.Mac needs a facelift

I really like .Mac

I’ve tried several photo gallery sites and I like the flexibility of .Mac and the fact that it integrates into iLife. That much is great but the service is severly behind competitors like Flickr and PBase.

One thing that is needed is a more robust photo gallery. Sure I can export my photos from iPhoto. This is a great start but where are all the features after that? There’s no EXIF display. Why not? There’s no tagging mechanism, no comments, no contacts list, etc. There needs to be more for the price of the service.

One more thing: I think the calendar mechanism is very hidden and obscure. Why is this? Why isn’t calendar a top level menu item once I login?

.Mac team please tell me you are modernizing the service or better yet coming up with something more innovative.

Why can’t we have Java = Swing = Flash?

I realize this is a gross over-simplification, but I’m growing weary of dealing with Flash in the browser. Why can’t we have a  rich media browser standard that is Java-based? Pretty please? If we had this then we could do server-side remoting with ease from a Web browser. What I am doing now involves pain with web services. and no I don’t care to use Flex.

Sun, why aren’t you working on this? Maybe Java is too heavy for the browser, then what about Groovy? Could that be object-compatible with Java?

GMail on Treo 680

This turns out to be easy to accomplish. I tried doing this by brute force first but then found some excellent directions on Google’s GMail site.

Setup GMail on Treo

I am stil testing out synch’ing with iCal and Google Calendar. I ended up resorting to calling Cingular who referred me to Palm on this one. It turns out that iSync needs to be enabled. I’m still fuzzy on if/how Palm Desktop is involved in synchronization, if at all.

The GMail app is a MIDlet and I got interested from listening to Jonathan Schwartz mention this in a recent interview.

Treo-enabled

So I have recently picked up a Palm Treo to use as my PDA/phone. I’ve owned several PDA’s in the past and none have stuck around. This one might since I’ll inevitably be carring a phone.

My first impression is that the whole thing is fairly well thought out by Palm. My previous phone was a Motorola and I was never convinced anyone had spent much time doing usability testing with its interface. The Palm is much better.

I had no trouble connecting to my IMAP account for email and I’m in the process of setting up my calendar to synchronize with iCal and Google Calendar. My corporate email is run on Notes so I’m a little stuck with trying to tie in my appointments from Notes. The best solution I have for now is to input my appointments from Notes into Google Calendar manually. I understand that Notes 7 may export to iCal which will be great whenever I get it.

Google Maps is the first app I’ve downloaded and it works great.

From my own usability. The color scheme lacks a high-contrast scheme. I need to surf around some more and see what I can come up with. Maybe I’ll try and contact Palm directly,

The Treo would be just perfect if it had WiFi and I could run Skype from it while at home.

Ubuntu migration (day 1)

This blog entry is intended to keep some notes on my migration to Ubuntu.

This morning I installed Oracle Express simply by downloading and using the package manager.

I added /home/public as a public Samba share and here it where I’m keeping music, images and movies. I mounted my local NTFS partition with my iTunes files and am just copying these across to the Ubuntu drive.

Next step is to install mt-daapd.

Switching to Ubuntu

Today I cleaned off a spare 80GB drive and installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my Dell desktop PC. I had to leave it to dual boot Windows. I intend though to mostly run Ubuntu and use it to serve iTunes using mt-daapd and also use it as a development machine for running Oracle Express and Subversion.

The machine that I installed Ubuntu has been running the same copy of Windows XP since about 2002. It amazing how slow the machine has gotten over time and it won’t even shutdown anymore without killing processes.

I’m looking forward to getting comfortable with Ubuntu and let it take over a lot of tasks I normally did on Windows.