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Posts Tagged ‘Internet Tools’

Boo Hoo! SimplifyMedia dropping products and changing direction

Filed under: Multimedia, Internet Tools, iTunes, iPhone, Music

The problem is, we just don’t know where they’re going. In a Saturday blog post, the company announced it is “…taking a new direction” and won’t be offering their current apps to new users.

SimplifyMedia has been offering free software for computer-to-computer and iPhone-to-computer music sharing over the internet. Using the iPhone app, you could connect to your computer at home and stream albums, playlists or songs without any complicated firewall setups. A newer version of the software also allowed remote access to your iPhoto library.

It also looks like the company is going to slowly sunset current customer accounts but will continue to keep them functioning for at least another 3 months.

The Simplify iPhone app has been removed from the App Store, and the company says new account creation will be disabled soon.

I don’t have any idea where the company is headed, but the current product will be missed. SimplifyMedia was offered for Mac, PC and Ubuntu.

[Thanks to Robert for the tip]

TUAWBoo Hoo! SimplifyMedia dropping products and changing direction originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Quix makes bookmarklets even easier to use

Filed under: Internet Tools

Bookmarklets are one of my favorite things. I have an entire folder of them in my Safari Bookmark Bar for Instapaper and Readability and bit.ly and Pukka and Tumblr and … well, you get the idea. They’re incredibly handy for doing “something” with the current webpage that you are viewing, or quickly looking up other information.

Quix has come up with a way to make them even better. It calls itself “Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids” and it’s hard to argue with that description. Imagine all of your bookmarklets together in one, and being able to come up with shortcuts to trigger each one.

The interface is extremely minimal: a javascript popup window with a text input space. What you type in that space dictates what happens next. Quix comes with a bunch of commands already built-in, and using them is a breeze. The syntax couldn’t be simpler: just type a command shortcut (such as “imdb”) followed by a word or words (like “ghostbusters” or “raiders of the lost ark”), then press Return. As Jeff Goldblum used to say “There’s no step three.” Some of the other built-in commands:

• Search IMDB: “imdb search word(s)“
• Search Google: “g search word(s)“
• Search Google Images: “img search word(s)“
• Search Wikipedia: “w search word(s)“
• Search only the current site using Google: “gs search word(s)“
• Reformat the current page using Readability: “read”
• Share on Tumblr: “tumblr”
• Share on Facebook: “fb”
• Share on Delicious: “db”
• Clip current page in Evernote: “evernote”

There are scads more for shortening links, sending the page to other programs like CSSEdit, MarsEdit, Pukka, Tweetie, or many others. and if you don’t find the one you want, you can add your own using Quix’s easy syntax in a plain text file (Mine is available for anyone who wants to use it.)

If you still are not convinced, checkout their two minute video which shows it in action. By the time I finished watching it, I was already sold. Instead of an entire folder of bookmarklets, I have one for Quix, which does everything that I did before, and more.

Oh, and one more thing: since this is just javascript, it also works on Mobile Safari on the iPhone. Ever tried to find a specific word on a long page of text in Mobile Safari? It can be a real hassle. With Quix, just type “find search word(s)” and Quix will highlight all instances of the word on the current page and show you the first one.

Quix is incredibly handy. Check it out at Quixapp.com.

TUAWQuix makes bookmarklets even easier to use originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs visits Wall Street Journal, trashes Flash again

Filed under: Internet Tools, Steve Jobs, iPad

Valleywag reports that during a recent iPad-promoting visit to the offices of the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time trash-talking Adobe Flash yet again, and doing his best to get the Journal to move away from what he called “old technology.” Just like Jobs’s comments during the recent Apple Town Hall meeting, these comments are unconfirmed, but Valleywag claims to have heard from people who were present at the meeting.

Click the “read more” link to see some more tidbits from the meeting and some analysis of the remarks.

It bears noting once again that none of these quotes are confirmed, direct quotes from Jobs, but rather hearsay from others purportedly present at the meeting. That having been said, Jobs allegedly:

1. Continues to call Flash a buggy Mac crasher.

2. Called the platform a “CPU hog,” a source of security holes, and a “dying technology.”

3. Compared Flash to other technologies Apple and other companies have abandoned, such as floppy discs and CCFL-backlit LCDs.

