If you’re a PC Gamer however, I strongly advise against the upgrade to version 9.0.  In version 9.0 they’ve intentionally inserted scripts that minimize the game your in every 30 minutes and bring you back to the desktop.  I say intentionally because not interrupting game play is listed as a feature in the basic price package.  When I saw this I figured it affected games when it runs a scan on my PC. NOT THE CASE!

AVG 9.0 Game Mode WTF

Every 30 minutes or so, whatever game your playing, will just minimize without warning leaving you player idol which is infuriating.  I understand that they’re trying to nag you into buying the basic version, but the tactic used has actually crossed the line from helpful service to virus like behaviour.  I’m certainly not going to spend $34.99 for a program that behaves like a virus.  I download your program to prevent annoyances like that from appearing on my PC altogether. AVG crossed over to the darkside with version 9.0 and I’ll never use it again.

I’ll be deleting your software as soon as I can find a suitable replacement. You can also bet your ass that I’ll evangelizing your services to less competent computer users who ask me to help them manage their PC’s.  (Most of whom, don’t mind spending the $34.99 by the way.)

If anyone has suggestions for more customer oriented non-virus like ANTI VIRUS programs… please leave me a note in the comments.

Bye AVG, I hate you.

Sincerely,

Tarandon

Usually I tend to make friends by offering comical insight or odd perspectives on topics of interest. I provide a view of a situation that might warrant some attention. Sometimes this involves rather lengthy debate, but sometimes all it takes is a series of one liners that create interesting juxtaposition.  Interestingly enough Twitter caters to these one liners quite nicely.  The character limit imposed by twitter prevents the lengthy debate style conversations I might prefer to have.  It instead forces me to simply add my two cents worth to a conversation.  But cming up with 40 or 50 one liners a day can be quite difficult.

One liners don’t enter my mind very easily.  It takes some work, and sometimes some knowledge of the people your presenting them to.  You need to understand your audience to pick up on things they’ll find funny or witty.  The problem with twitter is that the view of any one persons life only comes via the same short snippets I’m trying to make an impact with.  And because the birds I follow are usually organised around undustry not character similarity, it’s hard to find one liners that don’t alienate some while appealing to others.  I’ve been taking shots in the dark on a one off basis hoping someone might find me humourous/insightful to moderate success.  I’ve also been toying with a the option of just not caring how many followers I have.  Resigning myself to this option (at least for now) seems a little bit like quitting.  Whatevs!

Cheers,

Tarandon

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

I just noticed this today.  If it is new, I like.  If not, I still like.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Update: Looks like it’s not new, the folks over at Blogoscoped noticed this too!

The new operating system is called Palm WebOS.  Somewhat predictably this operating system is designed to be really easy for web developers to design applications for.  If you happen to know X/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create applications for this new operating system.

What this means for the mobile market, is that right out of the gate there are potentially millions of developers available for this system with all the knowhow required to get an application up an running in as little as 3 days.

What’s even more exiciting is the user experience design for this new operating system.  Palm has created a device that’s really open to developers while at the same time being fairly sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly integrate information from several sources simultaneously without duplications.  This means that your contact list from outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc.  can all be integrated on the same device without any hiccups or format incompatibility issues.  In short, I think they’ve acheived what google was trying to do with Android, except Palm seems to have pulled it off with a whole lot more class than the Big G.

That being said, I still have some concerns over the application interface being web based.  To me this seems like an opportunity for people to develop self installing applications of a malicious nature through link hijacking and the like.  I really hope Palm has thought far enough into the future to prevent these possibilities from coming to reality.

I think Palm deserves a Kudos from the tech community for sticking it out so long and innovating in a market that seemed to have all the angles covered (or at least have people with patents that claim to cover the area Palm has ventured into).  On that note, let the lawsuits begin.  I suspect there will be some litigation in the near future.

Congratulations Palm!

Cheers,

Tarandon

For free software this is really slick.

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

Cheers,

Cheers!

Tarandon

Huge props to Leah Culver and Mike Malone for their hardwork on Pownce.  I hope you both enjoy your new roles on VOX with sixapart.  Things are going to be interesting in 2009!

Cheers!

Tarandon

I figure that each record label should be selling their brand experience, not their music.  Musicians would be inclined to associated themselves with a record label based on the ideals associated with their brand, and their webportal experience would be an extension of those ideals.  An entire culture of loyal users would visit the website on a daily/weekly basis to find out what new music there was available, and the record label would be happy to give that new music away for free.  Why!?  Because it creates the potential for new fans at absolutely no cost to the record label, and increases ticket sales for the little guy who just got signed.

The potential exists today for a record label to subsist on several lesser known artists pulling in medium sized crowds with lots of tour dates.  Labels could even go so far as to give their users the option of providing location in their user profiles and then map the fan base geography to optimize tour locations for each band.

Instead, they force one of the largest distribution networks they have to piss of their entire viewership and in the end loose out on the potential to capitalize on what people want most.  Good music.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Fifteen minutes later I’m finished the test with a score of 95/100 when I notice that our teacher had one of the answers wrong, so it’s really a 97.

I’m now sitting here killing time until 3:00 waiting for everyone else to finish.

This course is such a waste of time.

Cheers!