Pure Web 2.0 – Music Collaboration

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

image

Via one of my musicial heroes,  Thomas Dolby, here’s a great example of how Web 2.0 really works—for musicians.

A very timely piece of software has become available for me to use on my album. It’s called Virtual Glass and it’s a plug-in you download from a web site/service called eSession.com.

The subscription-based eSession site handles all administrative aspects of auditioning, negotiating with, and recording with, a huge number of top professional musicians, all without leaving the comfort of your own home studio (or in my case, DIScomfort as it’s not finished yet!)

It ticks all the Web 2.0 boxes—free for basic services, allows users to find other like-minded users, and enables them to collaborate together online. In fact, I can’t really think of a purer encapsulation of the Web 2.0 vision.

Here’s how Dolby describes using it:

[I]t enables me to do a recording session with, let’s say Kevin Armstrong, who lives in London which is several hours away from me. Kevin has his own studio and uses the same software as me. So we can connect, open the same song, and Kevin can overdub guitar parts. We can discuss them, agree on retakes and so on, while hearing each other in real time. His face and/or his studio appear in a video window on my screen, and we have a ‘talkback’ system. The experience is actually not very different from me being in the control room and Kevin out in a booth. I can hear a low-res version of his part, then once it’s done he just drops the new recording into a bin online, and I update it on my end in hi-res. The software can keep track of the time we spend and even issue an invoice based on a pre-agreed fee.

Then let’s say I really need someone to play a jaw’s harp. I do a search for that keyword in the eSession talent profiles, and find out that Tony Levin as well as being a killer bassist is an ace jaw’s harpist (?!) and right now he’s got a mid-tour day off and he’s sitting in a hotel room in Nashville, Tenessee. I approach him and fix the fee. We can work together using Virtual Glass in real time over ADSL, or he can just work on it in his own time and send me a few takes to peruse offline.

Thomas Dolby’s Blog » Blog Archive » eSession rocks

How to Manage Your Nokia Phone

By | September 3, 2008
0 Comment

image

Nokia has finally woken up to the potential of connecting its phones to a computer. Although you could do it before, Nokia has launched a new version of its PC Suite, that makes some great strides in allowing you to use the computer to manage and monitor your cellphone.

The vision is a simple, and yet elusive, one. We work on our computers when we’re stationary. And on our phone when we’re mobile. But as far as we’re concerned we’re still doing the same thing: working. We can synchronize our data between those two devices, but operating both in real time is more problematic: there are tools to allow us to access our computer data from a phone, but sending and receiving SMS messages, for example, is still considered a phone activity, not a computer one.

It’s a technical barrier, not a lifestyle one. And here’s how to bridge it.

Your Nokia phone should have come with a cable. You’ll need that, and you’ll need the latest version of the PC Suite (this works only with Windows, unfortunately), which you can get from here  (http://is.gd/2aiL). 

Install the software, and then follow the instructions for connecting phone to computer.

When the two devices are connected, a list of options will appear on your phone. Select PC Suite.

Click on the Click here to connect a phone and follow the instructions:

Capture_473

The new bit with this version of the software is the smoother and more thorough handling of contacts and SMS messages. To try this out, click on the envelope icon and you’ll see a list of messages from your phone:

Capture_474

This effectively gives you full access to all the messages and contacts on your phone, and also allows you to send and reply to messages straight from your phone, but without the fiddly screen.

Clicking on the Contacts button on the left hand bottom corner of the program window lets you edit, add, and delete entries from your phone:

Capture_475

This is not perfect. I noticed I couldn’t always delete text from a field, and don’t expect the software to automatically notify you of incoming messages.

But it’s a start, and another good reason to buy Nokia phones.

Another tip: If you’ve got Bluetooth on your computer, configure your PC and phone so they talk to each other. That way you don’t need to carry the cable around with you.

This is the closest I’ve seen to making the phone an appendage to your computer, where it seamlessly integrates in terms of data and functionality. Some steps to go, but kudos to Nokia for pushing the envelope. Hopefully soon enough we won’t notice or care what medium—SMS, email, chat–we’re using, because it will all be one simple interface. That day just came closer.

©Loose Wire Pte Ltd.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a Singapore-based commentator on technology. His guide to using computers, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

When the Browser Grows Up

By | September 3, 2008
0 Comment

Google this week (eds: Tuesday 3/9/08) launched its own browser. Here Jeremy analyses its significance for the general user.

By Jeremy Wagstaff

Geeks have gotten very excited about the launch of Google’s own browser, called Chrome. But what does it mean for us ordinary mortals?

Well, in the short term, not very much. But further down the track, you can expect all sorts of things to happen that will blur the distinction between what is on your computer and what is on the Internet. This—overall—will be a good thing, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. But it may also get a bit messy.

Google have kept very quiet about this particular product, despite the fact they’ve been working on it for at least a couple of years. Surprisingly, they managed to keep it more or less under wraps until it was launched. They needed to: By launching their own browser they’re prodding the beast that is Microsoft. Expect open war to follow.

