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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Rocket in your pocketLodged somewhere between a Palm organizer and a Windows notebook computer is this gadget. Sometimes it pretends to be a desktop computer. You can attach a keyboard and monitor and hook it into a wired or wireless WiFi or Bluetooth network. At other times, it sits in your (large) pocket or briefcase and does PDA-like things on its built-in screen. I like the concept, but I fear Windows on that tiny screen might be a tad unusable. It's a niche product, to be sure, but a very interesting niche. Sadly, the Flash-driven Web site is a tour de force of bad usability that goes out of its way to confuse and induce seizures with all the flashing. Penny for your thoughtsThose folks over at Google always seem to be cooking up something interesting. They sort of remind me of Yahoo back in the days before it started abusing its customers' wishes on permission-based marketing issues. Let's hope Google doesn't slide down that slippery slope. If you've mastered search engines and know how to find things on the Web, this idea could line your pocket with at least enough to buy lunch every day. The idea: Somebody posts a request for information and offers money for a response. You, the wiley researcher, cull information from here, there and everywhere and plop it into the Google system. If the researchee is happy with the results, you get paid. It's not a new idea, but Google has enough traffic to make it work. Another future phonewww.uk.research.att.com/bphone/ Video phones have yet to be reality. Tech companies keep coming up with daft ideas and we consumers continue to reject them. But this concept phone from AT&T's labs in Cambridge in the U.K. might be the ticket. Rather than offering a video picture of your unshaven mug, you can doodle on the screen and that image will be sent to the person on the other end. Drawing directions to an office or home spring to mind, as does buying something over the phone that requires a signature. No, you can't get one today, but I'd like one tomorrow if possible. Opinions galoreLinks, links and more links to movie reviews is what you'll find jammed in the pages of this site. And, for the terminally lazy, there's a small icon guide to the left of each link as well as a percentage meter at the top of each page. Just linking to big movie review players would be a bit of a yawn, so this site takes all comers and supposedly independent reviewers, too. It's a good resource before you go and blow your hard-earned cash at the theater or video rental store. Consultants' delightIf you get the family tree out and trace Mac OS X's ancestry back in time, you'll see that its grandpa is a system called NeXT. This was the company Steve Jobs started during his hiatus from Apple. And developers loved everything the company had to offer. Sadly, business buyers stayed away. But developers such as Andrew Stone were cranking out NeXT applications that, because of their lineage, are quite easy to move over to OS X. Take the simple but highly effective Time Equals Money application. If you bill your clients by the hour, you'll wonder how you ever got by before this one came along. No more hulking spreadsheets eating up your computer's memory. It's almost perfect.
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From Tech Times
From the AP |
