Time Inc: is close to the original magazine, but optimized for iPad reading, with additional video and picture content. I love the full screen pictorials. A single, simple navigation system of an horizontal page scrubber with section navigation. In-app purchases (finally), but still waiting for a subscription service.

NYT Editor’s Choice: Good readability, extra photos and a bit of video, though it’s a “lite” version of what will be the real thing.

Wall Street Journal: great scan-ability, good readability, extra video and images, left to right navigation inside category, top to bottom between categories, click the article box to get the full article, section navigation. But before you can read the latest edition, you need to wait for it to download in full. When you register, you get some great subscription offers through email, like up to 60% off the regular subscription price.

The Australian: at a right price for a monthly subscription. Left to right navigation between sections, but the top navigation with drop downs is too “webby”. The biggest drawback is that the text on the section pages and article indexes is too small, both for reading and scan-ability. And the article pages are single column, which makes the text flow to wide (in landscape) to read comfortably. The text should really be in narrower columns, like in the paper edition (and NYT and WSJ apps). Feels like a rushed job, lots of room for improvement.

Financial Times: Doesn’t load the whole edition at once (“Live Edition”), only when you navigate to a section. Tab at the top to get a section scrubber (which is customizable – nice), a news + quote search box, and the option to download the full edition for offline reading, which is a nice difference to the other newspapers (most of them require you to wait for a download before you can start reading). Left to right navigates between sections, up and down navigates inside a section, tab to get into article, left to right to switch between articles. Great scan-ability and readability. Section front pages are often more than a single screen long, which means you get more preview text per article (though, yes you have to scroll down to scan a section). You get three free full articles within 30 days (else limited to first paragraph).

Popular Science: it all looks cool, but in the end the navigation is a bit un-intuitive. Swiping left to right, two finger swipes left to right, two finger swipe up, tab left and right… too steep a learning curve. In-app purchase.

Wired: best magazine so far. Great content, close to the original, but with a lot of extra media: video, voice, music (two minutes to full tracks), 3D interactive elements. Though I wish some of the pictures could be enlarged to full screen. It does result in a large download (500+MB), not helped by the included “premium” video ads. Great navigation aids (an index, horizontal scrubber, and a zoomed out overview of the magazine), remembers where you are in individual articles. Switching between portrait and landscape mode reshuffles the content brilliantly. And it’s cheaper than the imported, paper version (though in the US it’s the same price). (this guy doesn’t like it)

Zinio (also available as a desktop app): offers many popular magazines (National Geographic, Cosmo, Rolling Stone,… Mags from US, UK, NZ, AU, France,…). Magazines are partially optimized for the iPad. As in many articles the text is too small, you can often (but not for every article) switch to a text-only version of the article, which also allows you to enlarge the font. The pictures do look good, often you can zoom in by pinching for more details. There are some photo navigation features and low resolution video. You navigate through a page overview or a textual table of contents. The app is a bit buggy, but holds plenty of potential. Individual magazines as well as subscriptions are reasonably priced, but payment is through the browser (not through iTunes) with an account at Zinio, which actually gave me a nasty server error page. And when it does work, it asks for your credit card details over clear text HTTP! Please don’t!

GQ: cheap individual editions (US$2.99, for new, US$1.99 for back issues), but lots of adverts. In horizontal mode you see the magazine similarly as the paper edition (too small to read, but pinch to zoom in). Turn it into portrait, and you browse the articles through a full screen picture page, and tab it to get into the article, which is pretty nice. The article itself is split into a top photo section which can be minimized, and the article. Navigation through a horizontal scrubber or a popup index. In-app purchase.

APC: feels like a PDF magazine. Forces user to rotate for some articles. Only a page scrubber for navigation, though section front pages allow you to jump right into an article. Some articles have a slideshow but without captions. Lots of adverts and classifieds (I guess the same ones as in the printed edition).

One of the biggest drawbacks of media apps on the iPad is the fact that they all behave differently, with different user interactions. I guess this will be temporary until a common interaction language is agreed upon. We do start to see some common navigation elements, like the horizontal page scrubber. But for now, mostly no rules, a wild wild west, which is both interesting and frustrating.

PS: I’d also like a night time reading option, with white on black/grey text (like the option in Stanza and Borders), because the iPad is a wee bit too bright in a dimmed room.

