Tag: web apps

Zebra Melody Rocks with a Great Twitter App

Earlier tonight, my buddy Dave Wallace tipped me off to a great music site, with an even cooler Twitter app.

zm Zebra Melody is a new music aggregation site where you can search for and view music videos and hear songs from your favorite artists.  For example, a search for one of my favorite bands, Slobberbone, turned up a bunch of songs, including excellent live videos of Josephine and Engine Joe, two of my favorites, and an audio link to Lumberlung, my favorite Slobberbone song.

After finding an artist, there’s a music discovery tab (“Similar”), where you can explore for new music.  The “Similar” tab for Slobberbone includes Old 97’s, Uncle Tupelo and the Drive-By Truckers, among others.  That seems pretty accurate.  There’s also a tab where artists can add tour info and other events.

Now for the cool part.  Send a Twitter message containing the name of an artist or song to @getsong, and magically, Zebra Melody will send a reply with a link to the Zebra Melody web page for that artist or song.  I first threw a softball by inquiring about Whiskeytown.  I got a reply with a link to this page, full of videos and song files.  Interestingly, some of the listed songs are covers (see Dancing with the Women at the Bar, for example).  This is cool with me, as anyone who has been following my recent Blip.fm covers series would know.  Next I threw a little heat by inquiring about another of my favorites, the Deadstring Brothers.  I immediately got a reply with a link to this page.  More musical goodness.

The navigation (particularly clicking on songs in the “Top Melody” list) is a little shaky, but all in all, I think this service rocks, figuratively and literally.   Check out their blog for more (eventually).

Zoho’s Lucky Day: Google Closes Its Notebook

I have been a regular user of Google Notebook for a long time.  It’s not as pretty or full-featured as Zoho Notebook, but I don’t need a lot of those extra features.  I just need a simple, uncluttered and easy to use place to keep and access notes and other data.  Google Notebook has filled that role well for a long time.  Surprisingly, Google announced today that it is ceasing development on Google Notebook, apparently along with some other apps I have never used.  So from a note taking perspective, I am homeless.

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I don’t understand this move.  Google Notebook was a useful and reasonably well designed product.  I have to believe a lot of people used it.  Why couldn’t Google just add a right-side column with AdSense ads to fund development?  I also wonder if this is indicative of a move away from Google’s chase for desktop application dominance.  Google Docs is still under active development, but any office suite (or online substitute) needs a note taking application- at least as an add-on.

Technically, current Google Notebook users will continue to have access to their data and, presumably, the ability to create new notebooks.  But the Google Notebook extension will no longer be available, nor will the hope for new features.  In other words, Google has opened the door, but out of courtesy will wait patiently for everyone the leave the party.

So where does that leave us note taking hobos?  There’s always Evernote, which would be the easy choice if I made all of my notes on the iPhone.  Evernote’s iPhone application is elegant, but its web interface borders on horrible.  I suppose I’ll move my notes to Zoho Notebook, at least for now.  Zoho Notebook is a fine application, but, again, I think it has more horsepower (and clutter) than I need (or want).  Plus, I don’t find an iPhone app for Zoho Notebook.

I need a note taking home, with a simple, but powerful web interface and an elegant iPhone application.

Can anybody spare a link?

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Why Sharing is Holding Back Application Development

I still love my iPhone.  I especially love the fact that I can read my iPhone reading list and browse the App Store for new applications that promise to make my life easier and more efficient.  The iPhone/App Store combination has been one of the biggest productivity advances I have ever experienced.  Heck, Apple may be taking over my tech life- I bought an AppleTV box today.  It’s another elegant device and, by far, the best device I have found for serving home movies.

But it could be better.

hatesharingEvery developer, every application and every blogger is obsessed with sharing, collaboration, yada, yada.  Today I read that the developers of my most useful app, Evernote, may be moving their focus away from their excellent iPhone app to focus on, you guessed it, sharing and collaboration.  Does anyone actually use the collaboration features crammed into all these apps for anything truly useful?  Most people I know are more interested in keeping people away from their data than putting it out there for the world to see.  Even if we wanted to collaborate with our partners, clients, etc., no corporate IT department in the world would let us.  And even if they did, there are enterprise platforms that permit collaboration while maintaining the big business-mandated level of security.