It’s not as if Microsoft still dominate the browser world. Well, they do, in the sense that most people who use Windows don’t bother to use anything other than the browser that comes with it, Internet Explorer. Indeed, a lot of users can’t: At the university where I teach even the teachers can’t download or install anything, so switching to other browsers is not an option for most people.

But there are plenty of better browsers out there: A Swedish company called Opera has been plugging away at its own browser, and, at least until a few years back, has introduced lots of cool new features that have gradually made their way into Internet Explorer (tabs, for example, where you can have more than one window open inside the same program.) And then there’s Firefox, an Open Source descendant of Netscape Navigator, which ruled the roost in the mid- to late 1990s until Microsoft crushed it like a bug. (Oh and Apple have their Safari, which also works on Windows, and is sleek and fast.)

Firefox has made some serious inroads into Microsoft’s market share, partly by harnessing the hard work and great ideas of volunteers, who push the edges of what is possible by developing extra bits called extensions that users can bolt on to the browser to increase its potential. These could be as simple as swishing your mouse to move back pages, to as fancy as using Firefox as a drawing and painting program.

Firefox, or the company behind it, makes its money by renting out to Google its search box—the little window in the top right of the screen—so that the default search engine points to its servers. This helped Firefox and made sense for Google, directing lots of traffic to them, and allowing them to build a close relationship with Firefox developers.

But now the search engine giant has realised this doesn’t go far enough. You see, Google isn’t just about search. It’s not just about entering a few words in a box and hitting Enter. It’s about accessing information. If you take that definition broadly enough, you can see that Google wants to place itself right in the middle of pretty much everything you do. Whether you’re working on a document with colleagues, trying to find a restaurant in Banglampoo, or setting up a corporate web site, you’re handling information. And if you’re doing it with Google, then you’re sitting just where they want you to be to take their ads.

Seen like that, it’s a natural next step to try to move into browsers. The browser—as revealed by its name—was once a fairly passive beast, designed for surfing and reading stuff. Now we spend as much time typing into our browser—email, blog posts, documents—as we do watching or reading stuff. We’re used to every web site we visit giving us the opportunity to comment or contribute. The browser is no longer a browser but—horrible word coming up—an interface.

Now, with a bit of tweaking, we can do all sorts of things inside the browser. Even without doing anything we can use it as a word processor, a spreadsheet, a mind mapping application; we can edit pictures and audio. With some extra bits installed we can even do some of this when there’s no Internet connection. Who needs Microsoft Word when you can do it all in a browser, for free?

Now you might be seeing why Microsoft isn’t happy. It doesn’t really care about having a browser as competition; it cares about Google—a behemoth with deep pockets and some very good programmers—having a browser.

Until now, the dreams of a browser replacing all the other programs on your computer was just that. The browser wasn’t really designed for all these extra things going on inside it. And while Firefox is an impressive beast (as is Opera), both depend on old machinery under the hood. Google realised this, and realised that someone needed to overhaul the browser so it could be a platform in its own right.

Now Google’s other products—its online applications, its  blogging tools, its drawing and mapping applications—can become part of your browser. More importantly, us users won’t need to install anything to move these applications from the web—the cloud, as it’s called, meaning anywhere but on your computer—to your PC. Something called Google Gears did that already, but it was something you had to install, whereas now it comes as part of the Chrome browser. In short, if you use Google Docs you can edit as easily online—where the document you’re editing sits in the cloud—to offline—where it sits on your computer.

It’s not necessarily going to be as smooth as one would like. There are teething problems—the version of Chrome I tested was wonderfully fast and elegant, right up until it started hogging my computer’s resources—and there’s bound to be some tension between Google and its erstwhile comrades-in-arms at Firefox. And yes, we should be a little alarmed that the already powerful Google can now have more access to our data.

But on balance it’s exciting. For you and I it means leaner, meaner applications that do what we want, where we want, and without us having to for them. As Dương Thành An, the Vietnamese founder of Evolus which developed the drawing application I mentioned above, puts it: “What else do we need in our PC?” 

It means a new wave of innovation from developers—since Chrome is Open Source, meaning anyone can fiddle with it and add to it—and from Google’s rivals like Microsoft—who will be forced to come up with responses of their own.

So download it, give it a spin, and let me know how you get on.

©Loose Wire Pte Ltd.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a regular contributor on technology to the BBC World Service and elsewhere. His book-length guide to using computers, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

Tags: , , ,

The Third Screen Talks to the Second

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

image

Nokia has finally woken up to the potential of connecting its phones to a computer. I’ve written elsewhere about the PC Suite, but its latest version has made some great strides in allowing you to use the computer to manage and monitor your cellphone.

The vision is a simple, and yet elusive, one. We work on our computers when we’re stationary. And on our phone when we’re mobile. But as far as we’re concerned we’re still doing the same thing: working. We can synchronize our data between those two devices, but operating both in real time is more problematic: there are tools to allow us to access our computer data from a phone, but sending and receiving SMS messages, for example, is still considered a phone activity, not a computer one.

It’s a technical barrier, not a lifestyle one.