Carrying it around killed my manbag/murse, I think. I didn’t notice it before. I do sometimes carry my SLR and lenses in it too so that might have contributed too. But it does fit really nicely, without any bulk, into any reasonable sized bag, though it’s weight at about 700g is considerable. But it is a joy to use, like the iPhone is. It is not however, just a big iPod Touch, it feels totally different, more capable. Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Saying the iPad is just a bigger iPod Touch, is like saying a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.”

I get through at least two days of usage, with 30+% battery charge left. So I charge every other day, though I have to wipe it clean every day… Not that I am dirty, fingerprints are just more noticeable on the big screen compared to the iPhone.

I love iBooks as an ePub book reader (mainly O’Reilly ePub books), as a bookstore, I can’t find anything I want. For me iBooks works. I don’t get eye strain or anything. It’s a lot more comfortable than reading on a regular desktop screen. And the size of the screen makes a lot more sense than my Kindle 2. GoodReader for PDFs is pretty good, though not very intuitive. It contains a lot of functionality which isn’t apparent at first.

Though would it be enough to get an iPad just to read ebooks, in stead of a Kindle DX? You do get more functionality with the iPad for about the same price, for sure. Mail is great (though it is at times slow to sync). Safari is great, just to be able to surf a bit from the couch, reading at arms length, while glancing at whatever’s on the TV. Maps is great, though buggy, as it kind of locked up on me twice, where I couldn’t zoom in anymore.

There isn’t any great Twitter app yet. I’ve tried Twittelator, TweetDeck and Twitterriffic and they all lack something. One of them I can’t even seem to click any links in tweets (or did I miss something – Edit: yeah missed that you have to turn Tweetdeck into portrait to get to click links). So I hope my favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (now owned by Twitter themselves), gets ported to the iPad soon.

The newspaper apps are not yet there I think, with much room for improvement. Magazines are experimenting and all the different interactions don’t make it any easier to read e-magazines (double swipe up here, tab there, double tab right side,…). I am interested in getting a subscription on a newspaper and some magazines (Wired, where are you?), if the price is right, not too much adverts and it offers something more than the dead tree version does. Time magazine for example, requires you to download a separate app every week, in stead of downloading a new edition inside the existing app, which is just plain silly. With this model, you can’t get subscriptions either. It is priced at US$5 which I believe is the same as the printed US version, but you do get extra video and additional pictures, but then again you can find those online at their site too. (Edit: To be fair, I just noticed on their app description that in-app purchases and subscriptions will be made available in coming months)

Lots of apps are just gimmicky. The Elements app is pretty cool (and heavy at 1.7GB), but I don’t really need a periodic table. The iWork apps are cool, but each have there own limitations (Keynote not supporting notes for example). Sketchbook Pro is a pretty cool art app, especially for the price. Scrabble (using additional iPhones/Touches) is pretty cool. And so on… But I haven’t found THE killer app yet, the one app that would make you buy an iPad just to be able to use that app. But then again it is early days. And I can’t really say there is a killer app for the iPhone either. It’s just the combination of different apps, and the ease of use.

The iPod app is a bit limited, or at least it feels that way, missing Coverflow, no iTunes LP/Extra support, and some other things I thought were different or missing.

File management is the biggest drawback. You can’t just mount it as an external disk, drop files onto it, and use those in any app. The iPad doesn’t have a system explorer app to browse its disk. So file management all happens through iTunes, and only for apps that support it. You can however use apps like AirSharing and GoodReader to wirelessly (over WiFi) transfer files, and then open these files (PDFs, Word docs, Excel docs,…) into the iWork apps (for example), in which case they get copied to those apps folder and imported into the app, where you end up with a duplicate file. Having said that, it hasn’t impacted me that much just yet, so it’s biggest drawback isn’t a biggy at all (for me).

On a side note, the optional VGA cable only works for Keynote and video (or any app that supports video out). You can’t just demo everything on the iPad through the VGA cable as you would on a laptop (Steve must have had a special build of the iPad OS), which is a bit disappointing.

It’s a lot easier to criticize the things that are wrong, as they often jump out, than it is to emphasize what is right. Because when things just work, you don’t notice that, as it should. And I believe that is the case with the iPad too. Despite these niggles, I still love it, and I’m sure it will grow on me further (though we’re still in our honeymoon period, and my wife is already a little bit jealous :).

