LibArtTech

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...

This past week the tech world has been a-buzz about the new Facebook Home experience. For weeks we've been getting the pre-announcement rumblings... is Facebook launching a new app? A new phone? A bio-implant chip that records every thought you have as a new status update? Well, we finally got the answer, and thankfully they've decided not to enter the cybernetic implant realm... at least not yet. Facebook's new experience is a set of apps for Android phones that transforms your UI into a fully Facebook experience. Your lock screen and home screen get transformed into slick versions of your Facebook news page, combined with your phone's email and messaging. Your messaging gets merged together with Facebook Messenger so that you can ping people on Facebook or SMS through the same app. And, photos from your feed become background images on your home and lock screens, so you can always see the latest drunken stupor your friends are in, without having to log into an app. ...

Sure enough, just a month or so after I posted my thoughts on RSS, Google goes and decides to decommission Google Reader, forcing me to find an alternative. However, I'm not quite ready to give up RSS yet, so after experimenting with Twitter and such. I've jumped shot over to Feedly. It's a good reader, a bit heavier than Google Reader was, but it gets the job done and stays out of the way for the most part. I think the RSS still has a place in our media world today. Or even if RSS as a standard needs to change, the basic paradigm of RSS should remain. The ability to have news articles queued up in a special area, so that you can come back to read them later, is a useful feature. If you step away from things like Twitter you run the risk of missing a great deal of headlines. Social sites like Facebook and G+ often try to "smartly" chose what to show you, which isn't useful either. So having the ability top scan all my headlines, pick which ones I want to rea...

Recently, a tech journalist that I've followed for many years, and who is an Apple fanboy, posted a series talking about why he switched from an iPhone to an Android phone . It's a good read, and worth the time to see why he made the decision he did. Since I have a Verizon Galaxy Nexus sitting on my desk as a Wi-Fi device, I thought, "What the heck, let's give this a go for a week." So for the past week I've shelved my trusty iPhone 5 and have delved deep into the world of stock Android 4.1. So in the spirit of "copying is the sincerest form of flattery" here's my write-up of my experiences with Google's mobile OS. First, I need to make one caveat. After using the Nexus for a week I have to say that I do NOT like this device. It constantly loses 4G signal, and the battery life almost makes it unusable. I could barely make it to lunch before I was at 20-30% battery. So in the spirit of fairness, if I truly wanted to switch full time to Andro...

Back in the "old days", before these new fangled sites like Facebook and Google+, people maintained a social network of blogs. Everyone had their own site, and they would update them with pics, short updates, and yes, fully written blog entries with more than 140 characters. In order to not go crazy checking dozens of links every morning we all needed a way to get notified whenever someone posted something new. The most common tool for this was RSS. Using an RSS reader, you would subscribe to people's blogs, and then you only had to keep your reader tool running to get notifications when something new was posted. Plus, many news sites, both mainstream and tech focused, used RSS to publish their content to the world. I became an RSS junkie and have my Google Reader notifier installed on every device I can. Things change though, and recently as I was perusing my Google Reader list I was reminded about how many sites publish their articles automatically to Twitter, Faceboo...

This past week was a big week for the tech industry, with the holding of the Consumer Electronics Show 2013. Recent years have been a bit 'meh', but this year really had some interesting tech show up. In particular the theme seemed to be changes coming to our living room TV's. Much of what we saw this year revolved around ways to get entertainment to our TV's with set top boxes that tie into other services, or all new TV technology like 4k (Ultra High Defenition). Personally, I'm less excited about UHD, since I just bought a new TV, and am quite happy with it. Plus, I don't think we have the internet bandwidth for UHD content yet. The really cool advances are less technological for me, but structural. One of the things I love about internet delivered entertainment, is the ability to control what you watch a LOT more than the old days of flipping cable channels. I love the idea of discovering a new show, downloading an entire season and devouring it as quickl...

When I began this blog earlier this year, I had obviously hoped to be a bit more regular in my postings, and in the future maybe that will happen. For the time being however, I'll need to be content with a bit less content here. However, I didn't want to end the year without doing a quick tech year in review. 2012 was a very interesting year for technology, and I can say with confidence that I've dubbed this year, "The Year of the Tablet". No single consumer technology has taken the world by storm this past 12 months as the tablet. Although tablets have been around in some shape or fashion for many years, it was when Apple released the iPad in 2010 that things really started to change. Suddenly you had a tremendously usable tablet interface on top of pretty good hardware. It took a couple years for competitors to finally get in to the game seriously, but in 2012 everything exploded. This was helped tremendously by the introduction of the Nexus 7 by Google, openin...