Life is grand

R269

The cost to send 5 A4 pieces of paper and two passport photographs to Ireland by DHL from South Africa.

For awhile I thought I was going mad. Sitting before my laptop, reading an email or doing some work, the wireless headphones nestled on their cradle and my music player off I’d begin to hear a faint song. The first time it was a fast dance track that I had just been listening to. I put it down to some strange memory loop or my ears still vibrating from the pounding rhythm. A few days later I heard it again, this time a song I had not played in years. Then again, a song I had never heard before.

I began to worry.

It couldn’t be a neighbour; they were all out at work. I checked my house-mates Hi-Fi; completely off. I checked their radio-alarm clock; not even plugged in. I leant close to the speakers of my laptop but nothing came from them. I briefly wondered if fillings in my teeth were picking up radio waves but then remembered I have no fillings.

The songs continued and I came to accept my growing insanity.

Like the voices of the damned I was to be haunted by Milly Vanilly or Hit Me Baby One More Time at inopportune moments. While replying to a distant ex-lover’s email on came a Barry Manilow track. How appropriate I thought, maybe the singing voices were benevolent or even helpful. Then came a Maryln Manson track while talking to my mother on the phone; there went the benevolence.

And then just now as I finished listening to some Green Day, properly on my headphones, the phone resting on my shoulders I heard a well known local DJ begin his intro speel. I raised one ‘phone to my right ear and there it was, distant, interference galore but quite clearly, the source of my madness.

Those damned wireless headphones.

Google Talk is out in the wild and in usual Google fashion it is quick and simple.

Sign-up is through your GMail account (I heard rumours that GMail was opening up but right now you still need to be invited) which is good and bad. Good because it integrates with your GMail account preloading your contacts and showing GMail email notifications. Bad because it is one more sign-in to keep track of and I would rather be able to use my Google Account which is attached to my domain name.

GTalk runs off a Google hosted Jabber server which means at this point no integration with the MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo etc. IM networks. iChat users on Mac though should be happy as they should have an influx of available contacts now. Even though it does not connect to my main IM network, MSN, I do like that it uses Jabber. It bodes well for the future as it may be an incentive for the big players to cooperate. Also if your IM client is Jabber capable then you can easily talk to GTalk users.

GTalk comes with VOIP but I have yet to test it. No connection to non-IP phones yet though as Skype does with Skype Out.

The best thing about GTalk is its speed. It is a very lightweight app, loading in an instant and responding very quickly. No sluggish MSN Messenger here. Chatting with friends is also quick.

Part of that speed though comes from a lack of features. MSN Messenger is loaded with rubbish but it does have a few features GTalk could do with and probably will get in the future. There is no file transfer in GTalk. It records your recent chat history (displaying it in the chat windows) but does not store permanent logs. There is no grouping or sorting of contacts e.g. Business, Friends, Family. There is no group chat which is useful for business contacts. Emoticons are also limited; ;), :-D, :) etc. are simply highlighted in blue. That is not a major problem though. No MSN Winks, thank god.

The contact grouping issue is in part negated by a search box. Yes, Google put a contacts search in. This filters your contacts list down to what you searched on. This is nice but not great for doing a quick scan of which business, friend or family contacts are online/offline.

Good features are: You can rename your contacts. You can set a custom status which is saved in a list for quick selection. Conversations windows are stacked smartly and can be dragged around together. No adverts, alert tabs or useless features (winks, nudges, backgrounds etc.) The interface is nice and clean, colours are bright and easy to read for online/offline. I do wish the Google Talk app logo though was not so large.

And I have to say it again; It is so damned fast. I have become used to the lethargy that is our bloated friend MSN Messenger.

I look forward to Google adding in those key missing features and hopefully for more interoperability between Jabber and the major IM networks.

Butterflies
Originally uploaded by slight clutter.

With the release of Google Desktop Google is entering the desktop widget market already populated by Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets), Mac’s own Dashboard and Desktop Sidebar.

They all share the idea of providing a system whereby widget makers, you and me, can produce little apps that are hosted inside the main app. These are either displayed spread across your desktop or as a bar on the side of your screen. Widgets generally bring in external information such as weather, news, stock prices, time-info and feeds, displaying it all in a small UI. Other widgets are more interactive such as todo lists, calendars, email notifiers and post-it notes.

They are mini apps; quick loading and often needed just for a few seconds to perform a certain task.

Frankly though none of these systems has survived more than a week on my desktop. They seem useful but ultimately fail to become part of my daily routines.

