Google Wave…my thoughts

I recently watched the Google Wave developer preview video, that is on http://wave.google.com. I had heard about it, but really only heard that it was “Email if it had been invented today”. So I was like “yeah…alright…sounds like a farse”. But, I can tell you, it really will be amazing.

I am embedding the video so you can have a look at it before you read the rest of the post. However, I understand many of you may not want to watch 1:20 of video, but to see the full extent of it you need to. However, to get a small idea of how cool this is gonna be, I would recommend watching maybe half an hour of it. Seriously…do it, you will not regret it. Think of it as being a TV program.

Click here if you are reading this in a feed reader, and can’t see the video.

Right, so, I would like to talk about some of the things that were shown in the video, and also a few of my own ideas about how this could be used.

• Message editing.

I couldn’t quite word the title to this section how I wanted to do it. Basically it is about the way you can edit the “waves”. So, recently, I was sent an email from a person in my church about something they are thinking about doing soon, and he wanted my opinion on what we could do with a server. So, I got this email that had about 10 emails in the previously bits. So I had to scroll through pages and pages of writing from about 4 different people (Pastor, deacon, website guy and another guy) that seemed to be all about the place, just to get an idea about what was actually happening.

I did not enjoy this, but in Google wave, I would see it all in a much more sensible way. I would see the original email, with the comments everyone had put in it, and I would have to scroll down past “So and so wrote” and “On this date, so and so wrote, to so and so”. It makes so much more sense, saves so much time, and looks so much nicer. This leads on to the next feature.

• Playback

Instead of trying to figure out what is happening and in what order, I could have used the playback feature. This would show me in what order things will have happened. I really love this feature. It is so cool.

It also shows potential in other areas – if you watched far into the video, you would see that they played a chess game, and showed you the full game through playback. Not very useful, but still a cool way of showing what could be done

• Spell Checker

Isn’t this the best spell checker you have ever seen? I would just tell it to do its job. I think it is amazing that they managed to get such an advanced spell checker that knows what you want to say because of the context. Very very amazing.

And, if it isn’t “confident” about what you are saying, it allows you to change the word yourself. This is just so cool, and I want this in everything else that I use as well.

• Contacts

I’m not sure whether this happens, but it looks like it from the preview. It seems like it works in such a way like social networks. Unlike email, where you have to maintain your contacts yourself, I think each person maintains their contact details, avatar, etc, and you just add them as a contact. This means no more using a phone number, but realising they changed it 3 weeks ago. Again, I’m not 100% sure this is what happens, but I think it is.

• API/Protocol

Completely open, has a nice API, and is an actual protocol. This opens so many things. From setting up your own “wave” on your server, to creating desktop clients (like thunderbird and outlook are to email) to creating extensions, to integrating it with other products. It is just such a clever move by google that means we can use the Wave but without using Google.

Obviously, there are so many things you could use this for. From email, to IM, to document collaboration, to coding in groups, to monitoring twitter and identi.ca.

I also had an idea that incorporates with their “Bloggy” extension. They only used it to send photos to their blog, but you could use it as a full blog editing client. This is cool.

I’d love to see how the Wave would work with RSS feeds as well.

I’m sorry guys, I think this is well over the 1000 character limit, but hopefully that didn’t put you off reading this because I think Google Wave has sooo much potential, and I cannot wait until I can ride the wave. Lets hope it makes my surfing so much more exciting.

p.s If anyone gets into Google Wave, and you have invites…I would LOVE one.

Firefox 3.5 and Karmic Koala

A couple of things that I needed to say, first of all, Firefox 3.5 has officially been released! Woop! That is good. It is 2 times faster than firefox 3, 10 times faster than firefox 2 and it implements the new HTML 5

So I would advise you all to get it asap.

Second of all, an update on my sound issues with Karmic Koala…it has now completely died. It doesn’t recognise my sound card anymore. Really annoying…I’ll have to file a bug for this.

Sorry about all the posts I have posted today, but I needed to say these

Video of the Week: Samsung SSD Awesomeness

This has to be the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. I know I said I’d put the other video on, and I will later in the week, this is a special Video of the Week, as it is soooo immense.

Take 24 SSDs, hook them up to a computer that has 2 quad-core computers, 4 GB of ram, 2 graphics cards and 2 whopping great fans, and what do you get? The most powerful consumer computer to date…I want this machine…

If you are reading this in a feed reader, click here to view the video.

Windows 7

Ok, there have been a few interesting developments on Windows 7 since I last blogged about it.

