Here’s a neat little add-on that I found on FireFox the other week. Personas! Although the ability to set a custom theme on your browser is cool (with “viva” being my favorite so far), I think my favorite feature is the slick functionality that they built in on the add on to preview. Once you’ve installed personas, just hovering over a persona on their http://www.getpersonas.com/ site or on the little persona head in the bottom left corner of your browser will automatically show you what the persona looks like on your browser. Very slick.
Apr
13
I just wanted to alert everyone of a great resource out there for iPhone development. If you have an idea for an application that you would like to make into a reality, this book is for you. Carla Kay White (she has that many sites, so I have to user her entire name 
) has written a book that is targeted towards every day average people that want to create an iPhone app, but don’t have vast amount of resources and/or are not developers themselves.
However, I think it can relate to everyone! Even if you are going to do your own development, there is information in this book for you. I started reading this, not knowing what to expect, but after getting about 5 pages in, I couldn’t put it down. Finally, at about 11:30 with an early morning ahead of me I figured I should get some sleep, but I was easily able to finish up all of the books after the next night. That is what made the books so valuable. The information was compacted into a short amount of writing interlaced with interesting experiences of the author, which kept your attention and made you wanting to finish the current page, just so you could read the next.
Everything is covered, from the basics of what you need to release an app to the iTunes store to ideas on how to market your application. The information is light, but also contains facts along with personal experiences to back up any ideas that are put out there. Finally, the $13.99 price tag is tiny compared to the amount that you will save and potentially earn just from reading this book.
So grab your pick axe and your favorite gold pan and jump into this modern day gold rush!
Mar
25
I noticed this first and most obviously with the iPhone. Whenever you’d get an e-mail from someone on their iPhone it would say “sent from my iPhone” at the bottom of the e-mail. I thought it was kind of odd and just looked past it. However, I knew people who couldn’t get an iPhone, because they were outside of the coverage area and who REALLY WANTED one and it would definitely irk them! It’s the old “look what I’ve got!” that makes all the kiddies jealous!
My first thought was, really? That’s a big deal? But especially for Apple, that fits right in line with their marketing strategy. (especially their new direction) From what I can tell (and I’m not “in the know” or pretend to be with marketing) Apple has based their marketing on two things. Originally it was, all about filling the schools with macs so that macs was all the kids new coming out of school. It showed kids that you could use macs for “anything” and it got the macs to feel like home. So when college came and it was time to buy their own, macs was the familiar choice. Heck, even in a recent post out on Gadgetopia, Deane showed a homework assignment from his daughter that was on how email works and the window was a window from a mac. So we know that they are still sticking with that plan.
The second type of marketing is the most recent. From what I can remember it all started with the iPod. It is all about status. You’re cool because you own X. That’s where this new “nana nana boo boo” marketing comes into place. You see someone else has it…and you really want it too.
On a side note…I noticed blackberry started doing it too and it kind of made me laugh. Although in all fairness, there is a bit of the “I’m cool I own a blackberry” going around, but that’s more in the “I need to look important (and possibly conservative)” crowd.
Jan
16
This is an interesting little gadget that looks like it could possibly be useful.
It’s the Nav Jacket from O’neill. From what I can tell, it has a built in GPS that it uses to mark waypoints, record stats, along with track where you are. The information is then viewable through a flexible lcd screen on your sleeve. Information can also be audible through speakers in the hood of the jacket.
Along with all of that, you can also download/upload trails and waypoints via their community online.
It’s all an extremely cool little system and I could see it having some major advantages especially after the technology advances to the point that you could enter an entire resorts trail map into your jacket. However, the big problem with the jacket now is, from what I can tell they are selling the jacket on the O’Neill E-Shop for €1200. Which is about $1600. It’s cool, but it’s not $1600 cool.