ab_aditya's shared items in Google Reader

We can do better than Facebook

2012-05-21T13:49:45Z

Google's problem is they used Facebook as their guide to upgrading their view of what the Internet is. And that led them away from their strength, and into what I think is a dead-end. Much as Microsoft was led into a dead-end by the web in the 1990s.

The problem with Facebook's approach is more than it has centralized all access to user's data, which they have. They've also centralized the flow of new ideas to the Internet. If you buy the idea that Facebook is the Internet, which is of course the problem for Facebook. Because no matter how big they get, they're still just part of the Internet. All the devices people use to access Facebook can access other parts of the Internet. So if something more exciting comes along, people can get there.

No problem, you say, because Facebook is a very innovative company. But it is a problem, because that's the Facebook of yesterday. The one that occupied a small suite of offices in downtown Palo Alto. That was two iterations of Facebook ago. And they're working on the third iteration. Each is much huger than the previous. And they are all hiring out of the general talent pool of tech.

At best, they can produce a stream of innovation equal to 1.5 previous Facebooks, and that would be a victory. The model for everyone for scaling a company and still producing new products, and new ideas, is of course Apple. But I'd argue that the Apple of the 1980s was far more innovative than the Apple of the last ten years. They took huge unprecedented steps every couple of years. Today's Apple, and there's nothing wrong with this by the way, takes them every five to seven years. And they aren't as big, they're more evolutionary, more refinements of previous stuff. Re-releases. Like Pixar, they ship a new Toy Story every few years.

The value of the Internet is that it represents a common set of protocols and formats that are very widely implemented. Everywhere human beings are you will find HTTP and HTML. Even in space. Even at the poles. Even in the jungle. Or the core of our cities. It is even possible to add new stuff to that. But please study how that happens. Sure some of it comes from the big companies, but lots of it comes from the people. Some of it comes from young people, and some of it comes from people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Back in the 90s, there were only three stories carried by the press. Let's see if I remember them:

1. Apple is dead.

2. Microsoft is evil.

3. Java is the future.

Never mind whether they were true or not, what's important was that with the benefit of hindsight we see that these were not the only stories. Just the ones that reporters pushed. Even though they used Apple products, and if they had studied hsitory of tech cycles, they would have known that Microsoft was in its twilight of dominance, and that languages don't change things the way Sun and Netscape wanted us to think they do.

All along, however, all the way from the beginning of my career as a technologist in the 1970s, to the present, there has been the idea that big companies make innovation. This is the biggest impediment to actual innovation. It means that investment dollars go to the wrong places. That people are driven to become big just to innovate. Which is as silly is waiting to be happy until you're rich. By the time you get there, the sex sucks and the innovation is a memory. Instead you're mired in politics, and turf wars and strategy taxes, and execs lack the intuition they had when they were founders because now they live like almost no one else does. Even Steve Jobs drifted away from his roots as he aged. You have to work at staying in it.

If the past is a predictor, here's what will happen. Facebook will exist for a long time to come. They're huge. They've absorbed a lot of the growth of Silicon Valley. They're the continuation of companies like Sun and Netscape, Apple and H-P. Google is out there too, but they are imho where Microsoft was in the 1990s. They too will be here for a long time because it's very rare for companies as large and diverse as Google to go down quickly. It usually takes a generation or two, and sometimes they figure out how to be in it much longer.

But again, if the past is a predictor, new ideas will take root among users and those ideas will grow into the next layer of tech. That's a good place to put your attention too.

How to Use a Paper Towel

2012-05-15T18:38:44Z

Seriously, this is a terrific presentation.

★

The iPhone Bleeds Lumia Cyan, According To Siri. Or Wolfram Alpha. Or Best Buy. Sometimes. Maybe. Actually, No.

2012-05-11T20:52:00Z

Well, Jim Dalrymple beat me to making fun of this, but what the hell, it’s Friday.

Earlier today, a thread starting passing around the Internet pointing out something worth a chuckle: when you ask Siri what the best smartphone is, it responds with the Nokia Lumia 900. The cyan version from AT&T, to be exact.

That’s it — end of debate! Shut Apple down and pay the money back to the shareholders. The Lumia 900 is clearly killing off the iPhone. Well, except if you consider sales. And user happiness. But whatever, Siri says so!

