Giveaway to Bloggers Almost Turns into an Interesting Experiment

There has been a lot of discussion on the A-List blogs about Microsoft giving and then ungiving a sweet Ferrari laptop loaded with Windows Vista to influential tech bloggers. Microsoft’s PR firm asked the bloggers to use Vista and wants them to write about it. If the PR firm was thinking clearly, they would have treated this hubbub as an experiment and not retracted the gift. But they did retract and in doing so they signaled they had made a mistake. But did they?

There has been a lot of discussion of this giveaway here here here here here here here here and here. Some think it is ok and others think it isn’t. Overall, I think Joel of Joel on Software has the most informed and experienced opinion. The question is did Microsoft buy good reviews with these giveaways? I’m not sure. It is clear they didn’t expect this reaction from the blog community. Will the bloggers give the Laptops back? Have they been influenced by the good will of Microsoft? Or will they look at Vista with an extra skeptical eye because they and everyone else knows Microsoft tried to buy a review? The one sure thing is an unbiased opinion by the bloggers is out of the question.

There is a good reason the government and many companies have limits on the value of gifts to their employees. It influences decisions. But this practice is nothing new and it will not stop any time soon. There are plenty of examples of products that have succeeded with the help of celebrity give-aways and influential placements. The Chrystler 300, Omega Watches, lots of clothing and shoes and many other products are given away to influencers all the time. And it works. You can’t fault Microsoft for trying.

The interesting twist on this giveaway is the effect of the blogs themselves. Never before has there been a way for people to easily talk about this attempt at influence. Microsoft’s intentions have been made clear and exposed for all to see. This could have been a very interesting experiment for Microsoft’s PR firm. Give the bloggers a gift with the clear intention of influencing their writing. Let them talk about the gift. See if it influences their writing. I would love to have the list of bloggers that received laptops so I could watch and see how they spoke about Vista. There may still be some lessons to learn if one watches closely enough. But the experiment has mostly been spoiled.

Question for Mac and Thunderbird users

I sorely miss Google Desktop search on Windows and haven’t found a good equivalent on the Mac. Spotlight is pretty good but doesn’t search Thunderbird mail or address book. How do you search thunderbird email? Please leave me a comment.

I’ve discovered the reason…

I’ve discovered the reason for all those made up Web 2.0 company names.  Meebo, Sxip, Yoonoo, Zimbra, Askeet, and so on.  I discovered the reason because I have been trying to pick a domain name for some of my own hosting.  What a chore!  Over Here was my first choice and it has been taken.  In fact, just about every two word combination I tried has been taken.  I guess I’ll make up a name too.

Switching to a Mac – Day 13

I am completely switched over now. Using Windows seems a little odd because to automatically go to the wrong side of the window to close and minimize. Overall, I am happier with the MacBook Pro than my clunky Dell laptop.  The rest of this post is boring.  Click here for some good entertainment.

The Good

Nice clean look and feel.

Installing Apps. More simple that I had imagined. Uninstall by dragging out of the Applications folder.

Consistant UI across Apps. Although editing key combinations are not always consistant.

Apple Mighty Mouse. This is a brilliant mouse. It appears simple but is actually has right click, left click, center click, and side click. The little ball in the middle is the scroll wheel for horizontal and vertical. This mouse takes a lot of pain out of window navigation once you get used to it.

Dashboard. Similar to Yahoo or Google widgets. But it is nicely integrated with Mac OS X and is one click away with the Mighty Mouse.

Networking is easy. This just shows me how painful it is in Windows.
Spotlight indexes everything and makes it easy to find.

BSD Unix under the covers.

The Bad

The Finder. This app is core to OS X. It is like the Windows Start menu and file Explorer wrapped into one. But it is not good at either managing files or Applications. I hope to find a replacement for Finder soon.

MacBook Pro keyboard. It feels cheap. The arrow keys are way too small. It is missing Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, and the Windows style delete key. If you do a lot of typing, these are all important keys that make one more efficient.

Apple Full Keyboard. This keyboard does have all the keys the MacBook is missing. But they don’t all work out of the box!

No single button to exit an app. I often find I have several apps running that I thought I had shut down. When you close a window, the app keeps running. You have to use Apple-Q or the File menu to exit.

Applications. Choices are limited compared to windows so you might not find what you want. I tend to use a lot of free apps for misc tasks such as recording my linerider video, replacing the Finder, and so on. The major apps such as Firefox and Thunderbird are almost identical to the Windows versions but a bit buggier and less polished.

Our Linerider Videos

The whole family played with Linerider Sunday. Here are the results:

Nikki’s video (She’s 11 years old)
Stacy’s Video (She’s 9 years old)

My Video (I’m kind of old)

I just couldn’t get the final jump right so my poor sledder died prematurely.

The Departed – See it!

LeeAnne and I saw The Departed last night.  It is a remake of a Hong Kong crime thiller called Infernal Affairs.  We saw original on DVD a while back and liked it a lot.  The Departed is better.  In fact, it is the best movie I’ve seen in 2006.  It was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and others.  DiCaprio deserves an Oscar for his performance.  The movie is very funny, has a lot of action and violence, intrigue, suspense, and some shocking moments.   Go see it before it it leaves the theaters.  You will love it.

AIM Lite 0.31 released

For all you Windows users (hehe), Greg posted about AIM Lite 0.31. Justin and company have done a spectacular job on this client. Not only are there a slew of new features, there are some key enablers in this client such as theming and plugins. The list of new features includes:

• More robust plugin and theming support
• Read/Write Profile support
• Auto expando input fields in IM window
• Typing indicators in both directions
• IMs do not steal focus
• Enable stored IMs
• Allow messaging while away
• Show mobile states in IM window
• Access history from IM window

We will have to ask ourselves when this stops being “lite”. I consider these features necessities in a usable AIM client. And you can’t argue about it’s light weight in terms of size and performance. It is still only a 1.6MB download and very responsive. I am sure the memory footprint is small but I haven’t measured it recently.

