By Phil Whelan on September 3, 2010
Gmail Priority Inbox is a great idea. Prior to this the Inbox was split into 2 levels – Inbox and Spam. This Priority Inbox creates a third middle level, which is essentially “ham”.
Ham is all the things that waste your time, but come from organisations that you are affiliated with in some way, such as “offers from you bank”, or places you purchased things from online. It may be from more loosely affiliated partners that you accidentally opted into, but you haven’t unsubscribed yet.
This will be a tremendous time-saver, and I really hope it works as accurately as the Gmail’s Spam folder does. Just like the Gmail Spam folder, if this drops to 99% accurate you still have to check a second folder or you risk missing an important email. It’s likely that many users will never or rarely check their original Inbox again if the accuracy of the Priority Inbox is high. It must be over a year since I looked in my Spam folder.
This may seriously impact the ability of many marketing companies to do their email marketing. Their emails, although delivered successfully, will go unseen and unread. I can pretty much guarantee that the click-through rate from Gmail accounts will go down significantly. I know from working in the email industry (specifically anti-spam) that email marketers already have a very hard time getting email delivered successfully. This will only add a further blow.
Do you sympathize with the email marketers? Will you use the Gmail Priority Inbox? If you do, do you think you’ll start ignoring your original Inbox if the Gmail Priority Inbox works well?
Posted in gmail, google | Tagged email marketing, gmail, google, ham, inbox, priority inbox, spam |
By Phil Whelan on September 2, 2010
$200,641 has been pledged for the development of Diaspora, the decentralized web implementation, which intends to replace Facebook with a version that is distributed. Each user will retain their own data on their own machine. I see a huge flaw in this. They’re moving in the wrong direction. The web is moving to the cloud, not to home machines. In a few years we’re all going to be running dumb terminals and interacting with data far away. Who wants to look after their own data? Well, us nerds for sure. But your average Joe, or your aunty Barbara? Who’s going backup your data and make sure that you do not lose it when the burglars come for a visit? Will the benefit out-weigh the hassle of installing and maintaining this thing and upgrading your machine as you fill it up with photos and videos? No.
Nobody really cares that much about privacy. Sure, we all care, but not if we need to get up off our butts and “install what now?”. “I don’t get it. Why do I have to leave my computer on all the time to use my Facebook (Diaspora) from my mobile phone?”. Which brings me to another point – average folks do not run servers, they run desktop computers or sometimes they only have a laptop. If we are expected to leave them on 24×7 so that our friends can see our data, how bad for the environment and our electricity bill fund is that?! In the near future many of us may only have a mobile phone. Can I install my Diaspora node server on my phone? Hmm… why’s my phone bill so high? Oh no, the HD video of me falling out of a tree went viral and I’ve served it up to half of China from my iPhone.
Facebook will charge ahead as Diaspora struggles to support all different platforms they need to support, since following the HTML standard is much simpler than understanding all the ins-and-outs of every Operating Systems.
I understand the sentiment of the Diaspora developers and the 6479 backers on KickStarter. They’re just trying to find an solution to the monopolistic data control situations we find ourselves in with the web as it is, but I’m not sure they’ve really thought it through enough. I know I haven’t, so your thoughts on this would be highly appreciated. Hopefully some further ideas and projects will come out of this Diaspora idea, but I do not think Diaspora will work the way it’s described. It might have worked in the days of Napster, but not now. We’ve moved too far into the cloud.
Posted in facebook | Tagged cloud, diaspora, facebook, kickstarter |
By Phil Whelan on May 8, 2010
This week I attended Mobile Geeks Vancouver where we were given a presentation by Samir Agarwal, Head of Maemo Operations at Nokia in Mountain View, California. The presentation by Samir was definitely eye opening. After winning an Android phone at the Vancouver Android Developers Meetup last week I thought I’d covered all the bases of what’s happening in the mobile world. If I were a mobile applications developer, and I might be, should I be developing for the iPhone or for Android? Well, it appears there’s now a third choice. The N900 was demo’d with a promise of a far superior phone in the second half of 2010. It was running the Meego platform, which we’re told we should all be excited about.
