Cloudy Days and Netbook Nights

Hot topic. Yesterday saw the release of the new and improved TweetDeck and the matching iPhone TweetDeck, hard on the heals of the first non-preview version of seesmic desktop. Seesmic has been slowly overtaking TweetDeck in the features race, if  not in actual user base, and clearly TweetDeck is fighting back hard.

Let me say right up front that in my mind seesmic has been the app to catch for quite a few releases. I never warmed to TweetDeck, and therefore I am not addicted to its UI or feature set. I don’t have an investment in TweetDeck groups, etc. On the other hand, seesmic has been my desktop twitter (and Facebook) client for several generations now, and I, maybe, am biased through habituation to its UI and feature set.

So, lets just say that TweetDeck would have to try really hard to win me over. Did they try hard enough in this last release?

The primary reason I invested my time in seesmic in the first place was the ability to follow and manage multiple twitter accounts. TweetDeck, until this release, could not do that…so it was, for me, a non-starter. With the new version, TweetDeck not only adds multiple Twitter accounts, but establishes an master TweetDeck account (one account to rule them all) which allow you to log in to all your accounts with a single log-in, and, allows TweetDeck to sync your account info (groups, columns, read/unread etc.) across multiple computers and devices.

Of course, along the way seesmic began to add Facebook features. First the ability to post updates to your FB account, view your stream and like updates, and then, wonder of wonders, full integration, with the ability to comment on friends’ updates. With full FB integration, seesmic desktop became the one app I always have open on my desktop.

I even began to use the UserLists (groups) features and the saved Twitter searches. All very easy and very useful. To add a user to a list/group, just click on the gear icon in the atvar, choose add to Userlist, and pick your list from a dialog.

Seesmic also, to my mind, has the most natural way of managing @ (mentions), DMs, your posts, and favorites. Little icons across the bottom of the Twitter columns are one click fast in pulling up the selected items for your view. No new columns to deal with. When done, just click the Home icon to return to the normal view of your friends’ tweets.

It should be noted that you can have all tweets, from all accounts, as well as your Facebook updates, appear in the same column if you want, and use the navigation panel provided to navigate to @, DM, Favs, etc.

Then too, seesmic makes finding individual users profiles dead simple. You can click any @user and their profile and recent tweets appear in the column, or you can type in a user search field and find anyone. So easy.

This last release (o.3rc) fills in a few of the remaining gaps. You can now simultaniously post to any combination of your open Twitter and Facebook accounts. You can set the app to intelligently reply only to the account where you hit the reply icon (very slick).  And, for UI fanatics, the Update bar now sits narrow and restrained at the top until you click it…then it expands to a two line text entry box.

Of course, seesmic has full integration with url shorteners, including (new this release) the ability to use your own bit.ly account for statistical purposes. Seesmic can post pics to any one of  5 different services, using either personal (generally Twitter) accounts or the default account.

So what does seesmic not do? There is still no way to view a list of your friends (a la Tweetie or Twitterfon or Twitter.com for that matter). There is no conversation view for @ or DMs, so to find out what tweet some cryptic Reply is referring to, you are booted out to the Twitter.com site, where you see the single referenced tweet and nothing else. We are spoiled by the iPhone clients who manage @ and DM conversations much more elegantly.

And no Trends, though the very effective Twitter search makes up for it somewhat.

Both seesmic and TweetDeck, of course, suffer from what is, in my opinion, the major frustration of AIR apps…flaky browser integration (at least with Chrome…I have not tested other browsers). When you click a link in a tweet or update, it really looks like the app has died while it is sending the url to the browser and the browser is dealing with it. And it takes an unacceptably (imho)  long time to deal.  (seesmic, at least, is developing a browser-based version which may eliminate this issue.)

The major advantage, to my mind, for TweetDeck at the moment is the iPhone version and the ability to sync between iPhone and desktop…and between any number of desktops. That is cool!

However, on first impressions, I just can not like TweetDeck desktop a whole lot. I don’t like separate columns for @ (mentions), DMs, and Favs (even if you can hide them). I do not like the Facebook integration, which lacks the ability to post or view comments (a killer for me).

So, okay, with use I might come to accept the way TweetDeck does its business. In fact, I am certain that I would, and especially if I began using some of its deeper features. What you can do with individual tweets, for instance, is impressive. And the though neither seesmic or TweetDeck have trends in the usual sense of Twitter.com or the iPhone clients, TweetDeck has some unique tools: TweetDeck recommends, StockTwits, and TwitScoop. I will admit I have not experimented with them much at all. And, of course, you might actually prefer the TweetDeck way out of the gate…and you are certain to favor it over seesmic if TweetDeck is already your client of choice.

