LibArtTech

Yesterday Apple revealed their long awaited entry into the streaming music field. They were able to do this quickly because of the acquisition of Beats last year, and the systems and intellectual property that came with that purchase. Considering that the music reveal was pretty much the only big news out of a pretty benign developer keynote, I'll take a few moments to talk about what I think about it. Apple was perhaps the defining company in the music revolution of the past 20 years. With the introduction of the iPod that revolutionized portable music, to the creation of the iTunes store and the eventual death of DRM, Apple has been at the forefront of digital music. This leadership comes with high expectations to continue to lead, and so many people have long questioned Apple not getting into the streaming music business quicker. For the past few years new companies have come forth to lead the change in the streaming music evolution. From Pandora and its ability to create un...

Today Microsoft held their Build conference keynote. As with Apple and Google, developer conference keynotes have become a mainstay of announcements for the general public beyond developers. At first it seemed that Microsoft would be bucking that trend today as the first portions of their keynote were very, very developer centric. However, a lot changed when they started talking about Windows 10. Microsoft is betting the future on building a platform that applications will build off of. Much like Apple and Google, they seem to be discovering that the real money isn't in the operating system itself, but in helping bring applications to consumers through validated app stores. In Microsoft's case it's also seeking to converge all of their platforms into a single unified platform. They once again reiterated today that Windows 10 will run on all of the devices that are out there, from phones to tablets to PC's to XBox game consoles. This means that applications can be writ...

The other day I got a chance to play with the new Apple force touch trackpad. This is a new design that Apple has put on their laptops for non-mechanized clicking on trackpad. When you press on the trackpad it senses the force that you're pressing with, and when you reach a certain level, you feel a 'click'. If you keep pressing, you feel a second 'click'. The unique thing is that these 'clicks' aren't physical in nature. The trackpad never moves at all, but the click that you feel is from haptic feedback. In essence, when you press with enough force, the trackpad clicks back at you. You feel the sensation of clicking, but it's simply the trackpad responding to your pressure. I got to play with this for a while, since the Apple Store rep was talking with us about soccer, and after a short bit I was getting the hang of it. I feel that it would take quite a bit longer though to really feel comfortable with this new paradigm. I'm someone who has a...

This past week was big for Microsoft and it's future with Windows. Windows 10 was given star status at a press reveal, showing off all of the new features that will be coming in this highly anticipated update to many of our desktops. I watched the live blog of the event, and have been reading over a lot of the reviews of the new technology that Microsoft is looking to deploy. My initial reaction is to be impressed. Much of what was wrong with Windows in the past seems to be a focal point for fixing in Windows 10. A few key things stood out to me as areas that I'm anxious to see more. First, I have to applaud Microsoft for being willing to step back from a design decision (Metro) that didn't pan out they way that they wanted it to. They took what they learned from that experience and have incorporated it into the regular desktop experience in a way that is much more seamless and useful. In fact, Microsoft is ahead of the curve in how they are presenting a user interface ...

For Christmas this past year, we decided to get a Wii U as our family gift. My wife and I have owned various Nintendo consoles for much of our life, and we thought that the newest entry to the franchise would be a nice fit for our family. The Wii U has been out for a while now and hasn't been the hottest selling console by a long shot, so the question could be asked, why would we buy a Wii U now? The answer is that Nintendo has really decided to focus on some amazing new games for 2014/2015 that are only available on the Wii U. After the disappointing 2013 holiday season for Nintendo many questioned if the Wii U was a complete flop, and perhaps the final nail in the coffin of Nintendo's console life. With only a few games of much interest, there wasn't much of a reason to buy a Wii U. Then in 2014 Nintendo started to revive it's most powerful asset, its catalog of great characters and games, launching new and exciting titles that got people interested in what Nintendo...

One of the fun technology events every year is the Consumer Electronic Show. I've never had the opportunity to attend this in person, but maybe now that I have family in Vegas I should try and make it out some year. CES is a huge event that highlights some of the cool and crazy stuff that all the big consumer electronics companies are working on, and attempting to bring to market. Since I've been laid up sick for the past day and a half, I've been catching up on the news feeds of all the stuff that's currently coming out. Although CES isn't strictly laptop and computer focused, computer companies still play a major role. This year, I'm seeing a lot of emphasis on thin and light computing devices. ASUS and Lenovo  have both released some exceptionally light weight laptops, and hybrid tablets, that give the MacBook Air line a run for it's money. Additionally, HP is building off the success of it's Stream line of Chromebook competitors with an HP Stream ...

