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Amazon Cloud Player Updates – Matches Competitors

Amazon MP3 LogoWe’ve had a long road in cloud music. Back in December of last year, we compared the limitations of Google Music to that of Amazon MP3. At the time, Google won. The Amazon web player was not feature filled, the Google Music interface won, for ability to enter metadata, among other things.

But that has changed. Amazon announced a new revamped cloud offering. The most significant innovation is one that iTunes already offers, and that Amazon will now as well. Amazon will scan music libraries and match the songs on their computers to their catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased elsewhere or ripped from CDs will be made instantly available in Cloud Player as 256 Kbps audio.

Cloud Player now allows editing of metadata inside the player, a feature Google has had for some time.

Amazon Cloud Player is expanding to the Roku Box.

And, unlike previously, music purchased prior to the announcement of Amazon Cloud Player will now be available in your box. This was always a pet peeve, as Amazon knew the music was purchased…you bought it from them.

The new Cloud Player offers two options.

  • Cloud Player Free – Store all music purchased from Amazon, plus 250 songs.
  • Cloud Player Premium – Store up to 250,000 songs for $25 a year.

Amazon Cloud Player is now separate from Amazon Cloud Drive. Drive will now be used exclusively for file storage. 5GB is offered free, and 20GB is available for $10 per year.

In both cases, this is a compelling offer. However, there are some things missing. No Linux client for the desktop apps for either Drive or Player. No API for third-party development, which we’ve mentioned before.

How does this compare to Google Music? Google Music, since we last visited it, sells music itself…offers limited download functionality, and still has several limitations. Amazon is looking a lot more compelling.

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Published on August 1, 2012
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Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload

This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a

If This Then That. com

long-term bookmark archiving service.

When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use.

We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge.

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Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem.

Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up with all that?

The secret to a good workflow is to wisely choose your information flows, keep your inbox empty, and try to schedule spring cleaning for your accounts the same as anything else.

As part of that, we’re trying out ifttt.com, which allows you to tie together parts of the Internet. Using If This Then That logic, you can tie things together. For example, since Pocket support in Pinboard doesn’t allow bookmarks to be added when read, ifttt.com can add this functionality. There are dozens of suggested tieups between sites that otherwise would not be possible.

It is time to liquidate the Pocket account, get up to date, prune the Reader accounts again, prune the Twitter followers…

What is your workflow?

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Published on May 4, 2012
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The Asus Transformer as a Productivity Device

Asus_EeePAD_Transformer_TF101_49
Asus_EeePAD_Transformer_TF101_49 (Photo credit: blogeee.net)

Last time on Gadget Wisdom, we were asking the question of whether a tablet can be your primary computer.

After we wrote this, we headed off on a long weekend with only an Asus Transformer. This is the original Asus Transformer TF101, not the newer Transformer Prime, but the concept is basically the same. If you want the benefits of a tablet, with the option to produce longer form content as needed, this is a perfect choice.

The tablet is wonderful for consumption of content. There are not enough tablet apps for Android, but there are enough to make us optimistic for the future.

Let’s go over a few of the apps we’ve started to use…

 News Reading

  • Reader HD (Free Version, Ad Free Version) – The best Google Reader app for Android tablets, in our opinion. The developer is very responsive with bug and feature requestss

There are a variety of magazine style news readers that draw from a variety of sources. Even Reader HD offers a magazine mode. We hope the promised version of ReadItLater Pro for tablets arrives soon, but the current version is adequate.

Word Processing/Document Creation

We have yet to find the best document suite for Android tablets. The Transformer comes with Polaris Office, which is not offered in the market. We also have copies of QuickOffice HD and DocumentsToGO.

We’ve actually been using a simple text editor, DB Text Editor, which is built into the Dropbox Android client.

We blog, and use WordPress, and WordPress for Android (Market Link) was recently updated and now supports tablets. It is still, like many things, not perfect. Nor is using WordPress in the browsers, but these things continue to get better..

