TheJoey.Net is the weblog of Joe Casabona, a web developer who attends the University of Scranton, now for Graduate Studies. He is real bad at writing these about pages and hates writing in the 3rd person...more
**The layout is new and there might be some bugs. If you see any, please email me at Joe@Casabona.org
I’m a little bit surprised I haven’t written about Amazon Mp3 before as I use it quite frequently. My main grip about services like iTunes, the Zune Marketplace, Napster, Ruckus, and nearly every other digital music outlet is that their songs are protected by some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). You can only transfer them x number of times. You need a username and password to listen to them, or in the case of Ruckus, download for free (as a college student), but only listen to them on your computer. Yes, there was EMusic, but last time I checked their collect was not as diverse as I would have liked. But Amazon Mp3 changes all of that.
Amazon Mp3 offers a full line of music, underground and mainstream, completely DRM-free. It doesn’t expire, there isn’t a set number of transfers, play it on any Mp3 player as much as you’d like. This is the way digital music should be. If I have a CD, I can rip that onto my computer and do with it what I want. Why shouldn’t digital music be the same. But beyond that, their deals are amazing.
Amazon Mp3 offers two types of deals I use regularly (and use twitter to follow): Daily deals, where for a day they will sell a digital CD significantly cheaper (like $2 or 3) and Friday 5, where from Friday until Monday, they pick 5 albums to sell for $5 a pop. Plus, setup couldn’t be easier. Install their downloader, which links to your favorite music player, and when you download mp3s, they automatically get added to your music collection.
I really feel Amazon got digital music right. Freedom, easy of use, and low cost is everything I was looking for. If any online service will get me to stop buying CDs, it’s this one.
The buzz today has been about Cuil, a new search engine that is challenging the current champion of the interwebs, Google. Pronounced “cool,” Cuil makes the claim to have indexed more pages than Google, and in a better way too! That’s quite the claim, and IMHO, Cuil needs to heat up a bit (sorry).
Even though I am pretty biased towards Google, if you’re going to challenge them, you better come up big. Cuil certainly does not. My first search was my name, Joe Casabona. The first five results that came up were comments I made on sites, or my name mentioned on another page. The next one was finally my personal site and Google’s first result, Casabona.Org. But as you can see by the pic on the right, they botched that too. The photo with the result, while it kinda sorta looks like me, is not me. I don’t even host that picture. In a Google Image Search of my name, that pic isn’t in the first three pages. What gives?
The design isn’t that great either. My eyes bounce back and forth between the columns of results, making it difficult to easily find what I’m looking for. And the site is pretty slow. I understand maybe you’re getting more traffic than you expected, but I’m holding you to the fact that you’re claiming to be better than Google.
Over all, I didn’t have a great experience with Cuil. Besides, since they are ‘changing search,’ what does that mean for my current sites and the way I Search Engine Optimize?
For the last couple of months I decided to try out Google’s solution to online photo albums, Picasa. I had originally been using Flickr. I found that with Picasa, strangely enough, I didn’t have as much freedom as I did with Flickr and when it came down to it, Flickr was a much better web app.
The transfer (from Flickr->Picasa and vise versa) was easy enough using iPhoto and RSS feeds. But once I got into Picasa, the interface wasn’t as good, nor was the organization of photos. With Flickr, you have a little more freedom with how you organize your photos because they aren’t automatically associated with an album like they are in Picasa. You tag them and can add the to ‘Sets’ or ‘Collections’ if you choose. Because of this, you have a little more wiggle room with what you do with the photos.
When it came time for me to import the photos from Picasa onto my blog, I realized that I could only do it by album, which I wasn’t a huge fan of because adding my newest photos wasn’t automated. With Flickr, I used their RSS feeds to bring in the 10 most recently upload photos and then 10 Random photos.
Flickr also does social networking better. On the homepage, you view pics from your photo stream, as well as your friends’ and then random people. You can also more readily find friends, and create groups for pictures that anyone can add to.
Those who know me know I’m a huge fan (re: whore) of Google, but when it comes to a great photos web app, I doubt anything can top Flickr.
Recently a couple of my friends got macs and have been asking me for tips. Another one is getting his soon and will undoubtedly also be calling me. I’ve had mine since January (actually six months this week) and I’m very happy with it. I also had some guidance from friends who’ve been around the block Mac-wise and were willing to offer some tips. I’m going to break this post down into four sections- the Dock, Finder, Apps, and Widgets.