Me at Mobile Geeks Vancouver. I'm in the red hoody talking to Samir
Meego is open-source and is a collaboration between Nokia and Intel. It’s basically Linux under the hood and can incorporate any number of open-source technologies. Applications are generally written in C / C++ or something that can compile onto it (Objective-C ?). We were demo’d some OpenGL appplications, which are always a good crowd pleaser, even with the technologically enlightened. I was pleased to see see the OpenGL game Angry Birds running on there, since it’s the only game I currently play on my iPhone.
Video Skype was of interest to me. Nokia have decided “the genie is out of the bottle” on this one and doubts that, moving forward, network providers will continue to have problems with such technologies. I’m sure they’ll still have problems with it, but I agree that this is becoming a forced change if the entire Internet is to go mobile and the lines blur between what is “the Internet” and what is “a phone-call”.
I noticed Nokia as a business is not doing so well, with frustrated stockholders. Will these new phones apease the stockholders and fly off the shelves? I’m not sure. I understand what Nokia is trying to do by building, not a phone, but a small computer that fits in your pocket and is potentially capable of doing anything that your computer can do. It did seem very capable from what we were shown.
It has Flash in the browser, which I believe was Firefox? It must have one heck of a battery. The video-out on the N900 was impressive, but I doubt personally I’d use the feature too often. It’s here where Apple strives, making decisions on the needs of the majority in order to reduce bulk and weight for everyone. When the phone was demo’d I thought the Meego looked relatively slick, but when I used it hands-on it didn’t feel especially intuitive to me. The Android phone (did I tell you I won?) seemed much more intuitive to me, though I have still to find any Android 1.5 applications that draw me away from my iPhone. Meego, like Android, seemed to be widget friendly. This is an area in which the iPhone is really lacking. I find the home screen on my Android tells me most of what I need to know. The calendar shows what’s next, what time, and where. The news shows what’s happening in the world and I can see if I have new email. All this without entering an application. But this is not a Android review, so I’ll stop there. Multi-touch is not yet in there, but will be in the next [super] version.
Problems with Nokia's websites
Nokia seems to be focusing on services. For instance, I was interested to see Nokia be doing a great deal in China with services for farmers. Could be a big niche. I checked out Nokia’s ovi.com . The site is very slow loading, inconsistent and many pages, mostly in the maps area, did not work in the Google Chrome browser. Are these the services that cost $10 billion to develop? If this is an example of the services we can expect on the phone, I might give it a miss. I thought that might be a bit harsh, so I went to http://europe.nokia.com. Again, slow loading pages. Click around there any you’ll get a “404 Page not found” every few page clicks. Refresh the page and it’s fine. The word “flakey” springs to mind.
In conclusion, I’m interested to find out more about what Nokia has install for the short term future. Unlike Apple, they have several technology streams in the mobile area. Apple is simple – they have the iPhone. I hope we see a great phone come out with Nokia in the 2nd half of 2010. It could be in a few weeks, or in 7 months time. I hope they figure out how to have so many heavy-weight technologies running in a mobile phone, without the need for a heavy-weight battery. If they do, and keep the weight down, it could be good contender with the iPhone and Android. I also think they should focus on hardware over web services.