The iPhone has crossed over from the realm of the geek to the larger and much more profitable realm of the mainstream user.  I have numerous real world friends who can barely send an email, but who use and love their iPhones.  These people and thousands if not millions like them represent a gold mine for application developers.  And most of them couldn’t care less about the ability to share their documents with others.

The reason why the Apple Store was packed today, why I am morphing into an Apple lover after years of resistance, why so many of my real world friends have the Apple sticker in the windows of their cars, is simple.  This stuff works.  It’s easy to set up and use.  And most importantly, it makes tasks that lots and lots of people do every day more efficient and more fun.  Tasks like email, texting, information storage and retrieval, taking and emailing photos, finding a good nearby restaurant, playing Uno with your kids, etc.

The Evernote team, and just about every other app developer, would be better served and would more easily tap into that gold mine, if they forgot about sharing and focused on making their application more useful to non-geek users on an individual basis.  For example, while the Evernote iPhone app is intuitive and easy to use, the web application needs a lot of work.  That’s where the focus ought to be.

I think a lot of developers are electing to fish in a small pond, while the fish in the big pond swim around hungrily.

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I Just Heard It!

I just saw a reference on Twitter to Just Hear It, an on demand music discovery service.  According to the “About” page, Just Hear It was created by two college students and pays for licenses from the PROs.  The web page says it’s in private beta, but it worked for me and I have not been invited.

Based on some limited tests, this thing looks like it has legs.  I did my typical music search spectrum:

Easy: The Byrds (lots of songs)
Medium: Dillard and Clark (4 songs, plus more from the Dillards)
Hard: The Allisons ( 3 songs)

It even has some, but not all, of my songs indexed.

Some songs display album covers.

I don’t know much about this service, but assuming it’s legitimate (and the web page indicates that it is), it could revolutionize the way we search for music on the web.

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Evening Reading: 12/15/08

There’s a lot to talk about tonight.  Let’s dive right in.

AppCraver talks about iPhone app development.  This description of the app industry sounds like the music industry from a songwriter’s perspective: “with the hit-driven mentality behind the App Store that unless an app quickly gets pushed into the top 50-either by being featured on iTunes or by word of mouth-it’s doomed to only break even or lose money.”  I love browsing the App Store, but my advice to app developers is the same as it is to songwriters and auto makers: if you want people to buy your stuff, either make better stuff or make a lot of stuff and cross your fingers.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for a really fun or helpful application.  I think others would too.

Ed Bott on the Windows Live Essentials programs.  I can’t put my finger on it, but something about Microsoft’s internet-related applications seems significantly less elegant and user-friendly than the various alternatives.  I say seems, because it may be a marketing problem more than a technical problem.  I’m using Live Writer right now.  Movie Maker is an easy yet powerful application.  The best of the bunch used to be Photo Story.  I used it all the time.  Why is it not part of this package?  Is it dead?  Anyone remember the Microsoft application from the nineties that let you create songs, sort of like Band in a Box?  It was really cool, and then it disappeared.  Microsoft’s ancillary products are like television shows- you’re afraid to get hooked because they may not be around for long.

Here’s a Christmas present recommendation for the hard to buy for lion in your family.

There’s been lots of talk about whether brands belong on Twitter.  I tend to agree with Lon in theory, although I think email is still the new phone company.  Twitter is the new chat line.  The problem with turning brands loose on Twitter is that corporate America has absolutely no idea how to use the web in a mutually beneficial way.  Until they figure it out, Twitter will be just another advertising medium, at best.  Still, since Twitter is opt-in, the noise can be easily filtered.

Maybe soon we’ll see ads like this on Twitter.

Now you can toss your shoes at President Bush without getting tossed from the news conference after a minute or so.  How did that dude get a second try?  Where were the Secret Service guys?  I’m not a big President Bush fan, but I don’t like the event or the game.

