tnl.net

Blurring the line: Google Desktop

October 14, 2004

Today, Google unveiled a new appli­ca­tion that allows you to search your desk­top, blur­ring the lines between desk­tops and the web. This is yet another exam­ple of what I call hybrid com­put­ing, the new class of soft­ware that can be aug­mented through web use. It also has stag­ger­ing impli­ca­tions for a lot of play­ers. Microsoft Of course, everyone […]

OSX 10.4 preview: hits and misses

June 28, 2004

As it the case every year, the atten­tion of the Mac world focused on the Apple World Wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence with high hopes for new prod­ucts and excit­ing new devel­op­ment from a com­pany that has man­aged to show­case a high cool fac­tor while remain­ing one of the small­est play­ers in the com­put­ing field. The news of ban­ners poking […]

A Modest Browser Proposal

January 15, 2004

Robert Scoble men­tions on his blog that he had a meet­ing with the IE team and that they are solic­i­tat­ing feed­back from the blog com­mu­nity about what to include in the next update of the browser. While par­tic­u­lar fea­tures are nice, I’d like to sug­gest some­thing much more rad­i­cal: Switch to Mozilla. It may sound like […]

HP LightScribe: More info

January 13, 2004

I’ve been get­ting a lot of feed­back regard­ing LightScribe, the new tech­nol­ogy for writ­ing labels on CDs and DVDs. First of all, a cor­rec­tion to the pre­vi­ous entry: In that entry, I said that LightScribe was a silk screen­ing tech­nol­ogy. Steve Loughran, who worked on the tech­nol­ogy, points out that It has been likened silk screen­ing, but it is def­i­nitely not: […]

Route Around

July 25, 2003

Doc Searls wrote an inter­est­ing arti­cle enti­tled “Sav­ing the Net” in Linux Jour­nal. While he does present a dystopia in which the net is con­trolled by large cor­po­ra­tion that under­stand how to use reg­u­la­tions as a weapon, I beg to dif­fer on his vision of the future. My per­sonal sus­pi­cion is that the net com­mu­nity will route around […]

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

July 16, 2003

The recent announce­ment of AOL putting a final nail in Netscape’s cof­fin comes as a no sur­prise. As I pre­dicted ear­lier, AOL saw lit­tle value in sup­port­ing the open source project as much as it did. So Netscape, which once was rec­og­nized as the lead­ing inno­va­tor in the browser space, is dead. In a way, this was a move that […]

From David to Dave

July 15, 2003

The New York Times has an inter­est­ing arti­cle over a fight about how to best clean Michelangelo’s David. It’s an inter­est­ing study of how tech­nol­ogy some­times clashes with more tra­di­tion­al­ist approaches. In our rush to use tech­nol­ogy for every­thing, it is inter­est­ing to stop and pon­der whether it is the right tool for the job. Often, geeks […]

Usability 101: Learnability

June 17, 2003

The con­cept of learn­abil­ity is a key one to usabil­ity design. Basi­cally, it boils down to how easy a sys­tem is to learn. This, in turn, can be bro­ken down into five com­po­nents: famil­iar­ity con­sis­tency gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity pre­dictabil­ity sim­plic­ity Let’s delve fur­ther into each of those in more details. Famil­iar­ity The con­cept of famil­iar­ity is almost self explanatory. […]

SuperSync

June 11, 2003

Every­day, we man­age large num­bers of con­tacts across a vari­ety of devices. For exam­ple, I have a PDA, a phone (which hap­pen to both be the same device so that syn­chro­niza­tion is instant), a work PC, a home desk­top, and a lap­top. In order to prop­erly keep all my data in sync, I need to hook up each of those devices on a one […]

The Net as Critical Infrastructure

June 9, 2003

There has been con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion over the last few days about Wired Magazine’s deci­sion to pub­lish a story detail­ing the inner work­ings of the Slam­mer worm. As more and more traf­fic moves over the Inter­net, the net­work is increas­ingly becom­ing a key ele­ment of the over­all global telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture, espe­cially now that com­pa­nies are start­ing to move […]