Posted in mobile, nokia | Tagged android, flash, iphone, meego, n900, nokia, opengl, phone, smartphone |
By Phil Whelan on May 1, 2010
Well, I guess I have to be now, because I have just won a Samsung Galaxy Spica Android phone from Rogers. They kindly donated it to the Vancouver Android Developers Meetup. It’s running 1.5, so I want to get it updated to 2.1 and multi-touch-ness as soon as possible. More info to follow…
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged android, developer, galaxy spica, phone, rogers, samsung |
By Phil Whelan on April 21, 2010
After seeing the iPhone 4G on Engadget and the front facing camera that will be included, I started to think about what Apple intends as the future of the device. For the iPad Wifi+3G Apple has negotiated some great deals with cellphone networks. These are basically no contract data plans with no phone service (iPad is not a phone). This seems to be just one stepping stone away from, in my opinion, the ideal phone and [no] contract package. I’m sure if Apple were to ask the networks who would be willing to go this route, then all will begrudgingly say “me!”, just not to be left in the cold. Apple would not just throw a face-facing camera onto the iPhone without a careful strategy and a big “wow!” factor. These camera’s are nothing new, but nobody has done anything big with them yet, and Apple always does something big, or at least cool. My guess, and that’s all it is, is that iChat, which Apple has not focused on for some time, will be Apple’s next big thing on the iPhone. They already have the software, have established that they could get the data plans, and now they have the camera. If they have been quietly upgrading iChat for sometime and are making it a central focus of iPhone 4G, then I think this is where we will see the next big jump in phone technology.
Posted in apple, iphone 3g, mac, phone calls | Tagged apple, Engadget, iChat, iPad, iPhone 4G, phone, Skype |
By Phil Whelan on April 13, 2010
I’m currently having trouble updating my TomTom on my iPhone. iTunes will not transfer it, due to “not enough space”. I seem to have 3Gb free, and I’m removing even more for the 1.55Gb app, but iTunes still is not satisfied. What to do?
Posted in iphone 3g, iphone app, itunes, mac | Tagged fail, free space, iphone, itunes, problems, tomtom, transfer |
By Phil Whelan on April 13, 2010
This is what I’ve been looking for all my life. Well, all my take-a-screenshot-to-help-explain-which-button-to-click-on life, anyway. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does you want to do it quickly. I’m talking about taking a screenshot and adding some simple annotations. Draw a circle around this button, add a arrow to point to that thing and throw on a few comments because the circle and arrows just are not clear enough. Loading PhotoShop or Gimp is just too slow for this, and even then it’s not the best tool for the job. Back in the day, on Windows, I found that PaintShopPro 4 did the job nicely. It was quick to fire-up and only had a few simple tools for doing this. After Googling around for a better solution on the Mac, I came to the realization that it had been sitting under my nose the whole time. Preview can do it! And it does it really well and fast. I’m surprised such a handy feature is not visible by default. Annotation options can be added to the toolbar by choosing “Customize Toolbar” from the “View” menu and dragging the “Annotations” icon onto your toolbar.
Posted in apple, application, imac, mac, productivity, utility | Tagged annotations, leopard, mac osx, preview, productivity, utility |
By Phil Whelan on November 8, 2009
Sounds backwards doesn’t it. It is. I’m wiping my iMac 24″ and starting again. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard I’ve had nothing but problems and I really cannot see the benefits outweighing the swear-box filling annoyances I’ve been experiencing. So what happened?
- Firstly, things would just grind to a halt. After running for a while applications would just hang during startup. Applications needed to be upgraded, but the installers would often hang. Nothing in the console.log
- Anything downloaded by Firefox is “tainted”. This means that my Mac sees it as likely to give my computer a virus and will not let me open it. With the Terminal I found you can use xattr to remove this flag, but this only seems to work on document files. I found no solution to the tainted .dmg files I had downloaded, so all the .dmg files I’d downloaded were useless. The solution is either quit using Firefox or use File->Open to open documents from within Applications.
- My printer driver is not fully supported. I can use printer, but I cannot use any the features it came with. I cannot print greyscale or lighter (to save ink) and I cannot print on both sides of the paper, so I’m doing it for the trees. Save the trees!
- I was seeing the spinning beach ball far to often and for too long. This annoyance has become more noticeable to me since I started using Ubuntu 9.10 at work. In Ubuntu I never wait for anything, as applications load instantly, switch back and forth instantly and the experience is very very snappy, especially using Chromium. I’m curious why I would ever see these delays on my Mac, which is a more powerful computer, with more RAM and doing less work.
- Time Machine is cranking the external disk all the time. I have to eject it to stop it. This is after it has finished the creating the latest backup. I have no idea what it’s doing.