So, what about the iPhone TweetDeck.

Way cool!

The interface is elegant (with some obvious, not to say glaring, lapses), fully functional, and does a very good job of translating the desktop TweetDesk experience to the smaller screen of the iPhone. Columns appear first as smaller windows (very like pages in the Safari browser multi page view) which you can flick through (or even rearrange using the same metaphor used for rearranging apps on the iPhone screen), and which open to full screen with a tap. Once open you can flick sideways to move between columns. Here we have one of those glaring UI things. There is a huge arrow at the bottom of the column that you can tap to move to the next column if you don’t want to flick…two arrows if you are in a center column…which is, imho, a total waste of space. A little popup telling how to navigate columns on the first use  (or until you turn it off) would eliminate the need for the ugly (and huge!) arrows.

Major fail! No Facebook in the iPhone app. Not even the limited integration of the desktop version. Massive fail! Worse. You can’t even post to Facebook from the iPhone app. Can you hear the sorrow in my voice as I report this inexplicable fail?

Also, I managed to crash the iPhone TweetDeck already, while viewing a linked web page in the in-line browser.

So, no, as far as I am concerned, TweetDeck did not try hard enough to overcome the lead seesmic desktop has in features and UI on the desktop (unless you really need TwitScoop, etc.). Facebook integration alone, even if there were no other differences, would decide it for me. And even though the TweetDeck iPhone app is one of the most inventive uses of the OS I have yet seen, it offers no compelling reason to switch from the much more fully featured Tweetie or Twitterfon Pro.

I am waiting, with bated breath, as they say, for seesmic’s iPhone app. I only hope they manage to shoehorn Facebook in there as they have on the desktop, and that they preserve the one column multi function model made popular by Tweetie and Twitterfon (and seesmic desktop for that matter). That would make it a killer social client for the iPhone, and make seesmic the clear choice for both desktop and mobile applications.

Yes you can!

AVS through its site at AVS4You.com offers a full range of video and audio editing, conversion, recording, and burning tools which, despite the system requirements published for the various programs, work just fine on an Atom powered N’tbook.

AVS4You program manager.

They have a pretty unique licensing system too. You pay a flat fee for a one year, or unlimited (your choice) license key, and that gives you access to all their programs. Yes all. And to upgrades as they happen. Considering the quality and number of their offerings, this is pretty spectacular. Enter your key for any of their programs and a little program manager app downloads which allows you to download and install what you need from their library with a single click for each program. Could not be easier.

I was looking specifically for a program to edit AVCHD files from the new Sony Webbie HD cameras. There are not many out there. I turned AVS up in a Google search.

Despite the descriptions, you do not want the AVSVideoRemaker. You what Video Editor 4, which imports and edits AVCHD files with ease, and allows you to save the edited files in any number of useful formats.

AVSVideoEdit 4

It runs well on my Aspire One 150. You need to set the screen to 1024×768 in the video control panel to get to the buttons on the bottom of some of the screens but with auto scroll it is not an issue.  AVCHD files import flawlessly, and the editing functions work without undue lag. You can not play back the clips in real time (they are somewhat jerky on an Atom based computer) but you can easily trim clips, add effects, add text, install fades, etc. It is not real snappy, but it works and is certainly usable. Comparison testing with my work laptop (duel core)  shows that the N’tbook is a bit slower on all edit functions, and takes about 1/3 again as much time encoding a 10 minute video to MPEG. Acceptable for N’tbook use,  imho.

You might also want the DVD Creator from AVS, and the VideoConverter. Both worth the download. The AVS Video Player is also an interesting alternative to Windows Media Player (but see below on MediaPlayerClasssic).

And while we are boosting video programs, if you need to play AVSHD files on your N’tbook, you need a copy of WindowsMediaPlayerClassic. It is the only player I have found so far that will play AVSHD files smoothly on an Atom based N’tbook. For a download try here.

So, yes, video editing on a N’tbook is possible, even in HD. And they said it could not be done!

Workstation for the Week

For the past week I have been totally dependent on my Acer Aspire One. Through a series of unfortunate events, my work laptop got left in California and is wending its slow way back to Maine via UPS. (Ever try to set up a remote pick-up of something in CA while in ME? Without labels? Not easy.)

During that week I have had to create a major Powerpoint presentation for work, with Excel charts and graphs, knock out two other PPTs, keep up with my blogs (4), Twitter and Facebook, and all my personal and work email (had to redirect and forward all work email from by Blackberry, which is still, thank God, connected to the Blackberry enterprise server and picks up my work email).

