail site.) Installation and setup is easy. I use Locomotive as my local ruby environment so I opened an existing Rails project, launched the Locomotive terminal and completed the required gem installs which added the gems the Locomotive library.

Watching glTail is incredibly addictive. Most interesting is seeing the single requests for email forms and single site images, such as the Linux and Apache icons on the lower right of my blog, from places in the Netherlands and South America, and from various web forum sites. Needless to say I’ve been having fun with these would be spammers and bandwidth thieves. More on that in another post. In the meantime, give glTail a try.

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“Good boy!” TrendMedia and GuideDogs.com win the Web Marketing Association’s 2007 Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Website Development. Wow, that’s a mouthful. Bottom line, it was a fun project to work on and at the end of the day one of those projects that really makes you feel good about what you do. Three cheers for accessibility and a big tail wagging congratulations to everyone at Guide Dogs for the Blind for their efforts in creating such a great resource for the blind and visually impaired community. Award well deserved.

Learn more about the Guide Dog’s web project on Brian McNitt’s Blog — Guide Dogs, TrendMedia, Accessibility in News.

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Everyone loves a good story. I think that “iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It”, the autobiography of Steve Wozniak qualifies.

(Pictured below: Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I computer. I would say that Apple’s image has come a long way.)

Being a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to buying new books, I’ve waited for over a year for the paperback edition of iWoz to be released, but when I found iWoz available as an audio book from iTunes, I downloaded it immediately and listed to it virtually non-stop over the course of two days. The book is an absolute thrill-ride of the geekiest proportions and brought me back to the days of my first computer. (It was an Apple IIe with a green monochrome monitor, 80 column video card, not one but two 5.25″ floppy drives — perfect for copying and sharing early computer games, and an Apple dot matrix printer.) I wonder where it’s at today?

Many of the events detailed in iWoz are also recounted in Pirates of Silicon Valley, a must-see movie for any computer geek on either side of the PC / Apple divide.

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What other product besides the holiday release of Cabbage Patch Kids back in the 80’s has had so many people act so nuts? People camping in line on the streets, tech and popular press headlines dominated by the iPhone for months, hackers going to war with Apple, people with signs outside of T-Mobile offering to unlock iPhones, Apple developers fighting back. It’s all so crazy…

…and I love it. I’m so happy to be able to say twenty years from now that I got an iPhone on day one, paid full boat for it, got the $100 refund (grievance money), and grinned while watching WebbAlert on my bus ride home from work each day, amidst the global maelstrom of controversy that surrounded the phone on so many levels. Honestly, it’s more fun than anyone should be allowed to have.

I haven’t hacked my iPhone to install third party applications nor do I plan to for the moment. I feel bad for those who “bricked” their phones as a result of the iPhone 1.1.1 software update but fall more in the camp of, “you knew it was a closed Apple and AT&T platform before you bought it, so if you hacked it and now it doesn’t work, it’s your own darn fault.” That said, I understand there are ways to recover an iBrick and restore the phone back to factory Apple / AT&T settings or even back to it’s hacked state. (Google is your friend here.)

For the developers in the crowd, there are SO many ways to unleash the power of the iPhone with AJAX enabled web applications, or web/desktop PC hybrid applications. IMHO, developers could be far more creative on this front. Cali Lewis highlights one such hybrid application, Signal, in the latest episode of GeekBrief. She even paid $25 for it! Plus, with web based applications, there is the advantage of creating a single application that can be deployed to all mobile devices, not just the iPhone.

My (unsolicited) short-term advice to Apple: create an application that allows users to create home screen icons and link those icons to any website URL. This way, web apps become more integrated into the iPhone and developers are encouraged to create web based versus embedded iPhone applications.

Apple (specifically Steve Jobs) has a track record for listening to user feedback and anticipating the market. I’m confident that the iPhone platform or similar future Apple devices will open up in the future. I advise patience.

