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Posts Tagged ‘Good Stuff’

Rob Griffiths leaves Mac OS X Hints

Filed under: Tips and tricks

I have to admit that I don’t always use them, but I do always enjoy reading the hints over at Mac OS X Hints — there probably isn’t a more eclectic or helpful mix of random hints about how to use your Mac or iPhone available on the Internet. So I was saddened to read today that editor Rob Griffiths (who always adds in his confirmations and other testing on the various hints posted) is leaving the editor’s position. He’s moving on to join Peter Maurer at Many Tricks, where he’ll handle the business aspects of the company. He mentions that they’re working on “some good stuff in the pipeline, especially for the upcoming iPad.”

As for Mac OS X Hints, the site is owned by Macworld, so it will continue to run under the oversight of a new editor, who will have the benefit of Griffiths around for training as long as necessary. But it will be a little bit of a disappointment to not see the little “robg” notes on the hints in the future. Good luck to Rob on his next venture, and here’s hoping his successor keeps the site up as an endless fount of interesting tips and tidbits about all of these Apple products we use.

TUAWRob Griffiths leaves Mac OS X Hints originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What It’s Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom

Editor: This is a guest post by Andria Krewson, a freelance journalist who has written for Demand Media. Given our recent focus on Demand Media and so-called content farms, we thought it would be interesting to get a perspective from a Demand Media writer.

I made $37.50 at Demand Studios in November. That money went directly into my Paypal account, on time, with no billing hassles. But it probably took me about six hours of filling out a profile, studying a style guide and learning how to navigate the system. So my hourly pay was about $6, for a writer new to the system.

Sponsor

Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Reach her on Twitter as @underoak.

I had heard about Demand Studios from former co-workers before Wired wrote about Demand Media (Demand Studio’s parent company) in October, and media pundits like Jay Rosen followed up with comments on Twitter and an interview with the company’s CEO at ReadWriteWeb. [Ed: ReadWriteWeb's first analysis of Demand Media was in August.] Demand Media has been criticized for producing low-quality content designed for search engine optimization. It’s not journalism, critics say, and it’s clogging up Google searches, making good stuff hard to find.

But I suspect much of that criticism has come from people who haven’t gone inside the Demand Studios part of Demand Media to see how it really works, or they haven’t thought enough about what kind of content it provides, or they haven’t thought enough about how it feels to swallow your pride and make a little money with your strongest knowledge and skills, no matter the global hourly rate.

There are differences between the user-generated content at sites Demand Media feeds, and the content generated by Demand Studios.

So let’s get to it.

How it works

People sign up as writers, editors or filmmakers. I signed up as a writer. Contributors study the style guide, which gives specifics on allowed citations, and why citations are needed, and how to write for search-engine optimization without sounding too clunky. New writers can also consult forums and connect with other contributors with social-networking tools. Writers can then use keywords, pay rates and general content areas to search through available assignments. Generally, enough assignments exist that writers can find subjects of personal interest.

Fact sheets get $7.50 an assignment. I fulfilled one of those before I realized that rate of pay wasn’t worth the effort. The next two assignments, for $15 each, both dealt with the same topic, with slightly different angles, and I chose them because I knew the subject well. Still, I had to do some research, to back up my statements and provide links to .edu or .gov sites. No Wikipedia allowed.

Once accepting assignments, I had a week to submit them to editors. While I could have written each piece without any research, citations and outbound links are required, as well as a summary (a nut graf, essentially, in newspaper terms). Frankly, the discipline of filling out boxes with words could help some professional writers improve the focus of their pieces. Certainly new writers can learn from the system. And the SEO tips in the style guide are worth study.

One piece I wrote was bounced back for further editing. The editor’s comments were gentle but clear. I made fixes, resubmitted, and got paid, through Paypal, no invoices necessary.

What’s the content?

The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They’re evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They’re the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek.

You can tell by the assignment headlines that they’re generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement. People are actually turning to Google to ask these questions? What happened to asking basic questions from friends and family?

But indeed, we’re in a different world, and the criticism of Demand Media by some pundits strikes me as a bit elitist, as if the Internet weren’t for everyone. A personal example:

(Daughter, 19, volunteers to help me with my eye shadow for a special event.)

Me: Where’d you learn this technique?

Her: Youtube.

(And indeed, eHow videos, supplied by Demand Media, show how to apply eye shadow.)

Next page: Swallowing my pride

HTC’s 2010 roadmap goes on display?

Those among us with minds like steel traps might recall that HTC’s 2009 was leaked with shocking accuracy way back in January of this year, which lends some credibility to this already-believable series of slides we have seemingly showing off most of the good stuff we can expect out of the company in the coming months. The stuff we’re privy to here was allegedly presented at a meeting in Vienna back in October, with both Windows Mobile and Android designs broken up into four target demo categories: Design / Lifestyle, Social, Performance (we like the sound of that), and Productivity — but don’t take our word for it. Follow the break for everything you need to know about this very real-sounding downpour of specs and renders.

Continue reading HTC’s 2010 roadmap goes on display?

