I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
I came across Topsy – a search engine powered by tweets. Even though you can search Twitter and see tweets in your Google search results, it looks like Topsy has a place of its own. Clean interface, tweets and image search, only a few sources, trending topics – all make it a tiny little cool toy. Check it out!
Here is a quote form Bill Gates that made me go “Huh? Are you for real?”:
Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing. We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students. It can give you a device that you can not only read, but also create documents at the same time.
What? Pen-based? Really? In 21st century? For students? Even me, who dropped out of college a decade ago considers pen to be nothing but a pain and an absolute last resort for input and notes. I can barely write anything longer than my own signature, and even that comes out different every time I try it. Stylus? Do you mean that thing which is constantly lost or broken or stuck in the pocket? I can’t believe it…
I could understand it as a familiar interface for older people. Yes, why not. But for students? Have you seen any students recently? Most of them have mobile phones growing out of their thumbs. They can type with a single thumb faster than I can do do with ten fingers.
A pen? Nope. I think we tried the combination of pens with computing devices, and we are done with that. It’s been confirmed a painful experience and I don’t think anyone should be betting anything on pen’s future in the technology world.
A friend of mine pointed at the almost lack of difference between the logos of United States Department of Health & Human Services and Cyprus Securities & Exchange Commission. Here are the screenshots from both web sites in case they will change them.
And here is the United States Department of Health & Human Services logo as a stand-alone image. Just to make it easier to spot the similarities.
Today iTouched the iPad. I mean I spent a few minutes holding it, touching its screen with my dirty fingers, rotating it, shaking it, browsing to a few sites that people said won’t work, checking out my own blog on it, and doing a few more trivial and usual things. What can I say? It’s mesmerizing. Hypnotic.
I am not a big fan of Apple products. I never had one and I am not planning to have one. I appreciate the slickness and everything, but it’s just not my cup of tea. Especially at those prices. And I wasn’t ever much interested in their products either.
But the iPad seemed different. Nobody could quite figure out what it was, and even reviews from those people who had the device seemed confusing. It’s seemed like a cool toy that nobody knew how to play with. Which usually means you either have something revolutionary or something really stupid.  And Apple and Steve Jobs aren’t stupid, so circumstances were suggesting revolutionary.
After seeing it with my own eyes and touching it with my own fingers, I have to agree. It is revolutionary. Not necessarily in a way that everybody should run to the shop and buy one, but in a sense that Apple and Steve Jobs are experimenting with something that more people should be experimenting with.
Now, enough with all that non-sense. How was it, really? I liked it. A lot. It was pretty intuitive and easy to use. It was pretty much the size and weight that I was expecting after seeing a billion reviews. And it works well. My own blog looked nice in it. Even embedded YouTube videos were working fine (using the HTML5, not Flash, but I had nothing to do with it on either publishing or consuming end). YouTube itself worked fine. Flickr was fine, except for the slideshows which require Flash. I tried a few applications that were installed on the iPad – Kindle, LinkedIn, solitaire and more. Checked Google Maps. Everything was working nice.
I particularly enjoyed the YouTube experience. An embedded video from a blog post, expanded full screen and rotated horizontally was something. Somehow it just felt natural to do so. And I never felt I should do this in the browser. Plus I was pretty impressed by the sound quality coming out of the device.  It wasn’t like your average mobile phone. It was way better.
After using the device for just a few minutes I started thinking of buying one. I was discussing with other people in the room if should batch order together and if we should wait for the 3G version or get the WiFi one, etc. It was only when I came home and spoke to my wife I got the hypnotic effect dissolved. That often happens when I speak to someone smart. And it had nothing to do with her being my wife. Her arguments were solid. After all, I recently bought a laptop for roughly the same price. And the laptop does way more things than the iPad, and most of them it does better than the iPad too. I have the full-blown QWERTY keyboard, not a touch screen. I have bigger screen. I have a hard disk with a whole lot of files. I have a better choice of software – anything from games to personal finance tools, not simple apps to access websites. And so on and so forth.
Resume? It’s a slick device, it’s pleasant to use, and it will get quite popular. There are certain people and certain scenarios which would benefit from using iPad instead of a mobile phone or a laptop. But I am not one of those people and I none of those scenarios happen in my life often enough to throw away that much money.
How about you? Have you touched one already? Do you want one? Do you see yourself using one? What for and how?
I think that one of the most underutilized features of WordPress is the image gallery. It was added recently and all the proper announcements were made, but I still see too many WordPress based sites working too hard to display a bunch of images in post or page. If you never made an image gallery in WordPress, I suggest you try it. Maybe you are spending too much time solving your problem using something else.
Trying out the gallery is very easy. Just attach more than one image to the post, without actually inserting those images to the post, and you’ll see a gallery tab in your media popup. It will look something like that:
You can manage the images in the gallery, their order, sorting direction, the size of the thumbnails, number of columns in the gallery, cropping options, and more. It’s a very balanced compromise between flexibility (make it look the way you want) and ease of use (no coding required – all in mouse clicks).
More so, you can use some shortcuts in your blog posts and pages to control the appearance of the gallery. There is a Codex manual which documents all options and provides examples of use. Awesome, isn’t it?