04/02/2012

Hi there at Path, please get more responsive and fix your issues with Facebook.

11/12/2011 By

Path 2.0, the smart journal app for iOS and Android phones has been praised a lot after its first complete reincarnation in late November.

I also agree with everything Erik says about the app over on TechCrunch, rewarding it with two “Flys” (watch the video for the complete review). With more than $11.0M in funding and a rejected $100+ Million acquisition offer from Google, the Path team must be pretty confident.

One thing though bothers me: As a company, Path seems to be relatively unresponsive if not even antisocial.

As an example, last week Path faced some serious service outages causing journal entries, photos and comments to vanish. No word about it on the very polished Path blog. Communication through the @Path Twitter account regarding the issue has been pretty limited, too.

It really gets worse when it comes to Path for iOS ongoing issues with cross-posting to Facebook (find a solution below). The wall on Path’ official Facebook page already reads like a complaint center. And not a single response from anybody over at Path. Twitter is full with users experiencing the same issues.

When I sent out a tweet about the broken Facebook integration last week, Danny Trinh, a designer working for Path immediately responded just to disappear again a few tweets later. Did he get muzzled by some official product marketing folks?

With Path playing in the field of social media and applications, the company should urgently become more responsive to its users. Running a Facebook page and a Twitter service account (@PathService) means you’ve got to make sure that your company embraces social at its core. Currently, from the outside it doesn’t feel like that with Path.

Now, if Path on your iPhone has stopped working with Facebook, here is what you should do:

  • Uninstall Path on your iPhone.
  • Uninstall Facebook on your iPhone.
  • Uninstall Facebook Messenger on your iPhone. (This is essential. If you only uninstall the main Facebook app, the fix will not work!)
  • Press and hold the Home and Power button until your iPhone reboots. This makes sure that iOS clears all cached data.
  • Reinstall the Facebook app. Do not launch the app, yet. Stay logged out.
  • Reinstall the Path app.
  • Visit your Facebook account from a PC/Mac (= no mobile browser). Go to Account Settings > Apps. Find the Path app and completely remove it from your Facebook account.
  • Launch the Path iPhone app and sign in.
  • Add Friends and chose Facebook as the source.
  • This should start the re-authorization with Facebook.
  • At any time, reinstall Facebook Messenger on your iPhone.

I hope this helps. And maybe somebody from Path will pick it up and cross-post it to all of the various outlets, that the company is so unresponsive with these days.

Filed Under: Digital Life, Featured Tagged With:

Misa Textures for Minecraft 1.4 Beta

01/04/2011 By

If you haven’t been living under a rock and like casual gaming, you might be a Minecraft player, too.

Recently, the game got updated to version 1.4.

Now, the build-in textures are pretty basic. That’s why many players patch their Minecraft binaries to run with Misa’s 64 HD textures, a third party texture pack that is not officially supported, but greatly enhances the game.

These textures have not been created by myself. I’m just a regular Minecraft user loving the work and effort Misa has put into these. So, full credits go out to Misa!

The community forums over at Minecraft can get pretty spamy with now well over six million registered players, so I’ve taken the liberty to provide direct access to the texture pack and the tool to patch Minecraft 1.4 (Windows/Mac).

I provide a mirror to the files for free, as a courtesy to the Minecraft community. I found the original links to be quite unstable under heavy load.

Installation instructions outlined here are still valid. (This links back to Misa’s original thread, which gets updated whenever a new version gets releases. So check it out frequently!)

I hope you enjoy it! If you do, why don’t you hit the little tweet button at the top of this post, or like it on facebook (below)?

 

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With: ,

Why Carbonite on a Mac does not work for me

04/11/2010 By

Off-site backup is important. Your place might burn down or your external hard drives might get stolen.

There are a variety of services out there, which claim to provide affordable external backup through your broadband connection. I am using Dropbox for all my file syncing tasks, but Dropbox still lacks large storage sizes beyond 100 GB.

As a frequent listener to Leo Laporte’s TWiT netcasts, I thought I’d give Carbonite a try. Carbonite is a TWiT sponsor and Leo’s recommendations usually are a pretty safe bet.

Unfortunately, not so with Carbonite.

The first things that come into mind for the most of us, when thinking about off-site backups, are the digital assets we care about most.

Documents, digital photos and videos covering important periods of our lives and our music, movie and TV show libraries. If you are like me, you’ve collected tons of files over the past few years.

Now, these assets usually come with a larger file size and with HD video coming to a smartphone near you, file sizes constantly increase. That’s why most of us keep those files on external hard drives.

For example, my iTunes library is roughly 900 GB in size. My photo collection requires some 50 GB. I keep both on a NAS device shared between all machines in my house. Dropbox selectively syncs the stuff I want to take with me to my MacBook Pro(s).

