August 2006 Archives

I was intrigued by the offer of a free web based moblogging system at Scripting News.... Well, I tried it. And I tried. And I tried. And I got a lot of screens that look just like this:

The link l used was most certainly what I sent.

Oh well. Back to mo:blog. It ain't trendy. It ain't Californian. It is, actually, 2.0, and it does seem to be in permanent Beta, but, sadly, it doesn't support social meta tagging or crowd-driven meme mapping, so it can't be hip. Oh, and it works, too.

Ok, it's not very nice, big, or clever to mock a free, experimental service. But fercrissakes, why experiment with moblogging. Been there, done that.

(oh yeah.... posted with mo:blog.)

I just checked out Technorati (yes, I'm a bit bored at the moment), and discovered that "photoblogoraphy" is well inside the world's favourite million blogs!!! Success! Book deal!

However, "The Evenings Out Here" is really slacking, slumped down at 1,023,467. Bad dog! No biscuit!

This pinging stuff doesn't seem to work, though. I updated this blog today. And yesterday. Technorati doesn't seem to able to work that out.

Mac OS X is a pretty wonderful creation, compared with the competition. Most of it really does "just work". Things like, say, plugging in a USB stick require one step: plug it in - whilst the immediate competition insists on telling you all about the new hardware it has found, then telling you you're not allowed to add hardware, actually, and then mounting it anyway... and then insists on you telling it exactly want you want to do with it. You get the picture.
However,there are exceptions. Some things don't "just work" in OS X, and using a bluetooth phone as a modem is one of them. To do this, first you need to pair the phone with the Mac. This part is painless. But then, you need to use a complex combination of the Network preferences and Internet Connect to try to set up a modem connection. Along the way, you need to identify your phone from a list which doesn't appear to have been updated since OS X10.1, so you need to be aware that, for example, there is a chance that the settings for an Ericsson T39 (2002 vintage) will work with a 2006 v600i. You then need to set up ISP settings, and finally somehow work out how to get it all working. Good luck.
Well, there is a better way, and it is called Launch2Net, from Germany's Novamedia. Let's get one thing clear first: priced at 99 Euros, Launch2Net is bloody expensive. At that price, it needs to be absolutely flawless. Well, it is. Beyond bluetooth pairing, Launch2Net takes care of everything, and in an elegant way. A one time setup process sorts out the background details, and then it is simply a matter of launching the application.
On launch, you need to wait a few seconds whilst it activates the bluetooth connection, and then checks the available network connection type (e.g. GPRS, UMTS) and reports on the signal strength and available uplink and downlink bandwidth - something that Internet Connect does not do. You then simply click on "connect", enjoy the snazzy way the window flips to show connect mode, and hey presto, off you roll down the information super-highway (or crawl, depending on your mobile connection).

Launch2Net keeps you informed of exactly how many bits you are sending and receiving, and of your connection time, inobtrusively but clearly. When you've had enough, simply click on "disconnect". Roaming is handled seamlessly, which avoids hours of trying to set up connections when travelling. Launch2net supports just about every phone on the market, over 100 devices, and over 300 connections.
Since launching is manual, you don't run into the potential situation of the OS doing one of gazillion background tasks it appears to need network access for, and running up mobile session fees without you noticing.
Being a German company, Novamedia understands mobile networks in a way that most US companies, including Apple, just don't get. I used to use Novamedia's similar product for PalmOS, but Palm, being a little more switched than Apple in this regard, made it redundant, for me at least.

There is no getting around the fact that Launch2Net is extremely expensive, but this is the only qualification I would make to a high recommendation. If you regularly need to connect your Mac laptop over mobile, and you think that 99 Euros is a good tradeoff for saving you a lot of time and stress, then buy it.
You can make your own mind up by trying out the connection-limited but otherwise fully functional demo.

Entering text on Palm devices has always been a bit clumsy. Graffiti, whilst simple and effective, is not a patch on the handwriting recognition in the Newton 2100 (for example), and the screens are just a little too small to comfortably write on. Third party text recognition tools such as MobileWrite are not much bettr in practice, even if the technology is impressive. Of course, one can always pick away using the built in keyboards, but these are not particularly pleasant to use either.

Enter miniKeyboard by ANIMATORsoft, which in a nice bit of lateral thinking, eschews hitech solutions in favour of rethinking the onscreen keyboard.I've been using the demo on my Palm Lifedrive for the past few days, and I'm impressed.. The screenshot below shows the basic idea.

The keyboard can easily be accessed in any application requiring text input by placing the cursor in a text field and clicking on an assigned hard key (Navigator-right by default on the Lifedrive). A few applications are not fully compatible with miniKeyboard, most significantly DocsToGo, but a "compatibility mode" provides a workaround where input is buffered and then "injected" into the active document, a bit like a very fast ghostwriter. There is also an issue with mo:Blog, where it does not properly take control back after exiting from miniKeyboard. However, mo:Blog is in beta (forever it seems) and I have not encountered this issue anywhere else. In any case, switching to another application and then re-entering mo:Blog restores eveything.

Mini-keyboard is fast and intuitive. It is actually much more effective than you might imagine, and enables writing speeds that easily compete with Graffiti or MobileWrite. I can almost match typing speds now on the Palm, and also write in situations that up until now have been frustrating (caveat: I am a strong candidate for World's Worst Typist).

At $20, Mini-Keyboard might seem a bit pricey, but it is worth it, and anyway the price of PalmOS apps has been tending to rise recently, probably as a result of falling demand.

Mini-Keyboard is a highly recommended productivity enhancer. The amazing thing is that nobody seems to have thought of it before. Get the demo from ANIMATORsoft.

So, I decided to sign up for Google Analytics. Seems interesting, even useful. I went through the registration process, until I got to the terms and conditions. And here is what I got:

Guess what Google ? Not all of Switzerland speaks German. Switzerland has 4 official languages, of which French and Italian are significant proportions, and providing a version in Rumantsch would be a nice touch too. And since there is a considerable international community, an English version would be useful. Is that so difficult to manage ?

Companies which trample all over linguistic sensibilities like this do themselves no favours. Possibly they are even acting illegally - it may well be that this agreement is non-binding if offered in Lugano or Geneva.

It isn't just Google - MindJet, makers of the pretty cool MindManager, decided yesterday that despite the fact I signed up in English, because I gave Switzerland as my location, I wanted a German demo version (actually, I may be in part unfair here, as I believe that MindManager for OS X is a single, multi-language installation, but the download page was in German only).

I've got nothing against Swiss Germans, but I've got quite an issue with lazy multinationals who appear to believe that Switzerland is part of Germany....

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot (1819-1880)

There must be a good 10 million blogs (apart from this one) that this could apply to...