4. Claimed the iPad’s battery performance would decrease from 10 hours to a shockingly low 1.5 hours if it ran Flash.

5. Said switching the Journal’s site away from Flash would be “trivial.”

If these are direct quotes free of any embellishment from their sources, they paint an interesting picture. On points 1 and 2, Jobs’s claim is mostly true. While some people claim to have had no issues with Flash Player on the Mac, in my experience Flash has been the number one source of crashes and poor performance on every Mac I’ve come across. Whether Flash is truly a “dying technology” or not is something only time will tell. For point 3, Jobs seems to believe that Apple’s abandonment of Flash on its mobile devices is trailblazing in the same manner as the iMac’s ditching the floppy drive twelve years ago; this one is arguable, as there were viable alternatives to floppy drives back then, whereas HTML5 and other Flash alternatives are still in relative infancy. On point 4, while the claim may sound outlandish, Jobs is certainly in a better position than anyone to know how well the iPad would run Flash.

Point 5, however, is the most loaded. As Valleywag notes, shifting a site that’s heavily dependent on Flash for not only video but interactive elements like slideshows to another technology would be far from trivial. That’s not to say that it couldn’t or even shouldn’t be done, and the Journal and others are likely to shift away from Flash despite the difficulties involved, but the amount of money, resources, and programming time necessary for the task are by no means as trivial as Jobs is painting them.

One thing is clear though: Steve Jobs is on a mission, and if his recent (alleged) comments are anything to go by, part of that mission is killing Flash once and for all. No matter what you may think of Jobs or his opinions of Flash, it’s undeniable that when Jobs speaks, people listen very intently. It will be very interesting to see how Adobe responds to this latest salvo.

[Via MacRumors]

TUAWSteve Jobs visits Wall Street Journal, trashes Flash again originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, TUAW Interview

At the age of twenty-six, Aaron Patzer founded the financial website Mint.com. In many ways Mint was much like an Apple product: it had a simple interface, it was easy to understand and use, and many of Mint’s early adopters became very loyal evangelists. Word of mouth spread, and just 18 months after its launch (Mint officially went public in 2007), Mint had added its one millionth user.

To the dismay of many, Mint sold to Intuit in September 2009 for $170 million. I say dismay because many users of Quicken products had been less than thrilled with Intuit’s offerings for some time, and some people were concerned what a twenty-year-old company that seemed stuck in its ways would do with a popular user-friendly Web 2.0 startup.

Out of all the negative press, perhaps Mac users could be forgiven for having the most anxiety over the acquisition. Many had abandoned Quicken Mac 2007 in favor of Mint.com. Mac users wanted to move on from the stale Quicken ecosystem and go with something simple and easy. Now, that simple and easy solution had moved to where the users had escaped from.

Luckily, Intuit wasn’t like other companies who buy smaller start-ups just to eliminate a competitor. Intuit recognized that Patzer and his team possessed the much-needed original financial software ideas and UI design mojo to put a spark in their aging products. In November 2009, Intuit made Aaron Patzer VP/GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group — which left him in charge of Intuit’s personal finance offerings, including Quicken for Mac.
It was January 2008. At Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs had just unveiled the MacBook Air. Over at Intuit’s booth, the company was previewing an anticipated update to Quicken Mac 2007 – one that didn’t require Rosetta to run and didn’t have an un-Mac-like UI. Unfortunately, the UI that Quicken ended up with consisted of a Cover Flow-esque interface. It was 2008 after all, and Cover Flow was the hot new UI element, but this was a finance app. We didn’t need glitz when we just wanted to see how much cash we had in the bank. That aside, the single-window interface was a welcome change. Intuit announced that Quicken Mac 2007’s sequel, Quicken Financial Life for Mac, would ship in the Fall of 2008.