Unfortunately, Carbonite does not provide support for network drives and not even for external drives connected via USB.

Instead, the Carbonite help page blondly states:

“If you have files on these external storage devices that you want Carbonite to back up, they should be moved to the internal hard disk of your computer.”

Frankly, that is complete nonsense. For a company claiming to be a leader in online backup, it’s ridiculous to ask us to move externally stored data to the internal hard disk just because the dumb software can’t handle external drives!

Even worse: Carbonite also fails to use symbolic links on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

While it does see folders symlinked to the internal hard disk, it does not grab their contents. You end up having your directory structure backed up, but not your files.

Carbonite Pro, the product targeted at small businesses supposedly includes support for external data – but that version of the software is not available on the Mac.

So I guess, Leo either produces all of his shows on Windows machines, or keeps the tons of TWiT multimedia content on an internal drive – that must be one gigantic disk!

I ended up using IDrive for Mac.

Admittedly, IDrive hasn’t got the most unobtrusive user interface in the market. But it handles external drives (USB & NAS) seamlessly. It also gives me a fair amount of control of what gets backed up and it drops me an automated email in case anything went wrong.

Finally with only 79,95 US$/month for 1 TB it has the most aggressive pricing in the market.

I liked Carbonite’s approach to off-site backup a lot. It’s a shame they haven’t fixed their software, yet.

Filed Under: Digital Life, News Tagged With: , , ,

That’s why social media matters in the service industry

27/10/2010 By

Last week I visited Adobe’s online store to purchase a copy of their CS 5 Master Collection. It’s quite a pricy piece of software but taking into account the amount of really great application you get, I generally believe it’s good value for my money.

As I had to do some work over the weekend, I decided to go for Electronic Software Delivery (ESD), assuming I would be able to download the product instantaneously. Little did I know…

I purchased and prepaid (a four digit Euro amount). And waited. And waited.

My money was gone immediately but Adobe did not send any confirmation for the first 48 hours.

Then a welcome email came in guiding me to an Adobe licensing sign-up page. Quickly signed up and found the “My Products” and “My Licenses” sections completely empty.

Tried to call their service center just to listen to a poorly recorded out-of-office announcement. Opened a support ticket. That was on Saturday.

On Monday an electronic response told me to wait a little bit longer as Adobe was going to “process my order”. Whatever that means, but all the advantages of purchasing software online were long gone anyway.

After two more days of waiting I called into one of their service centers, noticeably got rerouted to some outsource facility in a poorly connected country and the agent on the other side couldn’t do anything for me. Almost as expected.

Being extremely frustrated with Adobe at this point, I sent out a straightforward tweet:

A few minutes later, I got the following reply:

Once I DM’ed the Adobe team my order number, the issue got resolved within an hour.

There are a couple of remarkable things here:

  1. Forget about contact centers. I’ve been working in that industry (technology) in my past life and there’s hardly any real innovation. You still get queued. You still get agents who can’t help. It’s predominantly an extremely frustrating experience. Vendors across the service industry promised to solve these core issues for the past decade. They failed.
  2. Obviously, Adobe Inc. is monitoring the twitter timeline for keywords linked to their brand. But not only that: They act on their “data”.
  3. The team behind the Adobe Care twitter account was empowered to help pragmatically. I did not have to go through long authorization processes and neither was I forwarded from 1st level to 2nd tier support.
  4. The entire interaction took a couple of minutes. I’m pretty confident that the total cost of this support incident was way below any contact center interaction.

While the Adobe Store still needs some serious improvement, cudos to Adobe for taking social media seriously.

Filed Under: Digital Life, News Tagged With:

The Great virtual Housekeeping

06/01/2010 By

Find out what I’ve been doing during the seasonal holidays over at 24z.me.

Any comment should go there, too!

Filed Under: Digital Life, News Tagged With:

Whom can we trust in this digital age?

27/11/2009 By

The digital age raises numerous questions as towards the credibility of news, images, audio and video footage.

I believe, I’ve found the universal answer. Turn up your speakers, switch to fullscreen and watch carefully:

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With:

A couple of weeks with the amazon kindle and I love it!

06/11/2009 By

kindleLiving outside the US feels unfavorable when it comes to movie release dates, availability of international TV programs and more often than not new gadgets and software releases.

When amazon announced the international availability of it’s much acclaimed ebook reader platform, the amazon kindle, I immediately ordered one.

A couple of weeks later I’m deeply satisfied with the entire experience, from purchasing, via delivery, through setup and everyday use. The buying process, as expected when purchasing from the world’s largest online retailer, worked seamlessly. A couple of days later the kindle shipped. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With:

Howard Rheingold on Essential Media Literacies.