Fresh off the less than fulfilling conversation on the “Semantic Web,” Read/Write/Web takes on “Cloud Computing.”  After shaking off what, I think, was a tongue in cheek prologue about jigsaw puzzles and splendor and whatnot, I tried to assimilate the first paragraph of the article:

Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, cloud computing is coming into its own, and it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way we access computational resources and to recognize that the walls separating organizations from their peers, partners, competitors, and customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data through which those distant machines will compute.

Oh boy.  Off to Wikipedia, which was slightly more helpful than it was during my “Semantic Web” quest:

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

I think there is something to Cloud Computing (unlike the “Semantic Web,” which I think is either an inside joke or complete nonsense), but if its proponents want people to care, they have to learn how to explain and discuss it in a way that doesn’t read like something on The Onion.  I am dead serious when I say that I believe at least some of the people writing about this stuff are messing with the rest of the devotees.  In a Borat sort of way.

All 10 of us corporate iPhone users desperately need a way to exchange vCards.  I tried Snapdat, but it didn’t work on my phone.  When I tried to add or edit a SnapCard, the app just closed.  Anything tied to a network or platform won’t work in a corporate setting.  Few corporate users have iPhones and none have the same application you have.  We need a cross-platform, email based system.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for that.

I’m still putting Technorati tags in some of my posts, even though Technorati no longer picks them up and doesn’t seem to be indexing my blog at all.  I think I’m about to pull the plug on Technorati.  Too bad Dave Sifry isn’t still there to help me out.

Three iPhone apps that every corporate user should have: Note2Self, Evernote and RTM (I could make RTM the perfect application with 3 tweaks).

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The Home Place – Mobile Edition

I created The Home Place several years ago, as my customized internet starting page.  Over the years, many of my friends and family began using it as their starting page too.  Tonight I created Version 1.0 of the THP-Mobile Edition.

It was designed specifically for iPhones, but should work reasonably well on other phones.  Take a look and let me know what you think.

Credits: the template is a modified version of a template by Joe Hewitt.

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So Long Pownce, We Hardly Knew Ye

pownceI just read that Pownce, the (more feature rich) iPhone of micro-blogging, is shutting down, thereby ceding the micro-blogging space to Twitter, the (more popular) Blackberry of the space.

I think this was inevitable, as there probably isn’t enough juice in the micro-blogging arena to support two separate platforms. But it’s still a shame. Pownce is/was the more elegant of the two, and facilitated media sharing in a very fun and effective way. I discovered some good music via Pownce, and I shared some good music (and purchase links) with my Pownce “friends.” For me, the media sharing element made the Pownce experience seem more conversational. I always felt like there were useful things to be found via my Pownce page. Twitter just feels like a shared grafitti board- there’s something to be said for that, but it lacks depth.

I’ve never been much of a IM user or micro-blogger, but of all the applications I tried, I found Pownce to be the most compelling.

The Pownce team is moving to blog software company SixApart. Here’s founder Leah Culver’s announcement. I hope they will eventually relaunch Pownce or something like it.

So long, Pownce.

Google Reader: Waiving the White Flag

OK, let me go ahead and get this out of the way.  I have capitulated to the inevitability of Google Reader.

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I’ve written quite a bit about the frustrations I’ve experienced with Bloglines- the two most frequent ones being the need to reload at least once before I can successfully click on a post and the fact that it never seems to finish loading in Firefox.  I had looked into Google Reader before, but found its interface lacking.  But continuing difficulties with Bloglines kept driving me back to Google Reader to take another look.

The migration started slowly.  I initially used Google Reader exclusively to read my news feeds (newspapers, Google news, the Houston Chronicle, etc.).  Over a few weeks, I started to feel more comfortable with the interface.  A few days ago, I made the switch completely, paring my feeds back, dividing them into categories and putting them into Google Reader folders.  At the moment I have Music, News, Personal (the comment feed here, my Flickr feed, my Yahoo Pipes feed, etc.), Entertainment, Local News, Sports and Tech.

gr I have to admit, it’s growing on me.  There are two must-have features that are strangely missing, but on the whole I am coming around.  Here are my major likes and dislikes.

