I respect the path 37signals has forged in the path few years but I have to say they are really riding the beta hype cycle hard with their upcoming HighRise app. At this point 37signals could launch the app. at the local Bedouin Starbucks and there would be a 5 mile queue outside three days before.
So when I read about the “golden tickets” idea I nearly gagged.
Come on guys, get real.
Awhile back I did a talk on Ajax and wanted to share the presentation with the world. It was pretty low-tech, a link to a downloadable PowerPoint file. You had to have PowerPoint or its viewer and you couldn’t preview the slides.
I also recently attended RailsConf Europe 2006 and collected some of the presentations together. Once again low-tech links to slide files. No previews and with the wide audience I’ll bet many didn’t have PowerPoint.
Not long ago we had the same problem with sharing video. Different formats, no easy way to preview, downloading links and files and what not. Then YouTube came along and suddenly all you needed was Flash and you could upload and view thousands of videos. No codec hassles, what a pleasure.
SlideShare does that but for presentation files. Upload a PowerPoint file and anyone with Flash can view it. That rocks.
TechCrunch gave a good overview and listed a few problems. I’d like to add that SlideShare needs to support more presentation formats (and telling Keynote users to save as PPT is probably not the best idea though it is practical for now.) And not just the standard presentation formats but PDF and HTML too. Loads of the RubyConf speakers distributed their slides as PDF. SlideShare should support that.
Full screen viewing would be good too. I am not sure how they do the conversion but Flash supports vector fine so scaling to any resolution isn’t a problem. You can go full-screen as the comment below suggests and it works well. Also I just noticed two clever features; for each slide the public can comment. So it isn’t just a general comment per presentation. The other feature is that the text of each slide is extracted and shown below the presentation. Very clever and I imagine will make search engines happy.
It is in private beta at the moment but I got an invite pretty easily. All in all though SlideShare is a fantastic idea and works pretty well. Give it a go.
FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.
FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.
I got an invite to AllPeers but have nobody to share with. So if you are on AllPeers then add PaulMWatson as a contact please.
Microsoft have released a screenshot of the third colour scheme for Office 2007; silver.
Anybody else feel angry looking at it? I nearly hurled my lunch.
While I happen to think Vista was designed by a jolt drinking, pizza munching geek I also happen to think that Office 2007 looks nice. In its default Blue colour scheme.
This silver scheme is wrong on so many levels but I will mention just one; look at the window title. The bit that reads “Fabrikam Journal - Microsoft Word”
Was a kid with crayons and an etch a sketch allowed to do that shading? Awful. Just awful.
Apologies to the hard working Office team who have done a great job with the new UI but have seemingly, in this latest colour scheme, been forced to use the Vista designer (and apologies to the Vista designer but you need to stop using MSPaint.)
Google Spreadsheets is out in invite-only beta. While Techcrunch may not think much of it I think it is another example of Google hitting the right mark. I don’t use spreadsheets much but the ones I have tried online have been a bit clunky at best. Some are too complex while others are a bunch of table tags and a save button. GSpread (my name, awful isn’t it :-D) is much like Google Calendar in that it offers up the core features, some clever background functionality and a usable interface. You don’t have to be a whiz to use it but you won’t be limited either.
Some screenshots from the Office 2007 beta. Overall I like what they have done though I am not happy they override my Windows XP theme choice (Windows Classic.)
Flickr have redesigned, cleaning up their pages in the process and giving a fresh spin to it all. It is an interesting mix of web-app and website.
They have also jokingly gone from BETA to GAMMA.
Daily bits...