20/07/2009 By

Watch this cool 6-minute interview with Howard Rheingold. Howard is the man behind many things. His Smart Mobs blog is a must read for Social Media geeks! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With: ,

Livescribe Pulse smartpen

11/02/2009 By

Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen is a computer inside a pen. Not only does it record what you’re writing it also records the audio and links the two together. By tapping anywhere in your notes it replays exactly what has been said when you were writing the tapped part. Finally it allows you to seamlessly transfer your notes to your PC or Intel based Mac.

I’m attending lots of meetings and regularly visit trade fairs. For years I’ve been trying many things to increase productivity. TabletPCs which promised to replace paper, PDAs which came with good or not-so-good Notepad applications and handwriting recognition that never recognized my handwriting.

None of it really worked for me and besides the fun I had with trying out all the new technology, I did not stick with any of those gadgets.

I’ve been following the company that develops the Pulse smartpen for quite a while. When they first announced their plans back in 2007 I’ve been pretty skeptic. Frankly, my thoughts about the Pulse smartpen have been in the “well, yet another digital pen solution” area.

When puristic blogger Stephan Hochhaus pointed me to the availability of Pulse in Germany I revisited their website – and got intrigued. I did not go for the unimall offer for various reasons. Amazon US grants me free shipping so I instead ordered the 2GB version directly at Amazon.com and four days later the Pulse arrived here in Germany. (Sidenote: Amazon’s logistics constantly amaze me. There’s almost no difference anymore whether you order in the US or in Germany. Besides a temporary advantage of the Dollar of course.)

livescribe Pulse smartpen

Livescribe Pulse smartpen

The product is fantastic. It’s simple to use and fulfills all the promises it makes. It’ll definitely change my (digital) workflow and significantly increase my personal productivity. I’ve used Pulse in various meetings so far and having the audio recording linked to my notes along with the immediate availability of a digital copy on my MacBook Pro is just making things so much more comfortable.

I did not yet drill into some of the other applications like the Translator, Calculator or Piano. Livescribe offers a beta version of its Pen SDK and there seems to be a vibrant developer community already. I’m looking forward to seeing more innovative stuff coming to live for what I consider a really interesting platform.

By the way, here is a screenshot of Livescribe Desktop for the Mac. (As always please click to enlarge.)

Livescribe Desktop

Livescribe Desktop

The desktop application itself is excellent, too. It has working full text search. So you type in a phrase and it highlights it in all of your handwritten notes. The folks at Livescribe did a fantastic job when it comes to Paper Replay on the desktop. You can generally play back the audio by tapping your notes on the paper and the playback will be done right on the pen. It has build-in speakers that outperform those in your iPhone. :-)

If you listen to Paper Replay via Livescribe Desktop the application does not simply replay the audio stream, in addition it links it exactly to your written words. The result it that it recreates the live situation which is brilliant to follow up on stuff when you’re back in the office.

So you start with a grayed out version of your notes (well, with the default settings it is greened out, see screenshot) and while the audio plays back it slowly colors the words move by move, stroke by stroke. It’s a karaoke kind of experience.

If you’ve got to attend many meetings, order Livescribe Pulse smartpen today!

Listen to what other customers think:

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With: , ,

bookworm comes to stanza

11/02/2009 By

What a fantastic post title!

With all the buzz about Amazon’s Kindle 2, I’m really looking forward to the date the device will be available in Germany, as I’ll very likely not go for the possible competitor, developed by German Telekom.

Besides the Kindle 2 hype O’Reilly has silently announced that the Bookworm project is now parts of O’Reilly Labs. Bookworm is an online ePub ebook reading service. Given the fact that I’ve been a happy customer of O’Reilly Safari Books Online, a service providing you with browser based access to thousands of books, and a user of Stanza, the ebook reader for the iPhone, I am extremely pleased that there is a lightweight integration between Stanza and Bookworm.

Getting your favorite books to your iPhone via Bookworm and Stanza is a straightforward process:

Buy your books in the ebook ePub format wherever you want. O’Reilly has a special buy-two get-three offering these days, so I grabbed “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide”, “Paitning the Web” and “Hackers & Painters” from their ebook store. ePub Books has a good list of stores that feature ePub content.

Visit the Bookworm page with your PC/Mac and upload your ePub files.

Open the Bookworm page on your iPhone. You’ll see a “Read in Stanza” link. Simply click the link and Stanza will be opened. Stanza will add the ebook and you can enjoy it while you’re on the move. Adding Bookworm content to Stanza also brings the advantage that the ebooks are available offline. So be prepared before you board your next flight!

Click to enlarge any of the following screenshots:

Stanza

Stanza Booklist

bookwormiphone1

Bookworm in Mobile Safari

Reading...

Reading on my iPhone

Filed Under: Digital Life Tagged With: , , ,
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