Evan Hahn (dot com)

Just made an icon for Fluid — it’s for TubeRadio. Both Fluid and TubeRadio are things I’d suggest you check out, if you haven’t.

Click here to get it on Flickr.

Evernote is a marvelous note-taking application. It’s quite open-ended with regards to what one can do with it, and I really like it. I use it instead of Notes and Voice Memos on the iPhone. I use it to keep track of ideas and (not-so-sensitive) passwords. I even used it to draft this post!

But, like almost everything, you can complain about things you don’t like. Here are five things I would like to see in Evernote.

1. Linux support. I now use Ubuntu for hours a day (because it is superb), and I’m disappointed that I can’t have the same Evernote experience as I can on Windows or Mac. Although there’s the web version, it’s not great (see below). You can also hack it to work with Wine, but that’s less than ideal. I would really like to have Evernote for Linux — this is my most desired feature.
2. Voice transcription, similar to Jott. I’m quite a fan of being able to photograph a whiteboard and have Evernote transcribe what’s written. I would also love to be able to record my voice and have it write down what I said. And it’d be free, ideally.
3. Better web interface. I’ve noticed that, at least on Linux, Evernote’s web interface quite buggy. There are problems with bulleted lists, autosave, and it generally feels pretty clunky. I wouldn’t mind it becoming similar to the desktop interfaces.
4. HTML editing of notes. I may be irregular in this respect, but I always find myself editing HTML and CSS in my Google Docs. I know that you can export notes as HTML, so why can’t you edit them the same way?
5. SMS support. I remember always needing to remember things and wanting to be able to text them to myself, but I had no great way to do that. If Evernote supported that, I’m sure lots of people would use it.

I know that Evernote just raised $10 million…I hope some of that money goes to some of these features. But even if it doesn’t, I’ll still love Evernote.

Image by William Hook of Flickr, released under CC Attribution-Share Alike.

I just recently got me an iPhone, and I love it. It does everything — it’s a phone, it’s a web browser, it’s my lover…it does nearly everything that a “real” computer can do, and I find that astounding. It’s a keeper of a phone.

But nothing is perfect, not even products straight out of Sexy Technology Central, AKA Apple, Inc. This post is all about the things I don’t like about my otherwise marvelous device.

By far, my biggest problem with the iPhone is the absence of multitasking. I cannot tell you how annoying it is when I’m playing a game and receive a text. I have to finish up my game before I can answer the text, because I can’t switch between apps. I use Pandora all the time, I use Skype all the time, I use Facebook all the time. It’s incredibly annoying when I can’t run all of those at once, because I do that on a computer.

The phone itself is really bad. My previous phone was on AT&T and I had only a few calls dropped; this one easily drops more than half of them. People often cannot hear me when I talk into the device. Why do the really-old Nokia brick phones work far better than any phone today?

You cannot delete default apps. I understand why a person would want Stocks, or Weather, or Compass. But I think you can understand why you wouldn’t want them, either. I don’t use Stocks because I don’t care (yet). I don’t use Weather because there are better alternatives out there. I don’t use Compass because Compass is pretty gimmicky. I’m not suggesting that they go away, never to be seen again, but I’d like to be able to delete them.

There is no easy way to mess with the settings quickly. I can understand why some settings wouldn’t need modification at a moment’s notice — ringtones, push notifications, other things like this. But I change settings such as brightness or 3G on a whim (perhaps because I’m a battery freak) and I wish I could change them far more quickly than I have to. (I think that jailbroken iPhones can do this, but I’m not sure.)

Bluetooth sucks!

Safari doesn’t load pages in the background. I’m the kind of person that loads many pages at a time, and they don’t load in the background. That annoys me.

Find in Safari would be nice. Everyone I know uses the Find command on their home browser. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t on a phone.

I can has a BitTorrent client? I know Apple rejected one already, called Drivetrain. They don’t like that it could be used for piracy. In my opinion, that rejection is stupid. First of all, BitTorrent itself is not illegal. Second, if someone is pirating things, killing an iPhone BitTorrent app is not going to stop them. Third, it’d be far easier to catch people doing illegal stuff if they were torrenting off of 3G. The 5-gigabyte/month bandwidth limit would be hit really quickly, and AT&T could lay the smack down on you for stealing.

Site-specific browsers would be better than bookmarks, in my opinion.

The camera has no flash. I used to always carry around a point-and-shoot digital camera, and it was nice, but I don’t carry it any more because of my iPhone’s camera (which is good enough for me). The problem is, though, I have very few night shots anymore.

All in all, these complains are fairly minor. The phone is still great — don’t hate me, fanboys!

Facebook Lite is a less-bloated version of Facebook. They’re asking for feedback; here’s what I sent in.

I’ve always felt that the “full” Facebook gets more and more bloated every day. Facebook Chat is, frankly, quite buggy and annoying; I never use it. Notifications are very important, but I find that they’re quite annoying in the way they’re presented. Most applications were a fad that I never really liked. The page was slow, too; look at the HTML and see how many different CSS files are loaded. My list of complaints can continue.

Lite takes my complaints and pretty much crushes them. It’s boiled down to the five things people actually use Facebook for: status updates, Wall posts, photos, videos, and messages. Groups and third-party applications have taken a back seat; while they were used, they aren’t as much any more. Pokes (what I am convinced is the lowest form of human communication) are gone. Annoying-to-maintain friend lists are hidden. While some might not, I welcome the removal of some features.

Not every removal is a blessing, however. While I don’t like applications, they shouldn’t go away. Some apps that I like are inaccessible: Notes are unseen. Honesty Box has vanished. I like that they don’t hog the spotlight, but they should be ABLE to hog the spotlight if we want them to. Fan pages are also harder to find.

