Forrester Research has mined its vast knowledge resources, and produced a report suggesting that Apple's products in 2013 will be nothing but household clutter.
Apparently Apple is out of ideas, so Forrester decided to take on the task itself, coming up with an envelope-pushing list of electronics that includes such marvels as:
digital picture frames
clock radios
universal remote controls
Wow. That's research money well spent, if you ask me. Take note Apple employees, these are the ideas you're going to have to top in your next product development meeting.
Apple's Science page has a profile up for the folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- apparently two MITers, Deb Roy and Rupal Patel, are using Macs, including "five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID," to record and track every single moment of their son's early childhood.
Not only are they assured to get his first few steps on tape, but they're also studying early development and how young children gain the skills to interact with other human beings. In order to do this, they're dealing with huge amounts of audio and video data -- about 250TB. And they're also building an analysis application on the platform called TotalRecall to scan through all the audio and video and pick out interesting parts and patterns (creating the kind of image seen above -- apparently that means something to them).
Of course, there is one thing they do that Apple can't -- when the time came to figure out how to transfer 200GB a day from the home environment to work, they eventually settled on a "sneakernet" approach, packing up the digital tapes in a case and carrying them to work. Here's hoping Apple will announce their own proprietary version of iSneakernet at the next WWDC (with a stylish design and a reasonable pricetag, of course).
The concept behind Googalyzer is interesting, though it's probably not for everyone. It's basically an open-source, tabbed web browser with built-in note-taking, web-clipping, outlining and bibliographic tools. The idea is to consolidate these different aspects of web research into one application. This way you can have multiple research projects with all the relevant information kept in one place, without getting data from different project intermingled (this reminds me of the thinking behind Panic's recent Coda web design application). If you do a lot of research online, and are not already using something like DEVONthink, this might be worth a look.
Googalyzer 3.0 beta 1 has just recently been released and is a free download from Funkware.
TUAW's nerdy (yet surprisingly well off) little sister Blogging Stocks has a great roundup of articles regarding a recent ABI Research survey that purportedly showed 58% of consumers would choose a Microsoft Zune over an iPod. In the study, people were shown an image of the Zune, and then asked how likely they would be to purchase the device over another music player. According to Blogging Stocks, ABI mentions only that it compared the picture of the Zune to "other competitive media players," with no specific mention that the iPod was actually given as an option.
As soon as I saw the news about this, I was immediately suspicious. The fact that Apple essentially has control over the MP3 player market combined with early reports from multiple tech journalists that the Zune is flawed in more ways than one, led many to believe that perhaps the ABI hadn't been truly upfront when conducting their survey and reporting the results. I too would choose a Zune over, say, a Creative device; it would probably be a neat little device to hack; but that doesn't mean that I, nor likely 80% of the population would choose the brown device from Redmond over our beloved iPods.
If you're like me, Wikipedia is your go-to site for all things research and definition. Read something in an article you don't understand? Wikipedia! Friend use an obscure TLA? Wikipedia! There is almost no end to the community edited encyclopedia's usefulness.
Most visits I make to Wikipedia are just quick fact checking and the like, but every now and then I am pressed to do some good old fashioned actual research; the kind grandpa used to do in the library. For those situations, Pathway is my new best friend. Pathway is a desktop interface for Wikipedia that not only lets you view wiki pages, but keeps a history of the pages you view, and displays your history in a sexy-sexy data map. I've only just started playing with Pathway, but its sleek look, original features, and light usage footprint have already earned it a cozy new home in my Applications folder.
It's too bad I didn't know about Curio from Zengobi when I was writing the Get Organized post, as it seems to take quite an interesting approach to collecting, jotting down and organizing information. Billed as an app that "promotes visual thinking gathering and shaping your ideas", Curio definitely seems to be more like a sketchpad than many other similar applications. You can literally place anything anywhere on the page, and includes tools for sketching and drawing - just look at the screenshot which includes an image, lists, an embedded video and some chicken scratch.
