The K Unit

I was quite excited to receive this email from Waze yesterday. Waze has been one of my favorite mobile apps of late. My major complaint was of course that there were very no Canadian maps available. With new Canadian maps, this could very well be a killer navigation tool while still providing real time information that you’d have to pay for from other providers like Tom Tom for instance.

Hello Canadian mappers,
Some great news – we have acquired a base map for all of Canada (thank you Canadian government!) and we will start loading them to the cartouche.
While this change is great, we realize this brings a few concerns to all the hard work you’ve put into creating the waze maps so far, so we wanted to explain how this process will be carried out which is why we’re sending this email.

Before we start, you should know that you can take a break for the next 2 days. Any changes made after we start the process will not make it to the final version of the map, and we don’t want you to waste your time. We will also put a big red pop-up on the cartouche itself letting you know once we started our work.

The technical descriptions are below (and my apologies for sending such a long email… only read if you’re interested).

At the end of the process, Canadian maps will remain on www.waze.com/cartouche, and aerial images should be up and running in the background.

Thanks and please feel free to email us if you have any concerns or questions

Dror

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Technicalities:

So how will the maps be combined? I will refer to two maps – the GOVT (new base map from the Canadian Government) and USER (existing cartouche maps)

• Since the GOVT has more segments, this will be the base for the new map.
• Each segment from the USER maps will be checked for a matching segment from the GOVT. If there’s a match, the the GOVT segment will keep its shape, but the driving direction, street name and ownership will be changed to match the USER segment.
• If there’s no match, the USER segment will be added to the new map with all characteristics (including shape).
• We will run a process that automatically recognizes highways. This process connects the highways to ramps and opens the driving directions. In this case, any prior info from the USER maps will be kept (info will be added only on new segments).
• We will run all the drives in Canada up to date; this will open driving directions on all segments that were not created until today and create routing connectivity (allowed turns).
• As for connectivity; the GOVT maps come with physical connectivity (nodes and their connection to the segments) but without routing connectivity (allowed turns). Unfortunately, we cannot move the routing connectivity from the existing cartouche when a new segment is involved. The only case where connectivity is kept is where two segments were not recognized completely and copied as is from the USER maps (3rd bullet above).

What should you expect?

1. First of all, great new maps that will make it a lot easier for you to complete the work on your area.
2. But… also some problems. Most likely you’ll notice a few places where there are duplicates, in case that the USER and GOVT segments were not matched properly, and so both were created in the final map. This is where we will need your help in editing and deleting the extra roads, so if you are not an area manager yet please let us know and we’ll be happy to see if you can join the area managers community.
3. Routing might not be optimal; even if you got the routes around your house on a good level, you will notice a decrease. This is because we cannot copy the existing routing connectivity (see last bullet above).

As mentioned before, we will put the pop-up on the cartouche once the work begins (most likely in the next couple of hours or by tomorrow the latest) which will be your cue to take a break. I will also post this on the forums.
–
waze support team
www.twitter.com/waze
alpha@waze.com
Share your experiences on the road with other wazers – waze.com/user_blog

Lately I’ve been addicted to a pretty neat application called Waze. It brands itself as a social navigation app and has apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian. I actually played with both the iPhone and Windows Mobile app and both work pretty decently. The app is pretty addictive. You essentially get points for numerous activities such as simply driving around, sharing event such as speed trap, recording new roads and yes, even editing the map. The mobile app works like it’s supposed to although I surprisingly had more problems connecting to the GPS with the iPhone than I did with the Windows Mobile which is quite rare. The web application is simplistic. You have a dashboard that shows you your previous trips and then you can choose to click them to view those trips. You could also choose to use those trips to enhance a current map by filling out roads that are missing and so on. I like the idea of editing my maps but I find the experience quite frustrating at times. Hopefully over time, they will continue to improve on it. The mobile app also integrates with both Twitter and foursquare.

Although maps are pretty sparse in Toronto and thus rendering navigation pretty useless in my area, it is easy to see the use of Waze. Every once in a while, I’ll get an alert stating that segments of the 401 have medium traffic followed by the speed of an anonymous user at the time. People can also report various things such as accidents on the roadways. One of the issues is that it’s technically illegal to operate Waze while driving so it works best when you have another driver in the car with you. For me, I typically just turn on Waze before I start driving and keep on driving. The neat thing about this is outside of giving up some privacy, it typically doesn’t really detract me from doing what I normally do anyway.

