Common Paradox Tech Blog

The WSJ’s glance at tech companies going more vertical mostly focuses on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun to produce both hardware and software, but it has other bits, like Apple purchasing chip designer PA Semi, that make it worth reading. [WSJ]

Just last month, Mozilla announced it would keep its Thunderbird 3.0 email client in Alpha form because "calling something a beta is likely to trigger a bunch of extra press attention we’re not yet in a position to deal with." Well, Mozilla’s now ready and has pushed its email client into Release Candidate status.

The RC is a public preview and intended for developer testing and community feedback, Mozilla says. Mozilla added that it’s looking specifically for feedback on the client’s new search tools, tabbed email, message archiving, new mail account setup wizard, and improvements for developers.

There are quite a few changes Mozilla made to the new email client, all of which are outlined in the Release Notes here. Be sure to give it a glance before grabbing the download here.

Image Credit: Mozilla

If you’re a Firefox user, you may already be familiar with Greasemonkey, an extension that allows users to create scripts that change the display or behavior of web pages. Greasemonkey scripts can come in extremely handy for various purposes, and Leonard Lin has come up with one that adds utility to the default Twitter display for the new retweet function.

The user script, which you can download and install here, modifies the avatar display in your Twitter.com timeline to include both the person you’re following’s avatar along with the avatar of the Twitter user they retweeted. The two avatar display makes it more clear at a glance both that the item is a retweet and which of your followers it came from.

Here’s how the display appears after you install the script. It attempts to solve the issue mentioned by a number of folks who have felt that seeing an unfollowed user’s avatar suddenly appear in their timeline can be somewhat jarring. Although people who primarily use clients to access Twitter won’t be able to get much benefit out of this script, those that have occasion to visit the actual Twitter.com site and who might take delight in customizing the new retweet experience might find this script just the ticket.

What do you think, is the script an improvement over the default retweet display?

[via Waxy]

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: avatars, Firefox, greasemonkey, retweet, scripts, twitter, user scripts

Google Calendar is testing out a new feature that should make scheduling events a tad easier than it used to be by allowing you to see at a glance if the event you’re creating will conflict with the schedules of the people you’re inviting. Dubbed “Sneak Preview”, the feature’s name is perhaps more exciting than its actual function, but it should prove to be quite useful. The feature is apparently in a limited rollout right now, so don’t be surprised if you don’t have access to it.

Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

It’s a big night for Bump Technologies, the mobile software startup that recently landed a round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company makes mobile apps that let users share their contact information (and other data) simply by tapping their phones together. Up until now the app has been available for the iPhone only, where it’s developed quite a following, and tonight it’s launching on Android as well. The iPhone is getting some love too, as Bump’s 1.2 update was just approved by Apple (you can grab it here).

The updated iPhone app includes a ‘Friend Compare’ feature that looks at the address book and Facebook profiles of you and the person you’re bumping with to see if you have any mutual friends, which can be a good way to break the ice if you’re meeting someone for the first time.

For years the humble all-in-one printer has been a simple tool for getting your documents onto (and off) paper. But while it’s great to have a machine that can reproduce your files, spreadsheets and photos, what you really need is a printer such as the Lexmark Interact S605 that can show you the news headlines from MSN. Or so Lexmark believes.

Three of its new range of all-in-one printers come complete with touchscreens. There’s nothing too remarkable in that, as HP and Epson have made all-in-ones with touchscreens for a couple of years.

Lexmark has tried to add extra value to the touchscreen proposition by using some innovative firmware and taking more than a glance at what Apple has done with the technology.

The touchscreens, which are available on two of the new range of Professional all-in-one series and the Interact S605 from the Home Office range, give the units a very clean, no-nonsense look. There’s now just one physical button on each of their control panels, and that’s for power.

All the other functions are devolved to the touchscreen or a number of single-function buttons ranged around it. The function controls only illuminate when their functions are valid, so the control panels look very sparse.

When powered up, the screens show three main icons – Copy, Scan and SmartSolutions. The touchscreens are capacitative, so are reasonably responsive to the touch. They also support multitouch gestures, such as a flick to move left and right from screen to screen.

The Interact is a well-specified all-in-one that boasts a large-swathe print head and separate ink cartridges. Vizix improves print quality considerably, so now text print is closer to Canon and HP output and photos are a lot better.

There’s no automatic document feeder on this machine, sadly, and it still sports the slightly cumbersome feed tray featured on other models.

Print speeds have been improved, though, and duplex print is much quicker than on equivalent Canon all-in-ones. A memory card socket takes SD, MemoryStick and xD cards, the PictBridge socket doubles for USB drives and wireless networking is incorporated.

Print costs are on a par with the machine’s main rivals, so the premium cost of the touchscreen is the only real blot on the Interact’s otherwise highly competent page.

Getting smart

The key to the versatility of Lexmark’s new screens is the support provided by its SmartSolutions tools. These are effectively mini printer apps that can be downloaded from Lexmark’s SmartSolutions site and added to the range of functions available on any of the devices that support them.

At the moment there are 14 of these. You could argue that some of them, such as the single-touch copy function, should be standard on a machine like this anyway. Some of the others, though, show the scope for innovation that this flexible approach provides.

