Tag Archives: products

Reviews

The new Nabaztag

Just this summer, I demonstrated what was then a new product on the US market on HGTV’s “I Want That! Tech Toys” show. It was called the Nabaztag smart bunny, and it was an interactive, programmable little toy that looked like a white bunny and connected to the Internet through WiFi. I also wrote a pretty detailed review about its capabilities.

Well, the folks at Violet, the makers of the Nabaztag, have just launched a new version, which does a whole lot more. You can communicate with it by voice, and you can program it to read books back to you, using RFID tags. Watch the video below, taped on a French TV show, it’s pretty cool stuff. Little kids would probably go bananas for the chance to have their books read back to them by a little toy bunny.

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Thoughts

Taking foolproof photos

We read about software that can improve blurry photos these days, and about significant improvements to autofocus on even inexpensive cameras. We look at photos that we take, the washed out ones, and wish we’d have exposed them a little less, or a little more. We wonder how they can be improved.

My solution points to bracketing. This is a current feature on one of my digital cameras, the Panasonic Lumix FZ20. When switched on, it will take three photos with three different exposure times (high, medium and low). I only press the shutter button once, and get three photos from which I pick the best one. Of course, this series of photos can also be used to get high dynamic range (HDR) photographs through manipulation, but the point is, the consumer only needs to press the shutter once. That’s the key.

I believe eventually we’ll see cameras that integrate bracketing into every photo. They’ll not only vary exposure times but also focus. The process will be seamless to us. We’ll press the shutter button once, the camera will only seemingly take one photo, but when we get home and download the photos to our computer, our camera software will allow us to use slider controls to adjust the focus and exposure without damage to the photograph’s quality. We’ll be able to bring different elements in and out of focus, and make the photo brighter or darker, just as we please.

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Thoughts

Consolidation lurks in the wings for web development industry

I’m struck by the amount of consolidation that’s taking place these days. Companies are gobbling up other companies in order to scale up, expand horizontally or simply eliminate competition. We in the web development industry have so far been spared this fate, simply because of the amount of incredible innovation and changes that always take place in what we do. Let’s face it, a company needs a solid product that can be sold, and so far, it’s really hard to pin down “products” in web development. Plus, the very nature of our work, which can be done anytime, anywhere, rewards individuals, especially those willing to stretch the boundaries of what’s thought possible and come out with something cleaner, something nicer, something slicker, something cooler.

But, even with all of these road bumps in the way of web development consolidation, it’ll still happen. Don’t think I’m enjoying myself as I write this. I don’t want it to happen! You know what’s going to act as the catalyst? The same thing that’s driven manufacturing companies out of the States: price. Look at some of the free products that are out there, that let you create websites with no cost at all: Google Pages, MSN Spaces, Yahoo (whatever it’s called), etc. They’re not full-featured, but they work to get people started. And they’re really easy to use, to the extent that even a “moron in a hurry” (aka the Apple courtroom test) would know how to use them. I’m not implying that most people are morons, but most people don’t need fancy sites that do lots of cool things and manipulate databases, etc.

If you don’t believe me, look at MySpace. It’s there that you’ll see the tastes of most people: that site is full of tasteless decoration, crowded, nasty-looking things that can’t even be called web pages. And that’s only the content. I’m not even talking about the MySpace-imposed page layout and horribly big, screaming ads. The whole site is gross. But, that’s the idea of a “nice” web page to most people. They don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to web development. They don’t understand how to design a site. They have no idea about the stress and hard work that goes on when coding/designing a real site. And they shouldn’t be expected to know this. After all, that’s what web designers and developers are paid to do. But the point is, the masses don’t crave and don’t care about good design, they want the free stuff, and most don’t care if that free stuff is ugly.

As free products like the ones I mentioned get more full-featured, and more complicated systems like WordPress or Drupal get even easier to use and customize (not that WordPress isn’t easy to install and use, it is, but you still need to know how to code and design when customizing it) the needs of more and more people will be met. And as that happens, the market for web developers shrinks more and more. And here we get back to my opening comments: solidification of product offerings leads to consolidation. Once a market develops for a clear-cut product, competition will increase, the main differentiating factor will become the price, and the biggest company will be able to offer the lowest price — hence the catalyst for consolidation. Besides, who can beat FREE stuff? How do you beat that? Who can beat offshore web development, where people can live on dollars a day and can afford to develop a complicated site for a few hundred dollars? It’s really, really sad to see web designers and web developers who aren’t able to make a living in the States anymore. I can understand why it happens, but it’s still very troublesome.

What recourse is left to us, as web developers? I would hope we can find some solution that would allow us to keep our independence while also allowing us to make a living without competing purely on price with Ivan in Russia or Mihai in Romania or Jose in Argentina, because living in the States, we’d lose the price battle very quickly.

I realize the outlook as portrayed in this post is a bit depressing, but I plan to write a counter-post to this in the next few days. I do think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s hope for those of us willing and able to seize certain opportunities.

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Reviews

Want to watch your recorded shows and movies over the Internet?

OrbWith all of the media hype surrounding Slingbox, and the Sony LocationFree Player, an easy and inexpensive (as in FREE) solution is getting overlooked: My Orb. But that’s to be expected. They haven’t advertised heavily, and they’re fairly unassuming. But don’t think that their product is underrated, because it’s not.