The Dock- Like the Windows Start Bar, it’s where there most important stuff will go. As well as all of your running programs being there, you can keep program icons there for quick and easy access. To do that just open up your Applications folder and drag the apps you want onto the dock. I have ten there at all times, the big ones being Firefox, iTunes, Adium, Finder, and Quicksilver. You can also hide your dock by clicking on the Apple icon in the top left, and going to Dock>Turn Hiding On. Then it will only appear when you mouse over the bottom part of your screen. I did this for more screen real estate.
Finder- The file system of sorts for your Mac. From Finder you’ll be able to access all of the files on your computer. One thing to note is you start in your user folder (username that is, mine is joe). Directly from there, you can get to Applications, Music, Pictures, Movies, Documents and a bunch of other things. You can also customize the “Places” section of Finder to include the folders you frequent most. Just drag that folder and drop it under “Places.” Mine contains Desktop, joe, Documents, Applications, iTunes Music, Widgets, and Fonts. The last three I added myself because I found myself copy and pasting or dragging and dropping to those folders the most.
Apps- The biggest question I get is, “What Apps should I download?” It really depends on what you’re into, but a few (either built-in or free) that I have found useful are:
Adium- This multi-protocol IM client lets you connect to all of your screen names in one app. I can use it for AIM, Yahoo!, GTalk, and rumor has it Facebook support is coming. The only thing native IM client iChat has on it is support for video chat.
Quick Sliver- This robust little app is the quick-launcher to end all quick-launchers. Run the program, which will run in the background, press control+spacebar and type in the name of the App you want to run, document you want to open, or even song you want to play in iTunes. Lifehacker is also quite the fan.
Dictionary- a built-in app that will search for definitions, synonyms and Wikipedia for whatever word you put in.
Preview- a built-in app that natively converts to PDF, and reads PDFs and all sorts of other image files. Much faster than Adobe Reader.
Widgets- The final feature I want to talk about is the Widgets. On newer Macs, by default press F4 and you will be presented with your ‘Dashboard,’ with all of your widgets. Ones like weather, calc, etc. come pre-installed, but there are literally hundreds of widgets out there to download for free. The only one I really recommend is Maintidget, which will run clean up and maintenance scripts on your Mac weekly. I am personally a fan or the PHP, Movies, and Lyrics widgets.
Besides my short rambling, Lifehacker writes quite frequently on how to make your mac-using life easier, including a guide to switching. MacUpdate is also a great site for free Mac software.
With a fresh perspective after the Day 1 sessions, I reworked my schedule to try and make the most of what Google I/O had to offer. The keynote for Day 2 was given by Marissa Mayer, which admittedly made me a little star struck. I read about her in The Google Story- she was the first female employee and part of the first handful hired at Google. I thought it was pretty cool that she was addressing us. Of the advice she had to offer, she mentioned something also mentioned in The Google Story; have a healthy disrespect for the impossible. It was this thought that constantly lead Larry, Sergey, and the rest of Google to do the things they do. It’s what made Larry and Sergey start Google. So with that phrase in mind, I went on to Day 2 of the conference.
I did two things I didn’t get to do on Day 1: A Code Lab and a Fireside Chat. For the code lab, I worked with the Google Maps API. The lab was incredibly helpful. There was a website with about 24 slides showing different things you can do with the API, some of them being demonstrated by the Google developer running the lab. Then we were given a link to instructions and got to work at our own pace making different API calls. Developers, of course, were there to answer any questions we had.
Then there was the Fireside Chat I attended, which was on the topic of Android. Eight engineers from the Android team were there to informally answer questions as long as we could come up with them. I didn’t ask any, but plenty I had [or should have had] got answered.
All in all, this was a pretty great learning experience that gave me a lot of new insight not only on Android, GAE, or other Google products, but Software Development in general. Just hearing some of the engineers speak was truly inspiring. It was also eye opening to the fact that there is so much I need to learn (not that I didn’t know that already, but this made it a little more concrete). And not only did I learn about software development, but also about running a business, how to treat users, and some new ways of thinking and problem solving. I feel they took the “Cura Personalis” approach the University of Scranton takes (translates to ‘Care for the whole person’). The people at Google know what it takes to teach and to get people to learn.
So will I do it again next year? You better believe it.