For starters, the starter edition will no longer have the 3 app rule. For those who don’t know, the 3 app rule was that you could not run more than 3 apps at once (not including A/V software). Their reasons were that the netbooks couldn’t handle it, and that most people won’t use more than 3 apps. So, it is interesting that they have stopped this, as they seemed to be taking more and more control over netbooks as time went on.

I wonder what made them change their mind. Was it the bad press? Was it the hundreds of people being unhappy bout it? I guess we will never know…

Second of all, windows 7 seems to be running at a base install (no AV software) at about 400mb on a 32-bit computer. That is interesting. It seems to be a lot better than Vista, but still quite heavy. 400 as apposed to about 150 for a base ubuntu install running compiz. But ach well, it is a step in the right direction.

Third, it seems Windows 7 will only be released as a full install in Europe. They will have an upgrade option, but it will just be the full install disk. I wonder what the point is…? But also, it will be much more expensive than in America. Up to double depending on the actual version that you choose.

So, good and bad things going for Microsoft and Windows 7 just now. I would like to point out that the RC seems to run slower than the beta.

A few predictions from earlier in the year

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see…

2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do. – Turns out I was right with this one. They have released the iPhone 3Gs already, halfway through the year
5. I will get my computer working again. – This one did happen, but I didn’t update you with it. I got my money back for my old motherboard, and bought a new one.
6.Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version. – Turns out this one is right as well, with the release today of the HTC Hero
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something. – This one happened as well. As we all know, it is called Karmic Koala
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough. – This one might happen soon, as we currently have the Beta 2 of Thunderbird, and mozilla don’t do many betas (ha…)

So, looks like a very successful year for me so far in predictions. More to come people…

Songbird 1.2 – The Review

Managed to get this up earlier than I expected, as I realised that you don’t need to build it from source from the songbird website, I just needed to download it and run it.

So, to the new features:

• Equaliser:

  The equaliser is quite interesting. It works reasonably well. It has sliders for 10 frequencies, and is quite nice. It isn’t the best equaliser I have ever said, it lacks a few features that are planned (either by the songbird team, or by addons), such as presets and the ability to remember equaliser settings for each song. That is something that would be immense, and I would really love.

• Automatically managed folders:

  Well, now this is quite a cool, interesting feature now. It is quite useful. I’m sure most of you would know what it would do, but you can turn on what it calls “Managed Mode” on. This will allow you to choose the folder for your music, the folder heirarchy, and the file name, and when you change anything in the metadata, it will change them for you. Really useful I think. It works as well.

• 2-way sync with iTunes:

  Very useful feature, not for me, but for a lot of people who love Songbird, but also love the iTunes music store. Does exactly what it says on the tin…syncs with iTunes both ways. Means you can buy music in the iTunes music store, and it will sync with songbird. Create playlists in songbird, and they will sync with itunes, and you can then sync them to your iPhone or iPod touch (which currently aren’t supported in songbird). I don’t know how to do this feature, and I don’t have iTunes so I can’t try it and tell you if it works, but it seems really cool.

  This could also be used in conjunction with dropbox (or similar) to sync itunes on a mac, with linux or windows on another computer, or to sync several OS on 1 computer. It has huge potential.

• Last.fm:

  I don’t get what is new with this. My Songbird 1.1.1 has last.fm on it, but maybe that is just an addon. I don’t know, it might be that it was an addon, and is now part of the core. But still, it allows you to do everything with last.fm that you can on the website, and also allows you to scrobble.

• Performance enhancements:

  Not as many of these as there have been in previous releases, but lets try

  • Faster searching. Definitely obvious. Searching is almost straight away in my library (its only about 1000 items just now though, not sure what it will be like with really large ones.
  • Less CPU intensive. It seems to be less CPU intensive, but this isn’t an exact science
  • Multiple files. Supposodly deleting and selecting multiple files is faster. I can vouch for the selecting, but I don’t see why I would ever need to delete lots of files at once, so I don’t feel like trying that, I’ll take their word for it.
  • Fewer crashes. Obviously I can’t test this one until having it running for a while.

Future things:
They have quite a few interesting ideas for the next few releases. The august one will have device firmware update, MSC device support, playback of AIFF MS-ADPCM, WMA 1 & 2 and AAC LC, editing metadata of ASF and M4A files, improvements to metadata editor and transcoding.

Other things they need to get done before it can surpass the likes of Amarok and Banshee, are podcasting support (it really doesn’t work just now) and cd ripping, which will be included in the October release.

To be honest, I love this release, it has a few cool features, and we are getting closer to a fantastic media player. It really needs to get into the repos for Ubuntu, in my opinion, and I’ve outlined what it needs to add in above there.

