Category: software

  • Looking for the best Google Reader replacement, don’t forget the plumbing

    Google is shutting down Google Reader, its RSS feed collector, in July. Google’s bare bones reader web site was never the greatest way to actually read your RSS feeds, automatically updated collections of all your blog post subscriptions. There were plenty of alternatives for that function — I was using Reeder on my iPad and…

  • The iPhone has lost its lead and needs a rethink, not a retread

    “iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,” Steve Jobs, Jan 9, 2007 Introducing the iPhone From the first version of the iPhone through at least a couple of revisions of its hardware and software, the thing stood so far ahead of any other phone…

  • Simplification disaster: The Case of Shafer v Civilization

    How does it happen that a shining success fades into failure, that a popular series falls out of favor, that a great product line drops off into obscurity? Those are the questions I’ve pondered for the past few years after my favorite video game series, Sid Meier’s Civilization, went completely off the rails at version…

  • Yikes, Microsoft’s Time Machine clone leaves out tons of important stuff

    (Updated to include a way to unhide files and add them to a “library” for backup) Basically, this post is a warning to anyone using the new File History backup program in Windows 8. The program is severely limited because it will only back up files in a few preset locations that can’t be expanded.…

  • I know Apple, Apple is a friend of mine. Lenovo, you’re no Apple

    Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing made an interest declaration the other day. He’s going to split their PC business into two units, one that does basic stuff aimed at consumers and businesses and another one that will get the Thinkpad brand and shoot for the higher end. The “Think” brand is needed to better compete with Apple, he said.…

  • Fail Fail Fail iPad

    “If the heap of new products that Microsoft showed here Sunday is any indication of the future of computing, the desktop PC is old news,” or so read the lead story from the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Yeah, desktop sales are tanking. Tablet sales are exploding. Yeah, desktops are old news, right…

  • iPad, Nexus, Kindle Fire – which tablet should I buy?

    What a crazy time to be shopping for a tablet computer. There are so many, many choices. Which tablet should you buy? I have some advice — and please give me your intelligent feedback in the comments section below — on the biggest sellers, all of which I have personally used: Apple’s iPad line, Google’s…

  • Best apps for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets

    Looking for the best apps for your new Kindle Fire HD tablet? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t give you easy access to the Google Android app store with its hundreds of thousands of offerings. Instead, you get just what is in Amazon’s much more limited store, missing plenty of good stuff especially Google’s own apps. But there…

  • Amazon is discounting ebooks, whenever it’s allowed to, unlike Apple

    Some really silly journalism covering the ebook marketplace today. It starts with this really bad, no good article in the New York Times by David Streitfeld. The headline gets off to a completely wrong start — “Little Sign of predicted E-Book Price War” — and it goes down hill from there, as Streitfeld asserts there…

  • Online storage prices come down slowly — Apple still the max

    Drastic price cutting has hit the online storage space, or so you may read. But, unfortunately, most of the price cutting is for big time corporate users not us little guys. Well, that’s not completely true. There have been some serious price cuts on online storage for us ordinary users since I last wrote about…