PS: In case you’re wondering, I still wrote this post on my desktop pc, though WordPress has a decent iPad app.

Still, I expect this to be fixed in an update of the OS, or maybe in iPhone OS 4 for iPad later in the year…

Then the CD replaced the LP, at less than a quarter of the size. Which means the booklets shrank too. Publishers started adding extra content onto the cd itself, hybrid cds with video. Now we have mp3 downloads, with hardly any cover art. Sometimes we’d get an extra pdf booklet, which I think is pretty sad mostly. Or the web itself on the official artist’s website (if you can find it) offers additional content, videos, lyrics,…

Then Apple quietly introduced iTunes LP and iTunes Extra last year with the new iTunes 9, but only with a limited number of titles, mostly older releases, repackaged with some video, lyrics. I haven’t seen that list grow either for the last 4 months. No new releases with LP content. Then end of November ’09 Apple quietly published the TuneKit API, for publishers to developer iTunes LPs. If you look at the technology, it’s as open as it gets: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, packaged in a webarchive with .itlp extension (just rename to zip and open up). It works both on Mac and Windows iTunes, and on the Apple TV. But currently not on the iPhone or iPod touch. It is supposed to be similar to the CMX (Connected Media Experience) format supported by 4 major music companies, but they still need to deliver any actual media content (which is supposed to be the second quarter of 2010).

Up until now the submission (by music and movie publishers only) has been manual and limited. When you look at the iTunes LP page now, it says:

“Automatic, electronic submission of your iTunes LP or Extra is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.”

Cue, the Apple iPad! Although missing from Steve’s presentation, it seems obvious that music publishers will be offering lots more iTunes LPs by the time the iPad is released (at least that’s what Apple is preparing for based on the above comment). It provides music publishers with extra revenue for music and video. And it provides Apple with another media segment to be sold to eager consumers (like me) using their hardware. Apple has control of the whole ecosystem: selling hardware, developing the format, selling the media. A hard act to follow by media companies, although at one point in time Sony was probably one of the few global companies to be able to offer a similar ecosystem of hardware, movies, music and games. But by now it may be a little too late. All they can do is try to catch up.

This also offers another great opportunity for web developers. You can actually publish your “iTunes LP” anywhere, have people download it on their iPad, which opens iTunes and shows your media/app (pure speculation at this time of course)! In time, the TuneKit API might be should be updated with a JavaScript touch API (like PastryKit?). If they don’t, you can always add it yourself! As for now I haven’t played around that much just yet. I’m not sure if it can load external content into an iTunes LP to get updated content.

Flux 2, a web development IDE for the Mac, comes with an iTunes LP and iTunes Extra template to get you started!

Of course you can do all this with a website. But the iTunes LP offers something to distribute, use offline. It might be just one more trick up your sleeve.

My love for gadgets started when I got to work on the web (I think) back in 1997. I started to make some real money, so I could afford some things once in a while. Working in this environment exposes you to servers and routers and stuff, and you start to get intrigued about how things work (or don’t work). Still, laptops were pretty expensive back then, and underpowered. My first laptop was some Compaq, a 14″ one with a detachable cd-rom wedge, which made it pretty cool actually. Slim and light. I liked it alot. But my first true gadget, was the Compaq iPaq 3630 pocket pc in 2000. It was the first pocketable device, that looked nice, felt nice and had stuff going for it. It had these jackets you could slide it into that would extend its functionality (like extended battery, compact flash card readers…). Now I wish I was blogging back then, so I’d remember what it was like. I did find this review. But back then, I still felt it was pretty limited in use, not really a joy to use. Since then I had a bunch of gadgets, most of which I don’t remember really (I bought a PSP years ago to browse wirelessly, not necessarily for games), that’s how much impact they had on my life (none).

