Entries Tagged 'Tech commentary' ↓

Huh? Everywhere else lets me have this as a legitimate name (Google, email (work and play), YouTube, errr, Xero and … I’m sure I’ve signed up to other stuff but maybe not), so why not you Facebook? I really don’t want to use it (because I have this sense I am going to bombarded with more spam that I already get telling me my friends-using-Facebook are having a birthday, yet if I’ve never signed up to the damn thing how can it assume who my friends are … anyway …) but the only way I’m going to keep in touch with a couple of travelling friends is to sign up. Not everyone has a blog or personal website like I do.

What kind of discrimination is this anyway? Do they trawl through rafts of noise words in other languages to determine if someone is a colour or a gender instead of a ‘real’ name? I wonder what orange is in Russian …

Well blow me down, Google’s been around for TEN YEARS! Did NOT realise it had been that long. Wow.

They’ve done a cool timeline of their history. Would love to have one of these on the go for Xero. We’ve kind of got one, but it was a pretty serious one for our first Annual Report.

Would be cool to have one like Google’s with little stories or definitions along the way of quirks or traits that make us who we are. Like when Rod was on the business show on TV the morning of our IPO – watched that on one of our old videos the other day. Cool.

It’s very cool how I can tell my laptop where the other monitor is in relation to it to make dragging from one monitor to the other as smooth as possible. In my office at home the monitors don’t sit exactly side by side – straight across horizontal drag from one t’other – but rather the second monitor sits slightly back and up – bottom left to top right horizontal drag. So instead of going across to the side of my laptop screen and up, I can go straight up to the right on the diagonal by telling my laptop that’s where the other monitor is. Cool!

Under duress I recently switched my default browser not only to Firefox but to the latest version, 3. Rest in peace IE6. Sniff. Talk about who moved my cheese! Getting used to tabs was hard enough and then there were the teething problems with printing, downloading, access to secure stuff on our network … however, it does have a logo with a lot of orange on it so will persevere.

Along similar lines to previous ramblings about people no longer having to remember things in their own heads because we’re becoming reliant on technology, going to a previously visited site in FF3 requires not much thought any more either. Anything that you type into the address bar that forms any part of a URL OR the title of a page that you’ve visited before, and not just the beginning of it, shows a list of all the sites you’ve visited so you can pick from the list.

So no need to remember URLs any more, just type a word and bingo! I think IE6 (& earlier versions of FF) did something similar but it might’ve been based on the start of the URL.

Don’t you think this makes it very tricky if you happen to be using another browser or another machine? You need to remember the sites you frequently use because short of searching for them every time or using a finger print or some other identifier that facilitates travelling favourites you’re stuck!

This time by a reputable company … and apparently can be spec’d to something decent so who knows … might be one step closer.

It’s orange and it’s a Mac … kind of (from papermag.com)

Look look! Look at MY Help Centre on an iPhone! It works, it’s readable, you can unravel the table of contents tree and click on links and see the screenshots. Very exciting.

No. The Mister doesn’t have a new phone.

A while ago I came across this make-a-list website and I just took another look.

Streamofconsciousness first impressions:

• Free 10-second sign-up but what about 10-second tell me what
  it is/does – although I guess I got as far as ‘make-a-list website’ although I think that was from a blurb from whatever referred me to it in the first place.
• So, assuming I do end up with a webified To Do list, does it print?
• How do I access it? Do I come back to this site and log in from
  any browser?
• Can I read my list on my phone when I’m at the shops and can’t
  remember what I was going to get for so and so for Christmas? If not can I rely
  on 2. above?
• How do you share the list? Should I choose a good name and
  password (or whatever it’s going to ask me when I sign up) to pass onto others
  or will they all have to get their own login etc?  And will they know what they’re being asked to do?
• Obviously I’m going to have to click sign up to see if I can get my questions answered and I’ll be really annoyed if it’s one of those sites that you have to go to all the trouble of choosing an email login, username, password, security question etc etc only to find out that it’s something that doesn’t suit my needs that I then have to unsubscribe from (assuming it allows that) or suffer through years of email newsletters from it.

Tick tock

Nope, nothing much on the sign up
page … I’m obviously going to have to sign up to find all this stuff out …not going to happen.

I guess they’re assuming that people that want to use this
are web-savvy and can second-guess how this is all going to work.

Now you can see why I’m probably a good fit for my job – what better person to write help for software that someone who as a customer asks all these ’stupid’ and curly questions themselves!

Oh, in case you want to use it: http://tadalist.com/

Am probably insulting an artist but just found some lollipops tangled up with the Google logo this morning.

On closer insepction I don’t think it’s their cool little images to go with some current event (like leap year or start of the baseball season) but rather an artists’ series so that you can create a colourful personalised homepage. Hmmm. Don’t want that. I like the white screen with box.

MacDaddy just gave me this cool orange Apple background image for my Mac’s desktop. AWESOME (Now just have to remember how to change the desktop …)

He also gave me a couple of Windows tips! Windows key +E opens a new Windows Explorer window and Windows Key +D shows the Desktop. Cooo-el!