Author Archive | Harry McCracken

NetShare: Hello, Goodbye, Hello, Goodbye

Okay, now this is just plain weird. Nullriver’s NetShare utility for tethering iPhones to computers as a wireless modem appeared on Apple’s App Store, then disappeared–and then resurfaced. That was odd enough. But now…it’s gone again.

Nullriver says that Apple pulled it again, without explanation. I suppose it’s possible that it’ll mysteriously return again, but at this point I think it’s more likely that it’ll remain an application non grata until and unless AT&T formalizes tethering as a legitimate iPhone use. Which, as I keep saying, I hope they’ll do–and it doesn’t seem unthinkable that they will, since other AT&T phones get that option.

Meanwhile, judging from the copy of NetShare that I managed to buy during one of its windows of availability, I’m not heartbroken that this particular iPhone tethering app keeps coming and going…

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Nullriver’s NetShare Tethering for the iPhone: It’s Baaaaaaack!

Curiouser and curiouser. Yesterday, a $10 iPhone utility from Nullriver called NetShare showed up in Apple’s App Store. It promised to let you share your iPhone’s wireless data service with a computer via the computer’s Wi-Fi connection, giving you the potential to get online in places where you can’t find a hotspot. Shortly after it appeared in the App Store, it disappeared; that was less surprising than the fact it was there in the first place, since AT&T offers no official sanction for using your iPhone as a modem.

Today? NetShare is back in the App Store. I’ve seen no official word from Apple, AT&T, or Nullriver about what’s going on here, and whether using NetShare is okay, not okay, or in some fuzzy area in between. I’ve pined for the ability to tether my notebook to my phone’s modem ever since I dumped my AT&T Tilt phone for an iPhone 3G, though, so I downloaded, configured, and tried NetShare as fast as I could.

I’ve given it only a quick try so far, not an extensive trial. For a few minutes I was up and running, using Safari to surf the Web (including YouTube) at decent speed and chatting on iChat. That was a kick. But other than that, NetShare has been kind of a pain–it’s safe to say it’s not the seamless iPhone tethering solution I’ve been looking for and would happily pay for.

NetShare works by setting up a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi network between your Mac (Windows support is promised soon) and the iPhone, then using proxy access to let your Mac piggyback on the iPhone’s internet connection. This requires some futzing around with network settings on both the iPhone and the Mac; Nullriver provides instructions, but they’re confusing in some places and simply wrong in others, and they’re far from complete. They also don’t mention the fact that they only get you as far as making Safari and iChat work; I had to reconfigure Flock to use NetShare’s proxy myself.

(Side note: A forum member over at MacRumors has provided instructions for using NetShare that are much better than Nullriver’s.)

Every time my iPhone went into sleep mode, my network connection died. I reconnected only by randomly fiddling with network settings and never figured out what I did that would get the connection working again. And when I was done testing and wanted to get back on my Wi-Fi network, I had to undo some of the settings that NetShare required me to change.

In short, if you’re a geek with a need for a way to connect a Mac via iPhone for emergency use, NetShare might fit the bill. But I found it way too much of a hassle to contemplate using it very often, even if AT&T were to give NetShare its blessings.

The good news: NetShare proves that there’s no technical reason why an iPhone can’t double as a modem, and the fact that it’s on the App Store would seem to suggest that it’s not unthinkable that a more polished tethering application along the lines of June Fabrics’ PdaNet couldn’t be approved by Apple and at least grudgingly accepted by AT&T.

But I say it again: If a future upgrade to the iPhone OS had some sort of official “Tether to Computer” option, as my Tilt did, I’d cheerfully fork over money to AT&T.

And I’d love to learn exactly what the deal is with NetShare’s appearance, disappearance, and reappearance, and whether Apple is really selling a piece of software that AT&T doesn’t want you to run…

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Firefox: The #1 Browser on Technologizer

When I was at PC World, I enjoyed following the browser wars by periodically checking in to see what browsers were being used by PCWorld.com visitors. It was fun to watch the Little Browser That Could chug along, gaining market share little by little; when I blogged back in February, just over a third of PCWorld.com visitors were using Firefox.

I thought of that when I saw a story over at TGDaily reporting on a new study that says that 20 percent of all Web users are now on Firefox. And I wondered: What’s the story here on Technologizer?

Turn out that Technologizer visitors love Firefox even more than PCWorld.com ones do–in this site’s brief life, 58 percent of visits have come from people using Mozilla’s browser. Only 30 percent used Internet Explorer, the browser that still dominates the Web, albeit a heckuva lot less so than it did a few years ago.

A shade under 9 percent use Apple’s Safaril just under 2 percent use Opera. And those are the only browsers with more than a teeny-tiny market share here.

Technologizer is a new site that doesn’t have gazillions of visitors yet, so this breakdown is likely subject to radical change as we grow. For now, though, you seem to be a pretty discerning bunch when it comes to browser usage…

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Me, on a Podcast

I had fun this afternoon being a podcast guest for the guys at MyMac Magazine. We talked about my past, present, and future–and, of course, about Macs. You can check it out here.

