Saturday night's alright for comments

Some observations on a Saturday night:

• The user interface that Comcast provides for its TV service is still vastly inferior to almost any web interface. Now that they are trying to create their own web presence will their TV UI improve?
• Will the idea of a home phone go away as we use our mobile phones more and more?
• As projectors continue to get smaller and smaller, will they get assimilated into computers or even mobile devices?
• The form factor and battery life of netbooks is so appealing, but the small keyboard, lack of processing power and low video resolution just doesn't seem worth the trade-off. Someone needs to combine the netbook form factor with better processing capabilities.
• How can the mobile carriers continue to charge extra for texting when it costs them next to nothing to provide the service?
• Is it just me or is the threaded message view in Facebook (and Yammer) a really effective way to communicate?
• Why are people still using Internet Explorer 6 when there are so many better alternatives out there?
• There are so many ways for companies to lose data from the inside with all of the web based file sharing, nothing is safe, so we all need to deal with it.
• User expectations on the consumer side of the application world continue to filter to the corporate world. Companies that ignore this trend do so at their own peril.
• Will Facebook's closed world survive any better then those that preceded it (and failed)?

Finally, will bloggers who sit around on a Saturday night asking questions get more readers by asking these questions? This is one question that I hope is answered affirmatively :)

Breaking down fences

Today's blog post is not about doing any physical harm to anything, instead it is about how the fences between data and applications are coming down.

First of all the new 0.30.0 version of Tweetdeck is a nice upgrade, as it adds in the ability to update not only your facebook status, but also your facebook page's status. It also provides the ability to see your facebook newsfeeds and wall updates from within Tweetdeck. It has evolved to the point where Tweetdeck integrates with so many different social media sites that updates are now called "Compose Updates" and make no mention of composing tweets.

Secondly, the continuing growth of facebook connect, which gives you access to 15,000 websites using your facebook credentials, making it easy to sign-in to these sites without having to create yet another ID / password. Considering that facebook connect has only been around since December 2008 this kind of growth is amazing.

I need to add a facebook connect option to my blog, but for now you can use one of the other big web user federations, OpenID (your Google ID is also an OpenID) to sign-in and leave your comments about breaking down fences or comment on any of my other blog posts.

Getting Organized with a little Voo2do

We all have too much to do and keeping track of it is never easy. Over the years I have tried pretty much every method of tracking my list of todos from paper to spreadsheets to Microsoft's Outlook and OneNote and found they all worked to some degree but sooner or later I found them all lacking (of course this could just be me).

Some have great functionality, but no portability (i.e. I want my to do list to be available when I need it and using the tools at hand) like OneNote. Some have lots of portability, but not enough functionality.

One of the products I tried that seemed to have a good combination of both functionality and portability is Shimon Rura's Voo2Do. Ignoring the voodoo doll for the moment, the product provides:

• A free web based app that is available on any web enabled device (including your Blackberry)
  
• A nice Ajax interface (think thick client like functionality without redrawing the page every time you make a change)
• Context management so you have one context for your work projects and one for your home project as an example
• The ability to have projects and underlying tasks that you can augment, prioritize, assign and manage deadlines for.
• The ability to publish and share your projects and tasks.
  

You can read more about the product's features at the Voo2do site.

I will tell that I started using the product and liked it, but Shimon had moved on to other projects and wasn't doing much to enhance it. This didn't stop it from working as designed and being available at all times, but when I wanted some enhancements and wasn't seeing them, I restarted my never ending quest to find the next great to do list.

Not having found anything better, I was pleasantly surprised recently when Shimon opened a new Google Group on Voo2do saying he was refocusing on the product. Thus far there haven't been many changes, but he is soliciting ideas and plans on implementing some of them.

Given Shimon's renewed interest, I too will refocus on Voo2do in my never ending task of staying organized. So why not get yourself better organized by checking out Voo2do soon. Perhaps the magic of all of Technology Plumbing's readers signing-up for Voo2do will be the magic needed to keep Shimon involved with Voo2do, as well as helping us all get better organized.

The boob tube goes YouTube

When I saw the Samsung press release today that they were releasing an YouTube upgrade, to select Blu-ray players with BD-Live 2.0, I was pretty sure the player I had purchased earlier this year was going to benefit from this.

Sure enough, when I turned on my Blu-ray player this evening it presented me with an opportunity to install a firmware upgrade. 20 minutes later my player started back up and presented an option on its start-up menu to run YouTube (along with the previous options of Pandora, Netflix and Blockbuster).

