UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

I want to discuss something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I haven’t really discussed this before, at all, on the internet or maybe even in real life.

The internet has allowed us to communicate in brand new ways using innovative new media. It seems that in a very short time, the number of ways that I can choose to communicate with someone has shot up exponentially.

One of these new-fangled ways of communicating is Bird Site (for the uninitiated, go read Wikipedia).

I find Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible to be a very useful social tool for communication, conversation and keeping up with people. In contrast, I find traditional instant messaging (IM, such as AIM, MSN, XMPP/Jabber and the like) burdensome and difficult to use on a consistent basis.

My dislike of the traditional IM most likely stems from my introverted personality. Hopefully in this post I will explain exactly why and why Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is better.

Note that this is purely my opinion for what works for me. Everyone is different, which means that what might be true for me may not be for someone else, even with a similar personality. These are my personal views on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible vs IM.

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All the time we get information thrown at us and managing that information so that you are in control of it and not the other way round can be a real challenge.

As you should know, I have recently started university. If there’s anything you can do that suddenly causes loads of information to be thrown at you, then that is it.

And it all adds up. A brand new email account with lots of stuff coming in, timetable information from multiple places, tasks to add to to-do lists and so on.

So I thought I’d take a moment to share how I’m dealing with some of this information and how I am using the technology available to me to have access to that information (hopefully) wherever I need it.

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There has been a considerable traffic spike here, since Google announced their new web browser, Google Chrome.

Not because I’ve spoken about it until now, but because it sparked interest in my thoughts on Gecko vs WebKit.

Google Chrome is considerably ‘buzz’-y at the moment, so I thought I would fire up an internet-connected Windows machine and give it a try.

While from a technical point of view much of the browser seems very interesting – and a very good idea (separating each tab into its own individual process, the new V8 JavaScript engine), at the moment I can’t see it offers much unique user-visible functionality.

Regardless of whether something is technically awesome or not, you won’t get the masses to use it unless they can see a killer feature – something that is visible to them and benefits them.

There are some unique elements to Chrome’s interface – specifically the single address/search bar (Omnibar), but I can’t help feeling underwhelmed at the lack of ‘killer-ness’ about the browser at the current time.

It is early days, though – and Chrome does show some promise.

Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:

• Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas – lack of innovation.
• iPhone 3G – nice.
• iPhone 2.0 software – looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
• Mobile Me – reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.

Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions. 🙂

… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

Yeah, they cost too much, but they are awesome. So here are my completely unrefined first impressions.

Mail is by far the best mobile email client I’ve ever used. To be fair, I haven’t really used that many, but it beats going to the Gmail web interface hands down. On a full-sized computer, Gmail webmail is pretty workable, but is sluggish on a device like the iPod.

Here, the richness of a local app improves the experience significantly, especially on slower and unreliable dodgy wi-fi connections. And I can have as many POP/IMAP accounts as I want loaded in and synced up. The best part of Mail for me is that it caches email you’ve downloaded (even on IMAP), so you can look at email again even when you don’t have a connection to remind yourself of a detail or something. I actually love Mail on the iPod Touch. 😀

Maps is pretty cool – haven’t had much real use for it yet, considering I only got the apps this afternoon. It’s less useful than on the iPhone as you’ll have to find an open connection to use it, rather than using the cell network. Still, it’s an impressive maps experience considering the portability of the device you’re running it on.

Weather’s useful, and as far as I can tell, also caches data so you can still see something when you’re not connected.

Notes is a genuinely useful app and should in my opinion have shipped with the iPod in the first place. Shame about the lack of syncing, but it’s useful for quickly jotting something down without finding a pen and paper.

I don’t really care much for Stocks, not at the moment anyway. 😛

The customisable home screen and web clips are a nice touch too, although I’m not sure about the wobbling icons. It sort of distracts you from what you’re doing – I think something a little more subtle might have been better to let you know that you’re in editing mode.

Overall – they’re worth getting, but I am still quite annoyed at the fact that it isn’t a free update. Roll on the SDK. 🙂

I finally had time to walk into an O2 store today and have a brief play with the iPhone.

And I’m pretty impressed. On a sidenote – I’ve decided to go for an iPod Touch, which is actually scheduled to arrive tomorrow, but since it’s a part Christmas present, it won’t be getting any usage for 42 days from today.

I was a little concerned about the iPhone keyboard, but even in about 10 minutes, I picked up how to use it and became pretty good and considerably quick for a small keyboard. Which is a good sign, as I’ll be getting used to it more on the Touch.

The applications all worked really well – the multi-touch interface is very well done and it feels very intuitive to just pick up and use. I mean, I would say that, as I tend to pick things up quickly anyway, but it did seem genuinely intuitive.

My only complaints from what I’ve seen about the device itself are the fingermarks on the screen (the demo iPhones there had seen a lot of fingers) and Safari occasionally rendering a little slowly on some pages. I can confirm, however, that my site looks just as it does in Safari on OS X on the iPhone. 🙂

Of course, my major complaint is the contract lock-in, which is why I’m getting the Touch and not the iPhone itself. It’s a shame, as Mail, SMS, Google Maps and the Phone functionality on the iPhone do look very nice.

Quick tip if you do walk into O2 or the Apple Store and play around – if you do log in to anything in Safari. and then just idly tap the Home button thinking you quit Safari, beware. Anyone who goes back on Safari will arrive at the page you were last – logged in and all. I’d recommend you log out explicitly from whatever sites you visit, close all pages with the bottom right icon in Safari and then clear History, Cache and Cookies in Settings from the home screen. Or, don’t log in to anything. 😛

I’m now going to have to resist the temptation to walk back into O2 during lunch breaks just to have another play! 😉

Argh. I really need to find more time to update this more often. It’s suffering right now and I’m sorry about that.

I’m here today to talk about a few things. First of all, projects. WPGet and SleekTabs still have had no time on them – right now stuff is just too crazy and it’s currently impossible to fit them in. I haven’t abandoned them and don’t want to, I just don’t know when the next time I’ll get a chance to sit down and work on them will be.

For my work on Vaveo, and just anyway, I actually have a couple of small projects that I might want to release in the future. First of all, there’s a JavaScript based image and text rotator script (I’m not sure the best way to explain it, but sort of like Jeroen Wijering’s script but not in Flash and supports text along the image) that I wrote for the Vaveo homepage.

I’m really happy with how simple yet elegant the code is and I think it might have utility in a lot of other situations and for a lot of other people too. What I don’t want to do though is just throw the code out there and not be able to commit to supporting it if people need help and updating it. Is it better that it’s out there though or not out there until I can be sure I can deal with it?

I don’t know the answer to that. Thoughts?

The second project I have is a home-grown download tracking system I use here on my site. Basically it’s a fairly simple PHP script that records information about people who access it, and then transparently passes them onto the file download. Now this one I won’t throw out there immediately; at the moment it’s quite tailored to my needs and would need a proper reporting interface built to view the logs and a lot more attention to make it portable. Still, I’m keen to get that out there too at some point as it’s nice to contribute back code.

On a completely different subject, I am going to be away and offline from the 18th-25th of this month inclusive. That might mean I may possibly get some time on my other stuff (albeit without an internet connection), but that is definitely not a guarantee. 🙂