Let’s Talk About Google+

This is the blog post I’ve been avoiding writing.

As a die hard Apple fangirl, I love everything about Apple. However, even I am willing to admit when Apple has gotten something completely wrong. Let’s face it, Apple’s attempt at a social network, Ping, blows chunks. I don’t use it. I want to use it, I think the idea of sharing the music that I love with other people via Ping is awesome, but it doesn’t connect to Facebook and to be brutally honest, it needs that piece of functionality. Ping is tailor made for the Facebook crowd and that’s where it should live, as an app for Facebook, not integrated into iTunes.

I would love to say that Ping has a brilliant user interface that is straight forward and easy to use. I would love to say that Ping has this cool feature or that cool feature that I can’t live without. I would love to point out that so far, the lack of stupid quiz apps and the lack of games that not only want to steal all of my private data, but also are designed to get me addicted to playing them so that I can sink large amounts of cash into them, is a huge bonus.

And while some of those things are true about Ping, mostly the lack of games and stupid quiz apps, the ones that matter, the brilliant user interface and the feature list, are not all that.

Google stepped into that little arena and filled in the gap between what I wanted Ping to be, and what Facebook is when they opened Google+ for public field trials less than a month ago. Google has really surprised me with Ping.

I have been absolutely unimpressed with Android. I don’t see the reason for the hype, I see Android as an also ran. It’s not a bad platform, but it’s not a great platform. I can’t hand an Android phone to a 90 year old grandmother and expect her to be able to make a phone call. I can do that with my iPhone, and in fact, I have run into many an elderly couple looking for cases for their iPhones in the Apple store. I almost never see them at the phone store. If your grandma has to call you for tech support every time she wants to send an email on her smartphone, you’re doing something wrong.

I like user interfaces that just flat out make sense. I do not want something complicated that is different for every single user, or every single device. If someone needs to use my phone to call 911, I want them to be able to do that without having to figure out which screen I put the “Phone” icon on. It should be obvious, and in your face. That’s just good design.

It also seems to me like Google had a plan for Android that isn’t working out for them in the way that they’d hoped and that Amazon is about to take the tool that Google gave them, and blow a great big hole in the side of the tablet market before Samsung can make another iPad knock off that is nowhere near as elegant and more expensive.

I can’t wait to see that fight, because I think Apple is braced for impact, and the Android tablet makers are going to get T-boned.

I feel completely differently about Google+ though.

Google has really put together an elegant product here, something that they could monetize easily by inserting Google ads and I’m not sure that would bother me too much.

What I love, is that I can choose who sees the content I put up on Google+. I maintain control of my material, so if I want my parents to see it, but not every person I know, I can just include the “family” circle in my post and not allow any other circles to see it. I can make new circles too! I don’t have to live with the five they gave me. I have circles for people that I’ve met via the Internet, by the internet forum that I met them on. So I have a MINI circle and a Dog circle and an IRC circle. I can also choose to add people to multiple circles. So if I have someone in the MINI circle that I am closer to than the guy I just met on the forum last week, I can add that person to a “Friends” circle in addition to having them be a part of the MINI circle, so they can see the posts that I make available to a more personal group.

You can get as complicated or as simplistic as you want with the circles. There are no hard and fast rules for how to make one, it’s entirely up to you. Facebook has a similar feature, but it’s hard to maintain if you didn’t start out using it from the get-go.

By contrast, maintaining your circles on G+ is a snap. Say, for example, you end up getting out of a particular hobby. In my case, I just got out of fish keeping. I liked the hobby and it was a lot of fun, but it’s not something that I choose to do. So, I don’t want to read about it every day now. If I had a bunch of people in my circles that did nothing but talk about fish keeping, I could go to the circle for the fish keeping friends, and with two clicks, cut the entire circle loose simply by opening up the circle and choosing “Delete this circle”. Not only does it delete the circle entry itself, but any friends that you have in the circle that you may not want to keep for whatever reason, are also removed from your circles and will no longer be able to see your posts.

It’s just that easy to maintain.

So far, I’m impressed. If an iOS app is approved for the service, I can see myself easily gravitating away from Facebook to using Google+ instead. It’s much more streamlined and more geared around what I want to do with it and how I want to use it, rather than being geared on how the developers think it should be used.