I navigated to this option and started up YouTube. Once started it presents a non-logged in user experience as well as an option to log in with your YouTube credentials.

First the good news, the picture in non-full screen mode was excellent. The sound quality also benefited from my home theater's sound system. Switching to full screen mode was decent, but the quality of the original video isn't going to get any better watching it on a 47" screen and the defects only get magnified on the big screen.

All things considered the YouTube watching on TV experience was enjoyable. However, the issue with this whole setup is the user interface. While it looks and works just like YouTube on the web, using a remote control to navigate around the user interface and enter in keywords via the remote's "phone keypad" like keyboard is painful.

The first thing to do is sign-in using your YouTube credentials, it is painful, but once you do it the first time you can create a 4 digit code to use for subsequent sessions.

Signing in to your account allows you to access your favorites and channels previously setup on a computer, cutting down on the amount of remote navigation. It should be noted, that there are some nice features, that leverage the Samsung remote such as easily adding videos to your list of favorites via a single button.

Bottom line, this is another one of those technology trade-offs, the actual watching experience is much improved over a standard computer experience, especially if you want to share the experience with friends and family, but start navigating to what you want to watch before everyone gathers round the old "boob tube" (of course there is no longer a picture tube in today's televisions).

Once you get it all setup (or using any method to get to YouTube), my family and I highly recommend checking out this Gustavo Dudamel video to see music being performed for the sheer joy of it all.

Getting even more Cozi with Google

My Labor day efforts are progressing well. Now that I have completed all of the PC and Mac upgrades I began my efforts to deal with our on-line calendering challenges.

First some background, I am a big believer in electronic calendars and have been one through the various generations we have gone through to get to the calendar standards that exist today.

My family is not necessarily with me in this passion. My youngest, being young, can keep her very busy schedule in her head, but since the rest of the family's mind-reading skills leave something to be desired, this occasionally leads to scheduling conflicts.

My oldest keeps her electronic calendar on her phone, which works great for her.

My wife loves her paper planner, but since she keeps it with her most of the time, it tends to only benefit her for the most part. So you can see the challenge my family (and I bet your family too) faces in keeping our schedules in synch.

We have been using Cozi, (well at least my wife and I have), which is a very nice product, for a couple of years. It provides nice ways of handling busy days (via word wrap) and creating nice printed output (I know this defeats the purpose of an on-line calendar, to a certain extent). Unfortunately, Cozi, most likely to in a failed attempt to hold onto their users, is not adopting enough of the calendar sharing standards. They do offer the ability to subscribe to external calendars and synchronization to Outlook (a mixed bag), but when you are trying to deal with 4 people, a dog (yes the dog has her own schedule of medications, vet visits, etc), 2 schools, 2 jobs and multiple musical organizations it just wasn't scaling.

I made one last attempt this weekend to make Cozi work for me, by reading through their forums. While several people have made the kind of suggestions I think would make Cozi the kind of product I would use, thus far they have not reacted or implemented them.

Google's Calendar functionality has always been just shy of what I wanted, but I have kept watching and checking back to see what changes they have been making. Finally, it looks like they have the right combination of features to make the move. Of course Google has many more resources then Cozi so they are capable to chasing down competitors when they want to (kind of like that little company in Redmond has been doing for years on the desktop).

So what made me make the switch (and put in a few hours of data entry as well):

• Standards - All of Google's calendars can be presented or embedded in XML, HTML, iCAL. Standards not only allow sharing of a calendar but also allows web sites to update them as one executes things like buying airline tickets or booking hotels, avoiding manual entry of this type of entry.
  
• Layering - While Cozi lets you create a calendar by person / animal, Google let me do this as well, plus create calendars for institutions (schools) and import sports teams calendars.
• Customization, it is easy to view one, two or whatever combination of calendars I want to at a given time. It is also easy to change this view on demand.
• Privacy - I can keep individual calendars private and institutional calendars public thus allowing me to share these calendars with web sites and others who want to put them to use in whatever ways they want.

So at this point I have imported or re-entered data from Cozi, our schools and musical organizations and have a nice workable family calendar that can be displayed via its web address, is viewable as a widget on my iGoogle page and is embedded in the home page I built for my wife. It can also be synced with my Outlook work calendar, but that is for another day.

I will also publish the public calendars I created so others can leverage my labor over this Labor day weekend.