Personally, I’m still waiting for Mac OS X Leopard!

Immediately after installing the application, I noticed that I need to STILL have a Zoho account even though I’m already on Facebook and they should just be able to identify me from my Facebook account. TechCrunch poses a similar question.

I’m also not a fan of the fact that all ‘Create Document/Spreadsheet’ windows are still in new windows, showing that this entire ‘Facebook Application’ is actually just the same Zoho office suite packaged as a Facebook Application.

I don’t think that Zoho will be a big hit on Facebook - it’s not where people go to in order to type up documents and spreadsheets.

Why do I say this?

Because it gets annoying when scrolling through a Facebook profile that is several pages long (I’ve seen a lot that are easily more than 10 pages long if printed out).

Facebook is starting to look like a (more organized) MySpace every day - now if only there was a table of contents at the top of every profile that helped you quickly jump to certain sections of the profile, then it would help browsing considerably - AND it would show you what the person had on their profile, just in case you wanted to find out what their favorite music was, if you wanted to post on their wall, or if they were going to the same music concert that you are going to next week!

Here is an example of how it could look like:

Unfortunately, ALL of these applications WERE installed on a friend’s profile. You know who you are .

Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

Go check it out!

It certainly was a surprise to see the changes at first. I used Google Docs back in the day, when it was still Writely (and I conversed with the team fairly regularly, giving suggestions, some which were implemented and still are.) So, I was used to the old view.

This new look incorporates folders, which are new, as well as tags, which existed before. Does this mean that tags aren’t working out as well as Google had hoped? TechCrunch poses the question to Gmail to see if they will also implement folders. I personally much prefer Google’s ‘labels’, as they call it, which are essentially just tags. I like these because they give me all the flexibility in the world, and I’m sure most of you who have worked with tags before know what I’m talking about.

It’s nice to see that Google still gives care to these products. I’m waiting for the day when I can finally ditch MS Office for good and move completely to Google Docs. They implemented graphs in Google Spreadsheets not too long ago, and that was one major step forward, but without the powerful features that Microsoft Excel has, Google Docs & Spreadsheets still has some ways to go before being more than a convenience for me.

(From radr)

If you do a search on pretty much any website at Technorati, you’ll see that they have it listed there. Examples include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN - all of them ranked 0, because they are not considered blogs by Technorati. How does it discern the difference?

If anyone has any ideas, then feel free to post them in the comments!

As a web developer, one thing that I’ve been curious about is whether or not Safari also brings with it special Mac fonts and improved graphics to Windows users, and it turns out that it does, as CNET points out at Safari ushers in better browser colors.

Safari for Windows “supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors.” This is especially good for viewing color-rich images on the web, especially high quality photos.

One thing that I am particularly excited about is that Safari for Windows finally brings fonts that were previously only available on Macs, to Windows. For example, my own blog uses the Lucida Grande font, a very elegant and popular font among sites such as WordPress.com, which is only available on Macs. For Windows users, they see the Verdana font instead as an alternative.

Safari for Windows contains a large set of fonts that were previously Mac-exclusive, to Windows, including Lucida Grande. This is great news for web designers because it now provides a larger group of users that can see the fonts that web designers plan on using as their site’s primary font.

The article gives examples such as iLike’s Facebook application, with over 6 million registered users, and Safari, which has had over 1 million downloads since its launch a few days ago.

This basically makes a point that most internet users don’t care if something is web 2.0 or not; they will use it as long as it’s useful to them.

The main thing that we have to remember is to stop building web applications that are supposedly geared towards a web 2.0 audience, and instead, build things that are useful.

I want to stop seeing a new todo list being released every week; or, if you feel an urge to release one, then add in some useful functionality, such as Todoist, which is my personal todo list of choice.

What are your thoughts on the whole web 2.0 thing? Do you think we’re nearing the end as it becomes integrated into the rest of the ‘mainstream web’?

Safari

It looks like Apple really wants more than that measly 2% browser market share that it currently holds, with Safari. They’ve just released Safari for Windows as well, giving Windows users the opportunity to try out one of only a few Apple-created application available for the alternative operating system recently (iTunes was a great move for Apple since it was the iPod’s tipping point.)

People have already told me that is really IS a lot faster on Windows than Internet Explorer, so I’m happy about that. I rarely, if ever, use Safari on my Mac since I depend on my Firefox extensions, but as a web developer, this news is great for other developers on Windows because they can finally test their websites in Safari without a Mac.

Finder and Desktop

Apple has shown some of the new features that will be included in the next version of Mac OS X 10.5, codename Leopard. Below are my thoughts on the new features that are introduced.

I dislike the new default background image that they’re using for the desktop; the old one is a nice, smooth blue, and the new one is a photo of wet leaves. Yum.

I like the fact that they’ve focused some changes on making a new Finder. The current Finder has its flaws, and it’s very basic. It’s nice, but it could be better. The new Finder will hopefully fix many of its shortcomings.

They’ve applied Cover Flow to the Finder. Cover Flow in iTunes is pretty pointless; it’s fun to use for the first five minutes, and then it becomes an inefficient way to browse your music. Cover Flow for Finder is even worse; there’s nothing less satisfying than looking at your documents as if they were cover albums, but instead of album covers, you look at file icons. Sounds boring? That’s because it is.

The dock is now reflective. I get Apple’s obsession with reflections, but when it’s embedded into the dock, I can’t imagine how I’ll be able to live looking at a reflective dock every single time I’m at my computer. I hope there’s an option to turn that off.

In conclusion…

The problem that I’m seeing is that Apple doesn’t NEED to release so many versions of Mac OS X, because the features that each version has does not substantiate the purchase of a new version every year or so.