To me, what is probably most intriguing about Waze is the social experiment it represents. I’ve always been of the opinion that most people are most interested in controlling their privacy and not so much containing it. Most people are willing to give out information about themselves usually if it benefits them in one way or another. Given its ability to provide real time data to its users, it’s the equivalent of Twitter for navigation

One of the biggest change in my technology profile after working for Zoocasa is that I’ve now started to become quite a Macbook fan boy. When the Apple Magic Mouse was released, I opted to get one because one of the things that I really like about the new Macbook’s is that I really like the gesture concept on the trackpad. I was hoping that the Apple Magic Mouse would offer the same. However, I was quickly disappointed with the minimal amount of gestures offered by the Magic Mouse out of the box. It really offered no more features than any other mouse in the market.

Enter three handy utilities that extend the functionality of the Magic Mouse: MouseWizard, MagicPrefs and BetterTouchTool (BTT). MouseWizard is not free but it’s relatively cheap to obtain – it’s only $2.50 to purchase it. MouseWizard actually doesn’t come with many additional gesture support – all in all, I count 5 new gestures but the one cool thing it can do which I like is that you could do your whole hand to call the screensaver which I use to lock my Macbook. That is neat. MagicPrefs is free and definitely more extensive at least in terms of available gestures that you could invoke. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get most of them to work for me. My favorite is BetterTouchTool so far because it allows you to not only configure the gestures on your mouse but also on the multitouch touchpad of your Macbook.

For the time being, I have programmed my mouse to activate Spaces on a two-finger tap, Show Desktop on a two-figer swipe up and Application Expose on a two finger swipe down for the mouse. For my mouse, I have the five finger tap setup to show the login screen.

I’m really excited about the Microsoft Courier. If you’ve read some of my previous posts, I have reluctantly gone back to using my Asus R1F tablet and have indirectly given up on my Macbook Pro. Don’t get me wrong – there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Macbook Pro or OSX. It’s still my desktop OS of choice. Everything just seems to work on the Mac.

Given then I’m no longer a developer, a lot of my work life is involved in meetings with the business team or the dev team to discuss new ideas, work out issues or discuss design. In meetings, I often find it a lot easier to use a notepad instead of typing on a computer to communicate or describe ideas. The tablet is both the happy medium and extension of these two solutions. It has the flexibility of a notepad and the ability to store and distribute digitally. The downside of my current tablet is that it is extremely heavy weighing at almost 7 lbs. The weight isn’t bad if all I’m doing is lugging it from home and to work. It’s a bit weighty to be lugging it around the office and sometimes across the street. The weight is not bad if you consider what it does but today, it is more powerful than what I need it to be today.

Here’s where I think Microsoft Courier comes in. From the demos on Gizmodo, the product looks more like a paper notebook or portfolio which I take to my meetings right now. It has two “pages” and the way it is designed to work is that one page is used for searching and research while the other is used to work on. The form factor is ideal and I love the idea of having both stylus and finger touch. The really interesting thing about the product is that most of the function that is being displayed here already exists within the Microsoft realm of products. The note writing, embedding of images, handwriting recognition, OCR and concept of pages is embeded in a combination of OneNote and Windows 7. If you’ve never tried, the tablet function in Windows 7 is phenomenal. The gesture support is already used in the Microsoft Surface products.

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

As there are still a number of things that are unknown about the product, there are also a number of things that I’d love to see incorporated into the device. Synchronization to a central service is key. Notebooks are really good to start ideas however at some point, most ideas need to be finished on a computer. Also for me I tend to work on multiple computers and other peripherals so inter-device accessibility is key. I’m not sure I would install a lot of different applications on the device but the additional applications that I would use on this device are instant messaging, email and multimedia player. Bluetooth integration would be a nice touch to connect to a wireless headset. While having the ability to do both multi-touch and stylus is really nice, I hope that the hardware is able to differentiate the two as when writing, my hand tends to touch the paper and could cause the device to go awry. The biggest unknown about the product is hardware. For me to be able to use it, it would need to weigh at 2 lbs or less. It also can’t be too big or too thin as this would be a device to supplement my MacBook, not replace it. Given that I’m usually moving around for meetings, it will need to last at least 4 hours and have the ability to change batteries.

Even though Tweetdeck revolutionized Twitter use in my mind, the Twitter desktop client of choice for me is PeopleBrowsr. Tweetdeck did a similiar thing that the iPhone did which was to revolutionize the Twitter desktop clients. I now describe Twitter as an office and the group concept is similiar to different water coolers in the office. It allows me to hang out at particular watercoolers depending on what is going on or what I’m interested in at that part of the day. When I first used PeopleBrowsr, it was a web version of the already very popular Tweetdeck but it was extremely buggy to say the least but even then it had quite a lot of potential. I like the idea of having a web based version of Tweetdeck because I’m not always on the same computer all the time. Since then, PeopleBrowsr has quickly grown to be a very powerful Twitter client and is currently my default Twitter client.