For the past year or so I've had moments of lamenting the fact that I no longer have a laptop to use as a personal computing device. Sure, I've got my huge brick of a Lenovo that my employer gives me, but if you can't guess, it's very heavy and unwieldy. To top it off, it's severely locked down because of all of the security requirements that we need to follow. So for the past half dozen or so years, I've had my desktop iMac as my primary computing device, and supplemented that with various tablets. Initially, I had a 10 inch iPad that I bought a keyboard for, as a way to make it more usable when traveling. That worked for the most part, but I eventually decided to upgrade to an iPad Mini. I love the smaller form factor for reading, and use as a general media device. The past couple of trips that I've been on, I've been missing having any type of keyboard to type on for blogging, and other convenient aspects that come with a computer vs a laptop. Fo...

So I've been a horrible blog author and have neglected this site for far to long. It's not that I haven't had anything to say, I've just neglected to say it. So with an attempt to get back on the wagon, here's some thoughts on Microsoft's announcement yesterday for it's Surface Pro 3. Despite being a minor Apple fanboy, the most interesting company to watch, in the personal computing space right now, is Microsoft. With the departure of Steve Ballmer, and the rise of Satya Nadella, it has been an interesting 9 months for one of the founding pioneers of personal technology. Many agree that Windows 8 has not lived up to what Microsoft would like it to be. They made a bold attempt to redefine how users interact with their computers, and merge the tablet and desktop experience. However, that experiment, by most accounts, has failed. This is a common pattern for Microsoft however, alternating between a mediocre OS release, and then a stellar one. Therefore, it...

A week or so ago I had an opportunity to purchase an inexpensive 8" tablet that ran a full version of Windows 8.1. So, being the adventurous sort, I headed out to the mall bright and early to get in line for a killer doorbuster deal. Although I didn't get the super-duper-amazing-low-price, I did manage to get the super-amazing-low-price, so I decided it was good enough to pick it up and try it out for a week to see what I thought about it. Who knows, I thought, it could even become me regular go-to tablet.  At first, I was planning to give it to my wife, but she decided she wanted to stick with her Nexus 7 (man that's a great tablet). So I started my experience, setting up my account the same way that you set up a regular Windows 8.1 desktop. In fact the process was completely 100% identical from the user experience, that is except for pushing buttons on a screen instead of a keyboard.  Once the account was set up, I started to explore how this thing works...

This past week Apple released it's 7th generation of iOS, and of course, as an Apple fan, I was hitting refresh all afternoon waiting for the update. This is one of the most radical updates of iOS, as it completely changes the look and feel, leaving almost nothing familiar from the old skin. People have been asking me what I think of this new update, and so here are a few of my thoughts. So what don't I like? Honestly, the new look-and-feel is going to take quite a while to grow on me. After using it for a few days it's not quite as shocking as it first was for me, but I still can't truthfully say that I like it. The colors are overly bright, the animations seem supurflus and slow down interaction time, and some basic paradigms have been changed, forcing a re-learning. First, I find the color scheme a bit too bright for my taste. The abundance of white just seems to blast the eyes, despite the other soothing pastel colors. The flat look isn't that bad, but sometimes...

The Verge recently posted an article that referenced Rush Limbaugh , and his belief that the tech blog press is made up of Apple 'haters'. He goes on to equate this to how mainstream media is biased against the Republican party, but this is a tech blog, so I'll leave the politics for another day. The comments from readers have been overwhelmingly negative towards his assertion, saying that in fact the tech press is too much in bed with Apple, not the other way around. But it did put into place something that I've personally noticed more and more lately. It's not that tech bloggers want to 'hate' Apple. In fact most of them are Mac Book Pro toting, iPhone using, iPad on-the-toilet-reading, Apple fans with their foot firmly in the Apple ecosystem. It's simply that many of them are dealing with a subtle undercurrent in the industry right now that is nervous about if Apple can keep up it's innovative dominance. Ever since the passing of Steve Jobs, A...

Editor's note : This weeks article is brought to you by Wesley Allen. Wes is an expert in presentation technologies and the creator of a technique called "Sermon Painting" which gives pastors more effective tools to integrate media into their teaching ministries. In this article I'll be comparing three web-based presentation applications — Google Presentations, PowerPoint on SkyDrive, and the beta of Apple's Keynote in the cloud. Yes, Keynote is a beta, but this series is including it because Apple is more than fashionably late to idea of cloud-base office suites. There are other options out on the web, including ZoHo office and Prezi, but we're limiting ourselves to the threes suites compared throughout this series. User Interface User Interfaces in web-apps has come a long way over the years. As the web has matured web apps have begun feel like applications, instead of forms forced into a browser interface. As such, the three presentation applica...

Document In this edition of Getting Work Done Online we'll be taking a look at the workhorse of any office suite, the word processor. Online text editing has been around in some fashion for many years, but it's never really been captured effectively until recently. The ubiquitous 'Word doc' has been the gold standard for text documents for over two decades. Now, with the advent of some on-line competitors, as well as it's own attempt, writing your term paper can maybe be done in the cloud.  Again, I used a personal document as my test. Just like last week there were some issues with the file, but this time it was my own fault. The file I used was from many years ago when I had decided to work with OpenOffice for my word processor of choice, while I was in graduate school. Thankfully Google Drive was able to import it, but the result was less than ideal. So I took the imported document, exported it to Word, cleaned it up, and re-imported it into each of the th...

