The blog “Cocoa Is My Girlfriend” includes a shout-out to Jordan Languille who did the graphics for Rickshaw and web imagery for Infurious recently.
“You can see Jordan’s portfolio at his site. I’m quite pleased with the results and highly recommend his work. This is not a paid endorsement. I just like to see good work rewarded, so send him your business. You won’t be disappointed.”
Jordan can be found on teh Internets at OneToadDesign.
Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.
But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.
For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!
Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.
Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?
Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.
Wil Shipley is planning to start something new.
Golden Braeburn is an attempt by Wil to change the way that Mac ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) work. In essence, you get screwed by shopping cart hosting companies, you get screwed by merchant account holders, you get screwed by card processing companies, you get screwed when you try to build your own shopping cart and trying to keep current.
In essence, you get screwed.
So, Golden Braeburn is about unscrewing you.
Cool. Let’s see what happens.
[I so have to create a company with an breed of Apple in the name. I’m such a fanboy.]
NiMUG are having another meeting!.
They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.
Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?
Every year we wait for the new and sparkly stuff from Apple and we often get it. The move to Intel. The iPhone. the 17″ and 12″ Powerbooks wayback when. This year is no different. We have a new subnotebook, software updates and a glimpse into Apple’s plans for everyone.
Some correspondants on Damien’s blog don’t think it’s up to much (and this is before touching the device). One commenter wrote “Certainly it’s some kind of breakthrough, but then shit-flavoured ice cream would be, too.” I think that’s more than a bit harsh but then it explains why Apple always dips straight after MacWorld even if the product announcements have been insanely great. A lot of people were expecting Apple to go after the eee PC market and produce a subnote that was cheap. People, seriously. Subnotebooks are not cheap. If you don’t mind running a machine with a 7″ screen, that is light but bulky, only has a 2 hour battery and has barely enough storage for the OS plus any media files, then by all means run, don’t walk, and buy a eee PC. It’s ugly (and yes, I have one here).
The MacBook Air is aimed at people who would buy the Sony TZ series of subnotebooks. No-one would ever accuse Sony of being a cheap brand so I wonder why people expect Apple to suddenly, after years of being a premium brand, flood the market with £200 laptops. The Air would have to be beautiful, it would have to show something new and exciting and it would have to beat the best, not beat the cheapest. It’s thinner than the TZ and cheaper than the TZ.
My beefs with the MacBook air are simple. It’s only got one USB port. Though I seldom have more than one thing plugged into my MacBook Pro, there are times I have two. I might be charging my iPhone while playing Battlefield. And no, wireless mice are not good for the First Person Shooters. This happens infrequently enough that I’m not concerned about it. I’m also not worried about the lack of an ethernet port because, frankly, it’s been months since I plugged my laptop into ethernet and that was when I was at a client site. I usually carry a Airport Express with me if I’m unsure of wireless at the next location. I’m also not that concerned with the lack of RAM upgrades and the inability to remove the battery. 2 GB of RAM is a goodly amount for the target market for this device. I am curious that they didn’t bring out some sort of dock, I guess you plug in your USB hub, your power and your video out and just work on. It’s a sleek machine, underpowered for what I want (mostly in the graphics card department) but tempting. I don’t consider the multi-touch trackpad to be a big deal - if it’s not a touch laptop screen I don’t see the point. That said - touchscreens tend not to be thin if they are of any size.
In all, the MacBook Air is not for me. I’m not THAT much of a road warrior (heck, my laptop is 17″ and seldom leaves the house). It would serve a lot of people I know, probably more than they realise especially when they consider exactly how often do they plug anything into their laptop!
Lack of ethernet? Yes. I really wanted to drop over a grand on a laptop and then run wires all over my house, chaining me to certain parts of the room.
Scores 8/10 in my opinion. I’d have liked a 11″ machine.
We knew this was coming and it’s just like it said on the tin. Maps will now find your location pretty effectively using cell tower triangulation. You can move icons about. You can add bookmarks to the home screen for the bazillions of web apps out there. Texting to multiple persons doesn’t inspire me in the implementation but that’s a UI thing. Song lyrics? If I had any. iTunes rentals? If they were available in the UK I might care but I have Sky and more movies than I can watch anyway. And for iPod touch owners, $20 for the update isn’t a big deal. Sure, it’d be nice if you didn’t have to buy it but then 5 apps for $20 means apps are being targetted at around $4 each. Is Apple laying down expectations for pricing for iPhone apps bought through iTunes later this quarter?
A solid enough upgrade I guess - I don’t get lost very often though. 6/10
This makes the Apple TV into an interactive device rather than just something to view media with. It becomes a realistic option for people who have broadband and don’t want to pay for cable or satellite TV or on-demand services. Of course, you can’t buy movies on iTunes in the UK and neither can we rent them via Apple TV. So if you’re in the UK, this is a useless update and another example of how if you’re in the UK, Apple doesn’t really care. Just keep buying their stuff. This is pretty much a 1/10
The Airport Extreme with built-in hard drive is the only thing that really impressed her-indoors. Everyone should be backing up and with having to plug in disks, it can be a pain having to do so. This removes that pain. This I would place as the most impressive release in the show.
What does this tell me? Apple wants people to have more than one Mac. That seems obvious but Time Capsule is designed to back up multiple Macs. The MacBook Air is not designed as a standalone machine but rather as a portable machine which provides you with a companion to your powerful desktop at home. Leopard options like “Back to my Mac” show that being able to access one Mac from another Mac is an important part of their strategy. They’ve convinced a lot of people to buy one Mac so far and when you’ve managed that, getting them to buy another Mac is a no-brainer.
Time Capsule gets a rather spiffy 10/10 from me. Would have been 11 if it had AirTunes too.
We’re now counting down to the release of the iPhone SDK.
Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:
When you look pictures hosted on Gizmodo you can see that Jonathan Ive is heavily influenced by Rams’ designs.
We now have to see what other household products Apple will reinvent.
I’d have to add that
I’m no design guru but I think there’s room for improvement.
iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, but from big business. SAP as previously discussed is bringing their product to the iPhone because their own people want it (and as we now know, the SAP client is being developed using a pre-release iPhone SDK here in Belfast).
Avaya, one of the big names in modern telephony, has also signed up to the iPhone and therefore lent it some serious credibility in the Enterprise.
Avaya one-X Mobile for iPhone will allow users to have access to visual voicemail, corporate directories, and VIP lists, all via an “enterprise-secure” environment, and allow the iPhone to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls while maintaining users’ office identity.
Click for the flash demo (which, of course, you can’t view on an iPhone).
Nortel, (never the visionary) hasn’t leapt onto the bandwagon for either Contivity or their IP phone products. But then they’ve been hot on air and cold on “actually doing anything other than loudly collaborating with Microsoft”.
Good oh!
Okay.
The 10/20/30 Rule - It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
The Lessig Method - the functional opposite of the 10/20/30 rule and best illustrated by the man himself (scroll to the bottom for video).
In both cases the focus of the presentation is to capture attention though they use drastically different approaches. Pick one of them.
Essentially you want to avoid this:
From Seth Godin’s Blog. Used without permission
I think it’s tragic that I’ve seen powerpoint slides in $BIG_CORP that may have beaten this one to the title of “Worst Powerpoint Slide Ever”.
I downloaded the cool CTU ringtone for iPhone inspired by “24″ and eagerly loaded it onto my iPhone.
Of course….no-one rang me all day so I didn’t get to quickly take the call, stand up in the middle of the training course and say “National Emergency, I gotta take this!” What is that all about?
Mood: Sad 