Fall 2008 came and went. At Macworld Expo 2009, Intuit previewed a new beta of Quicken Financial Life for Mac and delayed its release again until Fall 2009. I was an early tester of the new beta, and it was buggy; the user interface looked friendlier than it actually was – in other words, the beta was everything you had come to expect from an Intuit product for the Mac. July 2009 came around and, no surprise, Intuit announced it was delaying Quicken Financial Life again, this time until 2010. 2010 – four years after the last version of Quicken for Mac came out (2007 was released in 2006). This time Intuit released a statement all but admitting that the company had failed at providing the Mac with usable financial software:

Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks. We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.

At the same time, Intuit announced Quicken Financial Life for Mac would be available for pre-order from Intuit’s site on October 12, 2009. Guess what happened? That’s right. But at least this delay was only two months. By the time the product actually did go live with pre-orders many, including myself, thought it was too little, too late.

Luckily though, something happened at Intuit between the pre-order delay in October and the December pre-order release: Aaron Patzer was put in charge of Quicken Essentials for Mac (they scrapped the Quicken Financial Life name for a reason I’ll get to in a moment).

I interviewed Aaron by phone yesterday and he had a lot of things to say about the frustration Mac users have with Intuit. Perhaps that’s because he experienced the same frustration with Quicken – and that frustration led him to found Mint.com. Speaking with Aaron, I could hear the passion in his voice for simple products that allow users to easily access their data in a straightforward way.

Those original ideas and UI design mojo I mentioned earlier? Aaron put them to work right away. “When I first saw Quicken Financial Life, it had Cover Flow for no reason,” he laughed. Cover Flow? No reason? Gone. “Quicken for Mac 2006 and 2007 were C/C++ programs that looked like bastardized versions of the Windows product. Little things matter,” he told me. “In the old apps you would think you were supposed to press Command-A to select all of the entries in your registry, because that’s what Command-A does on a Mac – it selects all. But in Quicken Mac 2007 it would actually bring up your accounts list. It’s little things like that, that you could tell the people [writing the program] weren’t real Mac aficionados.”

Aaron himself uses a 15″ MacBook Pro. The team that he spearheads for Quicken Essentials is a group of “Mac guys who live and breathe this stuff.” The team consists of “five or six developers and three guys on QA with product managers coming on and off and the graphics guys switching between the Windows and Mac versions.”

Speaking of Quicken on Windows, Aaron himself wrote the spec for the next version of Quicken for Windows (2011, due out later this year). Why is that important? Because Aaron has a clearly defined vision of what the future of financial software will look like. “You’ll start to see the mess of all the [Intuit] products merged together. Longer term it shouldn’t matter where you use your financial application, whether it’s on the Mac, Windows, or Linux. I want to get everything to parity [on] the features and actually do the back-end so it’s all a consistent single data model – probably based on Mint – and then just skin the front ends (applications) to look like a Mac product, to look like a Windows product, to look like an iPhone or an Android app – to take advantage of the unique advantages of those platforms. But the back-end would be the same so you can just migrate any time you want to from Mint.com to Quicken Essentials for Mac to your Android phone or iPhone.”

Well, that sounds awesome, but what about people that have years worth of old Quicken data? “Eventually we will make it so you can just one-flip click your 20 years of data into the cloud and pull it down on any of these devices – that’s the holy grail and it’ll take over a year to do that,’ he says. “But you can see that already in using the new QEM – it’s using a lot of the same user experience paradigm (the way you budget on the Mac, the way you click through the pie charts) and that makes the back-end easier.”

That’s the larger picture, and after listening to Aaron’s enthusiasm, if anyone can make it happen, it’ll be him. Let’s get back to Quicken Essentials for Mac, though.

“It’s called Quicken Essentials for Mac because it’s what we consider to be essential for most users – about 80% of users.” It’s not just what Aaron and his team think is essential; it’s what people tell them they want. “We do a lot of usability studies, that’s why Mint turned out the way it did. We applied the same to QEM. We went to people’s homes and watched them use it. The majority of them just want to know: How much do I have? How much do I owe? How much do I spend on gas and food? How many times do I go to this restaurant? How many times do I go to Starbucks? What investments do I have? Let me set a budget to control my spending.” Yeah, but what about the thing many arm-chair reviewers talk about? “Only 6% of users across all platforms use bill pay,” Aaron says. “Most people still go to their bank’s website to pay a bill.”

