Archive for category Technology
RIP Steve Jobs
Posted by veetrag in Technology on October 6, 2011
This morning when I got up the first thing I saw was an image of Apple 2 with RIP Steve Jobs written on screen. It took me time to realize what has happened. It was a shock. A shock because I believed this time also he is going to pull back from setbacks that life keeps on throwing at him.
In 90s I knew who Steve Jobs was, but had no idea how his product looked like or how great were those. Reading tech articles, I had general idea about how good he was. Sometimes in 2004 I saw an iPod and I was surprised by the product and great mind behind this.
What really made me a fanboy was his Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. I heard this for first time and I was so impressed that I printed the speech and mailed it to my father, with a note saying, “you know father there is this guy called Steve Jobs, he is the founder of Apple Company and read how amazing this guy is”. Those three stories that he talks about were such an inspiration for me. His struggle in beginning and trying to break boundaries, challenge the conventional ways was something spectacular. I was so inspired that first laptop I brought, I got “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, engraved on it.
All this time I knew him as great innovator and visionary. But in 2007 when iPhone was unveiled it struck me how my thinking of him as innovator was an understatement. Ad story does not stop here, apart from all this he was the greatest marketing guy ever. His skills in marketing are not comparable. I never missed a single Apple event after 2007. I watched them not because I wanted to get the news first; I wanted to see him deliver those speeches. It was just a mesmerizing experience.
I should be a good example of his marketing skills. I am a person who does not listen to music, but after seeing his iPhone announcement I could not resist and bought iPod Touch soon afterwards. Using his products over years have taught me what actually experience is, and how to create customer experience. No one does it better than Steve Jobs.
He has such an influence on me that I would often say that one thing that can keep me in US is a job at Apple, for anything else I am returning back to India. I always tried to imitate his business style in exercises/simulation we did. I would always quote his example when arguing and when someone would quote his example, I would say, “he is an outlier, his examples don’t count.”
Rest in peace Steve Jobs, you are an outlier.
One Week Review of Google Plus
Posted by veetrag in Technology, Web on July 8, 2011
It’s been over a week since I have started using Google+ and till now it has been a brilliant experience. This is a set of features I really like and could differentiate it from Facebook, it’s biggest competitor, even if Google acknowledges that fact.
Circles – People might really like the idea of Circles because of privacy implications, but for me I like because of totally different reason. I don’t keep a lot of things private, but I always worry about spamming a set of people who are not concerned with the kind of things I am sharing. For example, I have these two best friends who I really want to talk and share a lot of information, but I don’t like to share technology related news/analysis with them as they are not techies. Now, I have a way of spreading the news to set of people I want to share with and neglect others.
Circles also help me categorize the news that is important to me. I created a Circle Geeks2Follow and am using that feed page as Google Reader shared items. Google Reader shared items had a problem that it did not contain the comment thread or could maintain the real time feedback. Now, I see the immediate reaction of people and don’t have to wait till one needs to write a full post. This is same that could be achieved at Friendfeed, but combining both experiences makes it great. It also solves the issue of now having threaded conversation on Twitter.
Huddle & Hangout - I see a lot of advantage of these two features, both of them deal with groups and that’s where most of my conversation takes place. Hangout would be one thing that I would surly like to use on my podcast, this way we could capture audio and video in a very synchronized way. Hangout is also useful in doing some group meetings, because this does not involve installing clients, changing firewall settings and so on. Another feature of hangout that I use most is watching youtube videos with friends. This has given a totally new experience of watching videos and has taken it to social level.
Huddle is useful for communicating while traveling. We do a lot of our business communication via N1 and always had issue of not having group chat functionality on phones. Huddle solves it and also makes it more SMS like, thus solving the issue of not wanting everyone to be online to start the conversation.
Search – One thing that will improve drastically is search results and I have already started seeing the impact of social graph. This morning I searched for ‘Google Plus Features’ and third search result was from Matt Cutts, and it read – Matt Cutts shared this (image below). Definitely as more users build in, we will see a lot of improved results.