Curio doesn't stop there though. It also includes a project center, presentation mode, a powerful search companion, tags, LinkBack support, project archiving, web/.Mac publishing and iPhoto exporting. I haven't played with this app yet, but I'm downloading a demo as I type up this post to play with later. Some features, however, are only included in certain editions, so check out Zengobi's feature comparison chart to determine which edition is right for you. A demo is available, while full licenses start at $39.
A while ago I decided to bring some sanity to the way I do things and organize all my stuff. I'm working on a design thesis in my multimedia undergrad degree, I'm constantly doing research for my blogging work, and I have countless other projects and ideas that were growing in both size and disorganization in my Home folder. When I decided to finally start getting organized, I realized I might not be the only person in this position, and I figured I would turn my research and testing experiences into a post; a sort of survey of what some call 'digital junk drawer' applications.
What follows is a pro and con summary of four of the most popular junk drawer apps I looked at, but read this post with a few of my criteria in mind:
I like keyboard shortcuts. I like them a lot. Being able to highlight a chunk of text in a browser or a PDF I'm reading and hitting a couple of keys to send it to a junk drawer app is far more efficient and less workflow-intrusive than having to use a mouse to drag and drop it to some far corner of my display.
I decided not to touch apps that employ entirely different paradigms such as the wiki-like VoodooPad; I'm not denying the usefulness of these other ways of working, but adding that entirely new level to this survey would've meant putting this post on the back-burner for longer than I would like.
I'm using a MacBook Pro 2.0 Ghz with 1.5 GB RAM, and while I synced my notes library across these apps to gauge performance 'n all that jazz, my library is a mere 500 notes (URLs, PDFs, etc.) strong, so your mileage may vary.
With that said, check out my survey of some Mac OS X apps that could help you bring order to your digital chaos, and feel free to post your thoughts or mention apps that should've made this list, and why.
Concierge is a bookmark assistant plug-in for Safari that offers a multi-function scratchpad, bookmark managing tool and history sorting in a drawer on the side of the browser window. The scatchpad sounds like the most interesting feature, as it allows users to organize URLs, email links, Address Book contacts and even links to files and folders; great for heavy surfers and researchers alike.
This latest version addresses a few bug fixes and brings Universal Binary super-powers to this shareware utility. Check out Concierge's product page for a demo and quite a few more details on all you can do with this handy plug-in, and a license will run you $10.
Since I'm on spring break and the only destination I have in sight is my couch, I figured it would be a
good time to wipe my Macs since I haven't done it in a while. This time around, I decided to learn how to create a
clean backup image with Carbon Copy Cloner, but this post isn't
about my adventures in getting responsible and efficient with backups. It's more about the fact that I just noticed
Saft offers some really handy new tab abilities in Safari that I don't think we've mentioned on TUAW.
I
guess since version 8.2.6 (it's up to 8.2.8 now) Saft has offered new options for tab placement that you can see in my
screenshot. These can really come in handy, depending on your behavior with surfing/researching on the web and how you
manage tabs.
Forrester Research has mined its vast knowledge resources, and produced a report suggesting that Apple's products in 2013 will be nothing but household clutter.
The concept behind 
TUAW's nerdy (yet surprisingly well off) little sister Blogging Stocks has a great 
If you're like me, Wikipedia is your go-to site for all things research and definition. Read something in an article you don't understand? Wikipedia! Friend use an obscure TLA? Wikipedia! There is almost no end to the community edited encyclopedia's usefulness. 
A while ago I decided to bring some sanity to the way I do things and organize all my stuff. I'm working on a design thesis in my multimedia undergrad degree, I'm constantly doing research for my blogging work, and I have countless other projects and ideas that were growing in both size and disorganization in my Home folder. When I decided to finally start getting organized, I realized I might not be the only person in this position, and I figured I would turn my research and testing experiences into a post; a sort of survey of what some call 'digital junk drawer' applications.
Concierge is a bookmark assistant plug-in for Safari that offers a multi-function scratchpad, bookmark managing tool and history sorting in a drawer on the side of the browser window. The scatchpad sounds like the most interesting feature, as it allows users to organize URLs, email links, Address Book contacts and even links to files and folders; great for heavy surfers and researchers alike. 
