Forget it. Nope! It can’t be done. I for one am unable to fully shake the Interweb.

Mentally prepared to ditch all calls, emails, texts, and social network pings, I was convinced I would be able to enjoy my nine day beach vacation in good old fashioned peace and quiet, exactly for the courage to disconnect myself from constant digital connectivity.

I know, probably no small feat for someone otherwise “always on” (I work in New York, on Wall Street, and for a telco. Oy!), the idea was, just once, no Blackberry voice or office email, no laptop, no iPod or iPad, or whatever else would get me to the Web.

Yet, come Monday (day three), I was back “on the wagon”, scouring for IP access as if I had money riding on it.

Turns out, according to The Economist I do!

Read the rest of this entry »

So the other evening I decided to finally get around to setting up my home Windows 7 machine to print to the printer hosted by my wife’s XP machine in the other room.  I wasn’t expecting it to take too much time: both machines were already sharing files across our Windows Home Group, I’d installed my share of printers on my share of Windows Server networks back in the day, Windows 7 is the result of a chastened post-Vista Microsoft ‘getting religion’ on user friendliness, and the printer in question is a popular current model from Hewlett Packard.  No problem.

Well… Problem.  Here’s how it ended up taking me over an hour and a half of the limited amount of time I have at home in the evenings during the week to get this done (and bear with me, there’s a point).

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, there are certain software products you use every single day.  If you’re even more like me, you start to have certain ideas; ideas about how that software could be friendlier to the user. Some of these ideas are more obvious than others, but what’s truly baffling is when an already-implemented feature remains unavailable to its relevant use cases - which brings me to Google Language Tools (the lower link to the immediate right of the Google search textbox).

A few months ago, after enough assorted brilliant ideas for application and OS workflow improvements had accumulated to warrant a quick post about them  (“a short wish list”), we wrote: “wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess)?”
Well, Google Language Tools still doesn’t include this admittedly small but user-friendly feature.  However, it was recently pointed out to us by an astute reader that Google Translate has exactly this feature (see below). Upon further research, it turns out it’s been there since May of 2008, and the mobile Google Language page has it as well…

Google Translate is the web service-based incarnation of their Language Tools, and is designed to be “mashed” into other websites. There are still a lot more people using Google on computers than smartphones. All of which begs the question: why does this cool little feature show up on a web service where it’s arguably less needed (since the language of any given website is of course not a mystery to the publisher and remains static) - and not out there on the main Google Search/Language Tools page, where millions of us web-surfing humans are visiting sites in multiple and different source languages all the time?

A Mountain View mystery.  Meanwhile, try out the Google Translate web service below - now you can read digitalmissive in Belarusan if you want to - pretty nifty…

Every now and then I find myself coming across things I wish an application could do - or could do better. Here then is a short and informal list of a few such ideas I’ve accumulated over the past few weeks - small ways the apps I use every day could be improved.

Anyone out there have some to add? (or, on the other hand, if some of these have already been implemented in ways I don’t know about yet, let me know!)

iPhone Zoom and crop on photos when emailing. You can zoom in and move around to any part of an image when setting it for your wallpaper. Why not when you email a photo too?

Adobe Acrobat Better search. I’m still baffled at Acrobat Reader’s primitive search functionality.  In a program that’s ostensibly all about documents, it’s not unreasonable to assume you should be able to search on multiple terms and receive results regardless of the order in which those terms appear - in other words, an <or> condition, like a web search engine.  Instead, an Acrobat Reader search for “Apple ” and “Flash” is treated as a search for “Apple Flash”.  Speaking of Apple, Steve Jobs just might have a point regarding his assessment of Adobe technology - the free PDF reader app ‘Preview’ that ships with OS X not only loads much faster than Acrobat Reader, it searches documents how exactly how one would expect  it to, and displays results organized by relevancy.

Windows 7 Smart scrolling. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you dragged a window to the right so the scrollbar was off the right edge of the desktop, the scrollbar popped over to the (still visible) left side of the window? Well wouldn’t it?

Firefox Search snippets highlighted in page. I usually make my decision as to which search result is worth clicking through to by that handy 1-2 sentence “search snippet” returned under the Google URL. Wouldn’t it be nice if that content (which is usually exactly what I’m interest in) was highlighted in the page when you clicked through to it? I often end up having to do this manually via a <copy> on Google and a <find> on the source page, and I’m wondering why I can’t find a Firefox add-on yet to do this for me.

Google Language Auto-detect source language. This is a simple one - when I paste some German text into the “Translate Text” box, wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess) for me? Incidentally, here’s a fun Google Language game - translate some English text to another language and back to English and note the (sometimes amusing) artifacts produced by translation error. Then do the same but go through several other languages before returning to English and note the (even more amusing) errors produced - sometimes they’re hilarious. Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.

Firefox Turn Google into a left-pane navigation device. With today’s wide-screen and high-resolution monitors, it might be nice to have your search browser persistently resident on the left pane of your browser - then clicking on a link would populate the large main pane. This too could be a Firefox add-on (but now that I think about it, where would the text ads that pay the bills for Google go?)

