Of course, as soon as the report is published, big news happens… FriendFeed is now allowing the upload and sharing of files (other than just photos, which they’ve supported for some time now). I saw this in action the other day when a friend of mine uploaded a PowerPoint presentation into a room I frequent – there was much rejoicing in that room, and we immediately came up with all kinds of ways to use the new functionality – and we aren’t even a “collaborative group”. For groups using FriendFeed rooms to collaborate, this is a HUGE great big deal. It makes FriendFeed just that much more useful as a collaboration platform – as well as that much more fun as a social network!
Month: June 2009
Categories
Updates and pointers
First, I’ll start off with a pointer to my “Raves & Reviews” page, where I’m keeping track of the reviews of my Library Technology Report that was recently published. The book to which I contributed a chapter (about using the LibraryThing API), Library Mashups is available for pre-order. I don’t yet have my author’s copy, but I’m eagerly awaiting it!!! Finally, I will be at ALA in Chicago for the majority of the conference (9th-14th) and will be hanging out there, wishing I was with somebody cool from the library world (since I’m the only one from my library going) – so get in touch with me (I’m robin.hastings on the gmail service – which includes GTalk, of course) if you will also be in ALA and want to meet up!
Categories
A Palm Pre Review
I’ve had my new Palm Pre for about 5 days now and I finally feel comfortable in giving it a thorough going-over. First, I have to say that this was a HUGELY anticipated product for me. I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while!! I’ve read the reviews that others have posted and I’m ready – now that I’ve got it – here are some of my thoughts:
ConsPros
It’s freakin’ beautiful. It fits perfectly in even my tiny little hands and is comfy. I’ve heard that some have issues with the keyboard being a bit difficult to slide out, but I’ve had no problems – the mechanism works beautifully and the keyboard itself is plenty big, easy to use and backlit (another drain on battery life, to be sure, but very handy in the dark!).
The OS is REALLY well thought out, being both beautiful & usable. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of navigation (though I wish someone had told me that swiping things to the right deletes them – that one took a day or two for me to “get” – so I was opening each email to delete it…).
The applications are a *current* weakness, just because there isn’t much there, but the ones that are work nicely (mostly – my shortcovers ebook reader has been crashy today) and are universally useful.
I have:
- Pandora
- New York Times
- Where
- Tweed (Twitter client #1)
- Fandango
- Sudoku
- AccuWeather
- Spaz (Twitter client #2 adn the one I’ll probably stick with)
- SplashID
- Shortcovers
- Speedbrain
Besides the apps that are currently available, you get a few pre-set bookmarks for the web application, including a link to Facebook that is pretty easy to set up. I can’t quite figure out how to get all of the FB info through the interface they provide, but given time, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out… Speaking of the web, the browser is nice and fast – and does a great job of rendering standard web pages. I’ve yet to hit a site that gives me problems – and today is the first time I’ve fired up my computer since I got the phone – I’ve been able to keep up using just my phone!
Summary
In summary, the phone has it’s issues – there are some hardware concerns that may cause some to give up on it. The interface and the features, though, are more than enough for me to deal with any glitches that show up in this first few weeks of use.
