Alpha authors
- Dan Ackerman
- Rich Brown
- David Carnoy
- Bonnie Cha
- Brian Cooley
- Wayne Cunningham
- Robert Dubbin
- Matthew Elliott
- John Falcone
- Jasmine France
- Kent German
- Will Greenwald
- Lori Grunin
- Justin Jaffe
- David Katzmaier
- James Kim
- Nicole Lee
- Lara Luepke
- Kevin Massy
- Tom Merritt
- Tim Moynihan
- Rafe Needleman
- David Rudden
- Philip Ryan
- Michelle Thatcher
- Robert Vamosi
- Elsa Wenzel
- Molly Wood
- Felisa Yang
November 01, 2006, 6:17 PM PSTScrybe lives up to the demo
Posted by: Rafe Needleman
Scrybe opened up its online calendar beta to some folks late last night, which gave me a chance to work with the product and see if it lives up to the gorgeous video demo that's been circulating.
As a calendar, Scrybe has two big things going for it. First, the interface is almost as fluid and intuitive as it looked in the demo. As you navigate from months to weeks to days, calendar boxes zoom in and out beautifully, and days scroll by as you go forward and back. It's like using a Macintosh: these UI cues make it much easier for your brain to follow what your hands are doing with your mouse. Adding and modifying appointments is easy and intuitive. There are no awkward page loads or jarring pop-ups as there are in lesser online calendars. Everything works just as it would in a real app.
The other huge benefit: Scrybe works offline. I'll say that again: it's a Web application, but when you're not online, it still works. You can view your calendar, add things, move items around, print, and so on. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it is, since other online applications don't work at all when they're not connected. When Scrybe goes online, it synchronizes the data from your local machine to the Web.
Scrybe does all this magic by using Flash, but Scrybe doesn't feel like a Flash application. The right mouse button does context-sensitive things, and the application responds quickly. However, the Scrybe window does not scale to your browser's window, and the back button doesn't work at all.
One other great feature in Scrybe: it prints useful calendars. Two of its formats fold up (there are instructional icons printed on the pages) into nice little pocketable booklets. My only beef with the printing function is that it's accessed from a right mouse-click and bizzarely called PaperSync.
In this first beta, Scrybe doesn't have enough of its features built out yet to make it a useful calendar (there's no sharing or inviting, for instance). The Web clipping function in the video demo isn't in yet. But more importantly, I'm not convinced that Scrybe's great user interface will be enough to win over users already accustomed to the full feature sets in Outlook and Google Calendar or in upstarts like 30 Boxes. Scrybe is solving the calendar problem in a neat new way, but some of the old ways aren't all that bad. The offline function is awesome, though, and might make the difference for users who spend enough time offline to get frustrated with online applications.
Permalink | 1 comment- Read also: Web 2.0
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November 01, 2006, 4:38 PM PSTBuzz Out Loud Show Notes: The physics of cow tipping
Posted by: Veronica Belmont
--Veronica
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EPISODE 346 |
On MySpace being so 2005. I'm done with it and use only Facebook. The 6th- through 12th-graders in my church all have gone to Facebook. They're tired of spam. Tired of bugs.
I went to the Google halloween party today. They had a pirate theme. A life-size pirate ship in the middle of the googleplex. And carnival-type games. Cannons were knocking over ships. It was insane. Everybody stopped working at 2 p.m. to party for three hours. It's pretty insane. A lot of fun. Compare to CNET half costume day.
Yesterday during the show, you read a letter from a BOL listener named Hotbranch from Montreal. Since I used to know someone from that city with that same nickname many years ago (we met via an online Fantasy Hockey league that started in the early 1990s...cannot be more geeky than that!), I decided to try to track him down, and a few Google searches later, I had one of his old but still-active e-mail addresses. Since then we have exchanged a couple of e-mails, and hopefully we'll keep in touch from now on. So thank, guys, for reuniting two old friends!
Just to let you know the new Xbox 360 dashboard is out, and it adds a new feature that is making me wonder where Xbox is going next. It added a new section for TV shows, and what makes it interesting is, when you select the video that you want to watch in the description, there's a spot where it tells you when the video will expire. Also, they added a section for viral video.
Blasphemy! There goes our chance at getting them for the Spectaclefest Fundraiser! Jeez!
Molly was musing the other day on how she'd like a Web site that was dedicated to showing just good commercials. There was even speculation about how to make such a site pay, like putting ads on the site itself.
Guess what? veryfunnyads.com
The ads play in flash, they load quickly, they're sorted by different attributes: top-rated, sexy, international, etc. I found it when visiting another favorite site of mine: bestflashanimationsite.com. It's a great place to find cutting-edge flash content that really shows off what flash can do.
A few days ago, you mentioned how you wanted a YouTube for commercials. Well, they had it. It was called Ads.com, and it was brilliant. I'm not sure who ran the site, but it had all the info you could ever want about a TV spot: which agency devised it, who directed it, who edited and produced the film, what music was playing, etc. Ads.com died back in 2003, I believe, due to the massive bandwidth, which they couldn't support financially. Nothing I know of has replaced it...until possibly now with YouTube. But Ads.com was approximately 100 times more mature, more organized, and ironically, did not feature advertising on the site. If anyone has any similar resources, let me know. Thanks.
Last week Molly mentioned at the Digital Hollywood panel on DRM that she asked the lawyer guy about music with no DRM. She seemed to feel it was a viable business model. Two thoughts:
1. Prisoner's dilemma
2. Public radio, which is something you pay for voluntarily, typically only has one channel while commercial stations have many. If it was a good enough business model for people to pay voluntarily, would there not be more stations run that way?
- Read also: cnet, buzz out loud
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November 01, 2006, 2:35 PM PSTMicrosoft sets a date for Vista, Exchange, and Office business launch
Posted by: Robert Vamosi While the exact retail date for the release of Windows Vista remains a mystery, Microsoft plans to launch Windows Vista, Exchange 2007, and Office 2007 at an event in New York on November 30. Microsoft said in e-mail to the press: "Launching together for the first time in 10 years, these releases will invigorate the IT industry, while enabling businesses to fully utilize their greatest resource: their people." For more details, see Ina Fried's article on News.com. Permalink | 8 comments
- Read also: software
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November 01, 2006, 7:05 AM PSTAdobe adds raw support for more cameras
Posted by: Will Greenwald
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[+] Enlarge photo
- Read also: Digital imaging, digital cameras
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