But wait. Does Siri even say so? After a series of never-ending clicks, I believe I was able to trace this “story” back to its roots. Dalrymple linked to AppleInsider, which links to TheNextWeb (hi Robin!), which links to ZUnited, which links to WMPoweruser. (CNet tried to insert itself into the conversation too, but well, it was this guy.)

Appropriately, it was a game of telephone that led to “Which is the best cellphone ever?” evolving into “what is the best smartphone ever?” Along the way, there were several reports of different answers — for example, I get nothing when I ask about the best smartphone ever and I get “I think you’ve already answered that question, MG.” when I ask for the best cellphone ever. Cute.

But people definitely are seeing the Lumia 900 pop up, the screenshots prove it! How could Apple let such a thing fly? Because it has nothing to do with Apple. The answer comes from Wolfram Alpha, Siri’s top data partner. And the fact of the matter is that in this case, the data sucks.

Wolfram Alpha passed the Lumia 900 to Siri simply because it’s the first on this list. But if you look closely at that list, you’ll note that several phones receive the highest “5” rating — 29 of them, by my count. And that list includes three models of the iPhone (two different versions of the iPhone 4S — the 64GB white model from Verizon and Sprint, sorry, AT&T). They’re simply not the first listed.

But again, this list is shit. It’s data from Best Buy based on user ratings. The Lumia 900 in question is “#1” with a whopping 5 user reviews. Number 2 on the list is this phone — I mean, just look at it! — which has a whole one five-star user review. Number 3 on the list is the HP refurbished Touchpad. Yes, the Touchpad. Number 3 best smartphone ever.

Need I go on?

★ iOS Low-Hanging Fruit

2012-05-11T20:18:36Z

iOS has evolved in a fairly predictable manner over the years. Apple has done a good job tackling the lowest-hanging fruit on the to-do list, year after year. They crossed off a lot of big obvious features over the first few years: third-party apps, cut-copy-paste, enterprise support, push notifications, better multitasking. Last year brought a few more: over-the-air software updates, cloud-based backups and wireless syncing, and a much improved notification interface.

Another good source for iOS feature predictions has been to survey the competition and identify the areas where iOS was lacking. Those items from last year, for example, were areas where Android was ahead.

iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are. The biggest one left is mapping. Today brings a report from 9to5Mac that Apple is set to switch the back-end data in iOS’s Maps app from Google to its own mapping services; John Paczkowski confirms it, quoting a source who claims the new Maps will “blow your head off”.

Here’s the thing. Apple’s homegrown mapping data has to be great.

Mapping is an essential phone feature. It’s one of those few features that almost everyone with an iPhone uses, and often relies upon. That’s why Apple has to do their own — they need to control essential technology.¹ I suspect Apple would be pushing to do their own maps even if their relationship with Google were still hunky-dory, as it was circa 2007. (Remember Eric Schmidt coming on stage during the iPhone introduction?) But as things actually stand today between Apple and Google, relying on Google for mapping services is simply untenable.

This is a high-pressure switch for Apple. Regressions will not be acceptable. The purported whiz-bang 3D view stuff might be great, but users are going to have pitchforks and torches in hand if practical stuff like driving and walking directions are less accurate than they were with Google’s data. Keep in mind too, that Android phones ship with turn-by-turn navigation.

What else remains hanging low on the iOS new-features tree, though? I can think of a few:

Clever inter-application communication. Seems crazy that iOS, the direct descendant of NeXT, doesn’t have anything like Services, which were one of NeXT’s most touted features (and rightfully so). It’s also worth noting that Android has a pretty good Services-esque system in place, called “Intents”, and Windows 8 has an even richer concept called “Contracts”.
Third-party Notification Center widgets. Like the Stocks and Weather ones from Apple — information at a glance, without launching an app.
Third-party Siri APIs. Let other apps provide features you can interact with through Siri.

But that’s about it. And even the Siri API idea seems more like a “nice to have” feature idea than a low-hanging “Apple really has to do this sooner or later” idea. Again, I’m not saying Apple’s iOS to-do list is empty; I’m just saying the list of obvious they-gotta-do-it stuff is getting short.

Tim Cook, back in January 2009: “We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.” ↩

Hotel’s Free Wi-Fi Comes With Hidden Extras

2012-04-08T16:43:10Z

Brian X. Chen, for the NYT Bits blog:

After some sleuthing, Mr. Watt, who has a background in developing Web advertising tools, realized that the quirk was not confined to his site. The hotel’s Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page’s creator.