Nokia, the biggest cellphone manufacturer in the world, has been slow to wake up to this weak link, but they’ve now seemed to see it. We should be able to send and receive SMS messages just like we can send and receive email messsages. It shouldn’t make any difference to us how people communicate with us; the medium shouldn’t matter.

But anyone thumbing out SMS messages in the office when they’d rather be typing them knows it does.

The PC Suite, once just a way to synchronize data between phone and computer, has now started to move into this space. Now it’s not a suite, so much as a Communication Centre. It’s become the interface for your phone (or phones; Bluetooth lets you connect more than one device simultaneously) when you’re at your desk.

The real improvement, therefore, is in the way the desktop software (Windows only) works with messages and contacts on the phone. Previously it was clunky and slow; it felt like the computer was downloading all your messages and contacts each time you wanted to do something. It was often faster just to tap the message out on the phone.

Now it’s fast and easy to use. Your computer will also let you know when a new message arrived, something the old software didn’t. The software is also good-looking and remarkably rich in features. Indeed, I’d argue that you don’t really need Outlook for your contacts with this kind of software working so well. (And yes, it handles non-Western alphabets well too.)

Some weaknesses: there’s still no way to add a phone number to existing contacts—as opposed to creating a new one. And when I first ran the software it ate up nearly all my processing power, which wasn’t pretty (it’s since settled down.)

Intriguingly, there’s a Firefox extension for synchronising bookmarks between your computer and phone browsers.

This is the closest I’ve seen to making the phone an appendage to your computer, where it seamlessly integrates in terms of data and functionality. Some steps to go, but kudos to Nokia for pushing the envelope. Hopefully soon enough we won’t notice or care what medium—SMS, email, chat–we’re using, because it will all be one simple interface. That day just came closer.

Loose Wire: Bookmarks Are Dead. Long Live Bookmarks

By | August 25, 2008
0 Comment

Bookmarking, the act of marking a favorite website, has become a much more complicated matter these days. Here’s how to master the art of keeping tabs on the web

By Jeremy Wagstaff

A thought occurred to me the other day, as these things do. Who uses bookmarks anymore?

Not the kind you put in books–although I have noticed they’ve been in steady decline too. I mean the kind you add to your browser to keep a record of a website you’ve visited that you’d like to go back to one day, if there was ever time.

So I dug more deeply. And I found it’s true that people tend not to bookmark as much as they did, but for a range of reasons.

It’s not that people don’t bookmark, it’s that the purpose of bookmarking is less obvious now than it used to be.

The point of bookmarking stuff is a bit more varied now. Websites we regularly visit are, for many of us, now part of our daily Really Simple Syndication feed. If we want to share a bookmark we can do it via StumbleUpon or Facebook. I see a lot more of the latter, recently—always fun to do—and StumbleUpon, if you haven’t stumbled upon it yet, is a rich trove of treasures maintained by some very fun people.

Then there are two other types: saving a webpage you won’t forget and one you’re afraid you might. That might sound silly, but it’s the difference between putting car keys somewhere prominent so you won’t lose them and leaving them somewhere prominent so you remember you have a car.

An online equivalent is your bank account website, say: You’re unlikely to forget you have a bank account, but you might forget the address—or hate typing in the address again. Whereas a cool new tool for collecting the email addresses of people who share your middle name might sound like something worth visiting again, but chances are you’ll forget it exists unless you save it somewhere.

So, saving something you go back to regularly makes sense as an in-house bookmark—one you’d store inside your browser, as in the old days.

But what happens when you come across something that looks interesting, but not exactly vital? How can you keep them some place you’ll know where to find them later, if you remember they exist?

This is where I think bookmarking becomes more of a useful service. And tagging—labels you add to things to help you find them (think losing car keys, not forgetting you have a car) is an important part of it. But it still doesn’t work that well. Tagging is a great tool—and bookmark storing services like del.icio.us have made it much easier by suggesting tags for things—but I still find navigating my own tags too time-consuming a task.

I don’t think I’m alone. What I’ve noticed that, at least among geeks, we’re turning less to software and more to people to help us find those signposts quickly.

Now, sharing our online day with others on services like twitter, gives us a channel to quickly communicate with a select crowd who are, at least for now, as cooperative and helpful as the early denizens of the net. So why bother rooting through your del.icio.us tags when you can tap into the wisdom of the twitter crowd?

That is what bookmarks, and bookmarking services, have to compete with. I’m guessing that what will evolve is a combined service where a request that is sent via twitter—anyone remember the name of that service that lets you talk to people with the same middle name?—would simultaneously search your own databases of links and saved stuff. The answers—automated, human–would merge together and the results would organize themselves into a list.

Which might itself, in true Web 2.0 fashion, become a new form of content.

So, in short, bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks. They are still the best signposts we have for getting around the web, but we have moved beyond the idea of needing to save them in some order. What we want know is to be able to find them quickly—and to be able to have what we find put in a broader context. Who better to do that then your big network of online friends?

How do you save your bookmarks? Share them with me at the email address below.

©Loose Wire Pte Ltd. Jeremy Wagstaff is a Singapore-based commentator on technology. His guide to using computers, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.