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg here. Those are just the major features that I have used so far. There are also hangouts, which I have not tried to use yet. I also haven’t really talked about Sparks, which is kind of a cool way to aggregate news articles on subjects you’re interested in, because I haven’t delved into how it works too deeply just yet. They’re not that relevant anyway.

The control that Google+ gives the user over their own content is the star of the show.

I still have a few invites to Google+ left. If you’re interested, let me know.

iTunes in the Cloud: What More Do You Need?

I have been desperately trying to put this blog post together for a week or so now. The reality is, there’s just too much about iOS5 that I love. Suffice it to say that we have iOS5 running on my old 3GS so that my husband can figure out how it works, and maybe, someday, finish that iPhone app that I keep telling him he needs to build. In the mean time, I’ve been carrying the thing around and using it where I would normally be using my iPhone 4.

I could tell you all sorts of cool things about iOS5 that Apple did not talk about at WWDC. But that’s not what has me excited as an end user of iOS5. What has me excited, is iTunes in the Cloud. Being able to sync my books, videos and music over the air is just a God send. This all started because of my mother, of course.

I’m reading this series of books that my mother has mentioned to me every time I’ve talked to her for the last several months. I finally picked them up for free off of SmashWords and am reading them with iBooks. They’re not the best I’ve read to be honest, the plot could use some work, it’s predictable, story pieces connect to each other a little too easily to be believable, but the writing is pretty solid and the world is pretty interesting and I really like the characters, so I’m hooked. The other night, I was reading book two of the series in bed and I had my iPad sitting up against my knees and I wanted to roll over and hide under the covers so the light wouldn’t disturb my husband and I thought to myself, “Oh! I’ll just grab my iPhone!” and I realized in the same moment that I didn’t have the book on my iPhone.

This was last weekend, before Apple’s keynote on Monday. I was a little frustrated at myself for forgetting to sync my books on my iPhone. My eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning when I heard them announce iTunes in the Cloud. The first thing I did as soon as that feature became available on my iPhone, was turn it on and start using it. I love being able to have my purchases where I want them, when I want them there, as opposed to where I put them when I bought them.

Then I decided I wanted to revisit George Michael. I used to seriously love George Michael, but we drifted apart after I graduated high school and his pop stardom waned. I caught an episode of Eli Stone and HAD to have Faith again, so I went to buy it this morning. I picked the seven songs I wanted, paid my seven bucks, and immediately the device I have running the iOS5 beta bleeped at me. The notifications window on the lock screen said, “You downloaded a song from your computer. Turn on automatic downloads to receive music on this device without having to sync.”
You can imagine the grin that spread across my face when I read this.

One thing I am learning about iOS 5 is that the intention here is to have your device work with your life, rather than you having to think about your device and wonder if you did this thing or that. I feel like it encourages you to live your digital life effortlessly, and when something important happens, it tells you, rather than you having to constantly tell it. Using the device and getting things done is just so much less of a chore.

It’s what I have wanted all along and never knew I really needed. I was content with tethered life, but now that I have seen a taste of what is on the horizon for Apple users with iCloud, I’m sorely tempted to sell all of my spare iPod cables on Craigslist. I can’t see a reason why you would need to plug your device into your Mac to sync it. It doesn’t matter where I am when I buy music now. I can buy it from my iPad, iPhone or Macbook. It will show up on the other devices before I even think to look for the data on them. What more do I need in this life?

Well, okay, I probably need a million dollars and a contract with a publisher but that’s pipe dreaming here.

Scrivener and Me

This could get long, I’m coming off of a very long November.

I am relatively new to Macs. I got my very first Mac in December 2008 and I am still thrilled to tell everyone who will listen, that I am typing on that very same Mac right now. I am impressed and amazed that I have had a computer this long and have never had to call tech support and have not had a hard drive blow up, or the back light in a screen go out for no apparent reason other than it just felt like dying that day. When I went to the genius bar to get my iPhone fixed, the Genius told me I could expect to have my Mac for another three years. I grinned like a kid on Christmas when he told me that.

I love being a Mac owner.

I have been searching for word processing software since I bought my Mac. I wasn’t a fan of Word even when I had PC’s. I don’t really need an “office” suite and OO for Mac is SLOW.

Last year, I bought a competing piece of Mac word processing software and liked it pretty well, but I was having a hard time with organizing my thoughts while working through this year’s NaNo novel. This novel is very important to me, it’s a story that’s been kicking around in my brain for years and I finally decided to get it out of my system and see if I could make a go of something with it. I was getting annoyed with the process of creating in this other software. It didn’t do things that I wanted it to do and was too… featureless.