What about other requested features, like deeper investment tools? That’s where the future of Quicken on the Mac comes in. Intuit isn’t abandoning the Mac platform anytime soon; in fact, they’re embracing it: “For the next version of Quicken for the Mac we are planning two SKUs: Quicken Essentials and a Deluxe version which adds the deeper investment tools – history of investments, stock lots (buying shares of one stock at different times), etc.”

You may rightly point out that Quicken for Windows and even the old Quicken for Mac supported these investment tools and that Quicken for Windows supports bill pay (for the paltry 6% who actually use it), but give it time. Aaron has only been on QEM for four months now, but has already helped completely reinvent Quicken on the Mac in that short timespan (yes, it’s finally a Cocoa app). Though many may complain of the lack of investing/bill pay features, I can only liken Quicken Essentials for Mac to QuickTime X. Both apps have been rewritten from the ground up to replace clunky legacy code that would have slowed their scalability in the future. Just as QuickTime X is missing some of the features of QuickTime 7, Quicken Essentials for Mac is missing some of the features of Quicken Mac 2007 – for now. But because of the clean-sweep rewrites, these new applications are just the launching point for the programs into a better, more feature-rich future.

I’ve been playing with Quicken Essentials for Mac for a few days now (I’ll have a full review of it on February 25) and I can already tell you, I’m a convert. I abandoned Quicken for Mint, but QEM has brought me back into the fold. It’s worth it for the Cocoa rewrite alone.

What else does Intuit have in store for the Apple community? Aaron told me that after Mint releases its Android app, the team will be adding features to the next iPhone version. Some of those features include adding manual transactions – the ability to enter checks that haven’t cleared yet, and an easier way to enter cash. “Doing that on the iPhone is probably the most useful way to do it because you are usually paying cash in a cab or buying a quick coffee with it.” Another thing under consideration is an ATM locator. “We know which bank accounts you have so we can tell you which ATMs in your area are not gonna charge you a fee.”

Also expect to see an iPad app. “Yes, it’s something we’ve been looking into. Ideal implementation would be Mint’s pie chart that you can click through and dive into to see Food-Dining-McDonald’s, etc. Where you could use pinch to expand and contract.” But the iPad app won’t be available at launch and probably not before late summer at the earliest.

What about Aaron’s brainchild? I use Mint for all my US accounts, but what about my UK bank accounts? Will the rest of the globe soon be able to utilize Mint.com? “Mint is working with the Global Division at Intuit, planning how to internationalize our code base.” As Aaron points out, that’s one of the advantages of such a large company taking over a Web 2.0 startup – the startup can use the company’s resources to go further than it could have on its own. As for that large company? Well, something tells me that acquiring Mint and Aaron Patzer is the best thing that could ever have happened to Intuit – and you can take that to the bank.

TUAWTUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad

Filed under: OS, Software, Internet Tools

The iPhone and iPod touch haven’t run Flash natively in the years since their respective debuts, and it’s pretty clear based on Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday that the iPad won’t run Flash, either. When scrolling through the New York Times’s main page, for example, where Flash ads or video might have been there were instead broken LEGO icons, big as life on the screen at the keynote.

Predictably, Adobe isn’t happy about this, and is accusing Apple of “continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers.” They go on to say that without Flash support, “users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

Let’s work backwards from this. First of all, I’d be very interested to see where Adobe got those percentages. Apparently YouTube now accounts for a mere 25% of video on the internet? As for Hulu and a few of the other specific sites mentioned in Adobe’s rant, now that Apple is in the business of selling content, exactly how is it in the company’s best interest to provide access to that same content, through another company’s platform, for free? And as far as games are concerned, once again Apple has this covered, through the App Store. Far from being limited, content publishers and consumers will merely have to adjust to a new method of publishing and consuming content: one that doesn’t involve Adobe in any way.
I know anecdotal data is the worst kind there is, but in nearly a year of using my iPhone to connect to the internet, not only have I not missed Flash, I’ve been glad it isn’t there. Flash’s performance on Mac OS X is so abysmal that when YouTube announced an opt-in HTML5 beta to replace Flash, I bounced up and down in my office chair in glee. I can only imagine the bag of hurt that would be introduced if Apple let Flash run on its mobile devices.

