Author Archive | Harry McCracken

StumbleUpon Stumbles Upon a Toolbar-Free Experience

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 10:43 pm

StumbleUpon, the addictive way to channel-surf your way across the Web by visiting seemingly random sites that other folks like, is about to get more addictive. Until now, it’s required a toolbar that let you surf sites and review and recommend ’em (or give them a thumbs-down). But it’s announcing a new version that requires no toolbar and which lets you browse around sites at StumbeUpon.com in much the way you might explore a site like YouTube.

When you begin your Web wanderings at StumbleUpon’s site, the Web pages you visit will be framed with a purely Web-based equivalent of the StumbleUpon tools up top; unlike the Toolbar, these tools are only there when you’re Stumbling around the Web. I’m a StumbleUpon Toolbar user right now, but I like the idea of going Web-only; I’ve got too many toolbars as it is, and getting rid of the SU Toolbar will free up a few precious vertical pixels of screen real estate, and generally declutter my browser a bit.

In addition, StumbleUpon is going to work with major sites to add StumbleUpon features to their site, so you can Stumble pages with one click (just as many sites let you Digg content) and can Stumble your way around content within the site in question. The Huffington Post and HowStuffWorks are StumbleUpon’s first two partners, but it will roll these features out to other sites, including RollingStone.com and The National Geographic.

This is just a quickie post–I really want to try the new StumbleUpon for myself and tell you what I think. And I will when I can, but it doesn’t appear to be live just yet.

Until it is, here’s an image of the new StumbleUpon, provided by the company:

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Time Travel via Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 10:01 pm

Here’s the most entertaining thing Google has ever done to celebrate its birthday: In honor of its tenth anniverary, it’s created a special search engine that uses a old version of the Google index to take you back in time.

The time in question is January 2001, not 1998–that’s the earliest version of the index that’s still usable, Google says, and it’s not exactly the index as it stood then. And it’s a bit anachronistic: It uses the original Google logo that the company had already given up by then, and has type-ahead Google Suggest search results, a feature that Google only rolled out recently. In some cases, the links lead to 2001-era content (Google worked with the Internet Archive) but in most cases they don’t. And for some reason, there’s no “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, without which Google doesn’t feel completely like itself.

But it’s still hugely entertaining, and it makes you realize that early 2001 was actually…kind of a long time ago.

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Operation Foxbook: More Fun With Web Apps

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 7:17 pm

The experiment known–by me, anyhow–as Operation Foxbook is winding down. By tomorrow, I’ll have packed up the HP Mini-Note I’ve been using as a dedicated Firefox machine, and I’ll allow myself to use desktop applications instead of relying on Web apps whenever possible. Already, I’m weaning myself off of my Web-only regimen–I may allow myself access to Photoshop later tonight.

But I’m still learning things from this project, and need to catch up on sharing them with you. Some notes on the last few days:

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Six Burning Questions About Flash on the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 5:21 pm

It may be the single biggest thing on the iPhone to-do list that’s not completely under Apple’s control: getting Adobe’s Flash working on the thing. Yes, there are cynics,lovers of lightweight surfing, and haters of animated intros who will contend that the iPhone is better without Flash. But anyone who’s ever tried to visit a useful site that uses Flash knows that the iPhone’s Internet has been more of an almost-but-not-quite-real Internet than the “real Internet” that Apple touts.

There’s lots of hubbub on the Web today about a Flash conference in the UK where an Adobe executive mentioned that the company is working on Flash for the iPhone. As Silicon Alley Insider notes, this isn’t news–Adobe’s said it’s on it before. But it is an excuse to think about the implications and ask a few questions. Such as:

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Technologizer’s Ten Biggest Hits of September

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 7:11 am

Is the month over already? Nope–but it will be in a little over seventeen hours, Technologizer time. So it’s only a little early to count down our ten most-read stories of September. Read ’em all!

10. Is Swoopo Nothing More Than a Well-Designed Gimmick? A new auction site from Europe has landed in America. It promises brand-name products at low, low prices. Are there any catches? Yes!

9. Google Chrome: Hey, That Logo Looks Vaguely Familiar! Idle musings on the look, feel, and color scheme of the logo for Googe’s new browser.

8. Twelve Bizarro Googles. We mark the search kingpin’s tenth birthday with a look at weird variants, from Klingon Google to all-spam Google to design-your-own-Google.

7. Windows 7 Starts to Come Into Focus. Slowly. Microsoft is playing it closer to the vest than usual with the next version of Windows, but little by little, it’s beginning to reveal its plans.

6. Apple to iPhone Developers: Don’t Compete With Us? The company appears to maintain that iPhone applications that tread too close to Apple apps will be rejected from the App Store. That can’t be healthy for anyone involved–including Apple.

5. Are Macs More Expensive? Let’s Do the Math Once and For All. We published this story in August, but folks are still discovering it.

4. Project Fakebar: Improvising a Google Toolbar Substitute For Chrome. When I discovered that thousands of Chrome users missed the Toolbar, I tried to help.

3. Ten Questions About Google Chrome. Even before I got my hands on Google’s browser, the implications were rocketing around my brain.