Yet another reason to bring your own 3G or LTE hotspot with you when you travel.

★

Carriers Whine: We Wuz Robbed

2012-03-22T16:21:48Z

Great piece by Jean-Louis Gassée on the carriers’ complaints about the subsidies they pay to Apple for the iPhone.

★

At Google, advertising is crowding out search results

2012-03-05T00:50:16Z

For years, Google was famous for its clean, uncluttered layout and its excellent search algorithms. Those days are long gone.

Google gets 96% of its annual revenue from advertising. Search results produce no revenue. That has led to some tremendous distortions and a horrifying breakdown in the once-clean Google experience.

I present Exhibit A, which I discovered thanks to Twitter.

If you’re signed in to your Google+ account and you search for pet meds, a little ad module appears at the top of the search results, with your email address already filled in.

I’m sure there are other search terms that will lead to similar results, but this is the first one I’ve seen.

The idea of pre-filling the lead-generating form is a little creepy, but technically there’s no privacy violation. After all, I gave Google my email address and used it to sign in, and they’re not sharing it with anyone unless I click the Get offers button.

But here’s what was more disturbing about those search results. I captured a screen shot showing the results page as it appears on a notebook with a 1366 x 768 screen—one of the most popular display resolutions available today. See if you notice anything odd (click to open the screenshot in its own window if you want to study it more carefully):

There is only ONE actual search result on that entire page. If you want to see the rest of the search results, you have to page down.

Surrounding that link are nine ads, plus a link to a PetMeds user account at Google+. There are 10 links to Google services at the top of the page. Below that is my Google+ profile picture (which leads to my Google+ account settings) and a big Share box.

That’s a total of 23 links on that page, as it appears on a typical computer. Only one is a search result.

That’s just wrong.

Update: As @BleepinComputer notes on Twitter, this is ironic, given Google’s January 2012 public statement on this exact issue, published on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

[W]e’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Huh. Imagine that.

John Williams Turns 80

2012-02-09T19:27:47Z

Five of his classic scores, with a bit of his own commentary. You could argue that Williams is the most successful artist in the history of film. (Via Jim Coudal.)

★

Kodak to Stop Selling Digital Cameras

2012-02-10T01:06:24Z

Dana Mattioli, reporting for the WSJ:

The decision to shutter the business, which Kodak says will save it more than $100 million a year, is the strongest symbol yet of the sea change in consumer electronics and decades of missteps that forced the former blue-chip company to seek bankruptcy protection last month.

A sad fate for a once-great company. But when not selling a product saves you $100 million a year, you know you were in the wrong business or doing business wrong.

★

★ The ‘Apple Should Be Worried If Anyone Else Has Any Success Whatsoever’ School of Thought

2012-02-10T19:47:55Z

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, regarding this week’s news about Windows for ARM:

And this is why Apple should be worried. So far I’ve been concerned that WOA would offer a cut-down, Fisher Price sort of Windows experience. It would look at a bit like duck, quack something like a duck, but actually be more of a platypus than a duck, and that ultimately this would be its undoing. But now I realize that I was wrong. WOA looks like Windows, quacks like Windows, and is Windows. Microsoft has pulled off what it promised, and has taken its desktop OS and put it across multiple platforms and onto various screen sizes. This changes how we look at tablets.

Apple has maintained a gulf between the Mac OS and iOS on a number of fronts. While we’re seeing some unification (in many ways with the migration of iOS features into the Mac OS), you can’t argue that there’s still a big chasm between the two platforms.

This is a recurring theme. Someone does something different than Apple, has some success with it, and pundits like Kingsley-Hughes start arguing that Apple needs to change course and do what the other guys are doing. Exhibit A: the Kindle Fire. It’s selling well — nowhere near as well as the iPad, mind you, but it’s not collecting dust in warehouses like most other tablets are — prompting some to argue that Apple “must” release a $250 7-inch tablet too.

Now we have Microsoft taking a very different approach to managing the difference between traditional PCs and touchscreen tablets. They’re going with a “one OS for all devices” strategy; Apple chose a “different OSes with specific shared concepts for each type of device” strategy.

Good for Microsoft for choosing a different strategy. Good for Amazon for choosing a different strategy. Their possible successes, however, do not necessarily bode poorly for Apple. There is room in the market for very different devices.

