frankps
The world as frankps sees it!
Seesmic for Windows
Nov 22nd
This week I installed a preview version of the native Twitter application, Seesmic for Windows. It combines a fully functional Twitter integration directly in the Windows environment.
It was funny to see how much attention a simple Twitter application still can get. I felt it to be overhyped! It got presented on Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), during Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote. What? It’s a Twitter application, nothing more. It is a more or less feature complete application, I’ll give the developers that much. First of all, I don’t like that the installer bypasses the UAC. No administrator password is needed to install the Seesmic. First I thought that this could be yet another AIR application, but it’s not. There excists an AIR version of the Twitter client as well. By bypassing UAC, the application gets installed in user profiles instead of under Program Files. A nightmare for system administrators.
I find it almost unbelievable to read:
Microsoft has provided great support to help us get started on the Microsoft platform. I would just like to thank the team who has been working with us to make it possible for us to deliver a product in such a short period of time
I hope they will help you to work with UAC and not against it, as you have done so far.
Another problem I have with the client, is the horrible “font rendering” this preview release has. This is not a sleek and smooth user interface. I have tried it both on my 12″ laptop and my desktop computer with a 24″ screen. Both computers running Windows 7. I guess the tweets are rendered as images, and therefor the text is blur. For the same reason you can’t cut and paste text from tweets. The Seesmic preview is someting I simply don’t want to use or recommend to my readers.
The idea of having social services as native desktop application is great. This let you use drag and drop to add user lists, and gives you an increased performance, with easier and faster navigation through tab views. Native applications compared to AIR applications use less memory, and they utilize more Windows 7 features (e.g. location sensor).
I realize that this is a quite negative review, I have only written about the things that I find bad in this client. For a more positive review, please read WEB WORKER DAILY’s Seesmic for Windows: An AIR-less Twitter Client.
The public beta of Office 2010 is finally here
Nov 19th
I have had access to Microsoft Office 2010 through my TechNet subscription for 2-3 days now, and yesterday the technical preview of Office 2010 got released in a public beta. Anyone interested can now download it and take it for a spin. It’s available in seven languages – English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German. The Office 2010 Mobile beta got released at more or less the same time, and can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
Office 2010 contains lots of improvements and new functionality, and Microsoft seems to have managed to redefine the game of office computing! Office 2010 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud services and is on it’s way to be connected to other cloud services. It’s funny to look back to pre-Internet times, when Microsoft Office was just four applications, with little integration between them and no use of the web for document authoring, collaboration and management. But when Microsoft bought Groove, perhaps the most important buy up Microsoft has done, things started changing.
Let us start with OneNote. In typical Microsoft style, they don’t succeed with their first and second attempt on creating new applications. So also with OneNote. In Office 2010 OneNote has finally gotten the attention it deserves. It is now part of the full Office suite, and not a separate purchase, and undergone many improvements. The biggest improvement is without doubt that OneNote has now become a collaboration platform with its new coauthoring feature. Have you ever liked doing project work on a wiki? Thought so, I’ve basically hated it myself. With coauthoring, a project team can share and collaborate on OneNote pages and notebooks. I started using OneNote frequently when I got introduced to Office 2007, and with Office 2010 I can definitely see myself making use of the coauthoring and collaboration tools for the research projects that I support.
A few words about Powerpoint 2010. I haven’t been able to play with it to much yet, but I see several news sites pointing out that the biggest news is that it enables you to edit video directly in the application, without the need for a third-party tool. I’m not a video person, even though I once in a while use iMovie on my Mac, but I can see that this will give videocasts of lectures a boost. I’m not sure that I would publish presentations online via SkyDrive, but I guess that SlideShare will come up with something here!
The first application that I tried after having installed the new office suite, was Outlook. Outlook has through the years gone from an email client to a conversation management tool. But to start with the e-mail first, Outlook 2010 comes with improved IMAP support. You can now also have your Trash folder on the IMAP server, but Drafts are still stored locally on the computer. I hope Microsoft improves the IMAP support even more before the finale release of 2010.
I mentioned Outlook as a conversation management tool. First of all, you can now see if the person you are about to write an e-mail to is online or not, and then rather then sending an e-mail start an IM conversation with the person. I started using Outlook, when I saw the great Xobni plugin (link to my blog entries about Xobni). And the biggest news in Outlook is the introduction of Outlook Social Connector (OSC), which appears to be a tool that ties into SharePoint 2010 and aggregates information on any user’s emails, phone conversations, and IM sessions with you. OSC will be your bridge in to into major social networks. Appearently LinkedIn is gonna be the first social network to be connected. This is a functionality that Lotus Notes has had for almost a year now.