There are three different photo viewers, for example, including a way to get to your Picasa folder and display any albums of photos you’ve uploaded there. While these viewers could be quite handy, it would be more useful to be able to get at the photos from your Pictures folder on a network-connected PC.

Most of the current SmartSolutions rely on RSS feeds. One of them uses an MSN feed to display headlines on the screen. There’s no BBC feed as yet, but there’s nothing to stop a suitable app being added.

All the tools currently available are written by Lexmark and there have obviously been some time and cost restraints, as they’re all pretty simple. If the idea takes off, though, there’s no reason why information and service providers couldn’t write their own.

So is it just a gimmick to sell more printers? Well, touchscreens are so popular that many new phones, PDAs and netbooks now feature them. With Windows 7 including direct support, this trend is likely to continue.

There’s a price premium to pay, though, with a touchscreen all-in-one device costing around £70 more than a similar machine with physical controls. If Lexmark can attract third parties to write useful SmartSolutions, then it could just make the premium worthwhile.

We’ll wait and see, but there’s no doubt it’s certainly one of the most interesting innovations in printer control for many years.

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It’s an interesting question to consider, especially if you use consider just how many Google services you might use: Gmail, Reader, Maps, GTalk, YouTube, Latitude, Calendar, Contacts and oh yeah, Search. Dashboard shows you everything Google knows about you.

It shows your most recent searches, last conversations in Google Talk, most recent location—basically, it summarizes all of the info you have poured into every Google service you use, so you can see it at glance. It’s kind of starting, actually. From the Dashboard, you can drill down into every app to look at the info more closely or adjust privacy settings, which you certainly might feel inclined to do. Or it might make you want to unplug from the internet entirely. [Google via Lifehacker]

I have a month-old computer with a 64GB Falcon SSD for my OS and my most frequently played games. After I first installed the OS and all my games I had roughly 13GB of free space. Everything I’ve downloaded and installed since then has gone on my secondary drive; I have not added anything new to the primary drive. Despite this, I now have just 137MB free on my primary drive and am getting warnings of low disk space. Where is my available space going? I did a disk clean-up and that hardly freed any space. I’m running 64-bit Vista SP1. Any help would
be appreciated.

Without knowing more about the programs you’re installing (for example, Adobe Creative Suite 3 requires substantial C: drive space even if you’re installing it on a different drive), it’s hard for us to give useful advice. Our gut says to check your Documents folder. By default, Vista stores saved games and other application data in your Documents folder on the C: drive; you might be filling up with game data or even temporarily stored Internet files. We suggest downloading and installing a visual data manager like WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info) or SpaceSniffer (http://bit.ly/ssniff), which will show you exactly which files are taking up all of your space. You can then move them to your secondary drive or delete them at your leisure.

Graphical drive-space utilities like WinDirStat (shown) and SpaceSniffer let you see at a glance exactly which files are taking up precious hard disk space.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

If you’re not familiar with Metacritic, it’s a fantastic web resource which collects music, movie and gaming reviews from all over the web and calculates a median “score” for each title, giving you a quick overview of what’s good.

Now, TwitCritics aims to do the same with Twitter “reviews”, piling up positive and negative tweets about movies and creating a score and a top list of the most popular movies currently playing.

The idea is certainly not new; we’ve seen FlixPulse do pretty much the same thing before, but that site hasn’t been updated in a while. But we like it: it’s definitely an easy way to check out the pulse of the Twitter community with one glance.

Ideas are one thing, however, execution is another. TwitCritics probably parses tweets for certain keywords to determine whether a tweet is positive or negative, but it’s often wrong. For example, this tweet was flagged as negative: “ajawest: where the wild things are was spectacular. the soundtrack was perfect, and therefore must be shared: http://wearenowfloatinginspace.com.” Yes, the users have the option to fix wrong calls made by the algorithm, but we’ve found too many mistakes to call it reliable.

One also has to wonder whether tweets have enough information to be dubbed positive or negative. If someone says a movie was “scary”, is that a positive or a negative review? From what we’ve seen, TwitCritics is not really sure, and, frankly, neither are we.

If TwitCritics manages to tweak its algorithm to be a bit more accurate, and perhaps improves the (currently very spartan looking) visual aspect of the site, it might be a nice resource. Until then, take its scores with a grain of salt.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: reviews, TwitCritics, twitter

We’ve seen plenty of sites emerge over the last few years that are built around helping users share media: Facebook is the largest photo sharing site on the planet, but there’s also media-centric sites like Flickr that have devoted followings. rrripple is the latest to joint the fray, and it’s doing it with a unique UI that’s optomized for both mouse/keyboard and touchscreen interaction. The company was part of this year’s TechCrunch50 demopit, where it launched its public beta.

The site has a slick and fairly unique design: everything is organized on a timeline, with an album for each day represented as a vertical column running up the screen. Each column is filled with thumbnails representing the photos taken on that day, which makes it easy to tell at a glance which album you want to jump to. Once you’ve chosen an album, you can hone in on the type of media you’d like to look at from that day, be it photos, videos, notes, links, or files.