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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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