This conversation transpired between myself and a very good friend just now.

It’s weird enough that I had to sanitize and share it because … well … see for yourself:

(WARNING: extremely geek-oriented material ahead; typos are original to the IM conversation)

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The doorbell has never brought this much joy! I ran downstairs and grabbed it up like my life depended on it. My brand new Kindle Touch!!! I had been waiting for this for weeks!

I haven’t had a lot of playtime since it landed on my doorstep, but I have noticed 2 things thus far:

One: The touch screen isn’t the most sensitive or sensible; I’ve had to touch a few times to get it to respond and a couple of times, it seems as if the gestures had been queued and ended up registering as two gesture instead of one. There is no indication when the display is frozen and waiting to process input.

Two: the on-screen keyboard leaves artifacts once the keyboard goes away. A faint image of the on-screen keyboard remains on screen even after dismissing it. This could be annoying as you get to the bottom of the page while reading.

Other than that – I am as happy as a pig in shit!

Photos follow:

that's going to get annoying

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1. The cloud … and me   I have been bitten by the cloud bug. And...

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This morning, I tweeted: “So takethislollipop.com would have been more impressive if done in HTML5 #BoycottingFlashOnMyMBA” and was accosted by a follower thus: “@fyrfli boycotting flash is like boycotting windows; you love to hate it but its popular because it works.  Boycott  itunes.“.  And it reminded me again how people just love to jump on a band wagon and ride it until its wheels fall off.

There was no discourse on why I chose to boycott flash (“OnMyMBA”, note) and no discussion as to it’s merits or downfalls – just a random attack on my choice to do so. When I subsequently tried to be witty with the well-known mantra “#DareToBeDifferent”, I was again told that it is common place, used, works, known … etc. yet still no asking after my reasons.

I have a long time love-hate relationship with all Adobe products. A lot of it is irrational I will freely admit. I simply have not chosen to educate myself fully on the matter. Frankly, I believe that the larger issue here (the stability of Flash as a platform) is above my pay grade. And this is possibly another irrational judgement call, but there it is.

The fact is that in my experience, Adobe products (Reader, AIR, Flash) have given me more headaches than I care to remember. In fact, just about every single experience I have had with Adobe has been painful and forgettable. But this is my experience … no one else’s. That it coincides with the general view out there of the products is telling. I’ve seen a great number of people lament that Flash could perform better, that it’s implementation is buggy, that it doesn’t play well with others, etc. The problem is that up until now, Flash has been the only option and so people embrace it, love it, defend it and … continue to patronize it.

One of the things that I am telling myself these days is that I need to really live my life out loud and stop being afraid of being decried or debunked. My life is the sum of my experiences – I own them and they have taught me things that I don’t know that anyone else can claim to have learnt. My choices and my opinions are based on my experiences and I make judgement calls based on that and that alone.

I have never been one to conform to the crowd just because everyone else was doing it, or because it’s the one thing that works or because it’s the only known solid solution. Just because everyone is using Flash – to develop or to publish – doesn’t make my choice to NOT install it on my laptop a bad decision. Nor does it make it an uninformed decision. If at any time in the future I find that my daily duties are hampered because I do not have Flash installed, I will certainly swallow hard and do the deed because at the end of the day, my choices are never the kind to “cut off my nose to spite my face”.

Until then I shall continue to #BoycotFlashOnMyMBA because I LOVE how that snappy, happy, speedy feel and would hate to bog it down with more crap than is absolutely necessary.   #JustSayin’

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I have been bitten by the cloud bug.

And no, it has absolutely nothing to do with Apple’s announcement of the upcoming iCloud.

Starting out in the cloud

Working in the cloud started fairly innocuously with ‘trying’ out the new toys on the shelf – apps such as Dropbox and Evernote and Google docs – and at the time, my need for them was minimal. Gradually, I learned that each of these tools presented the perfect opportunity to store (and share) information that I could access elsewhere.

It started with small things like eBooks and photos that I’d either want to share with friends or that I thought I might like to access from elsewhere.

I remember being extremely thankful to myself for putting my resume in the cloud via Dropbox because once when I was offered an on-the-spot job opportunity, I could get into my Dropbox account on a public computer and print it off in a mad minute.

The day the cloud saved my ass

Last year June (2010), the hard drive in my iMac crashed – most unceremoniously. I was in the middle of working at the time and I was devastated because I lost almost all of my email and quite a few documents.

Lost is relative, because I knew I could get it from the Time Capsule backup once I had my hard drive reinstated. The issue was more immediate than recovering data long term. The issue was that I was working and all I had been working on was lost – the rest of my day (and maybe week) was lost because all my stuff was sitting on that bad hard drive.

Luckily, I had a laptop with which I had planned ahead to using as my mobile working platform and with the help of Dropbox and a very supportive boss, I was able to be up and working again in a matter of minutes.

Possibilities in the cloud

It hit me there and then that being able to jump onto any machine and start working was a benefit greatly to be desired. And that Dropbox seemed to be the perfect way to get that benefit.

And so I started investigating being able to sync certain things into my Dropbox folder – mail, application preferences, data files, data stores, etc. There are quite a few applications that natively support the sync’ing to Dropbox – applications such as 1Password – and then there are those that you find forum posts about it being possible to sync them via Dropbox but not supported by the developers.

Let’s just say that I’ve been sync’ing Adium and a few other unsupported apps and their preferences to Dropbox ever since. I just have to remember to logout of them on one machine before I log in on another machine.