My first foray into Apple territory was a beige G3 Power Macintosh minitower desktop with a 21″ Apple CRT display, at work, I guess around 98-99. I didn’t like OS9 much, but I was using it to do some manuals in FrameMaker, and video editing, next to the development I did on Windows NT4/2000. Around 99 or 2000, we bought our first Apple for home use, a Bondi blue iMac G3. I played around with some Director development (remember Lingo?), but mainly used it for surfing the web and webdesign. I believe I sold it again and went back to a Windows pc at home. In 2005 I bought my first 30 GB white iPod, which I loved. A couple of years later, we bought a (second hand) white “lampshade” iMac which came with OSX which was so much nicer to use (than OS9 and Windows I thought). We loved it! It still felt underpowered though, if I remember correctly. But then we had to sell it again when moving to Australia. In early 2007 I bought my first Apple Macbook Pro (to replace a dead Acer laptop), followed by a first gen iPod touch, and a couple of months later the first gen, jailbroken iPhone from eBay. Followed up by an iPhone 3G and then last year a 3GS. I upgraded to the new unibody MBP last year. I’ve got a LCD cinema display, an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. Sooo, will I buy an this new Apple device? You guess…

That was a bit of background history. The fact that I remember these Apple devices, and not much of any of the other gadgets in between (oh, a Mio GPS, and forgot about the Sony Clie PEG-UX50), means that they had some impact in my life, they gelled into life and I loved using them. They do their job and get out of the way. And I’m a (web)developer, I love to get my hands dirty trying things out, see how it works, how to develop something that works on particular platform.

I jumped on the netbook bandwagon. I was intrigued by the its form factor, it’s kinda like a baby laptop.  It’s cheap enough to carry around (and loose it, have it stolen,… in stead of my workhorse MBP), small enough to fit in my “manbag”/gadgetbag, and it “kinda” offers the full PC experience. This when travelling, going to meetups/conferences. Yes, an iPhone does fit this profile too: It’s great to tweet, keep track of your email, search Google, GPS your way around town, grab a picture,… And I love it! It has some crazy cool apps, great games. It contains my most recent music (I’ve got a 160GB classic iPod that contains everything), it links to my Flickr account to show of my latest pictures on the go, I check the weather, the TV timetable, use Shazam when I hear music I like, has my contacts, keep a noise diary in Evernote, get the next Sydney ferry, keep track of my weight, check my bank account, play Wurdle, find nearby ATMs, remote desktop into my work pc at team meetings,… All in my pants’ pocket (yes, I am still talking about the iPhone here).

But the iPhone really isn’t comfortable to read lots of email, blogposts, nor ebooks for that matter (neither is a BlackBerry, or an Android phone). Sure the Stanza an Kindle apps allow you to do read ebooks, and some PDF apps allow you to read PDFs. But you really don’t want to read like that for an hour or more. Neither is it particularly practical to watch long (movie length) videos. It’s great for three minute YouTube videos, and three in a row at that. It’s inherent to that particular formfactor. And then there is the battery life while actively using the iPhone. I don’t bitch about it, because, again the formfactor limits the size of the battery they can use. Previous phones didn’t allow this functionality anyway so that’s why batteries would last for days. Or when they did offer the functionality, you still would hardly ever use it because the user experience would be so appalling (Nokia N95 anyone?).

That’s why I thought a netbook is a great idea. So I’d have something to easily browse the web, read emails and ebooks (pdf or some ebook format), while watching TV at night in the sofa, in bed in the morning without disturbing my partner, or at a conference, or while travelling. My 15″ MacBook Pro is really too big to read in bed, gets too hot, makes too much noise when it is so hot… (though it does have a backlit keyboard) . I got me a 7″ eeePC. It was crap. The screen and keyboard too small to do anything. It was rather a toy for toddlers.

I upgraded to a 10″ Aspire One. It feels more like a normal laptop. It is pretty nice actually. It is a WinXP, with 160GB harddisk, 2GB memory. It’s 10″ but it’s resolution is 1024×600, which isn’t that practical for browsing either as the height of the viewport is pretty low. I mostly end up going full screen in Firefox. Reading ebooks, or particularly PDFs, isn’t practical either on this resolution. It’s just too narrow. Sure I can rotate a pdf, and hold the netbook like a book, but it still doesn’t feel right. The keyboard is decent but cramped. The touchpad is a bit too small too.

And yes, I can multitask, if I want to, but I use Gmail in Firefox, and a Firefox extension for Twitter. When I really want to dig into Twitter, I’d open up TweetDeck, and sure whenever I click a link Firefox pops to the front. I can multitask, to run Spybot or CrapCleaner in the background while browsing in Firefox. I can multitask, as ZoneAlarm keeps me safe, while Windows Update does its thing. I’ve got TopStyle installed for when I ever need to fix some html or css on the go. I can open and edit Word documents. But that’s not what I use my netbook for. I mainly use it to browse the net (as in “net”book right?), on the sofa, in bed in the morning,… Sure I can watch videos in Flash, and then the ventilator starts to blow to keep it all cool… As it does whenever browsing media sites with Flash ads on each side. That’s why you’d install a FlashBlock extension in Firefox.