I’ve been a Mac user since the last Mac operating system, Tiger, was released (about two months after it was out). I was obviously more excited about using it than Mac veterans were, because I hadn’t owned a Mac since the Macintosh was out. With the previews shown of Leopard, I am seriously underwhelmed, even though it will only be the second iteration of Mac OS X that I will experience.

The announcements that were made today did not satisfy investors, and Apple’s stock price suffered because of that. The funny thing is that Apple set people’s expectations so damn high because of the past Apple conferences, that everyone was awaiting for yet another massive announcement to be made today (as if the iPhone isn’t enough.)

I also commonly receive email in Gmail that are spam and that bypass the filters. The Gmail spam protection system works similarly to Akismet’s, in that they both use a network filtration system by relaying any emails that one user considers spam to all the other users; the more times the same email or comment gets marked as spam, the more the system will believe that to be true and protect the other users from receiving the same item.

I’ve reached the point in both Gmail and WordPress where the number of spam/day that I get in my Gmail and the number of spam/day that I get in WordPress are about the same; I’ve currently got 12140 spam; divide that by 30 days, and that’s 405 spam per day. In WordPress, I’ve got 6130 spam comments, over 15 days; that’s 409 spam/day. They’re nearly the same by now.

So, which program is better? I get the feeling that I’ve got more WordPress spam slipping through the filters than spam email. I’m feeling that part of the reason that this is the case is because Gmail is newer than Akismet. (Gmail and its spam service debuted on April 1st, 2007, whereas WordPress’ Akismet service was released on October 25th, 2005, about a year and a half later.)

The spam email that slips through are usually very hard to distinguish from genuine email; indeed, sometimes even I have to think if the email is genuine or not, because it’s not selling anything and there’s no attachment (like a lot of spam has, because they include stock quotes in attached images.) The spam comments that I receive that slip through are almost always sex-based in an obvious manner, so it baffles me that they would not have been marked as spam.

Akismet also previously identified all of the comments made from a friend of mine as spam! Even after continuously marking his comments as genuine, they were still marked as spam, so I eventually just made an account for him. But still, that was frustrating. In Gmail, I used to have a few false positives marked as spam, but that’s very rare now. In WordPress, the number of false positives that I get is near 0.

In conclusion, I believe that both services have room for improvement, but I’m extremely happy that they BOTH exist. They fight the good fight on two different fronts, and they are both very commendable services. I believe that Akismet can also be used for services other than blogs, so that makes it a great asset. Over at b5media, Akismet saves us a great deal of work because we have received millions of spam comments since we begun using it. Gmail probably has more spam emails than Akismet has spam comments because Gmail is used far more often, but Akismet will soon catch up. It’s only a matter of time.

A lot of people have talked about how a keyboard that has no tactile response will feel after long sessions of usage; it’s no secret that tactile keyboards have their clear advantages. You use a keyboard every day, and it has tactile feedback because you can feel when you’ve hit a key square in the middle or when you’ve hit two keys at the same time by accident (I still do that sometimes - and my fingers reach for the ‘delete’ key automatically.)

I have no doubt that people will have some issues using the keyboard because of the unfamiliar feeling of receiving no tactile response when hitting the keys, but people will get over it pretty quickly once they’ve realized the other things that the iPhone does WELL are better than the things that the iPhone does NOT do well (this topic has been talked about so many times in the blogosphere that I’ll let you search for that instead of having me discuss about it again.)

The primary thing that I’m waiting to see is how good the predictive text is on the device. That’s the key to the whole typing issue. If it’s really good (and with the state of predictive text in current phones, it should be pretty decent at the minimum), then people will have less to complain about when making a bunch of typos.

Things like this particular issue can be talked about and beaten to death, but when you talk about something that actually requires touching the device, such as how people will respond to a non-tactile keyboard, the only way to know for sure just how people will respond is by waiting for the iPhone to get into the hands of customers. We’ll have to wait and see on June 29 just what people think.

Let’s face it. Here we have a company which rode atop a gimmick that was birthed during the dot-com bubble heyday; I’m talking about Ask Jeeves. Other search engines that also had a mascot include sites such as Mamma (one of the few that I can recall), and most of those have died off enough so that they hold a negligible share of web search. Ask is still around because they’ve managed to reinvent themselves as a search engine with a pretty good domain name, and I would say that that’s what’s kept them in the game thus far. If they were named something more web 2.0-ish, like Mahalo, then they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.

I applaud their attempt to again reinvent themselves in order to stay in the game, in the competitive search engine territory. Google’s got 50% of the search engine market share, and that’s still a long ways away from search engine dominance worldwide, so Ask isn’t done yet. They’ve definitely made a statement with their recent advertising blitz, but I agree with others in saying that it’s a fairly pointless campaign, and as a matter of fact, it’s more of an inside joke, because only geeks would think of algorithms when talking about search engines.

In spite of what I think they’ve done well, I still think that they pulled this latest reiteration of their search engine pretty poorly. I was baffled when I searched for something and saw that search results were fading in using Ajax. Ajax, for a major search engine? Are you kidding me? Using the Fade effect, no less; Google uses Ajax extensively in its non-search results products in things such as Google Reader and Gmail, but they have successfully implemented it in such a way that it’s not in-your-face obvious.

Ask really needs to continue tweaking their search results. The framed look makes it feel too constrained for me, or maybe Google has simply been pampering me all this time. There are so many things vying for my attention on the Ask search results page that I won’t be returning any time soon.

• the failure was trigged by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to increase the system’s e-mail holding space.
• “the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient”.
• the service in the event of a failure “did not fully perform to its expectations”

There’s a good chance that the problem was caused due to oversight by someone from the school that I currently attend, the University of Waterloo, since RIM employs most of its employees from there due to it being headquartered just a few hundred feet from the university’s campus. So on behalf of my university and fellow students: Sorry!