As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying out this new “digital admin assistant” service called Sandy. Every day I receive a “daily digest” email of items I need to take care of that day. I haven’t had anything for a couple of days – so this is what came in my “daily digest” this morning:
Nothing’s scheduled for today!
It’s been a couple of days without anything to include in your daily digest. Rather than continuing to send you an empty digest every day, I’m going to hold off until there’s something on your calendar, in your to-do list, or otherwise appropriate to send on.
If you’re having any trouble, are confused, or just need a little guidance on how to work with me on a daily basis, try leafing through my guide at http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide or send email to my helpers at help@iwantsandy.com — they’d be glad to help you out!
Have a good day!
Sandy
Just like a highly efficient human admin assistant would do. This is great! I fully expected to mechanically receive empty notifications every day I had nothing. By exceeding my expectations, and acting as close to a flesh-and-blood admin assistant as possible, the service significantly increases my productivity, and is a pleasure to use.
For awhile now I’ve talked about WAX – web application exchange. A number of people took this to mean thick-client, or desktop, apps that integrate with an Internet-based service.
That’s not exactly it – I recently signed up for a service called Sandy. This fairly amazing online service allows you to send yourself reminders to do things – to keep yourself organized. It’s pretty slick.
But the thing that really makes it go is the integration. Sandy speaks SMS, email, Twitter, Jott. There’s so many different ways to get those reminders in and out. Reminders to do things at specific times come with .ics (iCalendar) files so I can add them to my calendar.
Set up is a breeze – each means of communication is verified by Sandy sending a message containing a special code that you enter back at the Sandy application. Successful entry of the code activates that means of communication.
(Honestly I probably have too many channels turned on at once. A single reminder is now going to come at me as an email, an SMS message, and a Tweet. Its going to drive me crazy.)
All of this integration allows me to leverage all of the other tools that I already use. This is extremely powerful. Now instead of relying on one application to do it all (badly), application developers can concentrate on the things they do best, and work with each other to deliver a value to the user that is greater than the some of its parts. Because of the Web Application Exchange. WAX.
This is something to pay very close attention to, and to understand how it follows a well-established pattern in technology. As a technology matures, it moves from tightly integrated proprietary generalists (building, for example, yet another social network from scratch) to focussed application developers that add their own core value to an already existing infrastructure.
The phone is a Phillips VOIP 841. It feels nice and compact for a home phone. The base system is the base station, a small black box, which plugs into your router, and a handset. I purchased the base system, plus an additional handset. I paid $149.99 for the base unit and the first handset, and an additional $92.84 for the additional handset.
Setup is simple: the first handset comes pre-registered with the base station, but the second handset I had to register manually. Registration essentially consists of following the instructions on the handset, and pressing the big button on the top of the base station.
The phones are fully functioning Skype clients. When you start it up for the first time, it offers you the choice of either logging into an existing Skype account, or creating a new one. I logged into an existing account, and that was pretty much the end of set up.
The system is actually designed to work with both a skype account and a regular old analog phone line simultaneously. Why you would want to keep the analog line once you set this up is beyond me, but there it is.
Making a phone call is essentially dialing a number and pressing “Go”. (The phone dials like a cell phone – there’s no dial tone). When you do this it will ask you whether you want to place the call via Skype Out or the analog line, and thats it.
Have a look at my previous post for the whole set up – you need Skype Out or Skype Unlimited to place calls via Skype to an analog line.
Additionally, like any other Skype client, you can place calls to Skype accounts – no Skype Out required. One of the soft keys on the front of the phone defaults to “contacts” – which gets you to the list of Skype contacts for that account.
Some things that are cool:
- The handsets have a cradle for recharging, and the cradles have a power cord. Other than that, however, there’s no cable from the handsets. That makes it really easy to place them wherever you want throughout your house or apartment without needing to think about running phone cable.
- There’s no reason you can’t have the phones and a Skype software client running on your computer use the same account. That means if you’re away from home, you can pick up your calls as normal – through your computer. No need to forward your calls – just take them with you!
So, eternally frustrated by mediocre to terrible phone service, I’ve long been looking for a way to use Skype for my home phone service. Unfortunately up until recently, all Skype phones required the use of an attached computer, making the whole concept way to geeky to be feasible.
However, at some recent point, Philips came out with a snazzy phone that acts as a Skype client with no computer necessary. You get this little black box that you plug into your router, and the associated handsets register with the box. The whole thing signs up with your Skype account, and bam: you have a working Skype phone.