Please head over to Greg’s blog to read more about it.

P.S. I am sure AIM Lite will have the buddy update indicator in a future release so it can meet my minimum requirements for an AIM client

Adium Instant Messenger Client Review

I’ve been using Adium for a few days to get a feel for the client. I can recommend it to anyone using a Mac for general purpose IM. It is a very good general purpose IM client but is missing some key features that keep it from being a great AIM client.

I have used many IM clients on Windows but have only iChat to compare it to on the Mac. Adium beats iChat by a mile. Adium is a multi-headed client. It’s strength is the ability to customize the look of the IM form and buddy list. I’ve never seen so many customization options in one client. This is only a sample of the options:

• Set where mini buddy icons and status go on the buddy list; left, right, far left, and so on.
• Set size of mini icons with a slider control. I’ll bet people use this.
• Control spacing on buddy list from left margin, right margin, vertical between buddies, and more.
• Colors and style of buddy list and IM windows are highly customizable.
• You can see screenshots here.

Many of the settings are not needed and add to the complexity. A good example is left, center, and right justification of buddies and group names. But I did play with each setting to get the look I wanted. For a while it looked like this:

But I am a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to buddy list. After trying several styles, it ended up being pretty close to the default settings. This is what it looks like now:

This should give you an idea for how flexible this client can be.
Adium has a very good status (away) message management and controls. You can even set online status messages. Put your mouse over the buddy name to see your buddy’s status. There are several ways to choose status messages; on the task bar and on the buddy list. Only praises here.

Plugins, skins, sound sets, and more are available on the Adium web site. Again, customizing the experience is Adium’s strength.

Adium is missing a few features that I consider mandatory. My buddy list is approaching 400 buddies. Aside from knowing who all those people are, finding them is on my buddy list is the next challenge. Adium has no buddy list search ability as we have in Light AIM and AIM 6.0. I have resorted to openening and closing groups to find someone. It is a hassle I can do without.

The second critical missing feature is the Buddy Update indicator. The update indicator is an obsession I miss dearly. It tells me when there my buddy has shared some content with me.

Many people will miss the ability to set their AIM Buddy Info.

Overall, Adium is a highly customizable and very usable IM client. It may be overly complex for the mass market but great for those who want a particular look, a multi-headed client, and don’t miss special features of AIM. AIM 6.0 for Windows is the best AIM client by a wide margin. After using AIM 6 for a while, everything else feels a bit clunky. But Adium may be the best there is for Mac users.

Stay tuned for my next adventure in Macland will be installing Parallels and Windows XP. This may sound like heresy to Mac users but it will give me the ability to run the best AIM client available.

Line Rider – very addicting

Have you seen this little flash game Line Rider? If not, head on over to YouTube and check out a video to see what it is all about. You start this game with a sledder and a pen. You have no control over the sledder — only gravity does. You draw a hill for a sledder to go down. Some people are really adicted to this thing and have produced some amazing rides with jumps, flips, and more. The poor little guy always dies in the end. Give it a try. It’s easy to get started but more challenging to keep him alive than you may think.

Switching to a Mac – Day 5

So far, switching has been both fun and frustrating. I am starting to get the feel for this new machine but I’m not there yet. I have found a number of pleasant surprises along the way. One of the biggest is the Apple mouse. It is a terrific device. The little ball that acts like a scroll wheel is a real pleasure to use. And what once appeared as a very simple mouse turns out to be very usable. I can squeeze it to bring up a display of all windows, left click by pressing the left front and the same for the right side, press the ball and mouse at once to bring up the dashboard (a desktop widget app).

Many of the applications on the Mac are just as good as their Windows equivalents. I haven’t found any that are better but I am still learning many of them. Here is what I am using:

Firefox. It’s pretty much the same as Windows with more bugs.

Adium. I’ll post a review of it later. So far, I have found it very good at customizing look and feel but lacking in some key areas.

Thunderbird is almost exactly the same as on Windows. Ease of migration has been a great surprise. I would be stuck without a good email client. Thunderbird is almost exactly the same on the Mac as it is on Windows. Migrating from Windows to Mac was incredibly easy. Just install it on the Mac and copy the data directories to the Mac. Viola! I would never have believed migrating was so easy. Everything, and I mean everything, started up and ran exactly as I had it configured on Windows. I like to have my mail client working just so. All of my accounts work, all of my filters work, all of my preferences are the same. Amazing.

Entourage for our enterprise calendar. It kind of sucks compared to Outlook. I discovered today that deleting a meeting doesn’t notify the other attendees. Sorry, Tony.

NetNewsWire for feed reading. Kevin swears by it. It seems good but the articles are kind of plain and include fewer pictures than I get from other readers.

1Password for storing filling out web forms and storing passwords. I am using the trial which is pretty limited. I paid for Roboform and don’t really want to pay for another password manager. I think I’ll have to soon.

You Contol Tunes is a great little app that puts iTunes music control on the menu bar.

Plaxo to sync my Address Book between every conceivable place.

VLC for playing videos. It is a simple and clean media player. It is the same as on windows.

VIM. Sorry kids. It is still the best editor in the world. Best of all, it saves me from having to learn this confusing keyboard:

Finally, the best app on Mac OS X is Terminal App. It gives me access to BSD Unix right there on my laptop. Sweet.

Please leave me a comment if you have more recommendations for me to try.