That Microsoft’s approach appeals to some more than Apple’s doesn’t mean Apple needs to respond to it or follow their lead. The fact that the iPad does not run Mac OS X, nor run Mac apps, is by design — not a technical limitation. And the iPad’s success — it now sells at three times the rate of all Macs combined — suggests that consumers see the iPad’s differences as a benefit, not a limitation.

That doesn’t mean Microsoft (and Amazon, and everyone else) should copy Apple’s iPad strategy as closely as possible. But it certainly shows that Apple not only does not “need” to follow Microsoft’s or Amazon’s strategies, but that they shouldn’t. The iPad was not designed to be all things for all people. How much better would the iPad need to be selling to convince these pundits that Apple nailed it, that they struck gold with the iPad’s concept and execution? There may well be gold in other spots on the tablet frontier, but Apple is going to keep digging in the same spot.

Kala Pani - Hum Bekhudi Mein Tumko Pukare - Mohd Rafi

2011-11-27T09:12:08Z

I liked a YouTube video: Super Hit Hindi Song From Bollywood Film, Kala Pani, 1958, Dev Anand, Madhubala, Nalini, Jaywant, Kishor Sahu, Music By S.D.Burman, Directed By Raj Kholsa. http://www.shemaroo.com

Newell talks Steam sales, pricing experiments

2011-10-24T19:41:00Z

GeekWire has published an interesting interview with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell. The discussion centers on Steam, and specifically, the experiments Valve has conducted to explore how pricing affects the games that it sells through the service.

When Valve altered the price of one of its games without announcing the discount, it discovered pricing was perfectly elastic—lowering the price did increase sales, but given the lower cost, Valve's gross revenue was ...

‘I Finally Cracked It’

2011-10-24T22:07:49Z

Marco Arment on the passage in Isaacson’s biography where Jobs tells him he’s “cracked” the problem of creating an Apple-quality TV.

The way to revolutionize the TV market is to cut out all of the legacy. No cable companies. No broadcast tuners. No channels. No DVRs. All internet delivery. All on-demand. No commercials.

But that’s an incredibly tall order. Apple can do a lot, but I’m not sure that they can do that, given how much of it is out of their control.

It’s all about content. I don’t even think it’s that hard to imagine a truly game-changing TV from Apple — but such a thing would require massive participation from content providers. I’m not going to hold my breath.

The other thing that’s always struck me is that even if Apple could get a ton of content providers on board with the idea, they’d still have to worry about cable providers because so many of us get our Internet service from a cable company. What’s to stop Comcast from throttling your bandwidth after you drop TV service and pay them for nothing other than Internet service? Ideally the feds would prevent that, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that either.

★

Beta Update: Firefox 8 Offers Smarter Tab Restore

2011-09-30T14:28:29Z

The official release of Firefox is now at version 7, which means that all the other Firefox channels have also been bumped up. Nightly now sits at version 10, Aurora at 9 and Beta now contains Firefox 8, which has several new features worth noting, including more control over add-ons and the ability to limit which tabs load on restart.

If you’d like to give the beta channel a try, just head on over to the Firefox channels page and download the beta release. Those of you already on the beta channel should be updated to the latest version the next time you restart Firefox.

Perhaps the most useful new feature in Firefox 8 is the ability to selectively restore tabs. If you use a lot of tabs you know that closing the browser with dozens of tabs open, and then firing it up again the next day, makes for a very slow restart. You’re left waiting for all those tabs to reload when all you want to see is one of them.

That’s why Firefox 8 adds an option to change the way Firefox reloads tabs when it starts. Using the new setting you can tell Firefox to only load the focused tab when it restarts. That way the tab you want loads and you don’t need to wait for all the rest to finish. Background tabs then load when you select them.

To enable the new tab restore features, head to Firefox’s Preferences and look for it under the General tab.

Firefox 8 also gives you more control over add-ons installed by third-party software. Now any add-ons you don’t explicitly install are disabled until you opt-in. That stops less than scrupulous developers from hijacking Firefox without your knowledge.

The latest beta of Firefox adds some new developer features as well, like support for the HTML5 contextmenu attribute, a part of the menu element that allows developers to add items directly to the browser’s right-click menu. More details about what’s new for developers can be found on the Mozilla developer wiki.

