bruceb news

Previously: Technology Is Not Getting Easier!

Forbes published an article today that provides a nice postscript about new devices becoming more complex and cranky. Do iOS Apps Crash More Than Android Apps? A Data Dive is rich with details but the important lesson is that these simple, reliable devices in our pocket crash all the time. It’s not just you.

The details are interesting and the article is loaded with pie charts that break down crashes on mobile devices in lots of ways. (Conclusions: apps on Apple devices crash slightly more often than Android apps, but data from the end of 2011 might have been skewed by the release of iOS 5, which required a fair amount of rewriting for apps to work reliably. […] continued

It’s supposed to be getting easier! After all, smartphones and tablets should be simple to use, right? iPhones and iPads are exposing hundreds of millions of people to Apple’s fabled ecosystem, and for years we’ve been told that everything is easy and intuitive in the Apple world. Meanwhile Windows 7 brings impressive advances in hardware support and security and stability to our computers.

Why does it seem like there are more complaints, not less?

I recommend an interesting article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate: 2011 Was A Terrible Year For Tech. Here are the key points:

“In 2011 nearly every gadget or service that I use on a regular basis picked up new features that made it more frustrating to deal with. […] continued

Most casual photos are taken with a smartphone now. There is something to be learned from a quick comparison of the process of getting photos from a phone to a computer on an iPhone and an Android phone.

It’s a good way to understand why Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

On the phone:

• Install the latest iOS 5 update.

By default, iCloud is turned on and Photo Stream is turned on. If not, the settings are under iCloud. Set Photo Stream to On.

On your Windows computer:

• Install the latest iTunes update.

[…] continued

MyPermissions.org does something very simple and very helpful – and it might be an eye-opener for some of you.

The site has gathered shortcuts to the pages that list the permissions you’ve granted to access your information on eight social networking services: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr. The app permission management pages make it possible for you to guard your privacy and control how your information is used.

Let’s use Facebook as an example. If you have a Facebook account, you are asked constantly if you want to link this or that to your Facebook account. Maybe it’s comments on an online forum, or an add-in for a program (like Outlook’s social connector), or apps on your phone. […] continued

Google Apps For Business is a suite of Google applications customized for small businesses. Everyone in the business gets a domain email address and access to a smorgasbord of integrated Google products, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites. Everything is completely cloud-based and can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection. Google Apps For Business is inexpensive, $5/user per month, and there’s even a limited free version for groups of up to ten people.

I want to use it to reinforce something that must be kept in mind when evaluating any technology today: The cash out of your pocket is only one element in deciding whether a technology solution fits your business. […] continued

A new model of phone has been introduced roughly every day in 2011 but none of them have been very interesting.

Until now. Let’s take a look at three big developments in the phone world.

(Fair warning: I do not have any personal experience with any of these phones. They undoubtedly have quirks and limitations and exciting bits that might flavor your experience. Your mileage may vary; it’s all I can do to keep up with the product launches and press releases.)

Apple iPhone 4S

Apple’s new iPhone 4S is a collection of small changes, not big ones: a great camera, a voice-activated assistant named Siri (which apparently is really marvelous), and some welcome file syncing to make it easier to get photos and music on and off the phone. […] continued

If all goes well, Mad Mimi is going to take over the mailing list for subscribers to Bruceb News. Here’s the story that led me to the odd logo on the left.

If you send an email message to more than 25 people, most of them won’t receive it. The message will be filtered as spam and tossed into a junk mail folder.

Vertical Response and Constant Contact have made a nice business out of handling mailing lists for businesses that send out email blasts regularly. When I’ve used them in the past, they had all the hallmarks of tools for big companies – lots and lots of options, infinite flexibility, complicated controls for layout and design, sophisticated analytics for judging the success of email campaigns, and much more. […] continued

Facebook has a vision that every single thing you do will be channeled back into a record of your life held by Facebook and shared in real-time with your friends – every web site you visit, every photo you take, every movie you see and song you play and place you go, every interaction with your friends, streamed and viewed and recorded. It’s audacious. It seems science fictional and shocking if you’re over 35. Facebook users will have a record of their life that will be as natural to them as the dusty photo albums of older generations. If Facebook is successful, it will insinuate itself into every corner of the web, transforming the entire online world into something that is inseparable from Facebook. […] continued

Are you a Facebook user? You probably noticed the significant makeover to your Facebook page on Wednesday. Your news feed is now formatted a bit like a newspaper or online magazine, with “top stories,” a “ticker” feature on the right, “smart lists” on the left, and what appears to be some new methods of filtering the feed to show you a small portion of the flood being posted by your six hundred friends. That’s not all – there are more tweaks already in place.

Those are the minor changes.

The big changes will be announced at a Facebook developer conference on Thursday – likely to include various hooks into music services, possibly some kind of connection with Hulu, and perhaps new “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched” and “Want” buttons to sprinkle around on other sites and tie back to Facebook. […] continued

On August 10, the main data center for Exchange Defender suffered a catastrophic power failure. Clients using the spam filtering service had their incoming and outgoing mail interrupted or massively slowed for most of a day, and hosted mailboxes went offline for as long as two days.

On August 17, Microsoft Office 365 had an outage after an unspecified failure in a major North American server center. Mail was down for 2-3 hours for some subscribers.

On August 7, power equipment failures took a portion of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform in Europe offline for 24-48 hours.

On March 1, 35,000 Gmail users were offline for as long as five days, while Google scrambled to restore data lost in a server snafu. […] continued