I have edited photos in Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, uploaded to both Flickr and Smugmug, downloaded a huge app and one album in iTunes (and synced to the iPhone). For a blog entry, I took 20 screen shots on the iPhone, and downloaded them to the computer via USB.

In creating the PPT for work, I had two portable drives and 2 flash drives connected to the One at the same time (used a hub), looking for backups of files that are on my work laptop.

I have printed wirelessly to my networked HP printer.

In other works, I did a pretty complete week’s business on my n’tbook.

And it was no strain at all. Everything worked. Everything got done.

So when you read the industry disclaimers that N’tbooks are fine for light internet related stuff, but not for serious business, you can pretty much laugh them off. Unless you do 3D graphics or video rendering for a living, a n’tbook is all you need. No strain. You can get the job done.

Clearly, given the price of n’tbooks these days, and the price of real serious laptops (like for real business and work), this is a fact that the industry would like to downplay…would like to keep secret…would like to bury under lots of fine sounding disclaimers. If a n’tbook can really replace a full sized laptop for most business work, then who is going to pay for all those business laptops?

Not me. In the next round of laptop appropriations at work, I am going to request a n’tbook (now that Dell makes one…our IT will only buy Dell???). I travel 170 days a year. Why would I carry anything else?

And, if my work laptop had been a n’tbook, it would not have gotten left in California due to that series of unfortunate events I mentioned earlier. And I would not be writing this. Go figure.

Since the future of the term netbook is at least uncertain after Psion’s recent spate of cease and desist letters based on their registered trademark, I would like to propose what we all (starting with Intel) switch to N’tbook instead.

N’tbook, n’tbook, n’tbooks, n’tbooking, etc.

Pronounced exactly the same way as netbook with a hint of a click.

If I were smart, I’d copyright that, and sell the rights to any who want it. But I am not either smart (that way) or greedy. So, any and all, feel free to use the term n’tbook to refer to what we have been calling netbooks. You will note that I have already changed the name of my blog, and I am ready, should Psion send me a letter, to do a complete search and replace on every reference to netbook (inlcuding this one) I ever made. And it will be n’tbook from here on out!

(actually I will copyright that, just to prevent someone more greedy than I am doing it and then telling me I can’t use the term.

n’tbook ©®™ by Stephen Ingraham 1/3/2008)

Or Making Your Netbook Awesome with Chrome: With more than a little help from StandaloneStack.

GMail running as a stand alone app from Google Chrome

Screen real estate is at an premium on any Netbook, whether it is the increasingly rare 7 inch, the run-of-the-mill 8.9 inch, or the increasingly common 10 inch.  (I, personally, refuse to call anything with over a 10 inch LCD a Netbook, no matter what processor it has inside.) The same small form factor that makes the Netbook easy to carry, cramps the visual experience, and diminishes the ease and effectiveness of many web sites and web pages…not to mention web apps. 

Firefox has, for several generations now, had a full screen mode. Press F11 and the navigation and bookmark bars at the top of the page sort of melt up to the edge of the frame, giving you a significant increase in viewing area. Maybe not so essential if you are just checking your GMail, but often appreciated when viewing images on Flickr or SmugMug, watching video on hulu, or working with an on-line image editor like Sumo-paint or a web app like Google Docs.

At first glance the best Chrome can do is to hide the bookmarks bar (Control B). True the header and and tab bar are pretty small compared to Firefox or Explorer, but they are there, and they are taking up screen space that is unnecessary while you are navigating a relatively closed site like Flickr, or using GMail as a mail client. 

You would think Google would have thought of that. I have seen the “where is my F11 toggle” question more than a few times on Chrome discussion blogs, and I am sure it is a frequent feature request at Google.

Of course, Google did think of that, at least in a manner of speaking…and actually took the concept one better.

Grabbing GMail as an stand alone app

Choosing where your shortcut icons will appear

Chrome has the ability, through Google Gears, to take any web page, web site,  or web app and make it into what amounts to a stand alone desktop application. Under page controls in the upper right corner of the browser window (the little page icon next to the wrench), you will find the first entry is Create Application Shortcuts. Choosing it gives you options for creating application shortcuts on your Desktop, in the Start Menu, and/or in the Quick Launch Tray. (Assuming you have Google Gears installed and activated.) 

When you make your choice, and for purposes of this article my choice was always just to create a Desktop icon, the page you are viewing will pop out of the browser and into a window of its own…a fully functional Chrome window, but without the header, navigation bars, and bookmarks bar. All you will have at the top is a thin blue band with the name of the running application and the mandatory minimize, full/tiled toggle, and close buttons. You can, if you need and want, click the full/tiled button to expand the page to take up the full screen. Full screen! 

