June 27th, 2012
I linked to this a few days ago on Twitter. You do follow me on Twitter, right? Satellite Eyes by Tom Taylor is a nifty little utility that uses your Mac’s current location to create a Desktop Background image based on the map of your area. There are a few preferences to make it all your own.
Being that I travel about 360 miles per week right now I’m loving it.
May 21st, 2012
Like Mahdi Yusuf’s month-long foray using DuckDuckGo Farhad Manjoo spends a week with Bing. His first impressions were good:
The new Bing is like the old Google—your results are presented on a clean, uncluttered page consisting of a lot of links and a few unobtrusive ads.
But, like so many others, he realized how trapped in Google’s products he’d become:
The most striking thing about switching to Bing was how enmeshed I remained in the Google universe. During my week with Bing, I found myself reaching for lots of Google products beyond its Web search engine—Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Books, Google Scholar, Chrome, Picasa, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
A few things strike me about these attempts to switch away from Google. First, good on Google for realizing that search wasn’t enough to “keep” people around. Manjoo himself said it was extremely simple to switch from one search engine to the next. Google building other applications, that you can use for free, really does mean you’re more likely to stick with Google search. Second, is that I think it stinks that when something is made well that the proceeding versions of it must get more and more obtrusive for it to be lucrative.
Google’s search results have gotten better and better and better over the last decade plus. But arguably the way they display those results has, in some ways, gotten worse.
July 20th, 2009
Roz Savage, the Ocean Rower I linked to the other day, recently mentioned that she was a feature on Bing.com’s home page. Since I’m a few days behind on reading her posts she was no longer featured on the home page by the time I got there.
I noticed that Bing.com’s home page features have little arrows in the bottom right where you can, or seemingly can, go back and see past home page features. There’s just one thing – when you try to go back to previous home page features you get this message.
Essentially: You need to install Microsoft Silverlight – which is Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash – in order to see the home page archive.
No thanks Microsoft. Although I’d love to page through Bing’s home page features I’d rather not install Silverlight. I’m not sure why I can see the current home page feature without it installed – but I’ll chalk it up to the developers of Bing being pigeon-holed into using Silverlight instead of JavaScript and/or Flash to create the home page archive.
My suggestion: Go with JavaScript so that everyone can see the home page archive and there is no real competition argument to be had.