Author: jezlyn

Neat iPhone game.

Awesome pictures (as always) from the winter Olympic Games.

But enough of the technical details. The point here is that we are entering a new era of media, where we finally have a digital platform that allows us to retain all the rich visual features of high-gloss print, from lavish design to glorious photography, while augmenting it with video, animations, additional content and full interactivity.

Wonderful short video demoing Wired’s tablet version of their magazine. The URL of this page implies that the demo was running on an iPad, but I don’t think it was. Nonetheless, this is exactly the type of next-generation, digital magazine that I was thinking of when I blogged about Domino magazine (defunct) coming back as a digital version. I am SO excited to see how digital magazines evolve over the next few years. Obviously digital magazines have existed for years now in different forms — Zinio comes to mind — but now the tablet devices, not just the iPad, but all of these new slate devices with touchscreens, are providing technology that will make interacting with these digital publications more like reading a print magazine, but with enhancements.

Oh man, this is a dangerous website for me to be browsing…

Google Buzz is great for photography and friends!

Follow me on Google Buzz here. And, are you on Google Buzz yet, if so, share your profile in the comments with the community, so that new people to Buzz can find others to follow!  For the first photo I released on Buzz, I decided to add a brand new unpublished work of boats at sunset at the Portofino Hotel.

Here is why Google Buzz is great for photography and conversation and friends:

• The photos go Full Screen and can be viewed in their proper glory
• I get to see people’s photos as soon as they go up and scroll through them in a nice lightbox
• It’s very simple and built right into the GMail interface
• Conversations are real-time and it has all the “fun” of a chat room without the pressure

Nice take on Google Buzz from a photographer’s point of view. Follow the link above to check out more of Trey Ratcliff’s photography, and while you’re there, follow some other photographers on Google Buzz.

SquarePik is an app that lets you check-in on Foursquare while at the same time dropping an image or video at a venue you check-in at. Because Foursquare doesn’t support media natively, SquarePik does by combining Foursquare’s check-in API with its own backend to store the pictures and record their location. Sadly, to see these pictures or videos you have to sign in to your Pikchur account (which you can do with your Foursquare credentials) on the web.

Bah. I was all excited about this app because I thought it finally meant that Foursquare would support uploading geotagged pictures like Brightkite, but this is not the case. I really like the gaming aspect of getting check-in points with Foursquare, but I sorely miss being able to post geotagged photos related to the place I just checked in — a big example being food pictures. I also often used Brightkite to post pictures of notable things I saw in stores, moblog-style. So at the moment I’m “forced” (this is such a first-world problem) to use Foursquare to check-in, then if I want to post any pictures, use Brightkite.

In addition, Brightkite has a cool feature where people can comment on your Brightkite posts, and I miss that, too. I often see Foursquare check-ins pop up on my screen and wish I could comment on them. Sometimes I can if the person chose to forward the check-in to Twitter, but that’s not always the case.

So I guess my “perfect” location-based service/app would have the photo and conversation capabilities of Brightkite and the gaming/points/check-in feature from Foursquare. I guess I could sort of use Google Buzz like Brightkite, but I’d lose the Foursquare points/gaming aspect…hmph. Anyone up to mashing Brightkite and Foursquare together? Brightsquare? Fourkite?

Jailbreaking an iPhone is essential. Without all of the jailbroken apps the phone would be severely limited in functionality and usability compared to most other smartphones. Apple’s restrictions on what you can install is THE major problem with the iPhone. Jailbreaking is the solution around their limitations. There are many apps available now through Cydia or RockApp. Some are free, and some are paid. I have used everything. Everybody has their own ideas on what is useful, but here is my opinion on the best jailbroken apps:

I’ve jailbroken my iPhone several times in the past, but I currently have the stock firmware running. Personally I think it’s exaggeration to say that jailbreaking the iPhone is essential. I am doing just fine running the stock firmware, and I know what I’m missing out on. The jailbroken apps that I ran, while quite convenient, were not what I considered to be essential, so restoring my iPhone was not a big deal. At any rate, seeing some of the apps in this list has gotten me kind of interested in jailbreaking my iPhone again. But for now, I’ll leave it. I’m curious to see what is coming in iPhone 4.0, and those changes might be announced sometime next month.

However, if you are looking for reasons to jailbreak your phone, quite a few of the apps in this list make it seem worth it, so hit up the link above and enjoy.

I just watched the latest episode of Damages and heard this folksy cover of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister. Thanks to Yahoo! Answers, I found out it was done by a Swedish group called Hellsongs that apparently specializes in covering heavy metal as mellow, acoustic music. It sounds gimmicky, but their cover of this song is pretty cool. I’m going to seek out their other covers as well.

