Evan Sims

A Week with MobileMe: Day Two

Day two of my week with mobileme challenge has begun…

Morning — MobileMe and I were off to bad start yesterday, and I can’t say this morning as been much better. I woke up to find a MobileMe pop-up on each of my systems, informing me that my trial had expired. Clearly this wasn’t the case, given that I have 59 days left of said trial. Attempting to sync manually didn’t resolve the issue, but a reboot appears to have done the trick.

I’m encountering two other rather obnoxious issues with Mail, as if the rest weren’t enough. It appears each time Mail does an AJAX refresh (every couple minutes, I think) it locks up Firefox for a good 20-30 seconds. At first I thought this might be an incompatibility with Firebug so I disabled it, but it hasn’t resolved the issue. I haven’t encountered this problem with any other site, let alone Gmail which works in a similar fashion in the backend.

Continue Reading ‘A Week with MobileMe: Day Two’ …

A Week with MobileMe: Day One

Thinking about switching over to MobileMe? I’ve been pondering the logistics of moving all my stuff over to MobileMe since they announced the service, and today I decided to give it a try. I’m committing myself to a one-week challenge with this, and I’ll chronicle my ups and downs on this blog as I use the service exclusively for email, contacts and calendar.

I’ll play with the file hosting, but it’s unlikely I’ll touch the photo or bookmark sync; for photos I already have SmugMug and Flickr and am very happy with both, and unfortunately MobileMe does not support bookmarking syncing for Firefox, so I’ll continue to use the excellent Foxmarks extention for that.

My Configuration

I will not be testing this on my Macs; I consider the data on those systems too mission critical for an experiment like this. Instead, I’ll be using my Windows XP Desktop and Laptop. In the interests of fully testing the software in a Windows environment, I will likely load Vista in a virtual machine on my laptop to give the software a try in that environment. I won’t be picking up my iPhone 3G until next month at the earliest, so this experiment will be running on my iPod Touch instead. Touch users have the same experience as iPhone users for MobileMe, so you can interchange my experiences on the Touch with the iPhone.

The Format

I’ll make a new post each day, and will update that post continually with my discoveries and experiences with the service as I encounter them.

Day One Begins

Signed up for 60 day trial of MobileMe. Process was very simple, only a two pages and a few fields to fill in. Got the PCs, Mac and iPod Touch setup with the system in less than 5 minutes. First disappointment, they don’t support Firefox bookmark sync.

Continue Reading ‘A Week with MobileMe: Day One’ …

Watch Dr. Horrible. Immediately.

Joss Whedon, well known creator of popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, recently began sharing episodes of a new web series he created staring Neil Patrick Harris, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Simply put, it chronicles mad scientist and wannabe super-villain Dr. Horrible, aka Billy, as he attempts to put a stop to his nemesis Captain Hammer (played by Nathan Fillion) and join the ranks of the evil league of evil. Ever seen Venture Brothers? Imagine a live action version of The Monarch singing and you’ve pretty much got the idea. The series also stars Felicia Day as Penny (Dr. Horrible’s love interest, who’s fallen for Captain Hammer), and Simon Helberg as “Moist” who plays Dr. Horrible’s friend in evil.

Whedon and co penned the script during the WGA strike; they wanted to put something together fun that could be produced inexpensively, but still look professional. Episodes starting streaming from their website this month, and the Internet has been chattering about it ever since.

Myself? I watched it. I loved it. I totally recommend checking it out. If you haven’t yet, check it out before midnight tonight; the series will no longer be free to view on their website, and will move to digital distribution via iTunes (and elsewhere, presumably) after that. Even so, it’s totally worth the $4 on iTunes; it’s a fantastic little series.

Watch: Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3.

Brightkite is Slick

Finally got an invite to Brightkite tonight (thanks Jeff!), and I’m pretty damn impressed to say the least. The best way to describe Brightkite is something like a mash-up of Plazes, Twitxr and to some degree Twitter itself, though it’s much more of a companion to the former than it is a competitor.

Basically, you decide to broadcast that you are at some geographical location using your laptop or cellphone (i.e. The Starbucks on Green); you can see who else is there right now or has been in the recent past, and you can share photos and notes during your time there. It’s sort of an ad-hoc virtual community based around physical locations. The best thing? It all integrates with Twitter and FireEagle, so now your “I’m at Barnes and Noble” messages can actually have some useful metadata attached- who else is there? Where is that Barnes and Noble located? What does it’s interior look like?

So, it’s essentially a stalkers best friend, right? Well, luckily the Brightkite team was smart enough to impliment some decent privacy controls- you can define how much information you want to give out to the public, your friends, or your “trusted friends”.

I really love Brightkite; it’s not just a great idea, but their implementation is brilliant. The UI is responsive and sleek, and it doesn’t feel like a chore keeping it up to date, a problem I always had with Plazes. My only complaint is the lack of an API right now. I’d love to hook a certain GPS project of mine into this bad boy and have it automated some of the aspects. But, like all things 2.0, I’m sure they’re working on it.

My Review of the LG VX 8800 “Venus”

Pros:
* LG quality
* Touchscreen
* Nice, big slide-out keyboard
* Brilliant display
* Great camera

Cons:
* Laggy touchscreen response (probably an OS issue)
* The unlock mechanism is too easy to accidentally activate in your pocket