To use it Orb, all you do is install their software on your desktop system (only works with Windows XP machines), and it’ll let you access your photos, music and movies right through the Internet, right away. It’ll even stream your music in Windows Media Player or Quicktime streams, depending on what computer you access your files with (PC or Mac).

I wouldn’t have known about it myself, except that I bought a Creative web cam for my laptop, and found the software bundled onto the install CD. I tried it, and it really works like a charm! I simply installed the software, set up my account at My Orb, and logged in. All of my photos, music and videos were listed right in my account. I was able to stream my movies from my home machine, and watch them over the internet, at work. And if you’ve got a Media Center PC, it’ll even let you access your recorded TV shows, or the live TV stream. Cool!

And, what’s even cooler is that they’ve got this service called Orb Secure, which they make available for free to Creative web cam buyers, that’ll let you use your camera as a surveillance device. You can access the camera’s video stream at any time to see what’s going on at home, or even better, use it as a motion sensor, and set it to record video for a pre-set amount of time whenever movement is sensed. What’s more, this service will even email or SMS you whenever motion is detected. You can then watch either the live video stream, or the recorded video portions, right on the Orb site, and take action if needed (i.e., call the police). How cool is that!

So why spend your money on yet another piece of hardware? Use what you already have, and get your money’s worth. Look into Orb.

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Reviews

Zoom Search Engine: a powerful and inexpensive search engine for your website

Zoom Search EngineI’ve been using the Zoom Search Engine for over a year, and I’ve been very happy with it. But today I realized I hadn’t told many people about it, so I had to fix that.

So what’s the Zoom Search Engine? It’s a beautiful piece of software written by WrenSoft, an Australian web software company. Here’s what I think is amazing about it:

  • It’s inexpensive: the Standard edition is $49, and the Professional edition is $99. (I have the Pro edition.) There’s also a free edition for smaller sites. A side-by-side comparison of the different editions is available on the WrenSoft website.
  • It’s small in size, but feature-packed. The executable is 1.65 MB. Bloatware this is NOT. It is small and it packs a powerful punch. If you don’t believe me, install it, then run through the various options. There are a LOT of them!
  • It does the job — no crashing, no malfunctions. In over a year of serious use, with it running daily to index a lot of files for most of that time, it didn’t crash once. It just did its job.
  • Tech support is great, and included in the price of the software. I needed to contact them twice to ask them about some advanced configs for the app, and they responded within 12 hours. What’s more, they actually solved my problem. There were no excuses and no passing the buck.
  • It’s a scalable piece of software. Not only will it index small, simple sites, but its indexing engine can use ASP, PHP, JavaScript or CGI. The CGI engine can be used for enterprise sites – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pages here! Not only will it index sites hosted on web servers, but it will also let you put a search engine on a site that runs off a CD or DVD.
  • It spiders and indexes most document file types with the aid of free plugins that work with the paid editions of the software. They’ve got plugins for Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Flash and FlashPaper, and Rich Text formats. Having used all of these plugins over the last year, I can tell you they work a treat. They certainly do the job, and there’s no false advertising involved.
  • It’s a customizable and flexible piece of software. You possess the search index. You have access to the actual files used by the search engine, and you can tweak the engine and the index as you please. You can adjust everything. I can’t think of any other solution on the market that will let you do that. When it comes to this, it beats Atom and Google and any other solution, hands-down. Google’s search appliances are a black box. You can play with the options, but you don’t have access to the search technology. You can’t pop the hood and have a look at what makes their searches tick.

So how exactly have I been using the Zoom Search Engine? It’s been powering the site searches on Exprimare and the Road Management Catalog, among a few others. While Exprimare is a fairly small site (it’s my consulting/portfolio site), the Road Management Catalog is a big site in terms of the content, file types and number of pages. It belongs to the World Bank, and vendors of various road construction, measuring and testing equipment have accounts where they submit company information and upload brochures in various file formats. The Zoom Search Engine’s job on that site is to index all of the uploaded files, all of the various companies’ info, the regular site pages, and to make them all available in the search index. It’s been doing a wonderful job over the past year, and I love it. I’ve scheduled it to run every day, and to index all of the files. When it’s time for it to start, it does so automatically. It spiders the site, builds the index, uploads it to the site through FTP, then closes automatically. I don’t have to do anything other than adjust search parameters here and there as the need arises.

Here is a screenshot of the main app window, just as it’s indexing the Road Management Catalog. Once it’s configured, it spiders the site (you can set it to start multiple threads so the indexing goes faster) and then it goes about its business.

Zoom Search Engine

When it’s done, it gives you an index status report, to let you know what it found. It also outlines in red any indexing errors, such as files or pages it couldn’t download or index.

Zoom Search Engine

If I had to talk about the many configuration tabs, I’d have to reproduce their user manual. Instead, let me just show you a screenshot of one of them, the Indexing options. How cool is this! I get to decide what gets indexed, what gets boosted, and how words get joined. And this is just a small sample of what the app can do.

Zoom Search Engine

A lot more screenshots are available on the WrenSoft site. Their support section is extensive, a forum is also available, and their tech support is only an email away.

The Zoom Search Engine is an amazing product, and well worth its price. As a matter of fact, I’d call it underpriced. It’s a tremendous value given its functionality. So if you own a site and have been looking around for a suitable search engine, don’t settle for something that’s overpriced or inflexible. Get something that’s been tried and tested, something that’ll work, something you can use on a daily basis and tweak until you get just what you want.

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