Category: techno

John Saddington is right

I’m finding more and more how horrible email is on my phone.

While I’ve turned off 99% of my phone’s notifications (including email), if I’m out and about I’ll still get that itch and want to pick up my phone and check-in with my social networks and email…

And unlike Twitter or text messaging which allows for super quick easy replies, emails tend to take far more time to respond to.

And let’s be honest, phone’s just aren’t made to send long email replies. Auto-correct and small keyboards turn me off when it comes to long replies. So while I can often filter out a lot of emails on my phone, I don’t want to reply at length until I get a chance to sit down at a computer again.

And in the meantime, the email is stuck in my head ad nauseam.

“I’ve got to reply!”

“How will I reply?”

“How quickly do I need to stop everything and reply?”

On and on it goes.

I’ve even run into this on my desktop –while thinking I’d just quickly check my email before heading out the door. I fly through a bunch of unimportant emails that quickly get deleted and then there’s one or two stragglers that scream for attention.

Surely John Saddington and I aren’t the only ones who feel (mobile) email is so disruptive.

Do you? Have you found a solution?

John’s gone so far as to remove email completely from his “smart phone.”

I’m not there yet – but don’t think I haven’t considered it.

When Patents Attack…

Via The White House
Via The White House

This week President Obama is using Executive Order to try and stop Patent Trolls.

I don’t know if it will make any true impact at all (the Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks he could have gone further but seem to applaud several of the measures Obama is taking)- but I will say I hope something changes soon. Patent technology cases are out of control.

As mentioned at a session on podcasting I attended at SXSW, one particular patent owner is suing commercial podcasters for illegally using their patent without a license.

This American Life tracked down the company, Personal Audio, in When Patents Attack… Part Two! this past week. The owners of the patent, which was filed in 2009, are claiming they invented podcasting way back in 1995.

The only catch (according to This American Life and others): their company never made a digital podcast or invented a way to download a podcast into a listening device. They simply patented the idea that such a thing can be done. Now they’ve asked podcasters and companies who make mp3 players to pay them licensing fees.

While our podcast doesn’t make any money, I would hate to see us (and others) forced to pay someone licensing fees if we ever decided to make a commercial podcast — especially based on a very broad and general patent.

Listen to the This American Life podcast and then share what you think. Should me and my friends have to pay Personal Audio in order to license their idea?

Finally, if you want to get involved in fighting the podcast patent case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping fight the case. You can get involved by donating, raising awareness or sharing examples of prior art (pre-1996).

Google Reader alternatives

selfoss

With less than a month before Google Reader shuts down – I’m still on the hunt for a good replacement.

So far I’ve tried Flipboard, Pulse, Newsify, Feedly, Outlook 2013 (and Outlook 365) and Selfoss (pictured above). I even tried Google’s Flipboard-like app, Currents, somewhere along the way.

They all seem to leave me wanting in one way or another.

I’ve loved and used Google Reader for years. Although I was never thrilled with their mobile version, I was able to fill that niche by using complementing services like Flipboard and Newsify.

Both of those made reading my news feeds enjoyable again as I could simply pick up my mobile device and read at my leisure. When I’m sitting in front my computer, I tend to feel like I’m wasting time if I’m not actively working on something.

And I’ve loved Newsify for many reasons because of it’s easy UI and ability to share to numerous services (something most iOS apps lack).

But from what I’ve seen – Flipboard and Newsify don’t offer a desktop version for those times I DO want to sit at my computer and read.

Also I don’t believe Newsify has any plans to maintain my feeds – only sync to another service that will.

Pulse was pretty but it seemed like a limited version of Flipboard when I tried it.

And Feedly is still a great alternative but I seemed to constantly have issues with it requiring me to log back into services like Evernote and G+. When you have two-step authentication turned on that can be a real beating just to share a post with friends. If they can work out some of these issues I may jump back in.

Outlook was just – well it was Outlook. And having 300+ feeds in Outlook seemed to be a strain on the program and I really need it to remain good to go for work email and calendars, etc.

Finally, I installed Selfoss last night on my localhost setup and it was OK. It took some time importing all my feeds and updating seemed to stop everything for several minutes. I’m not sure if that’s related to being on my local setup or if it’s something with the software itself.

I like that it’s a self-hosted option, where I don’t have to depend on anyone else to maintain it. It’s also responsive so I can use it on my mobile devices without needing an extra app.

But it’s lacking in many of the sharing features I loved about Newsify and it’s a pretty minimalistic package right out of the box. It strips out a lot of HTML tags, including tags needed for video embeds, so you don’t even realize a video is supposed to be in the post unless the post specifically mentions it. I tried some of the customizations shared by others — and it helped — but I’m still not seeing embedded videos so that’s a big drag.

And… I should probably find out if my shared hosting environment will allow me to set up cron jobs or not (which I’m not completely up on anyways) to allow the software to update my feeds on a regular basis.

So the search continues.

I think ideally, I’d have a self-hosted option that’s responsive for mobile devices, allows sharing across a plethora of services (including my self-hosted WordPress sites – hint hint Newsify or Feedly) and is snappy enough and ready to go out of the box without too much customization.

Anyone found that yet? What are you looking for in your Google Reader replacement?

Exchange and iOS fix

Our organization is currently making the switch from Novell GroupWise to Outlook 365 for email and such.

After getting migrated to the new system last week I was excited to connect Outlook to my iOS devices to keep my calendars up to date on the go.

However, while my iPhone 5 had no real issues connecting to Exchange and verifying my account (it took 3 or 4 tries before it finally connected) – my iPad 2 would never connect.

I also had issues connecting to our Outlook web version as well on both the iPad and iPhone.

I continually received errors on the iPad 2 saying it was unable to verify my account information while the web version kept saying I had an incorrect user ID or password.

This morning I decided to try updating my password from a 15-character password to a shorter version… and viola! We have lift off.

Don’t know if this will solve any issues you might be having but it was a fix for me.