October 21, 2009 @ 12:52 am
From a design standpoint, the new Barnes & Noble Nook e-book device is simply gorgeous. The Nook comes with a dual screen — one to read the book on, and the other to touch and select your books with.
It is available now for $259 pre-order and it really gives Amazon.com’s Kindle a run for its money. If I were to purchase an e-book reading device now, it would be the Nook. Click the images below to see the Nook much bigger.
February 17, 2009 @ 2:26 am
The New York Times recently announced a new way to read and skim news headlines using their article skimmer. The NYT says that the article skimmer was made originally to mimic the feel of having the Sunday Times spread out across the table while having brunch — an act of consuming news that I’ve never personally done myself but that I’ve seen others do in the past.
In terms of getting a good overview of what’s being written in The New York Times, the article skimmer proves to be a fantastic tool. As most of you know, I’m an information and news junkie and getting my fix from the NYT has definitely been much more satisfying while using the article skimmer.
In fact, I consider it a “Google Reader” for the New York Times especially when I make use of its keyboard shortcuts.
We’re also geeks, so there are plenty of keyboard commands for the efficiency lovers. The space bar takes you down a section, and shift-space brings you back up. Arrow keys do the same. You can navigate sections by holding down the “s” key (s for section), typing the number that appears, and releasing the “s” key. Same goes for articles, but with the “a” key (a for article). If you need a reminder, just click the “?” in the upper right corner.
The article skimmer is a prototype at the moment and there isn’t an official name for the news reader, but I really hope the NYT puts some money behind this project. I could see it potentially replacing the NYT front page altogether. I think that would be nice.
January 30, 2009 @ 7:38 pm
Sorry for all of the infoMania madness going on today (hey, at least it’s good!), but I just had to share this archive segment of the infoMania Tech Report with Ben Hoffman as he reviews the Amazon Kindle. The Mayor of Television reminded me of just how brilliant Ben’s monotone voice is in making the rest of us realize just how stupidly excited we get over not-so-revolutionary devices [such as the Kindle].
In addition, the article goes into how infoMania is created by a staff of only 15 people, many of whom literally sit around all day and watch terrible TV programming so that they can regurgitate the information back to us in a humorous way. Oh, how I wish I had that job.
December 4, 2008 @ 5:55 pm
My Google Reader just refreshed to the newly redesigned Google Reader. Apparently, Google is rolling this update out gradually like it always does, so if you don’t see it yet, just wait and you will very soon!
I like the redesign a lot. Everything looks simpler and the left-side menu is easier to manage. I’m sorry to say this, but it looks like there’s really no need for Helvetireader anymore!
December 1, 2008 @ 11:01 pm
If you’re a power user of Google Reader — meaning, you can navigate your way around all your feeds using only keyboard shortcuts — then you might find Helvetireader very pleasing to look at and easy to use.
Helvetireader is a minimal interface theme for Google Reader that is easy to implement if you’ve got Greasemonkey on your browser. I’m going to go ahead and assume that most of my readers use Firefox, so all you need is the Greasemonkey extension installed and then you just install the Greasemonkey userscript on the Helvetireader page and you’re all set!
If you want, you can also install the Show Feed Favicons script too and get RSS feed icons in your Google Reader.
Helvetireader isn’t perfect — there’s some glitches with the star system — but I guess I could deal with it for a while. We’ll see how long this lasts before I disable the script. Haha.
January 31, 2008 @ 11:20 pm
I just turned off my email notifications from Facebook and subscribed to my Facebook notifications via RSS feed instead. Why? So that my inbox stays clean and free of any Facebook bacn/junk.
I don’t know why I never thought of this before but I’m sure glad I did.
Just about everything mildly useful these days has an RSS feed, and Facebook notifications are no exception. Since I use Google Reader so much (I pretty much have that tab open ALL THE TIME) it makes sense that the easiest way for me to keep up-to-date with my friends’ Facebook activities (wall posts, photo comments, friend-to-friend interactions, etc.) is through my RSS reader. No effort required! :)
Thank goodness for RSS feeds!
