Archives for "Reviews"

Posted by Tarandon on 20th July 2009
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Social Activity

For some reason I’ve become engaged once again in the social media tools the internet provides.  This very post represents the first since early February here at Tarandon.ca.

It’s interesting to try and identify why the internet today seems more apt to meet my needs as a user than it was 5 months ago.  Maybe it’s just the summer time, and the renewed energy that comes with warm weather but I think life in general just seems to be going at a better pace than it has in the past.

Whatever the reason, I plan on keeping things moving forward.  Just updated the whole backend of this bitch and now I’m ready to take it all on.

Now, off to investigate cheap bicycles in Toronto.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Posted by Tarandon on 22nd January 2009
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Bumptop Beta

I got invited to the Bumptop Beta last week and I have to say my initial impressions weren’t the greatest.

When I first heard of this concept by Anand Agarawala, I was really excited at the potential of this new desktop environment.  He was even invited to TED to display his thesis project to the greatest minds on the planet.  But what I downloaded and what he displayed were two very different interfaces.

In the TED talks the user was able to resize the icons in an analog fashion, they were able to make the icons rigid or free moving, they were able to make shelves out of icons and stack other icons on top of them, but this was not the experience I was able to get from BumpTop Beta.

While the animation of BumpTop icon resizing was smooth, the ability to re size was incremental and lacked the limitless feeling demonstrated at TED.  The icons also did not spin as freely as the ones in the demonstration, they more or less conformed to a grid with provided wiggle room to create the illusion of clutter.  It was possible to post pictures to the wall of the BumpTop environment but was not able to create the ‘shelves’ that were included in the demo.  When editing notes or prompted dialogue boxes like an outlook alert, the left edge of my BumpTop overlay became transparent exposing the windows desktop.  This is likely because widescreen support has not been fully implemented.  The list of grievances is long at this stage in the game but I’m still confident the BumpTop team will be able to pull it off.

I had my misgivings about the interface, but keep in mind this is just a Beta.  It really is worth while playing around with if you can get an invite, but in the end its just an overlay for your desktop and really doesn’t help you all that much if your desktop is pristine like mine (no icons to be seen here).  Everything created, copied or deleted only affects your desktop right now, but I hope this could eventually become a replacement for explorer in general.  Every file folder being its own room and its contents interactive icons.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Posted by Tarandon on 2nd January 2009
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2.7 Uploaded

Well, the 2.7 Install went off without a hitch, except the zip extracted to the wrong directory. easily fixed however, and we’re back on track. To my amazement the plugins all seemed to work. and right now I’m trying out the QuickPress Widget in the corner of the dashboard.  I’m immediately frustrated by the lacking option to choose my categories.  Save as a draft.
Okay, now in the new editor, which is finally fluid enough to give me a decent typing area.  I also like the collapseable sidemenu on the left for added space.  I really appreciate all the AJAX effects they seem to incoporated into this release.

For free software this is really slick.

I’ll do some more playing around when time permits.

Cheers,

Posted by Tarandon on 23rd November 2008
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Movie Review: Twilight

Twilight Movie Poster

Twilight Movie Poster

Had the ratio of vampire to sappy romance been inverted I probably would have enjoyed Twilight a lot more than I did.  That being said the movie still had its moments.  I give it a 3.5 out of 5, recommend that you rent this one since its romance far outweighs the action you would expect of a vampire flick, the theater experience certainly wont be missed. Unless you enjoy throngs of pre-pubescent stupidity.

Cheers,

Tarandon