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You Mean I’m Not the Only Person Who Doesn’t Bookmark?

Delicious, the venerable Web-based bookmarking service owned by Yahoo and formerly known as Del.icio.us, launched a new version today. I fully intend to check it out, but right now, I’m still mulling over Matthew Ingram’s post about it: “Delicious 2.0: Who Bookmarks Anymore?”

Matthew uses this Twitter post by Mashable’s Adam Ostrow as a springboard to discuss why he’s finding bookmarking less and less relevant:

I found the whole notion of bookmarking being passé to be not only intriguing but surprisingly cathartic–because I’ve never been much of a bookmarker, and I’ve always felt sort of guilty about it.

How come I’ve never bookmarked? Mostly because it’s always felt like work that didn’t result in adequate payoff. It’s required a few clicks that always seem like a distraction that interferes with whatever I’m doing at the moment. (Pretty much by definition, you bookmark something because it’s valuable; I’m usually so engrossed in the content that I forget to bookmark it.) Bookmarks require folders (or folder variants such as Google Toolbar’s labels); managing folders makes me feel like a librarian tending to a card catalog, and I always seem to end up with multiple folders that duplicate each others’ purpose. Which means that even once I’ve bookmarked something, I have trouble finding it.

Another issue with bookmarks that I’ve never found closure with is that it’s harder to remember to get rid of bookmarks than to create them in the first place. Any time I’ve ever made a concerted effort to bookmark stuff–and God knows, I have–I’ve ended up forgetting to bookmark some sites I go to everyday…and leaving bookmarks related to projects from years ago cluttering up my folders.

For a long time, I had a good excuse to avoid bookmarks: They were tied to a particular browser on a particular machine, and I’ve always been a multiple-browsers-on-multiple-computers kind of browser. In theory, that excuse went away years ago when Web-based bookmarking services started to pop up. (Backflip sticks in my mind as the first one I saw and kind of liked–and it’s still around.)

I’ve tried a bunch of approaches to putting bookmarks on the Web and/or synching them across multiple PCs, but I’ve never found one that made me into a long-term believer. I couldn’t even remember the original Del.icio.us’s name, let along figure out its cryptic interface. I liked Google Browser Sync until it started creating phantom duplicate bookmarks–and if I’d kept with it I would have ended up irritated with Google when they discontinued the service. These days, I use Google Toolbar’s bookmarks–sort of–but still fumble with the fact any browser I use also has its own bookmark system. (I sometimes forget where I’ve bookmarked what.)

When I say that bookmarking is difficult, what I’m really is that other means of finding information are easier. That’s always been true, and it’s only more strikingly so today. I can find nearly anything I need on the Web in Google in ten seconds or so. I’ve always gone back to sites by typing their names into the browser’s address bar, and with the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3 and its cousin Flock, it feels like the browser figures out what I’m looking for within my first two or three keystrokes. (Firefox 3 also makes strides in removing some of the hassle of bookmarking, but the Awesome Bar is so good I haven’t felt the need to bookmark anything.)

For years, I thought the fact that I didn’t bookmark much meant that I was secretly a clueless newbie. I assumed that serious Web users were serious bookmarkers, and that my failure to become one was a sign I was disorganized and wasteful of my own time. So I love the notion that bookmarking doesn’t matter much anymore. Whether or not it’s valid.

And now that I’m feeling better about not being a bookmarker, I may even find the courage to explain to you why I’m not that much of an RSS user…

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Introducing Technologizer’s T-List

New Technologizer feature! Starting this very moment, I’ll round up five items a day, give my take, and refer you to discussion elsewhere. They may be the day’s biggest stories. Or not. List starts after the jump…
Continue Reading →

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Microsoft’s Post-Windows “Midori”–It Must Exist

It’s always dangerous to get too excited about far-off Microsoft products with code names–especially when Microsoft has barely acknowledged they exist. But SD Times has published a story by David Worthington on “Midori,” which Worthington says is the operating system that Microsoft is building from scratch for the post-Windows world, and even if you read it with a very skeptical eye, it’s a significant piece.

Worthington’s piece is at a site aimed at developers, is pretty technical, and is about pie-in-the-sky goals rather than specific features. I’ll do my best to summarize, interpret, and translate into plain English:

–Microsoft says that Midori is a research project; nobody knows when it might become a shipping one;

–Microsoft is working on a migration path to help folks move from Windows to Midori, as well as some means of running Windows apps in the Midori environment;

–Rather than being a desktop operating system, Midori will be distributed–that is, it’ll consist a bunch of components that can run locally on a traditional PC or remotely across the Net, and which can access data here, there, and everywhere;

–It’ll be designed to be more reliable, with a better understanding of what applications are doing and greater ability to prevent misbehaving apps from causing trouble;

–It will also put more constraints on software developers designed to prevent them from writing problematic applications in the first place;

–It’ll be designed for a world in which multi-core CPUs and other technologies enable massively parallel processing–computing jobs getting divvied up into smaller jobs that all happen at the same time;

–it will be designed to run on PC hardware or in virtualized environments;

–it will have sophisticated means of managing tasks and processes, some of which will relate to doing things in a power-efficient way, thereby making it an attractive mobile OS.