Word seems to be feature complete these days, and no big news to report from this application. But I should mention the possibility to upload your documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive. SkyDrive is 25 GB with free online storage, and something you should really consider using. Do you have a good enough backup solution in place for your personal files?
Excel 2010. I rarly use spreadsheets in my work, but my guess is that Excel, as Word, is more or less feature complete and no bigger new functionality is introduced in 2010.
Notes Traveler on the iPhone
Nov 15th
At work we have updated our Domino servers to v.8.5.1, and gone is the need for Lotus iNotes Ultralite and Notes Pro for the iPhone. With the new version of Domino, Lotus now supports Microsoft’s ActiveSync. You can now have the same push functionality as with Exchange, and use your native iPhone applications. ActiveSync has become a de facto standard for pushing out information to mobile devices.
I have been writing lots of positive things about Lotus Notes, and I should continue a little bit more. Setting up Lotus Traveler on the iPhone is both elegant and easy,and done in about a minute. But seeing that the data of Lotus Notes desktop client, iNotes and the data on the iPhone not being in sync by default, can’t be said to be anything else then a sad story. I thought this was the whole purpose with Roaming User profiles. But ok, it could be fixed. I only had to go in to the Contacts preferences on the desktop and enable “Syncronize Contacts on the Replicator”. Just that this option didn’t make any sence to me. Syncronize my contacts with a replicator? What replicator? Why treat iNotes and the iPhone (or mobile phones) as something else then the destop client?
After having solved the replication problem, the solution has worked flowlessly. But sadly leaves me with a choice I have to make, Lotus Notes or Google Sync? The iPhone can only have one Exchange account, and I must admit that I liked Google’s Exchange service for Contacts, Calendar and Gmail better. It has to be said that we don’t use Lotus Notes for mail. But since this is a work phone, I guess I should stick with Lotus Notes. Not a bad choice if the amount of meetings increase, and if I was more on the move. But for now, I could have been just as happy with Google’s solution, pushing contacts and calendar entries.
I also found Google Contacts to have an easier accessable user interface, and it handles pictures of your contacts far better then Lotus Notes. I have not found what pixel size Lotus Notes use. So most faces look draged. It’s just a small thing, but it is nice to see when somebody has thought design all the way through their product. Google has!
But if it is Lotus Notes you have decided to use, Paul Mooney has put together a brilliant manual for how to set up the Lotus Notes Travel service on your iPhone / iPod Touch (this is only the client setup).
iMapFlickr
Nov 12th
The map service is perhaps the weakest service on Flickr, and I have been looking for alternatives. This week I found one. iMapFlickr lets you easily create custom Google Maps from your geotagged Flickr Photos, and it, of course, let you embed the maps to your website or blog. You can even link the maps up on Facebook or Twitter. And best of all, it’s free!
iMapFlickr is a great mashup tool with customizable map settings (photo size, map height and pin style), and you can save your maps for later use as well. The tool is one of many Flickr tools that are available at Flickr App Garden.
I learned about possibility of Combining Map Flickr and Flickr on Digital allows for easy Online Mapping on Digital Photography School.
VisitOslo making use of social media
Nov 11th
I’m happy (and grateful) to see that VisitOslo has chosen to include some of my pictures in their galleries on Flickr. It’s is great to see that they are making use of social medias in their marketing of Oslo, but most of all, I am grateful for being able to contribute with 5 pictures. I love Oslo, and I’ve been living in the areas around Kampen for 10 years now. It is such a great place to live! It is not the first time that somebody ask for permission to use some of my pictures from Kampen, back in 2007 Schmap!! did the same. Schmapp!! also asked for permission to use pictures for their Budapest guide. Of course, I said yes! Finally, I have also contributed with a picture in the German bike magazine Radfahren SPEZIAL “RadParadiese ‘07“, something I of course blogged about.
I’ve tagged several of my pictures with Kampen, Tøyen and Vålerenga. Feel free to take a look, and add a comment or two.
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Update – 2009-11-18:VisitOslo keeps adding pictures I have taken to their galleries, and here are some more:
In total they are now using 9 of my pictures in their galleries 
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