Improved Search Results
Everything else is more or less the same, similar to other social networks like Facebook. I drastically reduced using Facebook because of lack of energy there and most of the people spending time on Zynga. One main feature that I liked about Facebook was it’s event system. It used to work well when I was in grad school. Was very useful in planning events. Google+ needs to add that into their system as well, Calendars is already a good feature just it needs to be integrated with Google+.
Feature Wish List
Mute should permanently mute the post and I don’t need to see any comments that have been put after my comment, I also don’t need a notification mail for that. I am using mute post as a ‘read post’ feature, to clear of my stream. One way to solve is to add another feature called ‘read’. So, if I have read and commented then I should get notifications and if I commented and muted, then I should not get any notifications.
Android client for Google+ also needs a mute(and read) functionality, as I am consuming most of the content on my N1.
Similar to Picasa integration, we should have YouTube integration too. I have a set of videos on Youtube and none of them got imported to Google+ and I added few videos to Google+ and they are not on youtube. If that functionality can be added, it would be perfect. Of course here an option would be given, if you want to make the video public or not, as youtube does not have same privacy settings.
Overall, it’s been a very experience with Google+. Surely early adopters like it a lot, we will have to wait and see how masses will react to it.
Mail Merge in Gmail With Attachment Support
The post and spreadsheet provided by Amit Agarwal on How to Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs is extremely useful. But for last few days, I have been wanting to send attachments along with the mail merge. I tried many options but was unsuccessful, finally a set of combinations worked for me and I am sharing that spreadsheet so others don’t have to go through the same trouble.
Follow the above provided link for understanding how to use Google Docs for mail merge, after that is working fine, you can use the following spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet which can be used to add attachments to email. I have an editable column F13 where you will have to provide Document ID. Once you provide the document id, the steps to send emails are exactly same as mentioned by above blog post.
How to get Document ID:
Step 1: Upload the document that you want to attach on Google Docs.
Step 2: While uploading the document make sure that the option ‘Convert documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings to the corresponding Google Docs formats’ is checked. If you do not check this option, your documents will not attach properly.
Step 3: Open the document and go to the URL. You can to use the id value as document id. Example: If URL is
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_7_CbUovM_8YWJhYmQxNjktOTdiNS00ZWMyLTg3MzEtNGE3MWVhMjQyYTc4&hl=en
then the characters in bold are document id. Copy and paste them into the F13 box. When you send the mail, document with id will be attached.
I have added another feature of getting the remaining mail count of the day. That can also be accessed from the menu and count is shown above on the spreadsheet.
Update: I have updated the script to provide multiple attachments. Now columns F13 to F17 can contain different attachment IDs, or can be left blank.
An Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo
Since you joined as CEO of Yahoo you have been on one mission – call it downsizing, righsizing or cutting fat. The mission is clear to cut off all the services that are not generating revenue for the organization. Over last two years we saw a lot of services go down and some were for good, for example Geocities. May be world does not need geocities anymore but there are services which we all love and could see potential for Yahoo. World does not need another social network or a clone of twitter in Portuguese. And that aligns with my understanding of working with your core competencies.
Delicious has been my favorite site for long now. Without it, arranging the links would have been a very tough task. Those tag clouds that we have created help us day in and out. You had bought this company and did not change much in it, except integrating with yahoo id and creating some nice Firefox plugins. That was great, the site had worked well and we didn’t want to change it. And that Firefox plugin made the site more useful then ever. I believe the content generated via delicious is very precious, where else will you find curated data in such format. How else can you have hundreds of thousands of geeks working for you and arranging the links from all segments. This could be a perfect way to utilize it into your search (or anyone else’s search).
An Offer
It is inevitable that Yahoo would let delicious survive, but we want it to work. Lets have a deal, pass us the code and data, we are ready to maintain it and keep it alive. We can collect donations and host the system on our machines.
- Del.icio.us Fanboy
Zynga and Cityville – A Review
Much anticipated game from Zynga seems to be very addictive in first
sight but loses it charm. I would keep this review short, because usually people don’t write reviews about Social Games. This is sort of review of Zynga and their games.
