Archive for the 'Software' Category

Adobe came to Minneapolis for their Summer 2007 On AIR bus tour, where they introduced the new AIR runtime environment built to deploy internet applications to the desktop.

RSS Popper is a feed subscription plug-in for Outlook and Outlook Express users that bring RSS, RDF and Atom support, as well as auto-add from Internet Explorer and synchronization support with other readers like Bloglines.

Mike Culver, evangelist for Amazon Web Services (AWS), visited the University of Minnesota Wednesday September 5th, to describe services Amazon has made available to programmers looking to leverage large data sets and world-class infrastructure.

GrandCentral takes all of your individual phone numbers, and provides you with a single new number, which forwards to all of your existing phones.

I’ll leave the in-depth overview of each feature to the GrandCentral site. They’ve done a great job of organizing the multitudes of fun things you can do. Rather than repeat it word-for-word, I’ll focus on the real-world, practical side of GrandCentral.

Pownce lets users post messages, links, files, or events. Messages posted to an account page are viewable by friends and “fans” of an individual. Once a message is posted, it can be replied to and forwarded, and there are a couple options for recipients (such as users that have not yet received the message). Pownce requires an age and zip code to create an account, somewhat intrusive by today’s privacy standards. The sign-up page has a real-time validation effect that is very nice, and the website and application are very attractive in general. Sign-ups are by “invitation only” at this time, but anyone can sign-up for an invitation on the Pownce site.

While browsing the web - it’s a luxury that we don’t have to manually type in a URL, because our favorite sites are already saved as bookmarks. But sometimes it’s necessary to go in and manually edit a URL in the address bar.

Tim Westergren was in Minneapolis Thursday, July 26th, to talk about Pandora, the company he founded in 1999. Tim is originally from Excelsior, MN which is a suburb of Minneapolis–a good piece of local trivia. Pandora is an internet radio service growing in popularity, recommending music in innovative ways, and attracting droves of fans from around the world (though recently Pandora was forced to disable service outside the US to the chagrin of Pandora and its happy non-US users).

Launchy is a keyboard application launcher for Windows. Keyboard launchers are generally considered easier and faster at launching applications because a user’s hands never leave the keyboard. I’ve been using Launchy at home and at work for a couple of months, and could not go back to using my computer without a keyboard launcher. Launchy consumes just 12MB of memory (on my system), and becomes a natural way to open applications or perform other simple tasks because it is so fast. Launchy is open source and is designed to be skinnable and highly extensible.

Sometimes it’s helpful to change the location of your iTunes music library.

For example, I currently use Amazon S3 to store my music through iTunes, but since it’s a network drive, it’s really slow when importing CD’s, or downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store.

The reason is because it has to upload at the same time it downloads. I’ve seen some strange things happen when I attempt to do this, so to be safe, I always change my iTunes music library to somewhere local before I try any of those tasks.

Joost is currently private beta software that intends to bring a richer television viewing experience (for free) to users around the world, with high-quality content, social features, and minimal advertising. Joost was formerly known as The Venice Project, and deserves your attention because it is the latest software from Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis of Skype and Kazaa.