The Cloud’s infinitesimal applications

Much, much earlier than the epic hard drive failure of 2010, my husband and I shared calendars via Google Calendar. At work, he would input his schedule into his calendar, and at home I’d see the new schedule popup on my screen.

At the time, I was also working a crazy schedule and I could then put in my hours and schedule and he’d be able to pull that up on his phone or computer and see when I’d be coming home at midnight and when it’d be more like 4pm.

I suggested this idea to one of the organizations I worked with when I managed Site-Reference.com – and they now manage their calendars and schedules in much the same way.

In 2011, I started writing articles for a colleague and found that the best way to share my pieces was through Google Docs. I’d see when she went through them and the changes she made and she could share stuff she wanted me to take a look at or work on.

Now Apple has talked about this iCloud thing … as usual giving the impression that they were the first EVER to introduce this heady concept. While I acknowledge that .Mac (aka iTools and MobileMe) was quite possibly one of the first individual consumer based cloud computing service, I can’t say that Apple can lay claim to inventing the concept. ^[1]

The future of me in the cloud

I’ve always been a fan of Google Mail – from the day it came out, I benched all my other mail solutions in favor of Google Mail and I haven’t looked back. Most of you know me as using fyrfli at gmail dot com for years.

Well, I’ve made the leap to Google Apps having discovered that it is free to small organizations of less than 10 persons. And since my little domain name and budding company is still only me, it is very worth it. And so, I shifted my ‘business’ into the cloud.

As for what business fyrfli.net will be getting into …. you’ll just have stay tuned to find out.

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I had a chance to fool around with a Blackberry Playbook and a Samsung Galaxy Tab last week when the hubby and I were out and about. We were actually looking for a new computer chair for him; and ended up with one for me too I might add. I protested, but he insisted. <3

I had told him that I saw quite a nice layout at OfficeMax and OfficeDepot, but that I had preferred how OfficeMax displayed them. So we went to OfficeMax – and they had both tablets on display. We were waiting around for them to find our chairs in back, and I decided to play around with them a little bit – at least as long as I felt was decent without looking like I was trying to learn about every nook and cranny.

I have an iPad because I didn’t want to wait for the iPad2. I assumed (and rightly so) that the iPad2 had nothing over and above the 1 that I needed. So this “review” is going to be heavily subjective.

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The Playbook

The rep who showed me the Playbook said while she was sure it wasn’t anywhere near the iPad in sophistication or reputation, the Playbook was one of her favourites.  It looks quite sleek. Smaller in size and lighter in weight than the iPad. The weight is a definite plus – the size is a bit much to get used to, though.  Of course, if you’ve had no experience with any tablets before, then you probably wouldn’t notice the differences as much as I did.

It is extremely light. It was tethered to the display case, so I couldn’t move around with it too much but it seemed manageable enough for one of my small hands.

I found it to be satisfyingly fast – I didn’t wait too much for a response from my swipes. However, I did spend a few minutes swiping and looking for a home button to click. It’s a good thing the rep was nearby because I would probably be there a lot longer trying to figure that part out. I am going to make a big leap here and assume that the Blackberry touch devices have the same interface. I’d like some feedback from someone who knows about this though – so please feel free to hit me up in the comments.

It’s a nice little tablet, but if you’re moving from the Android or iOS interface to the Playbook, you will find yourself swiping around trying to figure out the swipe directions and their meanings. If you are new to tablets, you’ll be fine. Just don’t try to get on an Android or iOS device too soon afterwards, though, because you will be in a similar situation to me, but from the opposite end of the camp.

The Galaxy Tab

I had to take a look because this one was actually labelled as the iPad killer at one time … which considering everything is a little ambitious. It’s Samsung’s first tablet and I can’t imagine that they would get everything right first try.

As with the Playbook, it is quite small and extremely light. I can hold it in one hand without too much effort. It is Android, so for those of you who have played with Android before now, nothing I say about the OS or its interface will be much of a surprise.

I tend to lean towards the Galaxy because of my own familiarity with the interface as it is extremely similar to iOS.

In terms of it’s responsiveness – it’s fairly fast. It could have been my imagination, but I think the Playbook was faster. While the rep and I talked over it (he is an Android man all the way, incidentally), I forked out my iPhone and we compared screen resolution and clarity, and from a layman’s perspective, while it isn’t at iPhone4 level, it really is quite good.

What’s my take on the 3 tablets?

I had always promised myself that my first tablet would be an Android one – I had even gone so far as to say that I’d probably wait for Google’s Chrome OS tablet. However, Google, as usual, is late getting to the point everyone else is already at and I didn’t feel confident in anybody else’s offerings at the time. The iPad size suits me and while the weight is horrendous and the fact that it has no ability to manage files the way we are all used to (directly from an explorer or finder point of view), and has a few more quirks that are annoying … I am quite satisfied with it.

Would I consider buying a Playbook? Probably not – and the only reason is because I am so used to a particular kind of interface – thanks to iOS and the iTouch that I had first, followed by an iPhone3, iPhone4 and now an iPad. If it weren’t for that, I might consider it a real option; despite the screen size.

Would I consider a Galaxy tab? Hell yea! They’d just have to make that screen a little larger and it would be pretty hard for me to resist selling the iPad and getting a Galaxy tab instead.

To both their credits, Samsung and RIM equipped their tablets with a camera first time out. I think Apple missed the boat on that one with their first iPad. And while I don’t personally need a camera on my iPad, I can see that would have been an even bigger selling point for Apple (debatable whether the iPad needs a bigger selling point, actually) had they been less dense about it.

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