Likes:

1) I like how fast and responsive it seems, especially when compared to my recent Bloglines experience.  It’s also a treat to look up and see that the little circle in my Firefox tab is not spinning.  That’s something I haven’t experienced in a long time at Bloglines.

2) I like the implementation of the folders and the ease with which you can manage your feeds, with two glaring exceptions (see below).

3) I like the ease with which you can change the view from expanded to list, and from all to new.

4) I like the ease with which you can click posts in list view, expand them, and then collapse them.

Dislikes:

1) I don’t like, need or want all of the sharing stuff in the first list at the top of the left hand side.  All of this takes up a lot of real estate that I’d rather use for other stuff.  I’m probably in the minority on this, since I haven’t bought into the social network craze.

2) I really, really don’t like the fact that I can’t sort my feeds alphabetically within a folder.  This would take about 30 seconds to code, yet for some indefensible reason it’s not there.  This is almost a deal stopper for me.

3) I really, really wish there was a setting to mark all posts as read when you leave a feed in list view.  I find that I am using list view almost exclusively and it is a pain in the butt to have to remember to click the mark all as read button when I’m done.  This feature exists for the expanded view.

Google Reader feels a little like a work in progress and there are a lot of obvious improvements that could and should be implemented.  But it’s starting to feel like my home base for news and feed reading.

All in all, I’m reasonably happy with Google Reader.

I can’t believe I just typed that.

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Pownce: Initial Thoughts and Invites to Give

I finally got a Pownce invitation tonight (thanks Miles!).  Installation of both Abobe’s AIR (a requirement to run the Pownce software) and the Pownce software itself was quick and easy.

pownce Here’s my Pownce page.  My user name is Kent N.  If you’re one of my blogging pals, add me as a Friend and we’ll put Pownce through its paces.

So far, it looks like it combines a web-based, Twitter-like conversation page with an IM-like application (pictured to the left) that allows you to send and receive messages, links, files and events.  The first three are self-explanatory.  Events are messages with associated dates- good for letting people know about, well, events.  You can send any of the foregoing to the public, all of your Friends (the Web 2.0 word for contacts), or just a specified Friend.  You can group your Friends into sets, which seems very handy for project collaboration, etc.

You can send files of up to 10MB.  For $20 a year (Paypal accepted), you can send 100MB files and have an ad-free experience (though so far I haven’t seen any ads).

I sent my Friends an MP3 of my blues song Departing Passenger.  Lucky player3231 fellows.  The file uploaded reasonably fast and, presto, it was there on my Pownce page.  There is a player application that loads a tad slow, but sounds good.  The navigation below the player is a little jumbled, probably because of my monitor size and resolution.  A lot of pages have this problem, including both Morningstar and CNN, which is surprising to me.

Finding friends is similar to Facebook.  You search for them and then send a Friend request.  The recipient can accept or decline.  If the recipient declines, you become merely a Fan of that person.  I’m going to apply my Pink Floyd Policy to Pownce, which means that I shall be merely a fan to no man (or woman).

Of all the times I have experimented with all the various IM and IM-like programs, right now and Pownce seem the most compelling to me.  Twitter brought a lot of folks into the collaborative IM space and Pownce may just be the next evolutionary step.  Stan Schroeder says Pownce may, in fact, be the Twitter killer (at least it isn’t Quixotically aiming at YouTube like everybody else).  I think there’s room for both, though Twitter is clearly behind in the feature race.  It’s too early to tell how well Pownce will scale, though it did have a short outage earlier tonight.

If Pownce wants to seep deeply into the IM space, it will need to address the same incompatibility problems the other IM applications face.  As I have said before, IM needs to be like the telephone.  Not like a series of tin cans tied to a proprietary string.

Now what I need is some Friends to use it with.

I have a few Pownce invitations to hand out.  I’ll send them to the first 5 people who leave a comment asking for one, on the condition that everyone who gets one agrees to return to the comment thread here and send invitations to others in the queue.  I am particularly interested in getting my core blogging buddies signed up.

You know who you are, so let’s get started.

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