Zynga seems to be one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley these days, with venture capital from Google and great reviews from everywhere, it seemed like Zynga had found the secret sauce of making money in “social”.
Ctyville seems like the mix of the games Zynga brought last year. It is a cross between Farmville, FrontierVille and Playdom’s Social City. Actually, it would be better if I say, Zynga copied the idea of Social City and added aspects of FrontierVille and Farmville into it. This is nothing new for Zynga, they get the idea from some other company’s game and incorporate it with a lot of social feature. But this time they missed the trick – they could not expand on the idea on ‘we build the city’. And then what, this is the problem, a city would be build in couple of hours and player would have nothing more to do. Seems like the game was hurried and creativity was missing.
This game is too social. Zynga games always had the element where people need the help of neighbors, and if one does not have enough friends playing the game they can buy virtual currency with real currency. Here at every step one has to either ask help from neighbors or has to buy currency. They had over done it and it irritates the players too much. That makes the games bottom line as either spend real money or wait, there is not fun aspect to it, or something that can keep player interested.
Games seems like a lot of waste of time for accomplishing nothing, as compared to Farmville. I would like Zynga to use that secret ‘book of social gaming’ that is talked about and how Zynga has cracked the code. If they continue to roll out games like these, I don’t see the future of social gaming getting anywhere. May be times have changed and we like to Jump the Doodle or use Anger of Birds to kill the pigs.
What Could Google Do – Friend Rank
Posted by veetrag in Technology, Web on October 7, 2010
I was listening to This Week in Google where Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Leo Laporte were discussing the issue of Google’s social strategy. The main point of discussion was what Facebook and Twitter are doing. Facebook has more than half a billion users but still not able to provide proper recommendations, while Twitter had over 180 million users and it has an excellent recommendation system. The topic that skimmed up was it’s not the users that matter, it’s the relationships that matters the most for any social strategy.
On the other side, Google has a lot of users but not a successful social strategy. Google has shown it’s capabilities by providing us ‘Priority Inbox’ which is a testimonial that with enough data, Google can mine excellent relationships and eventually recommendations. How does Google get into the game? They have money, engineering capabilities but a lot of failed social attempts too. One thing is they can harness the fire hose provided by Twitter but that would not suffice all needs of Google.
One of the options is for Google to have it’s own Social Network (Google Me?), but we know form past experiences (Orkut, Buzz, Latitude) that Google cannot build a good social network. Then how do they get all the data they want? At that time I wondered what if we bring Android into the picture. One of the most fascinating things about Android is it’s contact sync. Google syncs all the contacts from Phonebook, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other application into one phonebook. They do an excellent job of figuring out which users/handle/userid belong to same person and bundle it together.
I see it as opportunity for Google; by capturing a large market in Smartphone they have a system where they can capture a lot of data with just one primary key – gmailid. With more and more usage of mobile platform people use twitter, Facebook, Skype and voice calls, all from one device. If that device is capable of capturing all the data and building a social graph internally then I see Gold for Google. Google can have it’s own ‘Friend Rank’ algorithm which will rank friends based on number of calls, frequency, twitter replies, wall posts, picture messages, email threads and many more small parameters. Once friends are ranked, that data can be passed to Google servers. And that data can be utilized to provide better “social” search results.
Main part about this is privacy implications. That is why I think building of Social Graph has to be done on mobile. That data should not be sent over airwaves. Once the platform calculates the graph, it can store on Google servers, as reverse engineering of that graph is not possible. It’s just an idea, where I think Google can be headed to.
Audio Notes using MS Office 2008
Posted by veetrag in Technology on August 6, 2010
Last week I was looking for solution for best Audio Notes. There are many commercial applications available but One Note was my favorite. Switching to Mac rules out use of One Note, but the solution that I found was perfect and without any additional cost.
If you are using Office 2008 or above this will be available in just 2 steps:
- Switch to notebook layout: In the ‘View’ ribbon you can switch to ‘Notebook Layout’ which transforms the normal layout to a tab based (vertical). Tabs can be used for different sections, and the page are ruled too (I don’t know what purpose they serve, but it looks good).
