[The makers of the Kindle's E-Ink] will be introducing a wide variety of new e-reader displays this year including color, flexible, and touchscreen EPDs. PVI also says that response times have been improved enough to allow for animation support on products in 2010.
Huzzah! Every time I point out how much I love my Kindle, someone has to be an ass and tell me that color or some other feature is “impossible” on E-Ink.
Whoops.
Charles King:
Software for the iPad can be downloaded through the App Store, but that doesn’t provide for applications to be deployed in a uniform way across an enterprise
I love it when pundits spout off about things they don’t know about. There’s an Enterprise Developers program, different from the normal iPhone Developer program, that provides exactly what he says Apple doesn’t provide.
By a wide margin, this is the most asinine news to ever come out of Cooperstown.
A huge portion of “what I do” is ravenously consume information. I consume information about new technologies I might use in my business. I consume information on trends in my industries. I consume information passed along from friends and from industry visionaries. I consume.
As you can imagine, I follow hundreds of RSS feeds. My Mac client of choice is NetNewsWire. I love this app. I love it to pieces. Seriously. Check it out. It syncs with Google Reader and it has a very robust Smart Folders implementation. NNW is entirely integral to my reading.
It is in replacing NNW that I found my second real challenge and my first possible Blocker. At first, I just used Google Reader’s webapp, as I’ve done occasionally even on the Mac. For large scale reading, though, it was a bit inelegant. Smart folders would make things much easier and, since Smart Folders are really just saved searches, you’d think that’d be a Google-thing.
After trying a few readers, including one that was a FireFox extension, I settled on FeedDemon, brought to you by the same fine folks at NewsGator who maintain NNW for Mac. It’s not perfect, as its “Watches” don’t quite replace Smart Folders, but it’s close enough.
I spent most of the weekend getting set up for general productivity; email, IM, web browsing, writing, and such. For now, I’m focused on free-ish software just trying to reproduce my Mac experience as best as possible inside the base Windows cost.
Safari is my primary browser on the Mac, but I soon found that Safari for Windows is pretty much garbage. It loses too much in translation. IE 8, as nice as it is compared to prior IEs, is too kludgy. It irritates me to no end, for instance, that CTRL-L pops a new URL entry widget instead of simply highlighting the current URL in the browser bar. I’ve played with just about every browser imaginable in my life and, as far as I know, IE is the only one that still does this. What’s with that? IE is still slow, too. It seems to load pages about as fast as any other browser, but navigating its UI gives the impression of a clockwork device. Sometimes I’ll tab to the next field and it seems like it has to calculate which field is “next” in a form.
So I wound up where everyone else does, or at least should: FireFox. It’s not perfect, but I find it especially humorous that FireFox for Windows feels more Mac-like than Safari for Windows.
I settled on Mozilla Thunderbird for my email needs. It’s free and it does just about everything. It’s Gmail configurator set up my main Gmail account and my Google Apps accounts without issue. The only trouble I’ve found is that Thunderbird defaults to synchronizing all IMAP folders. My “All Mail” folder in my personal Gmail account contains many tens of thousands of emails going back most of a decade.
Once this was discovered, it was easily configurable in Account Options. This leads me to one of the first benefits over Apple Mail: Mail will only poll your Inbox, whereas Thunderbird will poll any IMAP box. I assume you don’t need to go full blown Windows for this, though, assuming Thunderbird for the Mac supports the same feature.
On the Mac, I use Adium over iChat because it handles multiple accounts in a more sane manner. Pidgin works as an almost perfect replacement for Adium and I notice no appreciable differences.
I didn’t buy a copy of Office, so I can’t speak for Outlook quite yet. The only viable iCal replacement I found was Sunbird, but once I got started I found that it’s completely unworkable for me, and this alone may drive my need for Outlook. The trouble is that I use Google Calendars and have three accounts; one for personal, and another two tied to Google Apps accounts. While Sunbird implements CalDAV quite well, it will only store one set of login credentials for Google Calendar.
I worked around this by specifying my username and password directly in the URL, but for some reason this only seems to work with the first two calendars configured.
Next week, I’ll be attempting the unthinkable. I’ve only had brief flirtations with Windows when I briefly used a Compaq desktop in 1997 and again in 1999 when I was between Macs, but my direct line Mac descendency goes a little something like. My first Mac OS was System 7.1 and I’ve used every single release in between. My last serious experience with the other side was Windows 95.
So, the Great Ungenius Windows Experiment is born; I will be using Windows 7 Ultimate as my primary OS for the next two weeks, to see how the other side lives. Expect to see a lot of Windows-focused information along with the usual commentary starting Monday.
Every time you start thinking maybe some progress is being made in this country, someone like Don Lewis shows up.
Tea Partier Everett Wilkinson:
We have a very successful movement, similar to the Civil Rights movement, or women’s suffrage.
Your movement represents factions who once opposed Civil Rights, women’s suffrage, killed the Equal Rights Amendment, opposes modern civil rights reforms, seeks to roll back civil safety nets like Social Security, and opposes modern safety nets like Health Care Reform.
But other than all that, you’re just like the Civil Rights movement.
This is all kinds of awesome.
The event is being touted as a chance to see their “latest creation.” There’s a definite art vibe to the invitation. Apple’s been moving away from the Creative segment in recent years and more towards consumption; maybe this will signify a shift back in that direction?