I’ve taken my netbook to some conferences, sometimes to take notes, or browse any examples given by the presenter, or check email in between sessions. But then again battery life is only about 2,5 hours. I guess by now, netbooks come with 6 cell batteries for the same price which would double that time. And I kinda hate it when people are tapping away on their laptop at conferences as it’s really distracting (so I tend to not tap away either, and an iPhone is a lot quieter to type on, but too small to do so continuesly). So, what was a netbook good for again?

Last year I bought a Kindle when they introduced their international version. This is an ebook reader. No more, no less. I though the price was right, the overall size was right. I buy a lot of “dead-tree” books, but in itself they are too heavy/impractical to log around (on holiday, to work, across continents,…). And often ebooks are cheaper (but not always that much!). The screen really reads a lot better than a laptop screen. The 6″ screensize is the minimum size you’d need to comfortably read an ebook on the sofa. It holds a charge for almost two weeks. It’s got a 3G connection, but only to connect to the Amazon mothership to buy books, and update your virtual bookmark (the location in any book you stopped reading at). When I get back to my iPhone, the Kindle book would update to the last read page. Pretty nice. You can add other books in non-Kindle-drm’d ebook formats easily  over USB, as display PDFs. But you can’t zoom into PDFs, and the 6″ screen is too small. You can rotate them, but the the viewport is too narrow again (like on the netbook). I guess the Kindle DX with it’s 10″ fixes these issues, but at $490 it becomes too expensive for a single use device I think (and a lot less an impulse buy).

I was also interested in getting a Time magazine subscription (as well as some other titles), maybe even some newspaper. But on the international Kindle, Amazon limits subscription by not including pictures (which would be in grey anyway), which makes a lot of articles, and the subscription in general, a lot less attractive. They should, and could, update subscriptions through their desktop app. But the Kindle doesn’t get hot, doesn’t make any noise. It feels good in your hand. And I like it (maybe because it kinda feels Apple-y?). But it only does books. No internet browsing, no email, no socializing. This year more ebook readers are being introduced which offer some more functionality (without custom apps or APIs to build on), but often at an inflated price point. One of the selling points of the Kindle, its “free” lifetime, “Whispernet” 3G connection turns out to be also one of its Achilles heels. Since a couple of weeks, Amazon offers a Kindle API for developers, to develop active content on the Kindle. But how “active” can it be if you can only use 100KB per month of Whispernet on offer (as developer you can buy more data though)?

Anyway, I think I’m going to end this one right here. That’s a pretty long post making the case for the Apple iPad without actually mentioning it, no? I guess the hype was too much this time round for Apple to easily disappoint people. But I feel most of the complaints people vent are full of bull****. Yes it doesn’t do the dishes, nor a good cup of coffee. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on one!

PS: While writing this on my MBP, I started up my Aspire One. It had been a couple of months. I had to restart twice as there were Windows updates twice (in stead of bundling them all into one update), and there was a Flash update. Sigh.

Climate change affects everyone, even the deniers. What’s the cause of climate change? Our hunger for energy. Energy to power our desktops and laptops, our iPhones, our LCD/plasma screens…

Have a look around the office this morning (let’s say early 8am). How many people are around? How many PCs and screens are on, showing their screensaver, and doing nothing? Yes, it’s easy to press a button and have it on instantly. But it’s a serious waste of energy, and money paying for that energy.

Why do people leave their PC on overnight? It might be corporate policy to back up overnight. But shouldn’t files be stored on a file server anyway? Aren’t there images of fully installed OS’s for whenever something goes wrong? And can a backup server not remotely wake a PC from hibernation over Wake-On-LAN to do its stuff?

And, no, turning off your monitor does not turn off your PC (like in the movies). But there is a simple solution, the other way around: a Master/Slave powerboard. You plug in your PC as Master, and your screen(s) as Slave, and when your PC gets into sleep or hibernation, or ideally you turn it off, your screen(s) (and printer, scanner) will get turned off automatically. This is a very low impact (on your productivity) solution, which saves heaps of energy each year for your company, helping its bottom line, and the planet.