Lastly, Speaking of add-ons… My favorite Firefox add-on that should be a preference. I love me some tabbed browsing. So much so that I can accumulate quite a few tabs in no time at all - way too many to fit across my window. That’s why my favorite Firefox add-on is Tab Mix Plus, a simple plug-in that allows your tabs to create multiple rows rather than that little out-of-space dropdown.  In action, it looks like this:

I used to write a fair amount of music for television commercials.  It was interesting to have a glimpse into the workings of the advertising industry for a few years, even from the ‘gun-for-hire’ sidelines - for example, I was once called back in to do some minor revisions on a previously approved music track for an aerosol carpet deodorizer because of last-minute changes required by legal at the ad agency.

In this particular commercial, the product’s effectiveness was illustrated by an ‘odor-smelling wand’ prop waved over 2 pieces of carpet recently sat upon by the family dog - one carpet treated with our deodorizer, one with theirs.  After the post production was complete, though, it was discovered that the number of (fake) beeps coming from the prop didn’t accurately match the (real) numbers coming from the underlying focus group testing - so the spot had to be reedited with the correct  ratio of fake beeps  - hence my (and the voice-over talent’s) call-back.

Such is the attention paid to potential litigation arising from directly comparative advertising…

Read the rest of this entry »

I remember moving to the U.S. in 1993 exactly because it appeared to be a country certain the glass was half full. Fast forward, 17 years later, things seemed to have changed along the way – it is as if a growing lack of self confidence started replacing this country’s long-held trust in the power of risk-taking and go-getter success.

Where am I going with this you ask?

No, I won’t discuss the state of national health care here. Nor is this the place to ponder over where exactly US education stands, or whether immigration reform is getting a fair shake.

But the telco guy in me can’t help but notice — even broadband is getting the evil eye these days.
Read the rest of this entry »

“What we are seeing in the U.S. today in terms of smartphone penetration, 3G data, nobody else is seeing in the rest of the planet,” said Ralph de la Vega of AT&T during a conference call the other day.

“The amount of growth and data that we are seeing in wireless data is unprecedented,” he added.

As the long-standing negative buzz on AT&T’s network has peaked over the past few weeks (due in part to a recent Consumer Reports article and an aggressive advertising campaign from Verizon), AT&T has shifted from the somewhat defiant and dismissive stance taken earlier this year (when such reports were characterized as “anecdotal feedback” and “sweeping generalizations”) to a more plaintive tone - as demonstrated above.

Whether or not it’s good long-term policy for any company to publicly complain about how difficult it is for them to provide the service they’re being paid to provide is open for discussion - particularly when that company’s current windfall success is almost entirely dependent upon a soon-to-expire exclusive partnership with another company (i.e. Apple).

In any event, while the technical challenges AT&T faces may be very real, I would be more receptive to the recent “data networks are hard” excuses coming out of the company if it were able to a better job of getting even voice coverage up to par in the NYC area - above is a screen shot from my iPhone, taken from my home office.  My apartment (the blue dot) is located within 2 miles of downtown Manhattan - not exactly the middle of nowhere.  Yet, I get almost zero bars - and an unusable voice connection.

In AT&T’s defense, the company has recently launched an iPhone app to allow users to send the company location-specific reports of poor service (of course, in cases of no coverage you’d have to put the iPhone on an available wireless network for the app to function).

So that’s what I’ve done - I’ve installed the app, sent in my report, and am waiting  to see if my voice (let alone data) service improves.

In the meantime, while at my desk at home, it would appear I own an expensive  iTouch.

The keynote event at the Future of Television East conference here in New York a few weeks ago was a conversation with Paula Kerger, President & CEO of PBS.  During the discussion, the subject of the iPhone NPR app came up as a model of  what digital distribution of PBS content could someday look like.

Although the tremendously successful  BBC iPlayer might have been a more apt example, I was happy nonetheless to hear one of my favorite iPhone apps getting some recognition.

Of course, the ability of internet radio to provide access to any station regardless of the geographical limitations of its over-the-air broadcast range were touted -  Kerger, as it happens, enjoys listening to Maine public radio (where she has a summer home) while traveling.  However, what was left unsaid about the NPR iPhone app was what I feel is its most notable feature:  the “Programs” section, a comprehensive implementation of all available on-demand streams organized by program rather than station.  Not only that, but news shows such as “All Things Considered” are broken down by individual segments, so one can actually browse within the show (of course, for a more passive experience you can still play all segments sequentially via a playlist).

Read the rest of this entry »

Turns out, I spent a good part of Thanksgiving weekend catching up on my subscription to The Online Reporter.

As I am going through weeks and weeks of back-issues of the popular Internet and CE digest, I catch myself repeatedly noticing the growing number of consumer software start-ups with particularly short and vowel-rich companies names.

Think Google, Hulu, Lala, Vudu, and Veoh. Oh, and then there’s Rollyo, Slooh, and Bebo, of course. And that’s only the beginning.

Read the rest of this entry »

No! Not Wayne’s World. Nor The World According to Garp. Instead, your and my world. And this time according to either Thomas L. Friedman, Professor Eli Noam, or Facebook - depending on how you choose to see it.

If you ask long-time New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman, the world is flat, implying that digital communications increasingly ensures everyone everywhere has access to the same growing pool of World Wide Web-provided information. This levels the playing field for all of us, he says, to impact the plethora of socio- and economic-political issues — no matter where and who we are on this globe.

This sounds promising, I thought, if it wasn’t for an off-the-cuff conversation I had with Columbia Business School Professor Eli Noam, about a year past Friedman’s book published.

Read the rest of this entry »