HTC’s 2010 roadmap goes on display? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AUO previews lots of fancy displays, clownfish-approved 1080p 14-inch OLED monitor
FPD International 2009 is nearly upon us, and as we’ve seen in years past it’s a time of wondrous innovation and gratuitous side-shots of impossibly thin displays. Leading off the pack this year is AUO, teasing a number of new panels and technologies that may or may not rock your living rooms sometime in the next two to four years. Chief among them is a 14-inch, 1080p OLED display with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio and 16 million colors. There will also be a range of switchable and glasses-free 2D/3D displays ranging from 8- to 65-inches, a ridiculously wide 58-inch 2.35:1 TV with a 2560 x 1080 resolution, and, naturally, a skinny LCD — in this case the 65-inch beauty pictured below that’s just 7.9mm on the Z plane despite pumping out a claimed 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Good stuff? Yes. The craziest displays we’ll see this week? Not a chance.

[Via OLED-Display.net]

Continue reading AUO previews lots of fancy displays, clownfish-approved 1080p 14-inch OLED monitor

Filed under: Displays

AUO previews lots of fancy displays, clownfish-approved 1080p 14-inch OLED monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlackBerry Storm update landing tomorrow, bringing lots of good stuff

Hey, you — yeah you, the BlackBerry Storm owner over there. You listening? Good. That mythical software update we heard about just last week is obviously the real deal, and a screen grab from Verizon’s internal systems has shown up to prove it. We’re told that it should go live tomorrow (that’s October 25th for those in strange, potentially illegitimate time zones) at 6PM. On the whole, it’ll make your Storm act a lot more like the forthcoming Storm2, but specifically you can expect a “faster, more accurate and more natural text input experience, word completion, a virtual QWERTY keyboard in portrait view and enhanced sensitivity when editing, copying and pasting.” You’ll also get the ability to “enable Auto Correction as opposed to Word Completion in landscape view.” The full changelog should be coming soon, so hang tight! Oh, and cancel those plans for tomorrow night, okay?

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

BlackBerry Storm update landing tomorrow, bringing lots of good stuff originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video: Sony’s CEATEC concept party includes Walkman bracelet and 0.2mm thin OLED

We’ve yet to see a trade show where Sony left its Rhode Island-sized booth at home, and CEATEC is no exception. Aside from pushing its 1080p 3D installations with an epic amount of force, the company also had a smattering of swank new concepts on display that caught our eyes. A 0.2 millimeter-thin flexible OLED display was alive and displaying content, while an ultrathin Reader mock-up looked more like a MID and less like a Kindle. Without question, the two items that took our breath away were the all-panel laptop (which tossed the traditional keyboard in favor of a single, swooping display) and the Walkman bracelet, which did little more than talk dirty to us and get our imaginations working overtime. Unfortunately, all the good stuff was behind bulletproof glass with practically zero information to digest, but you can indulge your senses anyway in the gallery below and video after the break.

Continue reading Video: Sony’s CEATEC concept party includes Walkman bracelet and 0.2mm thin OLED

Filed under: Displays, Misc. Gadgets, Laptops, Wearables

Video: Sony’s CEATEC concept party includes Walkman bracelet and 0.2mm thin OLED originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Researchers developing OLEDs as cheap as newspapers?

Filed under: Displays

Researchers developing OLEDs as cheap as newspapers? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Failure to launch: Apple bungles Snow Leopard distribution in New Zealand

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Retail, Bad Apple, Snow Leopard

So, how’s everybody enjoying Snow Leopard? Good stuff, isn’t it? Gotta love those new Exposé options in the Dock, and all that saved hard drive space, and the faster if slightly quirkier performance… isn’t it, um… great?

Argh. I can’t keep up the charade anymore. I know nothing about the Snow Leopard experience other than what other people have told me, because it’s not available in New Zealand yet (at least not outside of Auckland). And I’m not happy about it. And I’m going to rant… now.

In July of 2008, the Apple-loving (and Apple-hating) world’s eyes locked onto a small, isolated nation in the South Pacific: New Zealand, home to 40 million sheep and a few hundred otherwise perfectly normal human beings dressed as hobbits. Why so much attention on New Zealand? Because of all the countries getting the iPhone 3G, New Zealand was getting it first thanks to its location just west of the International Date Line.

The logistics involved in a rolling launch across most of the world must have been staggeringly complex, but with a few bumps here and there, Apple pulled it off. The launch of the iPhone 3G was a success not just in New Zealand, but worldwide.

That led me to believe that something similar would happen for the launch of Snow Leopard. After all, if Apple could pull off launching the iPhone 3G in so many countries on the same day, it ought to be a simple matter to do the same thing with a much smaller and simpler product. I mean, it’s got to be harder to coordinate the launch of a big ol’ phone compared to what’s essentially just a plastic disk in a box, right? Right…?

Well, not so much. Apple has fumbled the NZ launch of Snow Leopard like a wide receiver wearing butter-coated gloves. Plus the receiver is blind. Also, he doesn’t know how to play football.

Continue reading Failure to launch: Apple bungles Snow Leopard distribution in New Zealand

TUAWFailure to launch: Apple bungles Snow Leopard distribution in New Zealand originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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