I have a couple of Objective C books laying around, which I opened once in a while, but closing them again pretty quickly… so I never got around developing anything. For now, I couldn’t justify any time spend on learning yet again another language. It is after all just a hobby project (the iPhone development that is). As a webdeveloper I could develop cool iPhone web apps (with jQTouch), but still that wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction as a native app. Then there are a couple of frameworks like PhoneGap and NimbleKit which allow you to develop iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But you’re still confronted with XCode, working in a new environment.

Then I found Appcelerator and their Titanium Mobile. Their Titanium product allows for cross platform development for desktop apps, and their Titanium Mobile allows for, well, cross platform mobile applications, using JavaScript and HTML. And Titanium Mobile is itself written in Titanium. Still in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. Was I in for a surprise! Titanium Mobile creates native iPhone and Android apps, which means you get to use native UI elements, the GPS, the accelerator,… to get some apps up and running pretty quickly. For example, I took the http://nextsydneyferry.com code and converted into a simple iPhone app (in the simulator) in less than 30 minutes! Before I was able to get it onto my iPhone though, I had to set up “provisioning”, generating certificates and all. Something you need to do for XCode development too. Once that was set up, you click a button and it gets transferred through iTunes to your iPhone, and you got yourself a native app. Without opening XCode, in my preferred webdevelopment environment!

Some gotchas:

• If you want to develop iPhone apps, you still need the iPhone SDK which is Mac only. No way around that. But you already have a Mac, right?
• You’re building native apps, and there’s different support between iPhone and Android. For one some features are missing in the other. So you’ll need to cater for that, and fork code between iPhone and Android.
• You still need to follow Apple’s design guidelines (although I’ve seen some horrible apps out there that don’t follow any design guideline). You’re not building an iPhone app for Android, or an Android app on iPhone.
• Don’t expect to go building 30fps 3D apps or something, you’re better of doing that in Objective C

Having said that, for simple text-based, web-connected applications, Titanium Mobile is perfect:

• There’s the basic API documentation of the JavaScript framework.
• They have a Kitchen Sink app and source that shows you all there is available in the framework, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.
• There’s a great forum for support and discussions.
• There are a couple of screencasts to get you started.
• Both iPhone and Android apps (and soon Blackberry) with a little bit of effort. I hope they would also add Palm’s WebOS.
• It’s Open Source (on GitHub).

Oh right, something about the iPhone apps I developed… A NextSydneyFerry app, which is just a port of the web application into Titanium Mobile. I might add some more features like saving the data locally, so you don’t need a web connection (only for updates). And a Twitter visualization tool called TweetFrame, which cycles through tweets based on a search query you define, like “a digital picture frame, but for tweets”. The funny thing is that, through Facebook I got a request to have something like TweetFrame, but as a website widget (don’t know why, but there were already widgets like that). Well, since it’s just some JavaScript, I did the reverse and created a widget based off of the iPhone app… You can see it in action on the homepage, below the Flickr feed.

For now I mainly focused on iPhone. I don’t care that much for Android at the moment, though with a little extra effort I could get them to work on Android too. One of the other platforms Appcelerator is looking at is Blackberry (though could )

It’s golden times for web developers, a Renaissance, where HTML(5) and JavaScript open great possibilities. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much happening now, it’s an exciting time.

So, if you’ve been keeping off developing for iPhone, try out Titanium Mobile!

At work we got brand new machines with 8gigs of memory on Win XP 64-bit. They have nVidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. We developer on IBM Websphere (WID 6.1.2).

I had the following problem when I tried to commit changes: no comment text box?!

I had other similar problems trying to set project references, and the likes in other configuration panes…

This bothered me for a couple of days, trying all kinds of things, including reinstalling WID. I also looked at the nVidia drivers, and they were the latest, no fix there.

Then I looked into nVidia’s nView Desktop Manager, which was enabled:

I disabled this and… lo and behold, WID problem fixed: I got my comment box back, as also any other pane which didn’t work before.

Just thought I’d share that. Someone might have the same problem, pulling out his hair about this.

Earlier last week Google introduces a new version of their Profiles. I had set mine up, and using it I had a concern:

It was a rather generalized question I put out there for the twitterverse. I wasn’t expecting a response at all. Less than two hours later I did get a response:

Google obviously cares about their reputation and seem keen to keep track of whatever’s being said about them. Unfortunatly they didn’t include a link to their report abuse system, which would have been nice if I had a problem (which I didn’t). They could have pointed to a particular blogpost addressing these concerns, or they could create one based on these concerns found around Twitter or the blogosphere in general.

