Transmit, my favorite FTP client for OS X, can now connect to Amazon S3 accounts. I never saw this coming but it only makes sense with more and more people using the affordable S3 as a static file host and personal file server. This quite literally makes my day, thank you Cabel and crew. Continue Reading »

I know what you’re thinking. Paul writing about an AOL product is the equivalent of pigs flying or renting a studio in San Francisco for under $1000/month. There are a number of reasons you might not approve of AOL’s tactics but for now I’ll put that behind me and post my thoughts about AOL’s attempt to break their 1990’s stigma with cutting-edge personalized web services, collectively dubbed myAOL. Continue Reading »

Groovr, the twitter-meets-mobile-social-network-ish website I looked at in January, has been overhauled with what I think is a more fitting site design and grokkable information architecture. True to social networks, Groovr lets you upload photos and videos, maintain a profile, have friends in addition to the concept of Shout Outs (think twitters/pownces) and a Groovr-specific feature, Check-ins. Continue Reading »

Minor Studios, an interactive storytelling and design company started by the talented Dave Werner, will definitely be a company to keep an eye on for interesting creations. If you haven’t seen Dave’s portfolio, check it out now - it’s stunning. Minor Studios is backed by Minor Ventures, a venture capital firm Continue Reading »

Y Combinator startup Disqus will soon begin public testing of their interactive blog commenting service. Disqus allows users to make an account to manage their commenting and even create a forum of their own. But the real draw of Disqus is the ability for users to easily utilize the Disqus commenting Continue Reading »

Going a little off-topic today, I’m going to address an issue I deal with daily - public relations people sending me press releases. In general, I appreciate the effort and can often find great things I wouldn’t have found out about until after it was too late or not at all. However, if PR folk followed a few steps that I shall propose below, a considerable amount of time and energy could be spared on both ends. Continue Reading »

Later today Mozilla will do something a bit out of the ordinary and release a special “Campus Edition” of their Firefox web browser, just in time for back to school. Firefox Campus Edition is your typical run-of-the-mill Firefox release bundled with three school friendly add-ons: Zotero, FoxyTunes and StumbleUpon. Continue Reading »

Today IBM announced the launch of a beta test with select partners, clients and vendors for their upcoming BladeCenter S. First announced in late June, the BladeCenter S will be the first desktop blade server system in addition to enhancements such as a wizard-based setup. The beta test announcement confirms that IBM is on-track and moving along with development of the BladeCenter S. But why is this so great? Continue Reading »

Today I’ll be taking a look at Western Digital’s recently upgraded Passport series of portable hard drives; in particular, the 120GB bus-powered Passport. But Paul, didn’t you tell us to avoid generally fragile, death-prone 2.5-inch hard drives in your back to school post? That I did. When it comes to storing your data reliably, Continue Reading »

CNET’s Crave blog beat me to the punch and published a comprehensive article comparing Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, virtualization software for OS X, as well as Boot Camp and plain OS X. As you might expect from reading my VMware Fusion launch post, Fusion performed Continue Reading »

The incredibly popular AIM/Y!/MSN/gTalk/ICQ/Jabber chat web app Meebo is now sporting an iPhone-enhanced interface. Just visit Meebo on your iPhone to start using it. Since Apple’s iPhone doesn’t (yet) ship with an iChat-like application, instant messaging mavens have had to rely on third-party Continue Reading »

We all know that customer service is a pain to deal with in most cases; waiting on hold to speak to someone in a noisy call center, not getting your problem solved and just going in circles. Some companies are better at this than others with online forums and then there are small companies that haven’t even setup any form of customer service yet. Regardless of the situation, Satisfaction aims to heal your customer service woes. Continue Reading »

Take one part die-hard WordPress contributors, combine it with one part up-to-date coding environment and you get Habari. It started less than a year ago with the idea from several WordPress users who wanted more control over what features get put into their blogging platform. The main difference is what’s Continue Reading »

Every year around this time some large gadget or tech website makes a back to school post. Unfortunately, they are under the preposterous assumption that college students can afford very expensive gear. Containing items such as a 55-inch plasma TV, CrunchGear’s Back to School Cheat Sheet published last year was met with mess of comments stating the list was absurd. Continue Reading »

I have recently been keeping revisions of my shoddy coding practices with Subversion, which I ignored until I picked up a “Practical Subversion” book a few weeks ago. Naturally, I figured it only logical to expand this to my own WordPress installation, making WordPress updates as simple as a single SVN command. That’s all kittens and daisies, but for some reason I thought it would be cool to update to trunk Continue Reading »

Earlier in the year I introduced you to Intype, a Windows text editor that looked promising despite being in the alpha stage of development. Six months later Intype is still in alpha and not exactly ready for people to use full-time. Enter e. Continue Reading »

Just as the rumors expected, Apple updated the iMac line with a substantial design refresh - aluminum & glass body, black accents and a slimmer physique. While I appreciate the move from using plastic for the body to aluminum, such as with the MacBook Pro, I’m not Continue Reading »

Daniel Kovach, the guy responsible for The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation from which I received a $1k blogging scholarship last year, is running a web design scholarship contest. If you’re a college student and can design a WordPress template by August 13th 18th (extended), you could have $5,000 taken off your tuition. Continue Reading »

VMware, the creator of native x86 virtualization in the late ’90s, has released their first consumer-directed product for Mac users. VMware Fusion allows OS X users to run virtual machines with support for over 60 Operating Systems. You might be thinking, “well Parallels Desktop does this too, what of it?”. I learned of Fusion’s remarkable features and advantages while Continue Reading »

Fuzzwich is the product of Habit Industries, an early-stage startup backed by Paul Graham’s YCombinator that aims to develop “tools supporting the creation and distribution of animated videos”. Fuzzwich Mini-vids are small and fun animated videos users can create themselves in an interactive interface with a growing archive of objects including music, actors and backgrounds. Continue Reading »

Amazon has been highly-regarded in the developer circles over the past year with solutions that take advantage of Amazon’s scale and pass the savings down to the developer. S3 and EC2 (like S3 but for scalable servers) have been widely adopted by coders for utter reliability, cost and not having Continue Reading »

The Microsoft Office for Mac Team recently announced that their Office suite of productivity apps will be released to manufacturers in December, so you can safely see it in retail locations/online around Macworld time. In other words, damn we gotta wait some more. Although the Mac Mojo blog asserts that the extra time is purely for quality control reasons. Continue Reading »

I was browsing through Jonathan Snook’s blog earlier this morning when I noticed something at the bottom of his posts; a link for users to bookmark his posts on del.icio.us with a count of saves. I love stats and rather than going to sleep I decided to investigate this and roll it out on my blog. Continue Reading »

One year ago today I was up very early in the morning in Sunnyvale, CA helping launch Yahoo!’s now 1 year old corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Yodel Anecdotal is praised for being a real blog into the life and culture of Yahoo! and not just a press release outlet. In addition, Yodel Anecdotal is able to get vital feedback from real users with comments as opposed to Continue Reading »