Again, Microsoft hasn’t confirmed the details of Worthington’s piece, and some of my interpretation may be off; the above items are likely more possibilities than confirmed details, and could be just plain wrong. Don’t start lining up at Best Buy just yet–and even if Worthington has his facts right, be prepared for Midori to evolve into something radically different, or to die the ignominious death that many intriguing-sounding Microsoft research projects have died.

Robert Scoble, whose opinion I respect, says that anyone who thinks that Microsoft will have a brand-new OS ready in the next few decades is–Robert’s word–an idiot. (He puts it another way: Bill Gates won’t be with us by the time an all-new Microsoft OS debuts.) I’m not so sure about that.

I don’t know how solid the details of Worthington’s report is. But I’ve got to believe that the broad strokes are correct, and that Microsoft is working on something which it hopes to turn into a product in years, not decades. It’s so utterly clear that the Internet is the computing platform of the future and that basic aspects of Windows are profoundly archaic that Microsoft would be crazy if it didn’t have people starting with a blank slate and working on figuring out what’s next. And the world is changing around Microsoft at such a fast clip that it doesn’t have decades to get its act together. The scenario Midori describes is gonna happen, whether it’s Microsoft, Google, the open-source community, or some company that doesn’t exist yet that makes it happen.

Of course, “brand-new” is a tricky thing to define. I don’t know if there’s any actual code from MS-DOS in Windows Vista–in theory there shouldn’t be, since Vista descends from Windows NT, which was allegedly the first version of Windows written from scratch rather than bolted onto DOS. But there’s no question that Vista carries a fair amount of legacy that dates back to DOS. In the 27 years that Microsoft has dominated operating systems, there have been no true big bangs.

So perhaps Midori, in whatever form it does take, will owe a lot more to today’s Windows than Worthington suggests. Every time Microsoft has said it was working on a radical shift in the past, the end product has proven to be less than radical; if Midori follows that pattern, bits and pieces of it will end up being integrated into an OS that’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.

But to think that Midori or something like it doesn’t exist is to believe that Microsoft is unimaginably dense and complacent…

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Scrabulous is Dead–Long Live Wordscraper, I Guess!

As Mashable is reporting, the Agarwalla brothers, who yesterday were forced to pull Scrabble clone Scrabulous from Facebook are back–with a new Facebook game called Wordscraper. It involves piecing letters together into words on a grid in which different positions provide different scores, and…well, it looks a lot like Scrabble. But less so than Scrabulous did. (For one thing, the letters are on circlular “titles,” not squares.)

I cheerfully admit being a lousy person to judge Wordscraper, having little experience with either Scrabble or Scrabulous. If you have a more well-informed opinion than I could muster, I’d love to hear it…and let’s hope that Wordscraper is a distant enough bastard cousin of Scrabble that avoids the wrath of Hasbro’s lawyers.

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Microsoft’s Whacko But Entertaining New Live Search Feature

It’s tough being Microsoft’s search engine. Life is great for Google; Yahoo, for all its problems, is very popular and has fantastic name recognition; Ask.com is a little guy (comparatively!) with some neat features. But Microsoft’s search offering’s woes begin with the fact that it’s hard to remember what it’s called. It began its life as part of MSN, morphed into Windows Live Search, and is now known as just Live Search. I think–the logo still has the Windows window graphic in it, and it lives at Live.com, not LiveSearch.com. (Quick, name me another major Web site whose name and URL aren’t the same.)

It’s hard, in fact, to think of any distinguishing characteristic that Live Search sports, with the exception of its odd and cheesy Cashback pay-to-search feature, which smacks of desperation as much as it does innovation.

Which is probably one reason why Live Search launched a very, very unusual home page redesign  today. The Live Search page used to be a spare, faux Google one. Today? It’s dominated by an attractive photo of some people in a canoe in Botswana:

The image has a bunch of hotspots; hover over one, and a bit of text pops up:

Each text snippet has a link to information on Live Search, such as Web results, videos, or images.

The idea is a trifle bizarre, but the basic goal as outlined at Microsoft’s Live Search blog is clear enough: They’d like to show folks who show up to search some of the diversity of the stuff that’s there: “We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well.”

My first impulse was to dislike all this. In theory, it should be a distraction that gets in the way you finding whatever you showed up at Live Search to look for–unless you arrived looking for information about Botswana. It’s probably annoying if you’re on a slow dial-up line (the blog post says that dial-uppers may notice the image and hotspots popping into place; on my fast cable line, they were zippy enough). The whole idea flies in the face of umpteen theories of good Web design.

But…I kind of like it. At the very least, you gotta give Microsoft credit for trying something so idiosyncratic and utterly un-Google-esque.

The big question is: How often will the images and hotspots change? (If I see the Botswana scene more than a couple more times, I hereby retract the nice things I just said.) The blog post says that the images will change “regularly.” Whether that means a few times a day, a few times a week, or a few times a month I can’t say. I do know that this feature would be a lot cooler if I could cycle through images and hotspots at will–but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to do that…

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