GMail sharing screen space with other apps as a stand alone app on its own.

I imagine Google had applications like Mail, shown above,  in mind when they created this feature. Afterall, many people keep their mail client open in a window  all the time, floating in the background, and there is no need for GMail to be floating in a Chrome tab in that case. Much better that it behave like a stand alone app, in an window that you can resize at will, independently of any Chrome window and tabs that you might have open at the same time.

And, of course, real web apps, like Sumo-paint or Google Docs, are ideal canidates for the Gears app treatment. Opened from a Application shortcut, they behave just like any stand alone application.

SmugMug Gallery running as stand alone app

More than that though, you may have noted that I said Google and Gears can take any web page, any web site, and make it into a stand alone app. Take SmugMug or Flickr  for instance.  Both of these sites can be challenge on a netbook, as the amount of screen real estate limits the size at which you can view work, and the number of thumbnails on a page that you can work with comfortably. On the other hand, once you are in a SmugMug gallery, or surfing someone’s photostream on Flickr, you are pretty much in a self contained universe and don’t really require more than one of Chrome’s tabs.  Turning SmugMug or Flickr into a stand alone app provides a significantly different experience of gallery and photo viewing.

Stand alone mode allows you to view Large size images on Smugmug. Conventional mode limits you to Medium on a Netbook.

So this stand alone app Google Chrome idea has potential. You can create shortcuts and icons for each of your commonly frequented web sites and web apps that you visit often, or at least the ones where you are relativley self contained, and screen real estate is at a premium.

By the way, in the properties dialog for your shortcut icons, you can set the shortcut to open the window in normal, minimize, or maximize (full screen) modes, depending on your work habits.

An asside here on one of the vagaries of Chrome. Chrome does not yet have full support for Greasemonkey scripts…or rather, it does, but there is no easy or elegant way to turn it on yet. Personally, I use one Greasemonkey script all the time in my work with Flickr. Super Invite and Comment Improved is a Greasemonkey script that adds dropdown menus for a set of award groups of your choosing to every comment box on Flickr, one for Invite and one for Award. Choosing a group’s name from the dropdown, automatically places the code for the invitation or award in your comment box, so that the graphics and group links appear under your comment like magic. Considering that the only other way to get the code is to go to the group page, copy the code, return to the image you want to comment or invite, and paste it in to the comment box, SICI is a huge time saver, and I would not willingly live without it. 

add " enable-greasemonkey" to the targets of appropriate shortcut icons in the Properties dialog

That means that, at least when working with Flickr, I need Greasemonkey enabled in Chrome. To accomplish this I had appended ” -enable-greasemonkey” to the target path for my Chrome shortcut in my Quick Launch tray, by going into the shortcuts property dialog and pasting it in after the last quotation mark in the existing target. 

However, now that I have a Flickr stand alone shortcut, that means going in and appending it to the target of that shortcut too. Easily done. But what if I open chrome by clicking on my GMail stand alone application shortcut and then navigate out to Flickr. That means going in and enabling greasemonkey for every stand alone application shortcut icon. A pain, but easily done, and necessary only until Google provides a toggle for Greasemonkey in the Options dialog (soon please!). 

On the subject of navigating out to another web site from within any of your new Chrome stand alone apps, Google has you covered. In the upper left corner of the stand alone window you will see the icon for your app. There is a dropdown menu under there (click it and see), and one of the choices is “open browser window”. This will open a new Chrome window, with header, tabs, navigation bar, and your bookmarks so you can go wherever your heart desires. It is independent of your stand alone app window, and can be resized, or closed without effecting your stand alone. 

So far, so good. We have created a set of stand alone application shortcut icons for all our frequently used, and space hungy, web sites and web applications, but that brings up the issue of what to do with all those new shortcut icons. Will they clutter up your desktop, turning it into, well, a messy executive’s desktop while his secretary is on vacation? 

The ideal place for them would be the Quick Launch tray. Once there, a single click opens the stand alone version of your web site. (One of the things (call me lazy) that I hate about shortcut icons on the desktop is the fact that your have to double click them to activate.) However, on a netbook, that Quick Launch bar can quickly fill to overflowing, and leave little or no room for running apps between it and the task bar on the right. 

Enter StandaloneStack! I did some research on alternative arrangements for shortcut icons and Standalone Stacker stands out as the best of the bunch.

If you are not familiar with Stackers, they are add-ons for some of the popular Launcher Bar and Quick Launch programs which mimic the Apple Mac’s Leopard application stacks, by arranging your shortcut icons in creative ways on your desktop. StandaloneStack does the trick, as the name might suggest, independently, using your existing windows Quick Launch and task trays.

