Archive for March, 2008

Boston Web Innovations Group this Wednesday

Mar 08
31

Anyone interested in new technologies and web-innovations in the Boston area should register and come see some demos this Wednesday. I’ll be showing off a new version of PicMe Photo Sharing. If you’re in the area please come by and introduce yourself. http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/

There will be 10 companies giving talks and demos and it should be a fun event. The Boston area seems to get less buzz with regard to web 2.0ish startups so it’s great to see an event that tailors to innovative companies on the east coast. See you there.

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Posted in Experience | No Comments »

The future of desktop Linux

Mar 08
28

The current dogma is that Linux can’t become a popular desktop operating system while the worlds most popular applications are written for Windows. But that’s just not true anymore. My grandfather who’s in his 90′s recently got his first computer. The only two applications that matter are web and email. The fact is that the OS matters much less now then it did in 2001 and it’ll matter even less in 2010.

Applications are moving to the web and application platforms are moving online as well. Flex from Adobe is moving things into the Air platform. Silverlight from Microsoft is bringing .Net onto the web.  Prism from Mozilla is also bridging the gap by bringing web applications to the desktop…. And Java, ahh Java, but that’s another story.

There’s no reason the next OS platform can’t be Linux but there has to be something in it for the typical web user experience. Even if Linux takes a foothold on the desktop the open source community will wake up to find that the field goals have moved. While everyone was touting Linux standards and open platforms everyone will have moved on and the operating system will be the Web. Your apps, your files and your data live in the cloud, not on the desktop.  This future is coming closer every day and it often feels like Linux on the desktop ignores this eventuality.

For the Linux desktop to succeed it needs to begin to enhance the user experience for the web user. it also has to be more relevant to today’s developers. Currently the browser experience is disconnected from the desktop and the innovations from KDE, Gnome and others aren’t relevant or visible to the web-community. (Both end-users and web-developers)
Questions Linux Architects need to ask:

  • What can Linux as a platform do to enhance the web experience?
  • What can Linux as a platform do to get developers excited about writing apps, the way that people are excited about writing iPhone apps.
  • How will Linux innovate and set itself apart from Windows and Mac? The hardware and the software are starting to look the same, what can Linux do with new interaction techniques and innovative hardware that will make people say wow, I want that!

For next year to be the year of the Linux desktop it needs to become relevant and provide something more then a free alternative to something that everyone already gets for free with their computers.

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Posted in Linux | 4 Comments »

Getting Things Done Desktop Wallpaper

Mar 08
22

The desktop of a computer is often a wasteland of unused icons, application shortcuts and all sorts of junk that never gets filed or deleted.  What if the desktop wallpaper could help you get organized? Using some basic concepts from David Allens book getting thigns done you can do exactly that.

wallthumb.jpg

(Download and set as your wallpaper 1024×768)

I’ve created a basic wallpaper that does exactly that. Feel free to try it out. The wallpaper is a simple blue background with two axis.  The first is Urgency going left to right. Things that are more urgent should be placed to the right. Things that are not urgent at all can be placed to the left.  The second axis is importance. If something is important it ends up closer to the top of the screen, if it’s not important it’s at the bottom.

If you position your trash can to the lower right (already setup on a Mac and sometimes on Windows) this ends up giving you cues to file or delete. I considered having delete on the left and file on the right but decided that the lower area of the screen was not important anyway so it was better to keep the recycle bin and finder in their natural locations.

The upper corners give you easy access to get stuff started and completed or store shortcuts and links for your someday projects.  Give it a try for a week and let me know how it goes.

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Posted in Misc. | 3 Comments »

Review – Remote Support with Crossloop

Mar 08
16

A new product I’ve been using recently to provide remote support is called Crossloop. It’s a bare-bones simple remote assistance application that allows you to see and help users remotly. The technology is based on VNC. It works well and it allows easy remote control and assistance without those pesky firewall issues.

I’ve been using Crossloop for remote support but it also works well for remote presentations. While services like WebEx provide many more features in the  years I’ve used WebEx I’ve never seen any of those features actually used.  Like it’s expensive counterpart Crossloop allows you to view/share a monitor remotly only it allows you to do it for free. Crossloop is limited in that it only allows one-to-one connections. You can’t do a one-to-many. However for most of my client-consultant meetings this is perfect.

Getting custoemrs to install Crossloop and call me up is easy and allows me to solve problems faster with less back and forth with the customer.

Overall I like it. It’s not as polished as Fog Creek’s Copilot for support isues but Crossloop is free to use and can be used beyond support. Check it out at Crossloop.com

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Posted in Review | 1 Comment »

Augmented Reality GPS

Mar 08
3

Imagine that instead of having a poorly rendered 3D map on your GPS you’re able to see the world as it exists with your GPS data overlay on your reality.

Augmented Reality GPS

I call this augmented reality. The concept is that you see the world as it actually exists via a camera in the back of the GPS device. The arrows for directions appear to be directly on the road surface the way it’s done in most football games. In addition you can get point of interest information on buildings as you drive by.

Mac from petitinvention got me thinking about this concept with his own mobile internet device. While his concept is perhaps the longer term future I do think that GPS devices could deliver something along these lines in the next few years. Now that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have driven fleets of cars around the country taking pictures of roads and landmarks with GPS information it’s only a matter of time untill the technology catches up. The nice thing is that you don’t even need high tech image-recognition for this to work. You just need precise triangulation of your GPS position and the road edges.

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Posted in Design, Ideas, User Interface | 5 Comments »