- Switch on the Audio: Tools -> Audio Tools -> Start Recording will start the audio recording. Best part about this recording is the position of text while audio was recording is also recorded. When you hover over a piece of text, a speaker icon appears next to it. Using that one can playback specific notes pertaining to that text easily. This makes it a brilliant utility specially for class and meeting notes.
Screenshot of Audio Recording.
Swype – Revolutionize The Way You Type
Posted by veetrag in Technology on July 1, 2010
Swype is the virtual keyboard device that replaces the original keyboard that comes along with various mobile devices. I have been hearing about Swype from Gina Trapani for long time but always thought, how great can one keyboard be over the existing one. I had to try for myself and in just 2 tries I fell in love with this brilliant piece of software.
Typing on mobile devices has never been my strong point, I would always spend a lot of time figuring out where the keys are and a simple text message reply will take up to 4 minutes. T9 was a great help and I still consider it better then most of the physical qwerty keyboards that come along with mobile devices. iPhones soft keyboard was improvement over all and Android’s keyboard was better but Swype takes the experience to a new level.
Swype is developed by the same person who developed T9. In Swype you do not lift your fingers to type but move them in a pattern such that it joins all the letters of intended word you wanted to type. Swype recognizes the pattern and types in that word for you. One does not have to necessarily spend extra time on the character he wants to input, just swiping over it does the trick.
By eliminating the time spent on lifting the finger and putting it back, a greater amount of efficiency is achieved. Tracking of the path need not be accurate, Swype uses its extensive database of words to give you a closest match and its substitutes. It has increased my typing speed by more then twice and it promises to take the typing speed up to 40 words per minute. Just try this once and you will fall in love with the new way to type.
This also demonstrates the importance of open platform. Swype started developing for Windows phone first and now has included Android phones to its portfolio. By replacing the normal keyboard, my productivity on N1 has improved drastically. I believe, these kind of revolutionary products will push the Android platform ahead of iOs platform.
Nexus One Review
Posted by veetrag in Technology on June 21, 2010
I have been using Nexus One for over a month now and it seems right time to do a
review. I did not want to review it soon, because as a smart phone it has too many functionalities and all those have to be tested thoroughly before giving a verdict. My main purpose was to fill the void between my McBook pro and mobile browser (iPod touch) during business travel. I planned to use this as replacement for a netbook and it seems N1 fits perfectly into it.
To start with hardware, the most striking feature of N1 is its beautiful screen. N1’s AMOLED touchscreen emits such beautiful colors that its a pleasure to watch videos and photographs. Unlike the iPhone screen, it gives much better contrast and blacks come out really well. One would expect phone to be heavy with a 3.7 inch screen but surprisingly HTC did a wonderful job. If one is transitioning from other smart phone they will feel the difference on how lighter phone this is. First thing that I noticed as soon as started my phone for first time was the snappiness, the reaction time between the action and command. It was brilliant and that is the result of 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor, which combined with 512 MB RAM makes phone very responsive.
At the end of screen we have four soft touch buttons, which come very handy for menu access, going back, reaching home screen and most importantly search functionality. These four buttons are tremendous leap for a multitouch screen phone. One might consider they are not needed when everything can be achieved with multitouch, but to experience the impact one has to use N1 and they will feel the difference. I believe Google took this idea from Palm Pre, but this is a brilliant addition to N1. Then at the bottom we have a trackball, which I do not use frequently. I wonder why would we need a trackball for such a device, might be some functionality but I don’t get it. The only use I have for trackball is its notification light.
Moving on to the Android OS, this is where Google shows its true strength. This phone is not as intuitive to use as iPhone, but by taking that away Google has provided such a wide set of functionality that every day one discovers new features. This OS is power packed with tweaks, shortcuts, and multiple ways of doing things that it takes few days to get used to the phone. But once a person is used to phone, its features look much more powerful then what iPhone provides. Android brings multitasking along with it and that adds a lot of complexity to the system, but Google overcame that with a brilliantly designed notification system. The way notification system is designed, my first reaction to it was, why don’t Microsoft and Apple make operating systems like that. Why have windows and all the complexity when things can be done in a much simpler way.