Take the weather for example. I have never understood the need for displaying on your desktop the weather outside your window. Even 5 day forecasts are rather odd to want floating about your desktop all day. Just who needs to know second by second what the weather is doing? If you need to know what the weather will be doing this Saturday then hit your local news website just once at the end of your day or switch on the telly. The appeal I think lies in that the weather widgets are pretty; Clouds, suns, rain drops and cute forked lighting. Ooooh, the weather is changing right this very second, better go rotate my crops.

Feed (RSS) widgets are also incomprehensible unless you have vital systems to monitor which spit out RSS. Reading more than one feed in a feed widget is crazy. We struggle with full featured apps like Bloglines or FeedDemon. Monitoring the news is barely a reason to have a feed widget.

Email widgets only work if they augment your email notification system. Having a list of emails in your sidebar is a bit pointless.

Calculators too. The Windows calculator loads in under a second, why bother with a bevelled, 3Ded, number-spitting monster that sits on your desktop all the time?

Power guages? Your laptop OS better already have that. Clocks that take up three quarters of your screen and actually tick? No comment. CPU and memory performance trackers? Come on, what are you, a sysadmin? If you are, you aren’t going to rely on Konfabulator to monitor your big-iron. Photo panels? Use your desktop wallpaper or visit Flickr every 20 minutes or you will never get any work done watching the lovely cat shots slide by all day.

Right now the three panels I have in my Google Sidebar are Todo, Scratch Pad and Email. The email one is minimised because all I want is the notification gadget. Scratch Pad I have typed “Tet 123″ in just to test. I may one day use it. The Todo list panel is quite handy, except it doesn’t sync with Ta-da List so my Todo list is bound to my desktop and not available elsewhere.

The way this is going I’ll be running Google Sidebar just to have the nice email notification widget.

Widgets I would use are; A todo list that syncs with Ta-da List. A calendar that syncs with Trumba (or iCal format). A feed-specific feed panel e.g. for BaseCamp project lists. A modified Quickview panel like Google Sidebar has, but better.

Of the two models, spread across your desktop (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets) and a sidebar (e.g. Google Desktop), I find the latter to be the best. I am not keen on the pretty but resource-intensive themed, styled and candy-coloured sidebars of Desktop Sidebar though. Yes, I could get a simple theme for it but Google Sidebar just doesn’t support it and that means less to download, run, maintain and worry about. Also Google Sidebar gets the minimise option very right. It is not hidden in a context-menu, it doesn’t leave anything behind on the side of your screen and when minimised (to your taskbar) a simple maximise/restore button puts it back on the side without any hassle.

I like the Google Sidebar system the best of all of them. But the widgets so far leave a lot to be desired. It is early days though. I am sure we will see a rash of pretty clocks, green power guages, complicated feed panels and thousands upon thousands of weather panels but I am hoping some genuinely useful widgets are also created. Alas the Google Sidebar widgets are not simple JavaScript and XML like Konfabulator; instead they use COM/ActiveX and require compiling with something like Visual Studio. Not terribly simple for anyone.

Desktop widget systems have a lot of potential and I welcome them. Right now though they are cluttered with “because we can” widgets rather than “because we need it” widgets.

some might want to more closely tie their identity with a particular product. Because our identities are often tied up with the products we buy, music we listen to, books we read, it makes sense that some may just want to add a piece of themselves to an official page for a particular product. It’s a bit like leaving an offering at a shrine for a particular deity.

Paul talks about this in his Amazon Reviewers post.

It is something we want to achieve with Colib. That sense of “Hello World, I am a White Stripes listening, Ian McEwan reading, Robert Rodriguez watching person” all through looking at their music, book and video collection. It is not by any means the whole of the person but it is an important part of them. It is not simple consumerist fault either. What you read is a good indication of a person. Is it Dan Brown or Ian McEwan, J.K. Rowling or Tolkien, FHM or Science? Same with the movies you watch and the music you listen too.

They don’t define you, they are choices made because of who you are.

the bug
Originally uploaded by awfulsara.

Tulips
Originally uploaded by Mountain Mike.

Where it’s at
Originally uploaded by shadowbox.

I have stopped saying No Thanks to Group invites on Flickr. The latest cause has been the Flickritis group whose sole aim is to be the biggest group on Flickr. Hey, it is a free country and thanks for thinking of me but I am not interested. Every day I get ten invites for the group, most with apologies for re-inviting (then don’t.)

For awhile I thought it was better and polite to hit the No Thanks button. Now I know just to leave it alone and I’ll not get bothered by invites to a certain group again.