I like that Lite is compatible sans Javascript, where the “full” Facebook isn’t. While I’m not a heathen without Javascript on his machine, it’s nice to know that you’re making an effort to make it compatible. (On the note of compatibility, if you could help out in ie6nomore.com’s kill-IE6 crusade, that’d be good.)

I like that birthdays have been moved up. I like that things don’t fade anymore. I like that profile pictures don’t flood the news feed next to comments.

I like the blimp icon.

I’m curious about whether or not Facebook Lite intends to “take over” the current Facebook. I can’t say that Lite can do enough that it should, but it’s pretty close. I use it instead of the “full” Facebook when I can.

Just remember, Facebook: keep being awesome.

Icon taken from chadarizona of Flickr, shared with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.

I’m at the Online News Association convention in San Francisco. Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter (a website you may have heard of), was interviewed. I recorded the audio of the interview. I haven’t had a chance to edit this down, so it’s over an hour long. I’m going to speed it up a bit, try to delete the big silent parts, and delete the stuff that isn’t actually part of the interview.

There were some interesting highlights, which I will also comment on later. For now, get the interview below.

Download the unedited interview (1:13, 13.1 MB)

Photo credit: Joi of Flickr, released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

I’m writing this post on Google Chrome OS. Unfortunately, it’s not the official Chrome OS; it’s a fan-made one. Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.

I’ve got an old, clunky laptop sitting in my room. It’s running Windows XP, but it’s quite slow, and I hardly use it. So I decided to get everything off of it and put a fan-made Chrome OS on it.

I found out about it from a post on Lifehacker. If you’d like to install it, you can have it overwrite your OS (like I did) or simply get a virtual image of it. Lifehacker has instructions on how to do this, if you want to try it out like a normal person.

I installed it off of the CD. The OS would run (partially) off of the CD, but it was an awful experience. Don’t expect to be able to run it that way.

Once it installs, it’s pretty much OpenSUSE with Chrome installed, much else gone, and a pretty background. It’s got links to Google Docs, Google Reader, and Google Calendar in the Applications, and it comes with OpenOffice.

Tweaking it to my Liking

I wasn’t perfectly happy with it right out the box, so I made a few adjustments…

• First, there were some pesky locked “openSUSE” icons on the desktop which I didn’t want. Open up the Terminal and type “su”, and then your password. Then type “cd /usr/share/dist/desktop-files”. Then type “rm GnomeOnlineHelp.desktop” and “rm SuSE.desktop” – they’ll be gone.
• I figured I wouldn’t be using the bottom Panel too much, so I added the hide buttons hid the panel.
• I put a shortcut to Google Chrome on my desktop. I gave it a fatass icon (here it is) so that it wouldn’t look bad when I scaled it, and then I scaled it over the background image.

My Impressions

• Speed: I downloaded this for my old machine so that I could make it faster, and it did. It was slow in part because I’d installed a bunch of things on it, but partially because XP is slower than this tiny little build of Linux. (I’m sure most Linux builds would make my machine faster, however.) Boot time was also considerably faster, though nowhere near as fast as the 10 seconds real Chrome OS shoots for.
• Usability: I don’t think this was any harder than any other user-friendly build of Linux. I’m not a Linux user myself, but I was able to figure it out, so that was good.
• Usefulness: If you would ever consider the actual Chrome OS, this is a good substitute. It’s pretty much Google Chrome and not much else. I think Good OS’s “Cloud” might be a better alternative, or even their gOS. But this is still good.

Pardon my inevitable errors — I’m not a salt of Linux.

I just picked up a copy of Snow Leopard. I know my review might be a bit late, but here are my two cents about it.

• Overall, an upgrade. Feels a lot better, lots of nice little new features.
• In my opinion, the $29 cost was worth it, but the regular $129 upgrades are not. My philosophy is that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (unless it’s pretty cheap). For example, my Windows machine is still sitting on Windows XP, and although I prefer Windows 7 by leaps and bounds, I don’t care $110 worth. I didn’t upgrade from Tiger for $130, and I wouldn’t have upgraded from Leopard from $130.
• I’ve heard criticism that it’s really a service pack; I agree completely. I understand that the internal changes may be huge, but a product that relies so heavily on flashy user-side gimmicks should have more to it if it should be called anything more. I don’t feel that it merits the jump between 10.5 to 10.6.
• IT HURTS MY EYES. I’m pretty sure they did something to the contrast. All the reds are so red, and all the blues are so blue that it makes the real world look bland and unexciting. Which it is. I can’t keep looking at my screen. (And no, I haven’t done anything with Control + Apple + Option + Period or Comma.)
• I think Apple is running out of cats. Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard…what’s next? Ocelot? Cougar?
• It broke a few little things about my machine; QuickSilver, Application Enhancer, etc. But this is to be expected with any OS upgrade, and so I don’t fault Snow Leopard for that.

In my opinion, if you’ve got the $30 and you care, go for it. If you don’t care enough, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. Leopard is fine, and frankly, you could survive on Tiger or Jaguar without wasting your money. And if you prefer Windows (I can’t decide whether or not I do), Windows 7 is where it’s at.

Oh, and I’m not kidding that it hurts my eyes.

Took this photo while I was on Maui. Awesomepants.

Type hex, see colors.

I’ve made a simple web app: type a 3 or 6-digit color in hex, and the background becomes that color. While this may not seem useful, it’s good for doing video calls in dim light when you want to illuminate your face. I’ve been using it as a site-specific browser (try Mozilla Prism or Fluid for Mac) behind Skype.

Enjoy the Hex Colorer.