The phone comes up with a set of preloaded applications from Google, most notable are Voice Search, Google Goggles, Navigation, Amazon MP3 Store, Voice dialer, New and weather app and a browser. All of these apps are very well developed and I tested them in various scenarios and found them to be very useful. Navigation system is brilliantly designed and when first times one see Google maps changing to street view when we reach destination is amazing. Google has used its web services very well and combined a of them together to provide N1 users a perfect experience. Browsing apps also have been made very smooth and aesthetic by a roll down approach, rather then a card based approach as seen in most smartphones. Another good part about the N1 is, integration with Google services. One just has to provide his gmail id and everything is setup for him. Picasa albums are directly synced, Gtalk configured, contacts synced and phone is ready to go. Syncing contact has been revolutionized in N1 – Google takes contacts from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and phone book and collates them together to provide all the information about the person. So lets say if I want to call X and I open the contact, I will not only get details about his phone number, email address but also his latest tweet, photograph etc. This just makes life so easy and one does not have to waste anytime for fixing contacts, removing duplicates etc.
Moving on to less used features. I rarely use the camera that comes with N1, its a very good 5 Megapixel camera but I have a bias. I do not like any other camera then a DSLR, I just want to have much more control over my settings. Browser – I do not know what browser it is, but I have not used it much. All the services/information I need are provided by apps from market place and direct search. One more complain I have from N1 is low ringtone. That is caused by the placement of the speaker on back side, if the phone is in cover, its very hard to hear the ringtone. One has to replace in built ringtones with a louder one.
Battery life, which is the main issue with all the smartphones is an issue with N1 too. But one can improve the battery life of phone easily. N1 provides a task manager where one can see how much battery an app is consuming and with that information one can kill the applications which are battery exhaustive. By following simple things, I have increased battery life from 1 day to almost 2 days.
Overall, I would give it very high rating. Its a smartphone with very progressive approach and frequent OS updates helps improve its performance. An open market place gives N1 tremendous strength. I get most of my updates/hacks about N1 from few people I listen to regularly. For hacks and increasing productivity on N1 I follow Gina Trapani and Leo Laporte, they give so many tips on This Week in Google that every times I listen to show I end up improving my phone. For applications I rely on Jolie O’Dell and her updates on Mashable.
Photoshop CS5 – Panorama with Content Aware Fill
Posted by veetrag in Photography, Technology on May 5, 2010
I have been hearing about how good Photoshop CS5’s Content Aware Fill is, so I tried to give it a chance. I took 7 different shots at Round Bald on NC/Tennessee border during spring break, using those I created a panorama. I used Photomerge in CS5 to stitch all the images, so it did not took me much effort. Here is the outcome –
![9138628_22745f9fee[1]](http://veetrag.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/9138628_22745f9fee1.jpg "9138628_22745f9fee[1]")
As you can see, lack of tripod will always result in these unfilled spots in a panorama. Usually when I have situations like these, I get the best possible crop of it and utilize it. This time I tried to use Content Aware Fill. The result is shown below. You will notice it has filled almost all the spots. The procedure I followed was to use lasso took to select dark areas and delete that portion. When deleting I get an option to use Content Aware Fill and I said Ok. This did not happen in one go, when I selected a large area, I got the error message that my computer does not have enough memory (RAM), even though I have 3GB RAM on my system. I used bits and pieces to fill the image and took me less than 10 minutes. I deleted 7 different selection to get this result.
![9138634_4857cbb1c1[1]](http://veetrag.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/9138634_4857cbb1c11.jpg "9138634_4857cbb1c1[1]")
As you can notice, there are some improper edges and some fills are not smooth. But these can be smoothened easily by putting some more effort.
I do not like to use Photoshop for my images, not because its not good tool but I like to use my photography skills more then to use photograph as my canvas. This certainly is a step too far into that direction and I do not like it. I agree their are times when we need to have good image, but personally, I like to show what real world looks like. Good bye Content Aware Fill.