More Google Coolness - Blogger Style

Sometimes Google gets on a roll with getting new features out there.

First, this may have been there for a while, but I finally notice it tonight. You can now check a box after commenting to have all additional comments on a post emailed to you. About time, now maybe commenting discussion can being to improve on a wider scale with blogs. Blogger is at least trying now to go a little ways toward improving the poor blog commenting that some have discussed in the past.

Second, I continue to find good things at Blogger in draft. For those who haven't seen it, Blogger in draft is where Blogger first rolls out new things (primarily for blog site design for now) before giving it to the general public. To see this, just go to draft.blogger.com, rather than www.blogger.com. I noticed today that they now have available any of the literally hundreds of Google gadgets that are already available for places such as the Google personalized homepage. Now, I just have to find a way to wade through the cruft, and find the goodness.

On a separate note, as those who added it to their RSS will already have seen, I finally kicked off my financial advice site tonight. There is a link under my other sites in the sidebar, but the site is http://financiallysimple.blogspot.com if you are so inclined.

What's old IMAP is new IMAP again

Leave it to Google to make ancient software cool again. I switched from POP3 to IMAP back in 1997 while I was still going to school and working at U of I. I used it all the way up until I switched everything over to Gmail web-goodness. Most of that time, it seemed that almost nobody else cared or used IMAP, they were almost all using POP.

Now, suddenly, after Gmail introduces this feature it suddenly comes off as the newest and coolest thing around. Amazing. In my mind (and apparently a sentiment shared by others) it is long overdue. I actually wanted to switch the domain for one of my email addresses to Google Hosted a while back, and the lack of IMAP for use on my friend's cell phone was the reason we couldn't.

So, I now am so stuck on the gmail web experience that I really have no use for this feature, but since it was on one of my accounts, I decided to give it a whirl.

Overall, it looks like they have done a very good job with it. I think it appears to function well and I think all of the logistical questions that I have are now answered. Here are my thoughts.

The Good

1. Labels show up as separate IMAP folders. Better still (and to answer one of my main questions), if you tag something with multiple labels it shows up in multiple folders under IMAP. Very nice.
2. Inbox and folders are shown at the top level, and then hidden under a [Gmail] folder is essentially the folder list from the left-hand side of the web interface. Thus "all mail" and friends are available, but nicely hidden.
3. Refer to #1. Now, try to go the other way. Dragging a message into a folder will automatically add that label to the message in gmail, copying to multiple will add all of them. Very slick.
   

The Bad

1. Remember Gmail's fantastic idea that you never delete anything, you just archive it? Fantastic idea, I've raved like a lunatic about the value of data for a while now, and I use this as a shining example of how to do it right. Until you have to fetch all of those headers over IMAP... Outlook (my unfortunate choice of IMAP client) froze completely for about 10 minutes trying to pull this off. Most of that is Outlooks fault though. As long as you never fetch the headers for the "all mail" folder, this shouldn't be too terrible (maybe).
2. This actually isn't anything against Google, it is against Microsoft. It turns out there wasn't as much bad as I expected, so this is filler. I setup the account in Outlook to use IMAP, and I happen to have a gmail address that is "something.somethingelse@gmail.com". Outlook politely warned me that my email address looked invalid, but then happily continued and worked perfectly. Morons. Reminds me of when BestBuy.com couldn't handle the hyphen in one of my email addresses. Read the email RFC's guys, this isn't hard.

So, good job Google. Your implementation of 1990's technology seems superb.

Ringtones

The introduction by Apple of ringtones to its arsenal has prompted some discussion, and made me actually think a bit about something I generally just find to be a nuisance.

The general consensus when the iPhone first came out was that the lack of custom ringtones was something Apple needed to remedy. This has been a staple of all of the other phones and providers for some time now. They did just that with their most recent announcement. However, I think many were expecting more/different since it was Apple doing it.

First, some things that I think they did right. Being able to pick which 30 seconds of the song to use is good. This is something I would have always considered a must, but it isn't available directly from any of the cell providers. Next, they don't force you to just buy an overpriced ringtone (anywhere from $2 to $5 from what I can tell most places); they allow you to make them from your own music that you already own. Yes, I know there is a catch, we'll get there in a minute. Finally, it can all be done from the safe haven of iTunes. Pick the song, pick the musical selection, and get it loaded on the device is all possible and very simple. The last one is the type of thing I have come to expect from Apple, and may be the single largest benefit. As usual, most people miss the benefit of simplicity.

Now, the things I think were not done the way I would have hoped or expected. I need to preface this by saying I don't think any of the current providers or ringtone offerings have done anything positive; they have been nothing short of horrendous. Overpriced, a pain in the ass to get or use, lack of choice, and a general annoyance is how I would summarize all previous offerings. I can't understand personally why people pay anything for a ringtone, let alone more than I am willing or need to pay to purchase a full song from the iTunes store.