Other new features in the beta channel include a new default search option for Twitter, some better animations when dragging tabs around and improved security for websockets, which were just recently re-enabled in Firefox 7.

See Also:

Samuel L. Ipsum: Pulp Fiction Placeholder Text

2011-09-30T16:12:52Z

Really you should be designing for the content, a practice that pretty much precludes the use of placeholder text. That said, our new rule is, if you’re going to use placeholder text, use Slipsum — Samuel L. Ipsum (probably NSFW).

Sure it defeats the purpose of Lorem Ipsom entirely by being distractingly, hilariously readable, but sometimes when you’re slogging through a boring project you need a little humor.

Slipsum comes in two varieties, regular, NSFW Pulp Fiction quotes and Lite quotes without the swearing.

See Also:

How do you relate to memes?

2011-10-21T12:00:05Z

meme is defined as “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” This could be anything from fauhawks, to LOL Cats to how you practice religion or whether or not you recycle.

We often unconsciously make decisions on how we relate to these memes. We can easily consume and be a conduit for these ideas, behaviors and styles without even realizing it. We can also be disinterested in or disconnected from memes with little thought.

What can truly define us are the memes we chose to create or chase and the ones with which we are determined to disagree. These are decisions we make with greater intention.

The issue with this is when we relate passively (positively or negatively) with memes of significance, while we relate intentionally to the less significant memes. I churn stomach acid over fictional TV characters and college football while real people are illiterate, hungry and/or dying of an easily-treated disease.

What would happen if we worked to relate intentionally with memes of significance?

Five Best Restaurant Discovery Apps [Hive Five]

2011-10-23T15:00:00Z

Looking for a new place to eat in a new town, or want to try a specific cuisine and don't know where to go? Regardless of the mobile OS you prefer, there are plenty of apps that can help you find a new place to eat that you'll actually enjoy. Here's a look at five of those apps, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week we asked you which apps you fire up on your mobile device when you wanted to find a new place to eat. You responded with a ton of great nominations, and now we're back to highlight the top five. Photo by Glenn Harper.

OpenTabl (iOS/Android/BlackBerry/WP7/WebOS)

OpenTable started off as an easy way to make table reservations at your favorite restaurants from your smartphone, without having to call and deal with a host or hostess that can barely hear you or may forget to make your reservation. Reservations are still OpenTable's bread and butter, but the team behind the app have also partnered with Yelp to exchange reviews and reservations. The app allows you to see nearby restaurants on a top-down map, earn points and awards for making reservations through the service, and read reviews from OpenTable members.

Urbanspoon (iOS/Android/BlackBerry)

Urbanspoon started as a BlackBerry app, and its trademark "shake to randomly select a place to have lunch" slot machine feature is still well loved. However, the restaurant slot machine is a bit of a gimmick that sits in front of a large list of smaller local businesses that other apps often miss. The app also allows you to share and compare your reviews with friends, find restaurants near you, and everything else that most restaurant-search apps do. To augment its ratings and reviews, Urbanspoon also integrates reviews from newspapers and food blogs. Doing so adds some real authority and weight to the reviews that other services are lacking.

Foodspotting (iOS/Android/BlackBerry/WP7)

Foodspotting's claim to fame is that it encourages you to search and share dishes that you enjoy, not just restaurants. So when you use Foodspotting, you'll be encouraged to take pictures of the food and drink that you like, upload it to the service, share some thoughts, and then tell the community where you are. When you use the mobile app, you're shown photos of dishes and foods near you, not just a list of nearby restaurants. The community then chimes in to like or favorite photos, and trade "wants" and "noms" for dishes they want to try and dishes they really love. Foodspotting's visual approach to discovering new food is a refreshing departure from a other food discovery apps.

Yelp (iOS/Android/BlackBerry/WP7/WebOS)

Ah Yelp, the ubiquitous crowdsourced restaurant review and ratings site. In addition to its mobile site, Yelp has mobile apps for virtually every platform, and all of them use your phone's on-board GPS to find out and show you what restaurants, clubs, bars, and other locations are in your area. You can filter based on what's open, what type of food is served, and how much you can expect to spend, look up a restaurant's hours, and Yelp's massive community means that you can usually find some good ideas for where to go and what to eat. Yelp's massive community is a pro and a con: there are plenty of reviews for almost any restaurant, but not all of them are valuable (although some are!), and great holes in the wall may be obscured by popular places with tons of ratings.

