I’ve got a new wallpaper on my machines. It’s homemade with Mueso Slab and a stolen copy of the Rebel Alliance logo. You can download a 1440 × 900 version here. If you center it and choose “Tungsten” as the background color, it matches perfectly.
Category: General Tech
Droid R2-D2
Xmarks Speaks Out on Paid Services
We’re revisiting the idea of Xmarks as a premium service. We’ve set up a Pledgebank page where you can sign up if you’re willing to pay at least $10 a year for Xmarks. No credit card is required, but please only pledge if you are genuinely willing and able to pay.
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Hopefully you can see that, for us and our investors, we were aiming for a different business, and staffing at a different level, than what it is likely appropriate for a freemium model. For a new company taking a fresh start with Xmarks, a freemium model could be really compelling. The overwhelming positive user support from all of you, combined with strong interest by companies looking to take over Xmarks, means that the service might just find a ninth life. Please stay tuned.
On NYC’s Subway System and Flooding
There’s a massive tropical storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.
In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.
Speaking of the Web...
Axiis has posted a brilliant chart showing browser market share, by year, since 2002.
Sadly, it’s done in Flash and doesn’t list MobileSafari as a separate browser.
Thoughts on the RIM PlayBook
Editor’s Note: These are in no particular order.
Phone & Tablet Data Sharing
Thus far, the tablet and the smartphone have lived separate, isolated lives, unaware of the other. RIM seems to be changing that, allowing the tablet to double as a large, external display for the phone. Which is cool. It reminds me of the Palm Foleo, although the PlayBook looks like it actually makes sense, since it’s an actual stand-alone product.
The iPad Life
Ben Brooks has started what he is calling the “iPad Life” series, which looks at how people are using their tablets day-to-day. I just love stuff like this. I am excited (and flattered) that my interview was chosen kick off the series. I assure you, there were far better choices than me to start such a series.
Thanks, Ben!
Bookmark Syncing Service Xmarks Closing
By Spring 2010, with money running tight and options fading, we started searching for potential buyers of the company. Over the past three months, we have been remarkably close to striking a deal, only to have the potential buyer get cold feet. We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Our plan is to keep the service running for another 90+ days, after which the plug will be pulled.
PlayBook: The Blackberry Tablet
Today at Research In Motion’s developer event, Mike Lazaridis introduced the company’s new tablet – the PlayBook. The device will sport a Cortex A9, 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 7-inch display, webOS-like app switching, an e-reader component, full document editing, and pairing with BlackBerry phones. The device will be capable of 1080p HDMI video and will have HDMI and USB ports, a front and rear HD camera configuration, and will be 9.7mm thick. The PlayBook is based on a platform designed by QNX, just as we’d heard previously.
Segway Company Owner Dies in Accident
Martin Wainwright for the Guardian:
The flamboyant former miner at the head of the Segway scooter company has died in a freak accident by sliding on one of the miniature two-wheelers off a cliff.
Damn.
[ via DF]
On MarsEdit
The biggest selling point for the new version: an improved WYSIWYG interface for post composition. You now have the option to compose posts in either Rich Text or HTML format, and as you type, a separate preview pane pops up and lets you see how your post is going to look. It would be nice if you could edit in the preview pane—for example, in one test post, a subject-verb disagreement eluded me in the composition window but popped into plain relief in the preview window, and it would have been easier to correct it the minute I saw it—but this feature is not a vital must-have.
‘Just Plain Wrong’
Ben Brooks, on seven inch tablets:
This small size sounds great if you think about it, surely it will be lighter and more portable. Seven inches is a huge difference though, you lose almost 3 inches off the iPad size and for what? Well you get a smaller device that still doesn’t fit in your pocket and doesn’t have the screen real estate to be really great.
The problem isn’t that tap zones become much smaller, the problem is the onscreen keyboards get much smaller.