There was recently a good post on StandaloneStack on Lifehacker (which is where I discovered it, by the way).

You can download StandaloneStack here. You could follow the instructions on the web page to create your first Stack. I did. But it turns out the instructions, like most instructions written by someone who already knows how to do it, leave more than a few things, as they say, to the imagination. Let me walk you through it.

Here is the goal:

StandAloneStacker grid view collects all your shortcut icons into one neat box that opens from an icon in the Quick Launch tray.

To accomplish this, you download the StandaloneStack zip file from the site above. Unzip it to a newly created folder on your C: drive, called something like “standalonestacker”. For ease in what follows, immediately make a copy of that folder, somewhere else. It turns out that if you want more than one stack, each has to reside in a uniquely named folder. You will want to keep the original standalonestacker folder as a template. So select your folder, choose Copy from the File Explorer task menu on the left, create a new folder with an appropriate name (I called my first one “InternetStack”)  in the directory you plan to use, copy, and then navigate to the new folder wherever you put it. I have an “Tools and Applications” folder in My Documents where I store all this kind of stuff. 

Open your new Stacker folder. Left click on the StandaloneStack application icon and choose “create shortcut” from the drop-down menu. Select the new shortcut and change its name to whatever you want. In my case I called it “Internet”.  You can do this by left-clicking, choosing “renane”, or by just clicking on the existing name to highlight it, and typing in your new name.

If you want to get fancy, and if you are planning on having more than one Stack, you might as well get fancy right now, then left click on the newly named shortcut icon and open the Properties dialog. You will see an option to “Change Icon”. Click it. This provides a dialog to select another icon, but unfortunately there is only the Stacker icon in the box. To get another icon, decide which application icon you want to be the representative icon for this whole stack. In my case I chose Chrome. Find a Chrome shortcut on your desktop (or make one). Open its properties dialog. Click Change Icon, and select and copy the complete text in the Look Here box. Go back to your Stacker shortcut icon properties dialog and past the location into the Change Icon dialog for that shortcut. Hit return. Presto, the icon for Chrome (or whatever you chose) appears in the selection box. Select it and apply or close. Your Stack shortcut will now have the Chrome (or whatever) icon. 

Finding a new icon for your Stack shorcut.

Now, before you go any further, navigate to an appropriate folder (I used My Documents again) and create a folder to store the shortcuts for this Stack. Name it something appropriate. I called my “Internet”. Drag, copy, or move the shortcuts for this stack into this new folder. At least one shortcut at this point. You can add others later.

Okay. Now back to the Stacker folder. If this is your first stack, you can open the StandaloneStack settings dialog by double-clicking the icon you just created for it. If not, or to be safe, hold down the shift or control keys while double-clicking the icon. 

Stack Settings Dialog

In the dialog that pops up, for the Folder box, browse and navigate to the folder you just created to hold your shortcuts. Select it and the folder path will appear in the folder box. Choose Grid from the Mode dropdown, and whatever Sort method you want. Close the dialog.

Now, drag your new Stack shortcut to the Quick Launch tray. When you click it the grid view stack will open right above it, in its semi-transparent backgound as shown above.  From here on out, when you want to add shortcuts to this Stack, just choose the Open Folder shortcut right in the grid view itself. Drag in your new shortcuts, close the folder and you are good to go.

To create another Stack, go back to your standalonestck folder on the C: drive, make a new uniquely named copy of the folder, and follow the steps above. You can put as many Stacks in the Quick Launch tray as you want.

I just have two so far. One that contains all my new stand alone Chrome apps, and one that contains the shortcuts for my graphics programs and folders (with it’s own unique icon, borrowed from Lightroom). That means that I can delete all my Internet and graphics Quick Launch shortcut icons, and all the shortcuts that littered my desktop! Neat. No really, neat…no clutter. Easy to use. Organization itself.

Chrome stand alone apps and StandaloneStack create, really, a whole alternative work space for the netbook, allowing you many options and maximum use of the available screen space. You can always run Chrome in its standard mode, when you need the tabbed browsing feature (for instance when copy and pasting urls from one site to another, as in when writing a blog, etc.) 

By the way, if you have more Chrome stand alone apps open at the same time than will fit in the running apps space on your task bar, they will group into a single pop-up menu (provided you have your taskbar set to group like). 

Chrome stand alone apps and StandaloneStack will not be to every netbook user’s taste, or match every work-style, but I am finding the combination a very worthwhile investment in more efficient computing.