Friday, January 18, 2008

Long time, no post...

Happy New Year!

It's been a long time since I wrote on here... Oh well. It was a great Holiday and a better New Year. Why? Well, I water-logged my BB Pearl and bought a Curve (model 8310) - it has GPS and with Google Maps installed, it rocks! Here's what you can do for the best GPS experience on a phone:

1) Download Google Maps to your BlackBerry
http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

2) Enable GPS
See your device manual for instructions

3) Enter the GMaps application

4) Turn on Satellite view

5) Press the 0 key to find your location

6) Drive around and watch the magic happen

OK, so why am I so excited about this? Well, first off - its amazing when I'm sitting in a drive thru and zoom-in to see my blue dot blinking in the Carl's Jr... the directions feature is just as cool - although it would be much cooler with some voice (audio) feature [um, hint hint Google...] and its like spot-on accurate.

Give it a try - you wont be dissapointed...

In any case, how was your holiday?

Thursday, November 15, 2007

I Want Sandy: The Reminder Service

I've been using the iwantsandy.com reminder service for a few days now and am really liking the features. The service allows you to create, tag and snooze reminders. In my oppinion, the best part is the ability to share reminders with your friends and family. To get started, create an account on the iwantsandy web site and confirm your email address. Then login to the site and read The Sandy Guide - a how to on the Sandy service. The Guide will get you info on more than 80% of the features.

Overview
The service has been good! I've used it to remind me about meetings, phone numbers, grocery list items, where i parked and peoples names. I also get a digest each morning that plans out my day for me!

Did I mention that Sandy works with SMS and Twitter!? Sandy will remind you by sending an SMS message to your mobile, but it will cost you regular text message rates. However, if you have a data plan and Twitter account, you can follow her and she'll automatically follow you. Unfortunately, the Twitter feature is not completely implemented... yet.

Details
The best part of the service, in my opinion, is the ability to add other people to the reminder. I can cc: multiple people and Sandy will include everyone in the reminder. The most fun was adding the additional email address and allowing my girlfriend to send me reminders. This one feature is helping us to keep a running list of tasks to finalize our move because we can both add tasks and receive the reminders.

The downside: its a bit slow. After sending my reminder, I waited a couple of minutes before it appeared in the web site home page. Additionally, I dont alway get reminded on time - sometimes a few minutes late. Its not a big deal if scheduling something off in the future but proved a bit problematic when I wanted to remind myself in 20 minutes.

Daydreaming...
I wonder what type of applications can be built on top of this? Obviously advertising, imagine you have a reminder to bring home dinner and see banner adverts for different dinner products: beef, chicken, sides!

Conculsion
Sandy is a cool service! I would love to use this service with Twitter and look forward to it exposing an API for me to code with... Enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Open Social

I cannot wait to get on the Open Social bandwagon. Marc Andreesen wrote a great entry about it here.

Robert Scoble also talks about it on his blog here and here.

Looks like its coming soon to a Google API near you...

Enjoy.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Frustrating times with the iPhone

I spent some QT with an iPhone this past weekend. If you follow me around on twitter you know that I was at the Morongo casino this past weekend and attended a boxing match. During the match, I took some photos with my blackberry pearl and some using my friends iPhone. I like the iPhone screen much better than mine and I believe the picture quality was a bit better, too. However, one issue came up that made me think. Something I feel should be simple to accomplish by mac and non-mac users alike: copy & paste. I figured the beer had got the best of me, or maybe I couldn't figure it out cuz I dont own an iPhone; regardless, I could not find a way to copy the Flickr url and paste it into the tinyurl.com web site. The mangifying glass didnt help and there was no menu functionality for it... ugh! I gave up and simply posted my pic to Flickr via the iPhone. I then took my blackberry pearl and navigated to the Flickr page with my image. Then i hovered over the image link and pushed the menu button (OK, listen up Apple!), I selected the "Copy link" menu item then nav'd to tinyurl.com and pasted it there... bingo! Can it get any easier?

So... why do I want an iPhone again? Oh right, they take nice pics ;p

G'night.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

kyte.tv: the best thing since sliced bread?

WOW! (not world of warcraft!) check out www.kyte.tv - it allows you to produce videos from your laptop or handheld device! video blogging, ability to produce a show anywhere at anytime, and chat with live viewers!

(btw - im chatting w/ my first live viewer right now)

My imagination can't stop! endless possiblities... How about the next time you're stuck on an airplane, on the tarmac, for fifteen hours? i want to hear about it!



technology and me, perfect together

Hi everybody,

This is TJ's technology blog.