2. Needed for Chrome: The Google Toolbar. Once I tried Chrome, I discovered that it neither supported the Google Toolbar nor replicated its functionality. I was sorry to learn that. So were thousands of other folks, and they all found this post.

And Technologizer’s runaway #1 story of September:

1. The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time. I named ’em, from Abort, Retry, Fail to Does Not Compete to the worst one of all time, which you’ll need to read the story to learn about. (OK, a hint: Its initials are BSOD.) And then hundreds of thousands of people read my list, and chimed in with hundreds of messages about other famous and infamous error messages they’ve known. They’re great reading in themselves–and will form the basis of a sequel.

Thanks for making September by far the busiest month in Technologizer’s short history. We’re having fun here–and we hope you are, too…

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The State of iPhone Satisfaction

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 5:52 am

It’s one of the most popular phones in history. It’s also one of the most controversial. And it’s almost certainly inspired more news, reviews, analysis, and general punditry than any phone–maybe any other gadget–ever. But when all is said and done, the bottom line on the iPhone is simple: What do the people who use them every day think of their phones?

There’s only way to answer that question–ask a bunch of iPhone owners. Which is what we did from Friday morning through Sunday morning, when we fielded an in-depth survey on life with the iPhone. Over 2150 users of both the iPhone 3G and the original model took the time to participate. And they were a passionate bunch with strong opinions about their phones, both positive and negative. (I published a representative selection of these opinions in “An iPhone Opinion Explosion.”)

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RealDVD Now Available; Ten Free Copies for Technologizer Community Members

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 5:32 am

[UPDATE: RealDVD is already the subject of legal wrangling–Real announced today that it’s suing the Hollywood studios to protect the product against charges that it’s illegal. Press release here.]

RealNetworks is announcing that its RealDVD software is available for download and purchase today. It is, for the moment at least, unique: It’s the first software for DVD copying that goes about it in a way designed to sidestep problems with U.S. copyright law, and it’s also the easiest application I’ve seen for PC-based DVD copying and playback.

I review the application here, and do so reasonably favorably–it’s fast and simple, and you wind up with a library of saved DVDs that’s a snap to browse through. (Limitations: You can’t move copies to portable devices, and options for sharing them among PCs are limited to external drives.) Folks who are already hardcore users of DVD rippers such as Handbrake probably won’t be drawn to RealDVD, but I think it stands a good chance of becoming popular with the larger group of PC users who have never dealt with the complexities–both technical and legal–of using existing DVD copiers.

You can download a thirty-day trial version of RealDVD before you plunk down your $29.99. But how’d you like to get it for free, period? Real has supplied Technologizer with ten license codes, and we’ll give ’em away to members of the community. Here’s how to get a chance at snagging one:

1) Make sure you’re a registered member of the Technologizer Community. If you already are, great; if not, it just takes a moment to sign up, which you can do here.

2) Make sure you’re signed into the community, then visit my profile page.

3) Use the “Send a message” link on the left-hand side of the page (under my smiling face) to send me a message saying you’d like a chance at a license code. “Please enter me for a RealDVD code” is all I need to know.

That’s it. Ping me by 12pm noon PT on Thursday, October 2nd–later that day, we’ll choose ten winners at random, and alert them by e-mail with the codes by midnight on Friday. And we’ll report back in a post on who won the free copies, just so the world knows we did indeed give them away.

Good luck! And if you try RealDVD, let us know what you think of it.

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Die, Scareware, Die! Microsoft Takes on Windows Scammers

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 1:59 am

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock or something, but I never heard the term scareware until today. But without knowing the name, I’ve sure seen a lot of the stuff over the years–utilities that use questionable tactics such as fake error messages to lead you think you’ve got a computer problem in order to lure you into buying them. Then they do little or nothing that makes your PC any better–assuming that they don’t do anything that actively screws it up, intentionally or unintentionally.

Such products are a scourge for Windows users–I’m not sure, incidentally, whether there’s such a thing as Mac scareware–and they must be a headache for Microsoft, too, since they’re one of the barnacles that degrades the experience of using Windows.

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Technologizer is on Google News

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 29, 2008 at 10:33 am

Here’s some news I’m pretty tickled about: Stories from Technologizer now appear in Google News. (Unlike other Google search services, Google News isn’t trying to index everything, just sources it believes to be professional and credible–only 4500 or so sites make the cut, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s news sites when you think about it.)

Technologizer stories will appear on the Google News home page and in searches. And here’s a link that takes you to a list of all of our items on Google News, sorted by date,

We’re Google News fans here, so it’s a kick to see Technologizer there. More important, there are millions of other Google News fans in the world, and we’re delighted that at least some of them will discover Technologizer as they browse around the site.

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It’s TiVo! On a PC! Thanks to Nero!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 29, 2008 at 9:37 am

Ten months ago, TiVo and Nero announced that they were working together to bring the TiVo interface to DVR software you could run on a PC. Then time passed, and I sort of forgot about it. Until today–when Nero announced Liquid TV | TiVo PC (yep, that’s the name, complete with | in the middle). The moniker may be a tad ungainly, but it looks like the product aims to be exactly what you’d want it to be: A version of TiVo that happens to run on a PC rather than TiVo’s own box.

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