So, while I’m tempted to install the latest Ubuntu on my nice shiny Mac, I’m heading back to a fresh install Mac OS 10.5.8 Leopard, waiting for the dust to settle on 10.6, or until 10.7 comes out.
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/timmythesuk/110790687/ for original Snow Leopard image
Posted in apple, Uncategorized | Tagged apple, beach ball, complain, downgrade, fail, install, leopard, mac, operating system, snow leopard, uninstall, xattr |
By Phil Whelan on September 13, 2008
I recently purchased my first iPhone. Here in Canada, like every other country, there’s only one provider of the iPhone, which is Rogers. I’ve really not enjoyed my experience with Bell and I had heard that Rogers was just the same so it made no difference in switching. When I switched our numbers over the Rogers immediately I started receiving long distance calls from the same number 416-645-2105.
The first time I answered it. Silence. I’ve had scams where they first check you’ll answer with a non-speaking auto-dialer. When they establish somebody is there and you’ll answer, they being calling you up and trying to sell you things. My first thought was that I was going to bombarded with calls now. I’d had a similar experience with a competition I had apparently won without entering. Therefore, I told my wife not to answer it and I did the same. What made my suspicious was that we’ve had these numbers for almost 2 years now, so it was a little co-incidental that these calls started when we switched these numbers to Rogers. Was this a glitch in the Rogers system or had they or someone in their company sold our numbers to marketers or, worse, scammers?
I did some research online and apparently I’m not the only one with this problem. Initially I read only the first few pages of complaints. “I keep getting this call… silence. It’s definitely from Rogers”. Countless people had the same problem since joining Rogers. I tried to call Rogers customers services twice, but 40 minutes was as long as I could wait.
The third time I called I was set up for a long haul. I had my cuppa tea (Earl Grey) and called them from Skype so I could be hands-free and surf the Internet whilst I listen to the on-hold music of Michael Bolton and listening to how important my call is in the “higher than unusual” call load. So as Michael sang about “how the love isn’t like it used to be”, I read into the Rogers complaints on the website a little further. Somebody wrote of how they had called the number back and it was actually Rogers Communications on the other end of the line. Someone else had done some more research and found it was a money saving exercise by Rogers.
In order to optimize their call-centre 100% they have a machine call you. When you answer they pass it off to call-centre employee. The only problem with that is when they are too busy to answer your call. This results in the silence on the other end of the line. Better for Rogers, a nightmare for the customers. Some have been plagued by this for months and months up to 7 times a day. Rogers refuse to block any numbers.
When I finally got through to the nice lady at Rogers customer services they said there was nothing they could do about this and they know nothing of this number. Which is strange, since I found a number of other people who had reported the same thing. I spoke to her manager who told me they would investigate. I hoped they could resolve it.
10 minutes later the phone rang. “Rogers Weirdness!!” was the caller-ID. I set it to this so as not to answer it by mistake. I also used a picture from Evil-Dead II to scare my wife into not answering it. I answered the phone. “Hello?… hello?”, I patiently waited for the silent machine to hand over call to a human. “Hello?”, I waited. A few moments later, “Hi! This is Rogers Customer Service calling you to welcome you to Rogers Wireless”. I could not help but laugh out loud. I explained to her what had been happening, but I could tell that her call-quota was diminishing by her listening to my story. She was relieved when I let her continue to confirm my details and go over my plan. She confirmed that myself and my wife had been removed from the system.
Now I wait to see “Rogers Weirdness!!” appear once again on my phone. I know there are countless others out there who have switched to Rogers to get the new iPhone 3G. My advice is to stay on the line when you get a call from 416-645-2105. Wait past the silence. End the nightmare.
Posted in caller-id, customer service, evil dead, iphone 3g, phone calls, rogers, wireless |
This will be a tremendous time-saver, and I really hope it works as accurately as the Gmail’s Spam folder does. Just like the Gmail Spam folder, if this drops to 99% accurate you still have to check a second folder or you risk missing an important email. It’s likely that many users will never or rarely check their original Inbox again if the accuracy of the Priority Inbox is high. It must be over a year since I looked in my Spam folder.