This release has gone from ~79M to ~90M of RAM with 20 addons and playing music. This is not bad, but we need to make sure it doesn’t keep going up, but this is the only bad thing I can find about this release apart from features that don’t exist yet. I love Songbird, and I really want it to be a fantastic and popular Media Player

p.s It seems I was beaten by Alan Lord to put a review out on Songbird, ach well.

Songbird 1.2 – PreReview

This is not a review yet, it is a PreReview.

Songbird 1.2 has been released, and I shall be reviewing it either tonight or tomorrow. This is just to let you know. To wet your appetite. It has a few new cool features.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2

I have decided that I am going to go through the whole of Karmic Koala’s development, and will write bugs, and document my problems etc with it.

So, I just upgraded from Alpha 1 (in which nothing was different really…just a debian sync) to Alpha 2.

What happened now? My audio setup has been mucked up. Woop! I had a great pulseaudio setup with pavucontrol, and everything was working fine. Now…its gone back to only 1 output working. Which is kind of annoying. Will try and fix it and see if I can.

I have also notices that firefox 3.5 is in the repo now (although it is called firefox-3.1, even though the version number is 3.5b4).

Gnome 2.27.1 is the version now, but I can’t see anything different with it, and also the kernel has been updated to 2.6.30-5.6.

Apart from these things, I can’t notice anything else really new, but it is only the second alpha, so there should be lots more to come.

***EDIT***

Turns out the problem lies with firefox. I can have more than 1 app using my sound card. Unless one of them is Firefox. If firefox uses my sound card, nothing else can. And if something else is using my sound card, firefox can’t. But, everything else seems fine. Odd.

Rant: Apple, our saviour!!!

I just found this link http://tinyurl.com/lwy2fb – before, I describe things in it, go read it. Go on.

Now, lets see, where shall I start? The title…”Apple Saves Twitter Universe From Twitpocalypse”. Sorry, no, they didn’t. They fixed 1 app. That is all. They didn’t save the “Twitter Universe” at all. Twitter worked perfectly fine, so did twitterfox, and loads of other apps.

Reports warned that Twitter would allegedly stop working once the number of tweets surpassed 2,147,483,647

Not quite…Twitter worked fine. It is some twitter apps that stopped working, because of the number of bits they used to count the tweets.

Apple rose to the occasion in epic fashion to push through approval of the crucial Twitterrific update in record time.

I’m sorry, but it is not record time. If i remember correctly, the flaw was recognised a few weeks ago, and was steadily getting bigger and bigger as it got nearer to the time. There are plenty of twitter apps that pushed updates to fix twitpocalypse BEFORE it happened. Not 17 hours afterwards.

Meanwhile, the rest of the anxious Twitterverse tweeted news of the impending 2.0.2 update submission over and over again ad nauseum, with hundreds of Twits repeating the exact same text launched as the only glimmer of hope during the Twitpocalypse blackout that struck Twitterrific.

O trust me, I know. I was fed up of people posting that stupid tweet. If people cared about the twitterrific update, they would be following twitterrific. I don’t care about twitterrific. ReTweeting was clearly abused in this case, where thousands of people retweeted the same annoying tweet that told tens of thousands of people that don’t care about it.

Basically, this blog post is saying how apple is amazing because they pushed through the twitterrific update through the app store in 17 hours. However, I am saying that the update should have been created at least a week before hand, when we already knew about it (and if they don’t know about it, they clearly don’t listen to their users, because there were loads of people talking about it for WEEKS).

Apple can’t be congratulated for doing what they should have been doing. It shouldn’t take that long to push an update through the app store. This clearly just highlights Apple’s app store ideas.

I am just annoyed that twitterrific and Apple are being congratulated for this, when loads of apps that I use never stopped working. Twitterfox, gwibber, s60twitter. I’m sorry, but when you hear that this is going to happen, you change the 2 lines of code that changes the number of bits in the code. Simple.

RANT: Pulseaudio? Why can’t we get it right?

Ok, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and, yet again, my audio set up really just doesn’t work. The first program that uses my sound, steals it. I’ve not figured out a way around this yet, but I will sometime.

I know, however, that this is not pulseaudio’s fault. It is Ubuntu. If I can direct you to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/fedora_11_review/ where they talk about Fedora and it’s pulseaudio implementation, which has just got better. They even have a cool application to turn specific application’s volumes up and down.

I have found very few people that have been complaining about sound in Fedora 10 or 11. But yet, we still can’t get pulseaudio even working in Ubuntu, never mind getting fancy features into it, like Fedora.

What is it that causes all these problems with pulseaudio in Ubuntu? I would love to know.