Jeroen's Repository

Quick Picks: Zenbe

Zenbe is a neat web application for the the web user who wants to keep track of all his stuff. What kind of stuff? For starters it can aggregate your various e-mail accounts and it has calendars and to-do lists. There's also a sidebar which houses the aforementioned lists, your address book, Facebook updates, and the latest tweets from the people you're following. Of course you can update your own status on Facebook and Twitter there as well. Zenbe has file storage so you can backup your important documents and photos, as well as sharing them with friends. I didn't even mention the "Zenpages". You can create these Zenpages to keep all your stuff related to certain projects or subjects and share these with friend or colleagues.

Zenbe does a lot of things and does it well, but its most significant achievement is that it does so in an exquisitely designed package. There may be a lot of clutter in your digital life, but you don't experience it as such when you put it all in Zenbe (Very Zen). Zenbe is free as in beer, so there's really no reason not to try it.

PS: Yes I do know I sound like I work for Zenbe's marketing department, but I really like the app.
PPS: If you have an iPhone or iPod touch with the 2.0 software you might also want to check out their Zenbe Lists app.

The New .Mac: Portable Identity?

Speculation abounds about the possible rebranding of Apple's .Mac (pronounced "dot mac") service as "Mobile Me". Wired's Gadget Lab has an interesting entry up about what this might mean for the iPhone:

Back to My Mac lets you access your home Mac from anywhere on the internet. The routing is all handled by Apple, so you never have to worry about firewalls or IP addresses (when it works, that is). Imagine, though, having full access to your music, movies and files from your iPhone. That would effectively turn it from a 16GB handheld computer into a handheld computer the size of, well, your Mac’s hard drive.

I think this is an idea with a lot of potential. What if you could carry an iPhone, or an iPod for that matter, and use it as a password protected dongle for your virtual identity? Imagine connecting your Mobile Me device to a Mac (any Mac), logging in and being able to use that Mac as if it was your computer. That would be a killer application for any kind of remote work. Of course, it's all speculation for now and we'll likely know more next week after the Jobs keynote at WWDC. WWDC is an event intended for developers, so making an announcement there makes it likely that developers will be able to exploit this funtionality in their own apps. That might lead to some interesting new uses for the .Mac service. I do hope that if they're going to revamp the service they'll also change the rather exorbitant price point.

What time is it?

Ok, so go to google.com (make sure you use the English version) and search for "what time is it". Neat, huh? Absolutely useless, but neat. [via: emptypage]

“We’re a drug ring, not a bunch of bloggers”

-Moment of introspection from a Gawker employee.

                    (Or, start at the beginning of this fine piece of meta-journalism)

                                (Yes, I am aware I am the last blogger on earth to points to this)

Diggin' Mahalo's Video Games Results

When Mahalo launched I was pretty skeptical. Do we really need another way to search the web? I mean there's Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and even Ask.com. But apparently I was wrong...(it happens). Take a look at their result pages for the latest installment in the Ratchet & Clank series or for Assasin's Creed. These are really rich pages that gives me all the information I need about these games. Google is great for showing me all that's out there about a specific topic, but Mahalo is more about providing a well-balanced overview on a topic.  It does so not by giving you encyclopedia-like entries, but by applying a human filter to the vast amount of information on the web. This way you don't have to sift through pages of Google results yourself to get to the good stuff. Mahalo isn't a Google replacement, but a good alternative when a typical search result just won't do.

Those new iMacs sure are pretty

What can I say, Apple gets elegant design (whereas other companies don't). Besides the new iMac there were a few other interesting announcements. Here are the highlights:

• iLife '08: Major upgrade for organizing photos on your mac into events. Also, a totally new iMovie that's very slick. See many of the new features in this video on the Apple site.
• iWork '08: Numbers, a spreadsheet app, joins enhanced versions of Pages and Keynote.
• .Mac: Still too expensive. but at least you'll 10gb of storage instead of 1gb. The new web galleries that work with iMovie and iPhoto are very cool though.
• Q&A: This isn't something that Apple does regularly, but the intimate nature of the event made it possible to do a public Q&A-session. Q: Is Apple’s goal to overtake the PC in market share? A: "Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products". [thx Macworld!]

All in all much more interesting than I thought it would be beforehand. The hype wasn't there as much this time, but lots of goodies nonetheless.

PS: My dream iMac setup? Eur. 3.408,01. Sigh...

Quick WWDC '07 Predictions

I'm pretty much swamped in work right now, but I can't let my long-standing tradition of Apple event predictions slide. If you're not into Mac geekery I wouldn't read on if I were you. So what do I think is in store for this edition of Apple's developers conference? In no particular order:

• New Cinema displays. An update for these is due I think, and the cinema displays have been announced at WWDC before.
• Leopard: Top secret features will be revealed, including  true resolution independence and ZFS as the new file system (these really aren't that secret anymore). As for the truly secret stuff.. Who knows?!!?
• iLife. OK this isn't for the developers, it's for the consumers. But the assumption within the Mac community is that the new iLife isn't out yet because its new features are tied to Leopard. So, I'm guessing we might see a glimpse of one of the new iLife apps.
• iPhone widget SDK. Apple isn't going to open up the iPhone for developers entirely. I'm guessing there'll be a very limited SDK.
• One more thing... I'm guessing there will be at least one hardware announcement besides new displays. Not anything iPod-related I'd say.

What are your predictions?

Podcasting, why it's not about quittting your day job

There's an interesting article in Businessweek called "Don't Quit Your Day Job, Podcasters". The basic argument it makes is that those who are able to quit their day job because of the popularity of their podcast are the exception rather than the rule. Stunning, no? Personally I think the large majority of podcasters and bloggers will ever quit their day job to go pro. However, I think that a significant part of the popular subset of these will be able to scale down their day job and devote more time to it. It may not replace your job, but can add a significant chunk of supplemental income to make it worthwhile. Look, I'm not a good or popular blogger and I make about $25 a month. Making money isn't even the point, but slapping Adsense on a blog is just too easy. I'm sure that if I would decide to get serious about blogging I would be able to quadruple that easily. So, no the average blogger or podcaster may never quit their day job. But they may be able to cash an extra check every once in a while.

I really like Google's MyMaps

Google's new addition to Google Maps, MyMaps, is a pretty cool feature that lets you share your own annotated maps. For instance here's my map of places I like in Nijmegen.

Signbot

Signbot is a pretty cool tool that allows you to make animated GIFs of scrolling LED signs.