Although the 99 cent price sounds about right, you can't actually purchase any ringtone for that amount. You have to already have bought the song or buy it at that time, which means there is an additional 99 cents to include. Thus, the minimum for a ringtone is actually $2. However, you do also get a full copy of the song for listening as well.
Not all songs are available for making ringtones though, even if you have purchased them from the store. This one seems confusing. You would think if you bought it from Apple, they would let you pay them another $1 to make it a ringtone no matter what.

Now, these few downsides seem to be far overwhelmed by the positives. However, I wondered immediately why Apple would put restrictions such as these on the songs. It doesn't fit with some of their past policies and my expectations of them. Coupled with the recent news that found many of these issues could be easily circumvented in iTunes 7.4 (although they have since been "patched") it made me start to wonder if Apple had nothing to do with these. Were they in fact mandated by some other entity?

I did a (very) little research on this, and came up with some additional conclusions and thoughts. Since this post is fairly long though, I'm going to make like Back to the Future 2 and leave you with this...


SEE THE EXCITING(POSSIBLY) CONCLUSION IN TOMORROW'S POST: "Idiocies of Licensing"

Pain and Suffering - Courtesy of Redmond

This one is for the true geeks, or those who just like to be dumbfounded by how bad software can go. In this case, it demonstrates how software can interact in completely odd and unexpected ways, and this is why computers are far less deterministic and stable than they should be.

I was attempting to install Silverlight. I'm not really going to even get into why, that's not important at this point.

The important part is that after downloading and running the installer, it stopped with an error at 90%. The installer splash screen then pointed me to this incredibly helpful error page: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/help.aspx?errorID=2. Once my head quit spinning, I started investigating a bit more. Obviously, the error page didn't help in the slightest, it was actually completely out of date. I tried moving the file, extracting it manually, various things did not work.

Amazingly, I did actually find the problem, thanks to a point where I had moved the installer to my root c: drive, but the temp folder still magically showed up on my desktop with a reference to s:.

It is at this point that I should mention a cool little trick I have setup on all of my Windows machines. I create a batch file that runs automatically at startup, using the old dos "subst" command to map a drive letter to my desktop. Yes, I was adept at tab-completing the full profile name (documents and settings\username\yada yada), but it's much nicer having it as my s: drive.

So, seeing the s: drive in the error message tipped me off. I deleted my shortcut drive, and lo and behold it all worked. Bizarre.

If you've read this far, you probably need professional help. I'm still in denial.

Good things are worth the wait...

Xbox media center rocks hard, I'll have more to say on that in an upcoming post. For now though, enjoy the madness:



Click on the image itself to see more details, or to see the original video that inspired all of this.

5 of the Now

Some new tunes to bump to, not really any theme this time around, just stuff I have been finding interesting. No links right now, the iTunes link maker thingy/pile o' crap is not working at the moment. I'll try to add them later when it is fixed. All of these are available on iTunes.

Scientific Lifestyle - Flight 273 - The Arrow EP
I chose this song, because this was the one that Blender was showcasing that led me to find this group. I like the whole EP quite a bit, and their other album available on iTunes as well. Smooth beats, with some interesting vocals. A good blend of mellow and beats.

Big and Rich featuring Wyclef Jean - Please Man - Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace
In this case, I chose this song to spite several reviews who have trashed it (plus I know nobody will listen to it anyway...). First, this whole album is incredible. In fact, the only songs I'm not sold on are the 2 more stereotypical-styled rockabilly songs (and the horrendous cover of "Shook Me All Night Long", that should be surgically removed from all future CD printings). Everything else on here is solid, modern country and done fantastically.
This song however, is all about just having fun. Wyclef gets it, these guys have always gotten it. Sometimes it's more important to just have fun with music, than to produce some epic. Great stuff.

Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend (Dr. Luke Mix featuring Lil Mama) - Girlfriend Single
I'm throwing this on here first because I think it's cool that this made it out as an officially-sanctioned remix. Second, it's on here because it's one of the few tracks featuring lil' mama that you can get from iTunes right now. The original song I can pretty much take or leave, but I'm extremely impressed right now with lil' mama's rap skills. She has some fierce flow to her rhymes.

Air - Alone in Kyoto - Lost in Translation Soundtrack
I finally saw "Lost in Translation" this past week (yes, I'm not sure why it took me so long). Great movie, and the soundtrack is equally on-par. I have lots of other stuff by Air already, and I think this is one of the top 2 tracks on the soundtrack. Jesus and Mary Chain would be a close second.

Carbon Leaf - Learn to Fly - Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat
I would have never heard of this group if one of their videos wasn't playing on a cruise we took a few months back. More on the alternative side, but this is just generally a good song. Doesn't hurt that they cribbed the title of a great Pink Floyd track either...

Map 2 Text

So, apparently the hot new thing to do right now is send maps to your cell phone via text message.
Josh is in the middle of pulling off a nice hack to do this with weather map information. In his case, you send a text to an address, and get back a map.

Now, I see today that Google is letting you call their 1-800-GOOG411 number, say "map it", and then they'll text you a map.

Now, how about marrying it all together. Have Google wire it up so you can email like in Josh's solution, and then have Google add weather maps as a service. Best of all worlds.