I am really proud to say that I’ve written my first guest post about the Sony Xperia X1 – ever and I was really excited about it. Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and get to know Howard Chui of HowardForums.com and HowardChui.com.For those of you who don’t know, Howard Forums is the major source of provider specific information or technical configuration for my phones. It is also one of the best ways to buy a used phone. I picked up my HTC Fuze by that means. HowardChui.com is where Howard writes about industry news and phone reviews.

Over that time, I’ve learned that outside of our passion for mobile technology, we both share the same passion for technology in general where we’ve traded stories about various servers and hardware components we have built or are thinking of building. Hope you enjoy the review and thanks to Howard who gave me the opportunity to play with a device I once considered purchasing and writing on his blog.

Outside of Evernote, one of my other favourite apps today is Dropbox. The Dropbox concept is rather simple; it allows you to store information in the cloud but it’s implementation is extremely effective. Ever since I started working, I’ve always had portable storage. Traditionally it’s come in the means of a Compact Flash memory card seated in a PCMCIA adapter that is always plugged in to my notebooks. If I ever decided to leave my laptop at work, all I would have to do is to eject my PCMCIA card and take it home with me and I’d still be able to hace access to my core information wherever I went. PCMCIA cards are no longer the norm; ExpressCards are. More importantly though this same requirement can be solved by web services like Dropbox.

I do my work on multiple devices. I have a Macbook as my primary work laptop, a Vista machine for when I’m home and a Ubuntu Linux box that I rely on to do system admin type tasks. I love the fact that Dropbox works on all 3 operating systems. For all 3, you install a client which then creates a local directory on that machine. Any time you make a change to a document in the dropbox directory, it will synchronize it to all the other machines. In that scenario, it works really well. For my mobile devices, Dropbox has a mobile friendly web site that makes these folders easily accessible. I often put cab files that I need to install on my Windows Mobile there as often times sites don’t make it easy to download apps from their site.

One of the really nice things that I like about Dropbox is the ability to share folders. This is most useful when you are collaborating with others and need to have information flow to multiple people. Instead of sending multiple files to multiple people, you can always have the latest copy accessible through a shared folder in Dropbox. One word of caution though, it doesn’t support the concept of file locking. If two people are editing the same document, the file that is retained is most likely going to be the last one. The good news though is that it does support some rudimentary file versioning which is accessible on the web.

The free account comes with 2GB of storage. It may not sound like a lot especially when USB keys are so cheap these days and when Yahoo and Gmail both offer storage sizes that is much larger than that. It all boils down to how you use your cloud storage. For me, it’s a very simple and cheap way to synchronize and cache the most critical files that I need quick and instant access to such as my work documents. For the laptops that I access to perform work related tasks, I default my local Dropbox directory as my Documents directory. That way any work I do gets saved that quickly. The nice benefit from this process is that I get file versions out of this by default. Just in case I do something stupid, I can always log on to the web to restore an older version. Since it’s cached locally, it means that I can still have access to a copy of the file. One risk though is that if it wasn’t synchronized before you took your computer offline, you might not have the latest copy.

Should you find that 2GB is not enough for your needs, you can upgrade your plan to a 50 GB or 100 GB plan for a fee. You could also get small upgrades to your account by referring friends. Each referral will get you an extra 250 MB added to your account. If you did find this review useful and would like to try Dropbox, please use my referral link.

One of the things that I love about PockeTwit is that it is in constant development. One downside is that it is hard to know when is a good time to blog about it. Even though other good apps like Twikini have been launched since I last blogged, I still find myself going back to PockeTwit all the time. In fact, if I had a choice, I would use PockeTwit as my primary Twitter app instead of Tweetdeck only because it can do everything Tweetdeck can.

Outside of the features that amazed me in my first review like having a very usable user interface and integration with other providers like ping.fm, PockeTwit has recently included the concept of groups, saved searches, retweeting, showing a conversation chain and emailing someone a status. Some other nice things they have included are the ability to create and change themes and the ability to clear the cache if needed. Personally not high value to me personally but still good features.

The ability to have groups is certainly quite valuable. When I started using Twitter, I followed only a handful of friends. Since Twitter has a whole universe of interesting people, I’ve found myself following many more people since then. So the ability to group them is essential. It’s allows me to better focus on conversations in groups. The nice thing about PockeTwit is that when I assign them to a group, I can either copy them to a group or move them completely. I started out with copying fellow twitters to groups but I’m starting to realize moving them to groups makes more sense. Especially in a mobile form factor.

