APP OF THE WEEK: SNAPDAT LETS THE BUSINESS CARDS FLY
One of the coolest features of the old Palm organizers was that you could beam business cards to other Palms. The iPhone will soon add a similar feature, but in the meantime there’s SnapDat, a free application that lets iPhone users send virtual business cards to other people.
SnapDat has roughly 40 card designs as templates. Users can maintain any number of designs, making sure there are different cards for different occasions. To send a card to another SnapDat user, simply look up their username on the app. Cards sent between SnapDat members are automatically transcribed into your iPhone’s address book. People who aren’t members can also receive cards, which are e-mailed as a standard vCard attachment.
On the virtual card are one-touch buttons to dial, text or e-mail the person. There is also a link to any Web pages they have specified and a button to map the card’s address. You can mark on a map where you met (“Denver sales conference ’08”), and you can “flip” the card over to make a note on the back. (“Bob likes margaritas, but watch out after his third.”)
COMING TO SAVE THE DAY: A MIGHTY MOUSE, INDEED
Talk about the mouse that roared.
It’s not for the casual gamer — or the casual anyone — but the US$500 SpacePilot Pro, arriving courtesy of the Logitech subsidiary 3Dconnexion, is full of wow for designers and engineers who work in three-dimensional computerized environments.
SpacePilot has a built-in color LCD screen, which can display e-mail, messages and other customizable visual information, but the substance of the mouse is to expedite workflow and navigation through 3-D spaces like Autodesk Inventor, Microsoft Virtual Earth and SolidWorks.
Of course, mouse fans will have to have one, if only to gaze at sexy blue lights and the Darth Vader form factor — the buttons on SpacePilot make BMW’s confusing iDrive simple by comparison. The big knob in the center twirls six ways, and it tilts and rolls as well. In Logitech-speak, the device has “six-degrees-of-freedom sensor technology … by lifting, pressing and turning the controller cap, design engineers can easily pan, zoom and rotate without stopping to select commands.”
It adds up to a virtual nirvana for fingers.
HOW TO CAMOUFLAGE YOUR TWEETING AT THE OFFICE
Twitter fans face a hurdle: Can you use it at work without being caught? A British Web developer, Elliott Kember, has solved the problem with Spreadtweet, an easy-to-use Twitter client that looks like a boring Excel spreadsheet.
Each version of the program displays a fake Excel toolbar atop its window. But those buttons don’t work. The real controls are hiding just below as fake column headers: Home, Replies, Direct Messages, etc. On my Apple desktop, Spreadtweet mimics Excel to the point of placing an Excel icon into my iMac’s Dock, so anyone watching from farther away than a cubicle wall will be fooled.
The very existence of Spreadtweet suggests Twitter is headed for the same workplace showdown as Web browsers in 1993, or Facebook in 2006: Is it better to let employees play a bit with the latest Internet fad, or have early adopters found yet another way to goof off on the job? I think the answer is yes.
CAN’T WAIT FOR 3-D TELEVISION? NEITHER CAN PANASONIC
How important is the development of 3-D television? As far as Panasonic is concerned, it’s critical.
According to Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, Panasonic’s general manager for its Blu-ray Disc Group, 3-D television “could be as significant as the transformation from standard- to high-definition TV.”
If 3-D television takes off, it could fall right into the sweet spot for Panasonic’s products: large plasma displays that have received high marks for their picture quality. TV in 3-D looks best on large screens, and Panasonic thinks the technology could significantly increase sales of its sets, as well as a new generation of 3-D Blu-ray players (current Blu-ray players cannot be used to show 3-D content).
Panasonic has been lobbying hard for the adoption of 3-D TV standards by the end of this year, so that it can get 3-D ready TVs and Blu-ray players into the market by 2010. The company is concerned that if the technology doesn’t become available soon — within a year — the industry will miss an opportunity to sell the next generation of large-screen displays.
How big could the market be? Panasonic thinks 3-D could represent 10 percent of TV industry sales within two to three years.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s