Scarlet Umbrella|Adventures in Mobile Technology

It’s official–World Cup is killing my productivity.  I have been finding American commentary on World Cup soccer somewhat lacking so I am putting out a call to the blogosphere..does anyone have any idea where I could find live (and preferably free) UK English or German commentary on the games?  I’ve tried BBC Five Live but it is unfortunately UK only.

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Brian Eng and Jeff Cohen of Luckymonk are working on an application that will allow direct ink support for the popular online collaboration software, Basecamp.  They have a video of the upcoming application at their site.  Great work, guys!!

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comes YouOS which is a Javascript based operating system designed to operate in your web browser.  I’ve been playing around with the demo and it’s pretty neat.  So far they have IRC, FlickrRSS, a text editor, a web browser (within a web browser), a shell, and other fun stuff.  It’s a pretty slick demonstration of the capabilities of Web 2.0 even though I’m still trying to figure the uses of the shell (although I’m all for getting emacs to work somehow- web-based emacs would be totally awesome).
Speaking of Web 2.0, I got an invite to Google Spreadsheets!!  I have to admit the marketing team at Google is genius because they really know how to work our inner desire to be a part of a “club.” So far, Google Spreadsheets seems like a pretty decent web spreadsheet app.  I’ve been putting together a little spreadsheet to keep track of my writing.  I’m by no means an Excel power user, but I don’t think that Google Spreadsheets will have the capability to replace Excel any time soon.  I certainly am not one of those users who can put together macros and such, but I do like graphing capability since I’m a visual person.  In short, the impression I have of Google Spreadsheets is that it it a nice lightweight spreadsheet app.  I think it is a nice way to share basic spreadsheets across computers- I certainly like the idea of being able to keep track of how much I write per day on both my Mac and my PC.  However, I really think it is too early to start predicting the death of Office despite what the MS haters think.

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Loren Heiny comments on some of the reasons for the slow adoption of Tablet PCs by consumers, a fact that I was complaining about in my post about the slow adoption of Tablet PCs by universities. I agree that the tablet was introduced at a difficult time and that tablets are much more attractive now although regular laptops are still lower in price. I also think that part of the problem may be the learning curve required to get the best use out of a tablet. In order to get more use out of a tablet, the user really has to make an effort to educate themselves on the variety of software out there and the ways that a tablet can be tweaked to be optimized for his or her usage. Granted this is also true for regular laptops, etc. but most people now are so familiar with computers that they have forgotten about learning to use the technology and are unwilling to expend the effort to learn new technology when their old technology is adequate. This is not true just of tablets but also of other operating systems such as Linux and even OS X. The only way to overcome this apathy is to really emphasize the benefits of tablets and continue to improve tablets until the benefits outweigh the cost and learning curve.

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I’ve sadly come to the realization that Office 2007 (I mean 2007 Microsoft Office system) is too much for my TC1000.  I’m still dying to try the public beta so I have been in the process of upgrading and tweaking my Gateway 700S which is 4 years old and currently serves to run The Sims.  Last night I had the fun of upgrading my antivirus suite.  My subscription had run out and since I was running Norton Antivirus 2003, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to 2006.  In the process, I had to restart my computer 5 times.  Deinstalling 2003 took 2 restarts and then installing 2006 took 3 restarts.  Despite my love of tablets, this one of my major annoyances with Windows architecture and why I’m duel-platform.  I love the fact that when I install software on my Mac it installs without requiring multiple restarts.

I’m also shopping for a decent price on RIMMs. I have a 2 GHz processor but only 256 MB of memory.  Despite the supposed increase in performance with RIMM memory, my machine is still really slow.  Unfortunately, RIMMs are still insanely expensive compared to other memory so I have a feeling I’m going to have to make a dent in my wallet to get better performance from my machine.

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Via a real life friend- Google is offering a limited test of their new spreadsheets application.  From what I can see it looks like a good way to do some on the fly spreadsheet editing.  The application allows you to upload, create, and share spreadsheets.  I’ve already signed up and I’m hoping to get an invite.

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