Google Places (iOS/Android)

Google Places is relatively new when compared to some of the others, but it's already getting real traction. The iPhone and Android apps leverage Google's growing database of restaurant information and user-submitted information to help you find restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and other destinations (like ATMs, banks, and gas stations) near you at any time. Tap a location to see photos, read more about the restaurant or see how to contact them, leave your own review, or check in using Google Places. In Android, the app is part of Google Maps, and lets you get turn-by-turn driving directions or call the restaurant directly.

Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to vote for an all-out winner.

What's The Best Restaurant Discovery App?

This week's honorable mention goes to Ness, a free iPhone-only app that shows you places that your Facebook and FourSquare friends have rated and what they enjoyed while they were there, uses your own likes previous reviews (as well as your favorite types of food) to deliver restaurant ideas the app thinks you'll love. Plus, the app is attractive and uses gorgeous food photos to frame restaurant info.

Have something to say about one of the competitors? Did your favorite app not make the cut? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter or Google+.

Feature: The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review

2011-10-23T16:30:00Z

Don't look now, but the iPod—yes, the original, less-space-than-a-Nomad iPod—just turned 10 years old. That makes the device older than Facebook, YouTube, Crocs, Vibram FiveFingers, and the Motorola RAZR, to name a few brands and devices that have penetrated general culture over the last decade. But unlike old flip phones and tacky footwear, the iPod's overall design remains iconic and its effect on our consumption of music remains pervasive. It was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it was the one whose industrial and UI design would influence handheld gadgets for far longer than its product lifetime.

In fact, it's not hard to argue that the original iPod is still with us. It can be found most obviously in the iPod classic, but its influences are also found in iOS and even third-party smartphones and music players. Hell, even though the original iPod is 10 years old, you could almost still use it today as your go-to music player... or can you? Ars got its hands on an original 5GB iPod from back in 2001 so that we could re-review it with some 2011 flair—clickwheel and all.

Read the comments on this post

The Internet of Fake Screenshots

2011-10-31T07:31:18Z

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet because screenshots can be easily faked. Sometimes these fake images are for pure fun – like you putting your picture on the cover of TIME magazine, sometimes they may be deceptive.

My favorite is Wall Machine – a service that lets you you create fake screenshots of Facebook walls and other Facebook related activity - like X is now a friend of Y or Z changed their relation status on Facebook. Every part of that screenshot can be customized including the conversation text, the profile images and you can have as many comments on a Facebook post as you like.

Another service – iFakeText - lets you make screenshot images of text messages exchanged on an iPhone. Just enter the text of the SMS conversation in a proper format and generate the screenshot – see example.

I also like Fake Tweet Builder for creating screenshot images of Twitter conversations that may or may not have happened. The screenshots of individual tweets look extremely real - see example – and you may also use customize the profile pictures, the name of the Twitter client and how many times a particular tweet has been retweeted.

Ticket-o-Matic lets you print boarding passes of any popular airline, Fodey generates newspaper clippings while Expense Steak creates PDF receipts of restaurant bills and office supplies for a given amount. When you print these receipts on paper, they’ll look real but there’s little potential for misuse as they carry old dates.

Finally, if a web form makes it mandatory to fill the street address or the phone number, use this website to generate random data for putting into that form.

This story, The Internet of Fake Screenshots, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Screenshots, Internet.

Dragon App turns your iOS Device into a Voice Recorder

2011-10-20T14:09:41Z

Want to capture that sweet voice of your little girl humming her nursery poems? Or maybe you wish record an audio interview but without having to carry that digital voice recorder?

Nuance, developers of the popular Dragon Naturally Speech Recognition software, today released a new iOS app called Dragon Recorder that lets you quickly record voice notes on your iOS device with a single tap.

Launch the app and tap the screen to begin recording – tap again to pause or double tap to finish the recording. You can playback the audio on your iOS device itself or the audio files can be easily transferred to the computer over Wi-Fi.

One useful feature is that if you switch to a different app during a recording session, the Dragon Recorder app will continue recording. Thus the app can be used to record audio from other apps – for example, Skype calls.

Dragon Recorder is for the iPhone but can also be used to capture audio on the iPad.

This story, Dragon App turns your iOS Device into a Voice Recorder, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 20, 2011 under IPad, IPhone, Software.