Being able to see a conversation is phoenomenal. Most mobile clients have this feature. I’m curious as to why most desktops don’t. It’s so nice to take a tweet and check out the history of the conversation. This is one of the reasons why moving a person instead of copying works in PockeTwit.

The other great part about PockeTwit is the ability to do a search and also re-run those searches later on. This implementation is less polished as how it is implemented is that it shows you the previous searches as part of a drop-down box. I guess it should more accurately be described as remembered searches instead of saved searches. I would have liked this to be accessible the way Groups are but I can understand why it’s implemented the way it is. I haven’t figured out how to delete searches from the drop-down list. So far it hasn’t been much of a problem because I don’t execute searches very often on my mobile device.

I personally believe that the reason why PockeTwit is such a phenomenal product is because the developer uses the app all the time. If I had a choice, I would want all of the features developed here on a desktop. Features like retweeting and emailing someone a status just makes sense. I also like being able to see the person’s timeline as well as profile. Given that it’s a mobile form factor, I like the fact that profile and timeline are separated out. Other niceties are that when I click on a tweet, it quickly separates out all of the things that I can interact with such as hyperlinks and profiles. Another sign of a great product is the ability to recognize when a feature isn’t as useful as originally imagined. In between my two reviews, there was a map feature where you could see where people were tweeting from. The feature was quickly recognized as not as useful as originally thought it would be and was removed. It was a good decision because I think that means that the developer can focus on core features instead of maintaining something obscure.

Overall, I am still in love with PockeTwit as my primary Twitter client for Windows Mobile

Technorati Tags: pocketwit, windows mobile, twitter, social media

SPB was the first company to introduce gesture navigation for the Windows Mobile after the launch of the iPhone application. The iPhone caused a massive paradigm shift in the mobile world when it intuitively thought that a mobile device was much more usable by navigating using your fingers rather than using a stylus. It was one of the most frustrating things using a stylus such that when HTC introduced the Tytn, the fact that you could do most of your navigation via either the scroll wheel on the side or the d-pad, it instantly became the most popular Windows Mobile device of it’s time.

HTC then introduced TouchFlo 3D with the Touch line of devices (i.e. Touch Diamond, Touch Pro) and it became the interface of choice. HTC did a decent job but the reality is that it is better known as a hardware company rather than a software company. The features are actually awesome on TouchFlo 3D. However, I found it extremely unstable. One of the first things I noticed right after I got the Fuze was that it would crash Manilla (the application name for TouchFlo 3D) and cause annoyances. It was frequent enough that it caused me to start looking for ROMs to ease some of the frustrations.

Enter SPB Mobile Shell 3.0. I had purchased 2.0 earlier but stopped using it because of TouchFlo 3D. After finding the Energy ROM, I was pretty happy with TouchFlo. However, being someone who enjoys tinkering, I couldn’t help but want to install Spb Mobile Shell as soon as it was publicly released. And after 3 days, I have to say it is a great piece of software.

While there are 13 screens, the application is actually broken down into a few major sections. There is the home screens which summarizes your information, there is the phone screens which manages things like phone profile and dialer, contacts screens helps manage your quick dial information and the address book, the programs and settings screen, and lastly the weather section that gives you weather information.

The software impresses right away. On first load, Spb Mobile Shell takes about 10% less RAM then TouchFlo 3D. Other things that I really like are contact integration with Facebook. I also like how I can easily switch between professional layout to info layout at a flick of a finger. With some minor hacking, you can have more than 3 info screens. The nice thing about the info layout screen is that they are completely customizable. The idea is that in the future is to enable third-party widgets to be built. Another thing that impressed me as well is the seamless transition from portrait to landscape mode. It works exactly either way (for the most part) without any rendering issues.

One of the things I would have liked is to have better integration with existing SPB Products like Wireless Monitor and Phone Suite. One of the really nice things that I liked about the previous version of this product was that I could embed the Today screen plug-ins as a tab. I think it would be reasonable to have more SPB products generate new screens. I really like the Facebook integration and would love to see the functionality extend to more than just downloading of photos but also of contact information such as email and phone numbers. This is more minor. When I added all of the icons I wanted for a particular screen in portait mode and then flipped to landscape mode, there were some minor misalignments that I could fix. Once it was fixed, it remembered the settings.

Overall, this has been an impressive product. There were no issues that made me even once consider going back to using HTC’s Touch Flo. For me this is the killer UI that I’ve been waiting for.