When Google announced that it had acquired microblogging platform Jaiku back in October of 2007, I was impressed. With rumors of an impending mobile-related announcement boiling over, it was a foregone conclusion in my mind that Google had made a brilliant move.

One short month later, the Open Handset Alliance was announced along with the Android OS, and the endgame was obvious: Google was about to change the way we use smartphones to interact. It would use the Jaiku platform to breathe life into mobile phonebooks. It would keep us connected to our contacts at all times. It would allow us to easily track and interact with individual contacts or groups of contacts like never before. It would make Android the most social mobile OS on the planet.

Here we are in February of 2010, and the reality is just the opposite.

This is a great post from a friend of mine who I actually met via Jaiku (but have yet to meet in real life). Back in its heyday, Jaiku was an awesome place to have great conversations. And since people used to be able to import various other services, like Flickr, Twitter, and other sites that had RSS feeds, Jaiku was a true lifestream. I consider it to be FriendFeed’s predecessor, since Jaiku used to do everything that FriendFeed does now. My adoption of FriendFeed was begrudging at first, since I was irritated that FF was getting a lot of buzz from the social networking A-listers, but seemed to be the same (a tad stripped down compared to Jaiku at its peak) as Jaiku, which was getting bad-mouthed for no reason.

Beyond its website, though, Jaiku used to have a kickass S60 client that not only allowed you to monitor and respond to convo threads on Jaiku, but also served as an enhanced contact list on your smartphone that would show you in real-time whether your friends were online — idle or busy — and if they chose to show it, their current location. It was a sort of like a mashup of certain services that are popular now — like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp (to a certain degree), and even Google Latitude. However, a user’s status on the Jaiku app was updated automatically (IIRC) using your calendar information and your phone’s GPS, instead of you needing to update your location manually via check-ins.

Clearly Google wanted the Jaiku founders’ vision of social networking and online presence when they bought out Jaiku, but so far, I haven’t seen anything major come out of this. Sure, Google Latitude came out, but I don’t know many people who are using it. Google Buzz is the new social networking product that’s garnering a lot of “buzz”, but it’s slowly getting rolled out over the next few days, so not many of my contacts are using it yet. I’ll keep my eye on it, as I do most Google products, since I am firmly entrenched in the Google suite, despite some of my irritation with how they’ve handled Jaiku. I wonder if the mobile client versions for Buzz will ever be like Jaiku’s mobile client? That would be great, especially if it gets my Jaiku buddies conversing together again. They’re a great bunch.

Hey, Kids.

Just a quick note that FastFinga is back in the App Store. It’s been updated to version 2.0.1, and it seems that there are some cool new features (or maybe they were already there and I didn’t realize it?) related to changing up the backgrounds and guide rules according to different usage (like writing out music on music staffs, or writing on a blackboard-like background). Very cool. Go forth and download or update now!

Check out Gizmodo for a demo video showing a possible usage scenario for the Microsoft Courier tablet concept. If the demo is pretty close to actual device usage, I will be so happy to plunk down some money (I’ll find it somewhere!) for it. Basically the Courier concept takes the best parts that I loved about using a Tablet PC and updating it for today. I used my Tablet PC as a digital notebook, handwriting notes, drawing diagrams, ink blogging (duh), and clipping parts of web pages to keep for reference, very similarly to what was shown in the demo video. OneNote was a great notebook, and Windows Journal was nice for simpler notes that didn’t necessarily need to be organized into a notebook. Even the snipping tool looks like it made it into the Courier concept.

I will be watching development on this device pretty closely. Even though I think the Apple iPad is a great general-use computing device for a lot of people, I am still very interested in the computing model that the Tablet PC/Courier represents. One of my ongoing clean-up/moving projects has been to go through my stacks of old magazines to cull the articles, ads, and photos/graphics that I want to keep, then recycle the remains. I have a *ton* of loose papers that I’ve been filing into expanding folders that will need further organization into more permanent binders at some point. I’d love it if I could scan them all in and organize them into a digital “inspiration notebook” that is quickly searchable. Currently I can scan all of these papers in, and do some kind of crude notebooking with the apps that are out there right now, but working with such apps now is not quite the same as the Courier’s model of a journal/notebook. The interface for the Courier is so much closer to pen and paper, which I feel puts your mind into a more creative mindset than working on a desktop computer or a laptop.

Anyway, after you’ve seen the demo at Gizmodo linked above, also check out this other Gizmodo post with a second demo video: http://gizmodo.com/5369493/leaked-courier-video-shows-how-well-actually-use-it . It is also pretty intriguing. Yay!