James Farrar focuses on the business balance between financial performance and social-environmental impact.
I've been on a bit of a blog and RSS hiatus the past couple of days and have been working my way through tales of destruction and distress (the 365 outage, not Lindsay Lohan's latest episode), news, and views. In my reading, there's a recurring theme that beats louder all the time. People are just not loving Vista.
Here's a great idea for iPhone users starved for offline content. Filemarks, a free droplet utility developed by Jamie Wilkinson, builds a bookmark you can sync to your iPhone (via Safari 3 on your Mac or Windows PC) that can contain hi-res images, PDFs, or other data. It's a free download and seems to work really well. A brief description of the utility from the Insanely Great News web site (co-authors of the droplet and makers of some fine t-shirts) reads...
I tend to get a little skeptical when I read stuff like this but according to Lightspeed Research who conducted a survey days after the release of the iPhone, just about one third of the nearly 40,000 people surveyed plan to buy one and 90% of them had heard about the iPhone. That's a stunning accomplishment no matter how you slice it.
I've been using a new Jabra BT5020 Bluetooth headset for the past few days and despite the short period of time I've had to use this device I am already a huge fan. Jabra claims ten hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby time and, while I'm unable to as yet verify the latter, I can attest to the fact that former number is no exaggeration. I've been able to use the device for four days (about eight and a half hours of talking so far) and it still has juice to spare!
I'm a sucker for these bundle promotions. I admit it. Last year's MacHeist bundle got me and so did the current (and about to end) MacUpdate promotion. This one's quite a nice deal if you're looking for an ecelectic but very useful collection of Mac applications and utilities at a significant discount. The bundle includes...
USA Today's Ed Baig posted a story yesterday reporting on the results of a survey of 1000 new iPhone owners. The numbers are a product manager's (or iCEO's) dream come true. 90% of 200 owners said they were "extremely" or "very" satisfied with their phone. And 85% said they are "extremely" or "very" likely to recommend the device to others.
So Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey, has announced he's swearing off e-mail. Not going to use it. At all. It hasn't been a very good year for Corzine who was critically injured in an accident earlier this year while racing to intervene in the Imus crisis drama soap opera because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. Sad to say, declaring himself e-mail free (in response to a lawsuit from state Republicans – Corzine is a Democrat) feels a lot like buckling up immediately after the crash.
OK – brief rant here. Why is it that when I'm using a USB memory stick, Vista is apparently incredibly stupid about removing the device when I'm finished working with it? First, the OS refuses to allow me to safely remove the stick if a window is open. How dumb is that? Second, even after dutifully closing all windows, files, applications, etc. and clicking on the Safely Remove Hardware button in the tray, Vista leaves the dialog box informing me that I may now safely remove the hardware open after I've removed the stick. Seemingly forever. Until I dismiss it manually. XP was smarter than this. So I ask again: Is Vista stupid or is it me?
Flock, the "social browser" built on the Mozilla platform, will release version 0.9 tomorrow morning.
BeeJive has just released an alpha of JiveTalk for iPhone – a web-based mutli-network IM client that allows you to chat on AIM, GTalk/Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo simultaneously. It works much better than Meebo and uses an iChat style bubble display.