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iphone, apple, controversy, hack, webbalert, mcnitt

I finally checked out Amazon’s new MP3 music store today and have to say that I was pretty impressed. The main attraction of Amazon’s MP3 store is that all music, much like regular CDs, is DRM-free which means you can copy and share the music without technical restriction. (Of course, traditional music copyright and use laws still apply.) Another advantage is that most songs are $.89 per download, compared to the industry standard $.99, and most albums are $1-2 dollars cheaper as well.

Amazon’s audio interface has also improved. Gone are the old Windows Media Player and Real Audio “listen now” links replaced with Flash audio playback which improves performance on all browsers without the need for extra plugins.

The Amazon MP3 music selection is still small compared to iTunes due to the fact that the four largest record labels have yet to agree to release their catalogs without DRM but it’s a great start. And in fairness to iTunes, Apple has openly stated that they want to offer DRM-free music but it’s the major record labels that are blocking them from doing so.

I enjoy the convenience of iTunes but from now on when it comes to buying music my approach will be to check Amazon first, then only buy from iTunes if what I am looking for is not available in a cheaper, downloadable, DRM-free format.

PS - I’m still unable to buy “Crash” by Matt Willis from any legal source.

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music, drm, mp3, amazon, store, mcnitt

Why do the scariest computer updates always coincide with the busiest work days? Apple released a new firmware update for the MacBook Pro today. Have to say that Apple does a good job of making even the most serious updates user friendly. Phew! It worked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple just released Update 1.1.1 for the iPhone which includes a host of new features including the new
iTunes Wi-Fi Store. Music search, preview, purchase, and download at the touch of a button. Amazing. And dangerous.

(Sorry for the blurry image. Seems my Cannon digital camera decided to go bad today.)

UPDATE: People with hacked iPhones beware. There is a lot of chatter about hacked iPhones bricking under the update. Steve Jobs promised to crack down on the hacks. As they say about messing with a bull…

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apple, iphone, music, itunes, trendmedia, mcnitt

Believe. It really does exist. For years I have lived with a flood of daily spam messages and an email inbox that scrolled for pages and pages. I absolutely dreaded opening my email application. Every time I did, there were new spam messages to delete, a new fire to put out, and a list of rotting emails that I had put off answering for weeks, even months, because each required something more than a simple response, each almost a project in itself.

Not for lack of will, I tried a number of things to improve the email experience. I set my mail application to only check email every 15 minutes. I turned off the email alert sound so arriving email would not distract me from the current task at hand. I would make heroic efforts to clear my inbox each day before shutting down the computer but the more difficult emails would survive and sit in my inbox along with half-written email drafts in the drafts folder until the next cleaning battle which was essentially a never ending saga. On the eve of every third new moon, I would sheepishly and with great guilt, looking over my shoulder to ensure that not even the office janitor was around, file the oldest unanswered emails away as if they had been taken care of properly. My email experience was clearly broken; my inbox weighed me down every time I looked at it and there seemed to be no way out.

That all changed two weeks ago when an innocent Twitter message from Scott Beale of Laughing Squid appeared on my screen. “SpamSieve, Kills Spam Dead on Mac OS X.” Boy, I needed less spam. I started reading the short post and had SpamSieve installed before I was finished. I then read the related post on Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero”, a system for keeping your inbox clear. I had heard of the system before but never really got into it. Now that there was a video about it, I figured it would be easy enough to watch (video). From that hour on until now, this is the view of my inbox…

That’s correct, it’s empty. My email inbox is completely empty. Zero inbox, zero spam.

Now, you maybe thinking, “Yeah sure, it looks like that for the screenshot. For a few hours maybe, but tomorrow there’ll be a growing list of emails again.” I assure you that my inbox has been completely empty for two weeks solid.

You too can experience email Nirvana. (And you don’t need to be on a Mac and use SpamSieve. If you have corporate email with spam filtering, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. you probably have spam filtering that is good enough. If you host your own domains and use POP or IMAP mail, find a good third-party spam filter for your mail application.) Apply Merlin’s sustainable “Inbox Zero” approach and henceforth live in email bliss. It really does work.

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If you are still using the bookmarks feature of your web browser, know that there is a better way; this tutorial on using Delicious.com is for you.

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delicious, del.icio.us, social, bookmarking, common craft, trendmedia, mcnitt