Jay Hathaway
Seattle - http://jayhathaway.com
Download Squad blogger
Filed under: Fun, Social Software, iPhone
Balloons: launch a balloon from your iPhone, see who finds it
If you ever let a helium balloon float away when you were a kid and wondered where it eventually ended up, you already know what Balloons for the iPhone is all about. This cute little app lets you launch a virtual balloon with a message and a photo attached. Anyone with the app installed call pull down balloons near them -- Balloons uses the iPhone's location services -- and read messages. I grabbed a few balloons to see what it was all about, and it was more addictive than I expected. My first balloon was an ad, launched by some marketer near my city (Boo! Hiss!), but then things started getting interesting. I caught a balloon that had drifted from London to Texas to Arizona, picking up new notes along the way. Balloons reminds me of the message-in-a-bottle feeling of the early days of the Internet -- "Hey, who else is out there?"
I tested the Lite version of Balloons, which is free. There's also a $2.99 version that adds the ability to track your balloons, in case you get really serious. TUAW interviewed the developer at this year's WWDC.
Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging
Twitter plans to cut the noise out of trending topics ... but how?
Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do something to cut down the noise.The precise something that Twitter intends to do isn't really clear. Biz Stone's blog post is full of ambiguous language: "We're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful." It's not clear whether this means manually filtering trends in some way, or whether Twitter is introducing an algorithm to weight tweets by relevance. I think the average Twitter user is less concerned with the technical details, and more concerned with how effective this experiment will be at reducing junk tweets.
[via TechCrunch]
Filed under: Social Software, iPhone
BeeJive iPhone app gets AIM chatroom support, sort of
I once called BeeJive the best chat client for the iPhone, and for good reason: it supports several different chat services, offers push notifications, and has a user interface that makes chatting on the iPhone about as easy as it can feasibly be. BeeJIve just keeps getting better, too. The latest version, 3.1, now supports group chats in AIM ... almost. Group chats are a great feature that I'm sure Beejive will fully implement soon, but I'm not a fan of the way they work now. To start a group chat, just click the plus button and add multiple contacts. So far, so good, but here's where things get sticky: the only option is a private chatroom. You have to invite contacts to allow them in.
There's also no control over the name of the room. It's just Beejive plus a random string. Also, you'll want to turn notifications off if your room is very active, because having your phone beep or buzz for every message in a fast and furious chat is a wee bit obnoxious.
I know these are all minor quibbles, but it would be great to have a separate "start group chat" button, with the ability to create and name a public room. For now, though, I'm not complaining too much when an already-excellent chat client adds a useful feature it didn't have before.
Filed under: Developer, Social Software
Facebook Chat gets XMPP, catches up with AIM, Google Talk and MSN
Facebook Chat has been a bit slow to catch on. Since it's been relegated to being opened from the web in a Facebook Tab, it hasn't been able to compete with chat services that have their own dedicated clients, like AIM, MSN and Yahoo. Although some third-party apps - like Adium - have made the extra effort to support Facebook Chat, it's not widespread. That's about to change, though, when Facebook adopts XMPP and becomes compatible with tons of existing chat apps. XMPP is most famous as the protocol behind Google Talk. That means any chat program that currently includes Google Talk will be able to include Facebook Chat too. Facebook, like Google, is starting out in the chat market with the advantage of huge pre-existing contact lists - for Google, it was your Gmail contacts, and for Facebook it's, well, Facebook. If you've ever wished you could just automatically add all of your Facebook buddies to your favorite IM program, you're in for a treat.
[via GigaOM]
Filed under: OS Updates, Hardware, Apple
Atom support back in Mac OS X, Hackintosh netbooks not dead after all
We recently reported some bad news for Hackintosh enthusiasts: Apple's upcoming OS update, OS X 10.6.2, had removed support for Intel Atom processors. None of Apple's hardware uses Atom, but some of the most popular netbooks do, so that news affected a big chunk of the unauthorized OS X installs out there. With the latest developer build of 10.6.2, though, Apple seems to have flip-flopped and reintroduced Atom support.A couple of possible explanations come to mind: removing Atom support could have been a bug, or it could have been an intentional, yet temporary, measure. On the other hand, maybe flipping the Atom switch back on is temporary. We really don't know, because Apple hasn't commented. The company is notorious for taking measures to keep its OS running exclusive on Macintosh hardware, so this could still go either way. For now, though, enjoy having a netbook with the very latest build of OS X
[via Engadget]
Digg's homepage will display trending stories for user voting
How can a Digg story make the front page without making the front page? Digg is about to show you, by placing some highly-active stories on the homepage for 10 minutes at a time before they have enough diggs to be there. By putting these trending stories up front, Digg intends to have a higher volume of users digg or bury them, as a sort of filter to decide what belongs on that coveted ...Get a Firefox 3.7 feature early with Tab Progress Bar
If you're gung-ho about upcoming versions of Firefox, you can start testing some of their features via add-ons. Firefox 3.7 is slated to introduce a new look for the progress bar, relocating it to the top of each individual tab but you can enable the feature in current versions of the browser right now, with Tab Progress Bar. This neat little add-on won't cost you much disk space, weighing in at ...Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook
You might have seen the various petitions on Facebook to add a "dislike" feature to the site, to complement the "like" option in the News Feed. Well, Facebook hasn't listened. However, if you're a Firefox user, you can add a thumbs-down feature to FB with (what else?) a Facebook Dislike add-on.
It sounds kind of silly to keep track of your own dislikes, but it turns out that the extension ...Voice Mac is a native Google Voice client for OS X
by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009 {1 comments}
We recently told you about an Adobe AIR-based Google Voice client with a pretty small featureset. It puts your SMS and voicemail messages close at hand on your desktop, but that's all it does.
If you're on a Mac, though, you can do a bit better. Voice Mac is a Google Voice client with a threaded SMS view, voicemail downloading, and the ability to make calls and send texts, and Address Book ...Make your Firefox more like Google Chrome with Pin Tabs
One of the slick visual elements of Google's Chrome browser is pin tabs. They're those compact tabs that're only as wide as a favicon, and they save a ton of space in your tab bar. You could point out that Firefox doesn't have this feature, but I'd give you the Firefox fanatic's standard answer: there's an add-on for that! For Chrome-style mini-tabs in Firefox, grab the Pin Tab extension.
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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