If you want to know why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad, why Flash will never run on those devices, and why that’s a really good thing, check out this piece by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. One of the key points of Gruber’s argument is that Flash is, by far, the biggest source of application crashes in OS X. Flash crashes so often that Apple’s engineers went out of their way to create a new mechanism for running plugins in Snow Leopard; in 10.6, Flash runs as its own process rather than being lumped in with Safari, meaning than when (not if) Flash crashes, it doesn’t bring all of Safari down with it. Considering Flash’s poor stability and fan-blasting, CPU-hogging performance on the Mac, gee, why wouldn’t Apple want it running on their mobile devices?

Want to see something that “imposes restrictions on content publishers and consumers?” Look no farther than Flash itself. According to the company’s own (possibly made-up) numbers, 70% of games and 75% of video on the internet is all shuffled through one company’s proprietary plugin. I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully restrictive to me. It seems like a really bad idea to let a single company have that much control over the creation and delivery of the internet’s content, don’t you think?.

With the iPhone and iPod touch we already have tens of millions of mobile devices owned by tens of millions of highly satisfied consumers, and not one of those devices runs Flash. With the advent of the iPad, we can expect millions more mobile devices to hit the market, and none of them will run Flash, either. Thanks to YouTube and vimeo, HTML5’s star is on the rise for delivering free video content on the internet, and the App Store has gaming covered. There’s no telling what the internet will look like in ten years, but one thing appears certain: if things continue as they have, Adobe will no longer have the stranglehold over video and gaming content that it enjoys today.

[Via Engadget]

TUAWAdobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Home security on your iPhone

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Internet Tools, iPhone

We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.

A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It’s an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.

I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.

I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn’t compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.

A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It’s an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.

I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.

I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn’t compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.

TUAWHome security on your iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple posts articles to help protect MobileMe members against ‘phishing’ schemes

Filed under: Odds and ends, Internet Tools, MobileMe

It was just a couple of weeks ago that we warned you that there were a bunch of phony Apple emails being sent to MobileMe subscribers designed to trick them into giving up their credit card info.

Now, Apple has published a couple of Knowledge Base articles designed to help you if you get some mail that might not really be from Apple.

The first posting helps you to renew your account, update your credit card information, and to deal with messages MobileMe may send you about your storage limits.

It also has an additional older specific link to help you identify fraudulent emails that look like they are from Apple but aren’t. For whatever reason, crooks love to prey on MobileMe users, and there have been issues with fake renewals and credit card phishing schemes for a couple of years now.

If you have any doubts, check the Apple articles, and report any problems to Apple. A credit card is a terrible thing to waste, or lose.

TUAWApple posts articles to help protect MobileMe members against ‘phishing’ schemes originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 3.6 now available

Filed under: Software, Internet, Internet Tools

Head on over to Getfirefox.com, Firefox fans. Version 3.6 of your favorite browser is now ready. The video explains the major changes in this version, but here are the highlights.

1. One-click themes. Using the Personals Gallery, you can assign a new look and theme to Firefox with a click. The way it works couldn’t be simpler. Roll over any theme to preview it and click to commit. I found most of them annoying, but I’m old and crotchety.
2. Out-of-date plugin warnings. This super-handy feature lets you know when you’ve got an out-of-date and potentially virus-friendly plugin installed and provides an update link.
3. Speed! This version promises improved speed with javascript, rendering and startup.

There’s more, of course, so watch the video above. Or better yet, grab a copy and start playing. In my extremely limited testing, content heavy pages did seem to load quicker (I typically visit StarWars.com), and all of my plugins continued to work. If you experience any issues or have a plugin that refuses to work, please let us (and your fellow Firefox users) know.

The Mac beta became available last year on Halloween (spooky) and the final release candidate dropped on January 11, 2009.

TUAWFirefox 3.6 now available originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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