CAW Christopher Wichura
Jaikus from CAW
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
-
Jaiku's comment system is what originally attracted me to it, and the community is what made it stick. With the way Google let Jaiku stagnate, however, most of the community is now gone. Twitter is a terrible place, but I've been using it simply because that's where most people have gone to now. The best system comparable to Jaiku is FriendFeed now. Comments work well there, and you can pull in feeds from various places as well. But the problem with FriendFeed is it has no real community feel to it, like Jaiku used to have. Instead, FriendFeed is more of a dumping ground of people importing their various feeds (primarily from Twitter) and never actually looking at FF to see and/or respond to comments left there. There are a handful of people that post natively on FF, but nowhere near enough to make for a community feel like Jaiku used to have.
Sunday, 19 April 2009
-
Another thing I find really annoying since the change over to AppEngine is that Jaiku now seems to use very short-lived cookies for remembering you are logged in. Seems every time I come look again (to see basically hardly any posts in my overview), I first have to log back in again. Which is just another annoyance to drive me away.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
-
I think people also just have the attitude of "well, just go to Twitter". I installed TweetDeck yesterday, and while it helps make Twitter a little more tolerable, the plain and simple of it is that Twitter is a giant steaming pile when it comes to conversations. So I still don't see myself really using it. I'd rather just use Facebook and it's ability to comment on statuses than try to follow conversations on Twitter -- and I have no particular love for Facebook, either, so that should put into perspective how much I despise Twitter.
It really is a shame to see Jaiku dying so horribly. It was doing OK until the platform switch -- not great, but still a steady set of people and posts. Now I look at my overview page and I have maybe 5 new posts show up in an entire day...
-
Definately growing pains with the new Jaiku platform. I wonder if we'll ever see an update to mJaiku that supports the new API...
Saturday, 28 March 2009
-
McLarren really is hurting with the new requirements for the cars. Even if they catch up over the course of the year, they'll probably be too far back points wise to have a good showing at the end of the year. Assuming we don't have as many dramatic changes in the requirements for next year, I suspect they'll be back in form for 2010, as will other teams struggling with the new requirements.
Friday, 27 March 2009
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Thursday, 19 March 2009
-
@jyri: I tried Google Reader on my iPod Touch and gave up on it within 10 minutes. It is still a painful experience compared to accessing the 'full' reader from a computer. And don't get me started on how laughable Google Reader is on my Blackberry. Google has some awesome BlackBerry apps, like the GMail and Google Maps apps. A proper Google Reader app for the BlackBerry would be huge for me. Viigo has a nice RSS reader for BlackBerries. Go buy them and convert it into a proper Google Reader native client that syncs your read articles back.
Also, do whatever you can to make APIs for Google Maps available to developers. Don't just let them jump to an address -- give them routing APIs, geotagging APIs, etc. Let them display their own stuff on your mobile map application. Think outside the box on what people might be able to do with a rich set of mapping APIs.
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
-
And buying books is another thing that I am a bit annoyed with. I cannot for the life of me find a way to disable the hideous 1-Click buying method. Even when you go into settings and disable it for the rest of the Amazon store, it is still used for Kindle purchases. I much prefer using a cart over 1-Click.
-
Ah, I missed that the dropdowns had a download option on that page. The sync aspect still stands, though. I just really wish they had included WiFi as it would have made things so much easier.
-
The library link gives a 404. I know you can hook it up via USB, but I saw nowhere on their website to download the actual book files. Granted, I didn't look too hard for it. Even still, without Whispersync connectivity, the ability to sync read-position/bookmarks/etc between the Kindle and the iPod app while traveling internationally would be lost. And that's one of the appealing aspects of the Kindle to me.
I can confirm that the Amazon store let's you purchase the books while outside the US so long as you have a US-based Amazon account.
-
I expect I will be relatively happy with it. The two biggest issues will be that 1) it is still a white elephant in terms of aesthetics so still a bit embarising to be seen with and 2) its network connectivity only works in the US and they provide no means to download purchased books via computer to copy to it via USB. So I can't ever buy something for it while traveling internationally. I really wish they had included WiFi support in the new model as well as the cellular, as WiFi would have been much more usable for me. Ironically, the iPod app does download via WiFi, hence my ability to test it while out here in Sydney.
Monday, 9 March 2009
-
The other thing that suggests Sony is serious about the Reader is that they've now launched it in multiple countries. You can get it in the US, UK, Germany, France (I believe) and I just saw an announcement about the upcoming Swiss launch.
-
I agree that Sony's store software is absolute, unmitigated shit. It's sad that the only viable way to really look up info on books from Sony is to look them up on Amazon's website. And it's buggy and unreliable. It deliberately will not remember your password as a 'security feature', which gets annoying. On the other hand, the Sony Reader hardware itself is extremely well done. It slaps the Kindle 1 around silly, and while I haven't had a chance to really play with a Kindle 2 yet, I would still give the nod to the Sony Reader over the Kindle 2 for aesthetics and ergonomics.
Sony has been adding a lot of books to their store. They used to be much further behind than Amazon. And they are onto their third version of the hardware, which would indicate some level of commitment. They also support the ePub format (although not on your 500, unfortunately) which should give it some life even if they end up closing their store. And the Adobe Digital Editions support in the 505 & 700 means you can use digital library rentals with the Sony Reader -- something you can't do with the Kindle. However, it is a very real possibility that they will throw in the towel, since Sony as a company overall is hurting pretty bad. I don't have a massive library of books purchased for the Sony Reader, so if I was to switch over, now would probably be the time to do it. But as I said before, for the stuff I read, the Amazon store is nearly identical to what Sony offers. And while I could buy Kindle books and read them on my iPod Touch, the actual reading experience on the iPod Touch blows chunks compared to an E-Ink screen. So to really make the switch, I'd have to buy a Kindle 2 which makes the cost of switching considerably more expensive. Even if Sony's store is a buck or two more expensive than Amazon's for the books I read -- that's a lot of books to make up the difference in paying off the Kindle 2 hardware...
One thing I really don't like about the Kindle software is that there is no way to organize books. You can only sort by title or author. I use the collections feature of the Sony Reader heavily. Many of the things I read are books in a series (e.g., The Wheel of Time series -- which neither Sony or Amazon have in their stores since Tor won't release them in E-book format). Collections are great for this, as not only do they group the books together, but allows me to group them in series order. Even with my paltry collection of books on the Sony Reader, if it wasn't for collections, finding books would be a royal pain in the arse. Hopefully Amazon will add some way to organize books to the Kindle.
-
If I owned a Kindle, the Whispersync feature would be pretty sweet. But I don't own a Kindle; I own the Sony PRS-505 and have a fair sized library of books for that already. Looking at the Amazon Kindle store, they seem to have a pretty similar library to Sony's -- at least for the genres I tend to read. The books Sony doesn't have are the same books Amazon doesn't have, as it's the publishers that are blocking them. So dumping the Sony Reader in favor of the new Kindle 2 is a pretty hard sell for me...
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
-
I would have to guess around 1982-1983 for me, too. UUCP mail over a 1200bps modem was awesome. Bang-paths FTW. Er, maybe not...
-
Jaikus from CAW