I broke 50,000 words on November 12. The problem with that, is that what I was writing had no direction, no guidance. It meandered all over the place and didn’t adhere to any sort of time line. There was no good way to organize the scenes I was writing into timeline and write them out of order, which is what I tend to do. Sometimes I want to work on the end of my story first, and go back to the beginning later, or write a scene in the middle and then work chronologically forward from there for a while.

My process has NEVER worked for me when I was using any tools other than a three ring binder, a typewriter and a hole punch.

During the middle of NaNo, I ended up needing to make a day trip out of town, so I updated all of my podcasts and went out on the open road. I was listening to Andy Inahtko talk about the various Mac apps that he loves and he started talking about Scrivener. His praise for Scrivener was just glowing. Then I saw that some authors that I really respected and loved used Scrivener exclusively and then I saw the trial version available for WriMos… I had to at least give it a shot.

On day 14, I downloaded the Scrivener trial and ported over some of my NaNo novel into it.

Scrivener saved my novel.

I was in a place where I was ready to call it done for the year. After I installed it, I ended up organizing the whole thing in the binder. I fit my outline into 11 chapters in the binder with no trouble at all. I cut chunks of text out of my old document and placed them in a new one and it took me about one afternoon to set the whole annoying, frustrating, beast of a project to rights. I wish that I had started the novel this way in the first place.

It’s December now and I’m still working on my novel, which is odd. I love to write, I love being a writer, but I don’t get paid for it. I have always been way too frustrated with the process to try to make it something more than just a creative outlet. It is what I am, not what I do.

Scrivener might just make a doer out of me.

Random Gemini’s iPad Review.

Welp… I don’t have much to say about the iPad.

Hubby picked ours up yesterday and I have played with it for approximately oh… 15 minutes. Long enough to tell you that I really dig the IDEA of Netflix App on the iPad… and I really dig the idea of Kindle App on the iPad… iBooks looks really swanky and… the AP Mobile News App on iPad… just… owns.

Otherwise… hubby has not taken his hands off our iPad except for while he was sleeping last night and the 20 minutes that he was in the shower this morning… and the 15 minutes during which he was making breakfast.

So… I have no idea what I can tell you about the iPad and its features… because I have no freaking clue what they are yet.

That’s it.

Happy Easter!

Kindle App v. Stanza: Round 1!

I’ve been reading ebooks with Stanza on my iPhone since early January. I had never honestly entertained the idea of reading ebooks, until I hit a huge reading phase and realized that as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder to hang on to hefty hardbacks. After a while, it makes my hands hurt to hang onto a paperback in such a way that I don’t crack the spine, which, as all good readers know, eventually causes the pages of the book to fall out.

For eons, Stanza has been the de facto standard for e book reading on the iPhone, and I was very happy with how it worked. Text colors and font sizes were completely customizable to make reading easier on the eyes. Tapping to either side of the screen advanced pages forward or backwards. Accessing the menu was done through a simple tap in the center of the screen. There was also the advantage of having direct download access to the entire width and breadth of the Gutenberg project without having to sign into an account. Stanza is just incredibly intuitive to iPhone users. It works like an iPhone user expects an iPhone app to work. So pitting yourself up against something that just plain works is a pretty brave thing to do.

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Smartphone Experts HD Skin Case

Shopping for a case for my iPhone 3g has been a nightmare. I really enjoyed my case for my previous gen iPhone, the Inno case by Seidio. That case had everything I wanted. It was a hard sided case with a grippy texture to it so that the phone didn’t slip out of my hands. It was felt lined on the inside, so it didn’t chew up my phone and it fit around the bezel of the phone so that it could be used without peeling up a screen protector.

I know that’s a tall order for a case, but Seidio performed the job beautifully and then they brought out the Inno II for the iPhone 3g, which I honestly don’t like as much. There’s a hole in the back of the case to expose the apple on the back of the phone, which to me just screams dust and scratch magnet, and then there’s the fact that they’ve introduced new colors and I’m not really a fan of any of them. It’s just not as nice a case from my perspective on things. So here I am, shopping for something that I like as much as the Inno and so far, I’ve been disappointed.

But I think I’ve found something that may have changed my mind, just a little bit.

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