Category: Blog

I don’t get Path [iOS App]

Path iOS App image
Path iOS App
  • Why would one want to capture their lives in a mobile environment?
  • Why would one want to capture moments of their lives in a mobile environment even though it is with limited friends?
  • Why would one want to update their status messages in one more place [unless that is the only place they update]?
  • What happens when I decide to go and buy a Windows phone? Will I have to abandon my and my friend’s lifestreams?
  • No iPhone means I have no access to my food [status streams of me and my friends], how will people cope?
  • Can the data be exported in a beautiful looking format so future use?
  • For now I see it as a beautified version of Facebook timeline which is not so open [I know that is intentional and the point of the app].
  • For now I don’t feel like giving it any more time and energy. Will revisit in the future.
  • Anyone who can enlighten me?

 

 

What makes iOS 5 excellent for me today

Software ultimately is how it either improves my life today or enhances my experiences. I haven’t speculated much this time over about Apple’s iOS 5 or indulged too much into speculation. I did installed it on my iPhone as well as iPad and below are my observations of what’s in it for me:

  • Notification Centre – Just fabulous and time saver. I do not need to click few different options or need to worry about missing the notifications.  One click and a scroll or two and I know what I missed or need to do next
  • No more ‘Sync. is in Progress’ when I connect my devices to iTunes. I can keep using it while it syncs in the background and get all charged up
  • Install an app once and it gets installed everywhere
  • iCloud – Love the concepts, especially where an app installed in one place is installed on other devices. I have yet to play more with other features.
  • Keyboard undocking feature on iPad – It just works!
  • iMessages – It’s fast, saves money and hassle of sending people with iPhone just another email for a quick thing. Sorry WhatsApp your usage now will go down from my end.
Tomorrow is another day and more features to be found and used.
As an end note, getting iCloud to work has been a little frustrating today. Hope tomorrow is better.

Hearing what you want to hear

Read this story, what is the message that it provides you?

Who’s the King?

The lion was completely convinced about his dominance of the animal kingdom. One day he wanted to check whether all the other animals knew he was the undisputed king of the jungle. He was so confident that he decided not to talk to the smaller creatures. Instead he went straight to the bear. “Who is the king of the jungle?” asked the lion. The bear replied, “Of course, no one else but you, sir.” The lion gave a great roar of approval.

He continued his journey and met the tiger. “Who is the king of the jungle?” The tiger quickly responded, “All of us know that you are the king.” The lion gave another roar of pleasure.

Next on his list was the elephant. He caught up with the elephant at the edge of a river and asked him the same question, “Who is the king of the jungle?” The elephant trumpeted, lifted his trunk, grabbed the lion, threw him in the air and smashed him into a tree. He fished him out of the tree and pounded him into the ground, lifted him up once more and dumped him into the river. Then he jumped on top of the lion, dragged him through the mud, and finally left him hanging in some bushes. The lion, dirty, beaten, bruised, and battered, struggled to get to his feet. He looked the elephant sadly in the eyes and said, “Look, just because you don’t know the answer, there’s no reason for you to be so mean-spirited about it.”

via Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog: Who’s the King?.

 

 

Google Circles and my concern

Dave Winer puts his thoughts on why he thinks Google Circles will fail. I have the same problem with Circles (but not necessarily think that it will fail for everybody). As much as I like to be organised, I doubt I will keep on shuffling people from one group to the other. It might start off with a professional relationship (and hence in a circle called Professional) and then move that relationship further into being friends with them. I doubt that I will keep on reshuffling people and will be difficult to manage it after a while. This comes from my experience of using lists on Facebook.

To simplify and if I can foresee value of Google Circles in the long run, I might start off with most of my contact being in the friends circle and then categorising them further from there. With over 1000 online contacts (between LinkedIn, Facebook and Gmail) it can become a job in itself to keep the Circles organised at all the time. Time will tell.

Working hard is ..

Me – How’s work?
Friend – Don’t ask. They make me work too hard
Me – and
Friend – well and I don’t enjoy it
Me – I understand

Slacking At Work?

Flickr Image – hirosan

Most people don’t mind the hard work. Infact they will love to work as hard as possible but on the things that interests them. People like to work hard on the matters that motivates them, on the matter that makes them feel alive. Work that inspires them to bring the best of them. If your work is not the one that you enjoy, does not motivate and inspire you, well then even the little amount of work will seem like hard work to you and you are not going to enjoy it.

Find the work that you enjoy doing or find the inspiration in your work.

Speed is not free

Our need for things faster has no limit. Among other things this stands correct for web browsers. We want things to be super fast, web pages to appear as fast as we click on links and images. Among other thing two techniques used by developers is prefetching and caching. Prefetching obviously utilises Internet bandwidth to download the links that are anticipated to be clicked next by the visitor.

User Cache
User Cache screenshot on a Mac

I clean up my Mac on a regular basis (weekly) and my Mac has nearly 1.2 GB in browser cache (Safari and Google Chrome). This was clocked over 4 days of browsing. I haven’t watched online movies or a lot of Youtube Videos. My browsing experience has been fast but then the speed is coming to me at a cost that I am happy to bear.

Now the question that makes me wonder is how do browsers and apps using Internet on smartphones and tablets behave? I hope they are smart in what and how they prefetch links and images.