Spreadsheet In this installment of Getting Things Done Online we're going to look at the spreadsheet component of our big three offerings. As with many of these posts, I'm going to use a real-life example as a way to show the differences and similarities between the products. In this case, I fired up my personal budget spreadsheet. It's a semi-complicated spreadsheet with multiple cross-sheet references, a pie chart, and a multi-nested 'IF' formula to do paycheck withholding for both Federal and State (Minnesota) taxes. There are plenty of other features I could also review, but I wanted this to be a real-life example, and not just a mock-up stress test. First, some background on the file that I used to perform this review, and how I got it imported into each of the services. My budget spreadsheet was originally done using an old version of Excel many, many years ago. When Apple's iWork Numbers came out, I converted it to that, and was mostly happy with it f...

Just a real quick update that this blog now has it's own domain name. You can get to it at http://www.libarttech.net/. The old blogger address will continue to work as well, but wanted to share the new custom DNS name.

I'm a huge fan of cloud based computing, especially for productivity applications. With the advent of the iCloud Beta, there are now three major players in this space, and I'm going to take some time over the next few weeks to give an overview of each offering. The three leading companies (in the U.S.) I'll be looking at, are Google, with Google Drive/Apps, Microsoft with SkyDrive/Office365, and Apple with iCloud. Each upcoming piece (hopefully weekly) will focus on one component of their productivity suite (order subject to change): Word processing Spreadsheet Presentation Email Calendar Messaging Finally, I hope to tie it all together with talking about how the different systems tie themselves together into an ecosystem. My hope is to also have a guest writer for at least one of these components, lending their expertise. So stick around for the next few weeks as I start a review catalog of how you can best get work done online!

For many years, I've been a big fan of Instant Messaging as a way to communicate with friends, especially those in other parts of the country. Sure e-mail works, but if you want to have a conversation with someone immediately, with a lot of back and forth, IM was the way to go. I jumped on the IM bandwagon all the way back in the ICQ days (and no, I don't remember my number). Followed by a bunch of years maintaining multiple protocols at the 'Big 3' at the time; AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Many of us recall the years of running three different clients on our desktop at all times, because all of our friends used different systems. Thankfully, it wasn't too long before multi-protocol clients came into play and we could start to consolidate. Google was a late comer to the market, but it's GTalk Instant Messenger caught on fast. It was slim and trim and since GMail was the rage, everyone had a log-in. Slowly, over the course of ...

Today, the internet was all a buzz about the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. In particular the star of the show was the premiere of the totally redesigned iOS 7. Since I'm an Apple geek, I felt it was my sacred duty to add to the plethora of pundits and commentators, and add my two cents about this radical design change. When Scott Forstall left Apple and Jonny Ive was given control over software design, it became a foregone conclusion that skeuomorphisms were going to be a thing of the past. Ive has made his views on them quite clear, and so the first thing that was shown the door with this new design was the wood bookcases, the green felt, the yellow legal pad and any semblance of leather stitching. During today's presentation there were even multiple jokes about the lack of these textures anywhere in the new design. Not sure if Forstall was watching, but for his sake, I kinda almost hoped he wasn't. So about the design in general... The first t...

One of the big tech stories this past week that caught my eye, was the announcement that Barnes & Noble's Nook platform may not be long for this world. At least not in it's current shape. Apparently, the hardware hasn't been performing as well, financially, as needed, and so the latest word is that Microsoft is trying to buy the Nook experience and allow B&N to exit the hardware market. As a Nook user, I find this very sad. I've own one of the original Nooks, that had the little mini-touchscreens below the main e-Ink screen, and it's been a great device for the years I've owned it. When I got my iPad I specifically continued buying books in Nook format because I wanted to continue to support a bookstore that I really like going to. However, it looks like all of that might be coming to an end. From Microsoft's perspective the deal is a big win for them, if it goes through. They get a huge headstart on their eBook ecosystem for their continuing mob...

My fiancé recently got a new laptop, a nice small ASUS with a touch screen and Windows 8 pre-installed. This gave me a chance to actually play with it for more than a couple of minutes and really start to figure it out. I'll admit that my initial impression has not been positive about Windows 8, and although getting to spend more time with it has tempered that quite a bit, I still feel like there are some major issues overall. First, I think the reason that my experience was more positive this time is that I got to use Windows 8 on a machine that has the intended hardware. Namely, a touchscreen and a touchpad that is set up to deal with all the different gestures that Windows 8 likes you to use when you're in non-desktop mode. Being able to switch between apps with a long flick of the finger across the touchpad or touchscreen is actually quite nice and simple, and I like the metaphor that it's trying to do. Similarly, being able to touch your selections on the screen feel...