I’ve signed up with two Skype services to complete the picture – SkypeIn, which gets me a telephone number that people can call from their last-century phone system, and Skype Unlimited, which gets me the ability to place unlimited local or long distance calls to anywhere in North America.
My phone bill for the next year will total about $90. I am stoked. Every time I make a call I feel like I’m getting to stick it to the man.
I’ll continue to report here as I settle into the service, warts and all.
So I’ve had a day to digest the FOWD conference (the speakers) on Wednesday here in New York. The quality of the speakers was pretty good overall, although there was some yawn-inducers.
So, due to my extreme lazyness, instead of comprehensively reviewing the day (you can get my incomprehensible coverage from my twitter feed. I thought I would hand out some awards for moments during the day.
Best Slide: “Why are email campaigns like gay porn?” - Matthew Patterson (Campaign Monitor)
Most obsequious presentation: Microsoft keeps showing up in the weirdest places. Linux conventions, design conferences. They were here, as a sponsor, and had almost nothing to say. The poor guy on stage was a “User Experience Evangelist” within Microsoft. Can you imagine that job? Running around, trying to tell people – “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t pop up the same security warning over and over without giving people a ‘remember my decision’ option. Maybe the talking paper clip isn’t a great idea…” I just felt bad for him.
Most like the Comedy Channel: Joshua Davis. It was obvious why they picked him to open, the guy knows how to work a crowd. He’s an artist that uses algorithms to generate amazing randomized pieces from human-created input patterns.
Most overdue presentation: Elliot Jay Stocks, kicking off the Web 2.0 design aesthetic backlash (big fonts, bevelled curves, reflective logos). He established the rule: unless your name actually has the word “reflect” in it, you can’t use a reflective logo. Don’t be sheep!
Most notable presentation of information designers are supposed to know anyway: Ryan Singer of 37 Signals. Find out the most important stuff on the screen, use contrast for emphasis, make decisions…don’t they teach you this stuff in school?
Some time in the last 12 hours or so this went live.
OpenSocial is a common API for writing social networking apps. Its being embraced by practically every single social networking site out there, with the notable exception of FaceBook. Basically the promise of this is that an application developer can write an application against one API and then deploy it in any of the compliant social networks.
FaceBook, as the current king, has the least incentive to adopt the open standard. In fact the OpenSocial API can be seen as a check to FaceBook. Its simple to understand really, in place of “Facebook” use the word “Microsoft Windows” and in place of “OpenSocial”, use “Java”. The FaceBook strategy is to add value to their platform by harnessing third party developers to write to their proprietary API. OpenSocial is a counter-strategy to that, by making a universal API that is supported by all social networking sites.
The potential fallout from a successful deployment of OpenSocial is the movement of value in the supply chain away from the social network, and towards the applications. When an app can be deployed on any social network, it doesn’t matter so much which network someone is on.
The natural response to this would be for various social networks to “embrace and extend” the OpenSocial API, to try and create lock-in for their own platforms. In the past Java had several legal protections in place to prevent this (not that Microsoft didn’t try anyway). JavaScript, with none of the legal protections of Java, was forked mercilously, creating a difficult programming environment for JS developers that persists to this day.
Historically, Java failed at driving a wedge between Windows and application developers. It remains to be seen whether the social networking application community will standardize on FaceBook, OpenSocial, or something else.
All the tech buzz this week has been around the latest release of Apple’s operating system: Mac OS X Leopard. However, in the previous release (Tiger), a new technology called Core Image was introduced, which is only now starting to bear fruit. Using Core Image, at least three low-cost image manipulation programs have sprung up, namely Pixelmator, Acorn and DrawIt.
Core Image does a lot of image manipulation heavy lifting that has previously only been associated with applications like Adobe Photoshop. Presumably if Apple wanted to compete in this space they could have released an application, but instead they chose to do something far more clever.
By taking the hard parts of graphics programming and wrapping it up into an easy-to-use library Apple is playing a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy against Adobe. Now any reasonably talented Mac developer can come a long and lay down some low-end disruption on Photoshop Elements. And Apple can always claim: “Hey – we’re not competing against you!”
This is a platform play. Platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, Facebook) enable application developers to do cool stuff without having to roll everything on their own. As the platform developer, the third party application developers add value to the platform, locking the end users into it. The application developers benefit, but the platform developer benefits a lot.