Then last Thursday at a workshop I was demoing a couple of my little web apps where I noticed that one was crashing Firefox and the other had a weird Firefox rendering issue (in effect duplicating the content, though view source only showed the content once). I quickly dugg around and uncommented the UserVoice script loading in those page, which seem to resolve the issues. I posted my concerns on Twitter, to see if anyone else had the same problem.

Two minutes later someone (who I think/hope is involved in UserVoice which wasn’t obvious) replied:

Since I had the UserVoice code removed and was at a workshop (and it’s not really critical to me), I told him I had fixed it for now, and would look at it again later, to which he let me know that I could contact him if I needed any more help. I did not have to go to a UserVoice forum to get help (I wasn’t looking for help actually) , as it could well be an issue with one of the Firefox plugins I have installed. But UserVoice cares enough about their reputation that they try to keep all customers (even little old me, even free customers) happy.

Twitter has been useful for me before in resolving (or sharing) problems. For example, when all my sites hosted on (MediaTemple) were down a couple of weeks ago, I obviously tweeted about this, and got responses back from other people having the same problems. Some of them then pointed me to the MediaTemple Twitter account which was giving out status updates on the cluster problems they were having, to which I then subscribed and got into the loop of how and when things got resolved.

Twitter is an open micro messaging platform which allows people to use it in any way they see fit (within the 140 character constraints). It’s a diary, a bulletin board, a self-help system, a publishing platform,… enabling real time search for events, brands, people… and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

Net TV looks to be a proprietary service through Philips (you need them to get onto their Net TV platform), which is based on CE-HTML (Consumer Electronics), a subset of XHTML, CSS TV Profile 1.0, ecmascript, DOM,… intended to improve the experience to browse the internet on a tv. But why do we need another standard? Why are manufacturers trying to set up new walled gardens? Did they not learn? My mobile smart phone is perfectly capable of displaying full featured webpages, why wouldn’t a tv set? It might have been true five years ago, when we were all still on low resolution CRT tv sets, but with the lcd/plasma revolution we had last couple of years, resolution has improved greatly and tv set sizes have grown.

Browsing the web on tv has been around for ages, but never took off, with for example now defunkt Microsoft WebTV. I myself worked on a TV banking platform back in ’99-2000 for a Dutch bank and cabeltv company accessing internet banking over a settop box (“t-commerce”), which if I remember correctly was also using a version of CE-HTML, but there was certainly no JavaScript involved. And if you have a Nintendo Wii, you can browse the full internet on your tv using a version of Opera (a 5$US upgrade). But unfortunatly Wii isn’t an HD device, and isn’t an optimal browsing experience even on new full HD tv sets (native resolution seems to be 608×456, with pages being zoomed in and out). Playstation 3 (and I guess XBox 360) has a full featured browser too, and again people complain about text being too small.

But why would Philips not get on board with Opera (or Mozilla, or use WebKit), in stead of using CE-HTML? And it’s not a single manufacturer getting on board the internet-on-tv train, it’s also Samsung, Sony,… getting on board though with different solutions. And yesterday Adobe introduced its Flash Platform for the Digital Home
with Intel at NAB, but the tv makers seem to be reluctant to join them. While browsing on tv might never take off, one thing I am looking forward to are tv widgets, using web standard XHTML and Javascript, where Samsung and Yahoo! are leading the way (sets already available at Bing Lee).With these widgets you could keep track of Twitter while watching tv (without having a laptop on your lap, or an iPod/iPhone in your hand), and we might see new ways of interaction with tv programs through backchannels displayed at the bottom of the tv, as already happening on Twitter (#newinventors instigated every week by @mpesce). What I am looking for is actually some kind of Chumby for tv, something that injects widgets onto the screen (without me buying a new set), though better integrated (form, transparency, bottom or sidebar positioned) like the Yahoo! widgets.

In stead of a new browser war on television, we’ll get a widget war, between Flash, Yahoo!, Google (imagine the advertising potential) and all the other widget makers out there, trying to get their hands on whatever little time you still spend watching tv. Hmmm, come to think of it, Google Calendar as an EPG on your tv…