Browsers

There is a build-target for a full build of Chrome for Android, but so far, there isn’t a full browser for Android. But the choice of browsers is not bad. While there is a tablet version of the popular Dolphin Browser, it is still in beta and has not been updated in a while. The HD version works fine for now, as does the Android version of Firefox. We hope to see more in this category in the future.

Email

Gmail is an example of what a good tablet app can be. It works nicely, efficiently, and it is a reference for many other apps.

Finance

Mint’s Android app(Market Link) just updated this week to support tablets. It shows that any app can become an indispensable part of one’s productivity if properly designed.

In the end, the market for tablet apps on Android is expanding. There are many good apps so far, including many we haven’t mentioned. There will be more, and the ones we have will only continue to improve.  So, what is the conclusion?

An Android tablet is one of the best options out there for content consumption and simple productivity. For word processing, with the addition of the Transformer’s keyboard dock, it means you can handle your on-the-go and travel word processing. We wouldn’t use it as our primary computer, but having it around means you can use your primary computer less and be more mobile around your house.

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Published on February 4, 2012
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The Responsive Developer

John "maddog" Hall - Linuxcon2011
Image by Beraldo Leal via Flickr

Twice in 2011 we had the pleasure of attending a speech by Jon Hall, who is the Executive Director of Linux International. In both cases, he told a story of the early days of software, about companies that were small enough that the service department was the programmer himself.

As these new small startups, and this 1-2 person software companies spring up to make mobile apps, or cloud apps, or what have you, you have the same situation. You can contact a developer of a mobile app, in many situations, and get them to work with you, or have them seriously consider feature requests.

The developer of Poweramp for Android, a popular music player, was recently on Twitter asking people for feature requests to consider, for example.

We recently have had a lot of luck in this regard. We emailed a developer, and they looked into an edge case issue to see if they could address it. We made another suggestion of another, and today they sent us a beta to test and give our opinion of. And these are mobile apps. Most mobile apps are less than five dollars, more are less than ten. That a developer is willing to take you seriously when their profit from you might be less than a fast food meal is also very inspiring.

Compare that to another medium sized company that took two days to explain the status of a shipped item, or the large company that took three days to arrive for a repair appointment. Some companies have grown to the point where the service staff are barely able to support their product.

Is smaller better? Can these small companies provide good service and make a decent profit? Either way, it is worth considering. At the least, before you leave a bad review, contact the developer and discuss the matter.

What do you think?

Published on January 11, 2012
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Choosing a Cloud Photo Service

How things change over the years is astonishing. A few short years ago, the idea of storing so much of your personal information on remote computers would be

Flickr buddies rememe 2.0worrisome. In fact, the ability to get all that information in the cloud would be limited, with slow internet connections.

Now, everything is Cloud Cloud Cloud. Now, as we mentioned before, never put all your eggs in one basket. always keep copies in multiple places. But backup services are a separate issue for another day.

What we were looking for in a photo service was not what everyone was looking for in such a system. Some people want their photos to be social.

Flickr,, for example, states that its mission statement is twofold…to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them, and enable new ways of organizing photos and video. There are tons of great images on Flickr, and it has a great community if your goal is creating a community around photo sharing. There are a lot of serious photographers on Flickr who want to share with other serious photographers.

Flickr offers a free service, and a $25 a year Pro account. The Pro account gets you unlimited uploads, storage, and bandwidth, and ad-free browsing. But Flickr is run by Yahoo, and Yahoo’s performance of late has been less than stellar.

Google’s Picasa is also popular, and is transitioning to Google Photo, which is part of Google’s rebranding of their services with an eye toward social. As part of its integration with Google Plus, the service now allows unlimited photos, but the terms of service allow Google to use the uploaded photos to display, and for promoting services royalty free.

Facebook has become one of the most popular places to store photos. However, it suffers from the same pitfalls as other services. It is free, but the quality and organization is limited by Facebook’s desired function.

So, we went to Smugmug. It is the most expensive option, but with that comes reliability and control. Most serious photographers agree that it may not be a place for sharing, but it is a place for photographers.

Smugmug offers unlimited uploads, a variety of privacy and safety options, prints, customization, and is ad-free. You can use your own domain name(Power Account) and customize your gallery theme. All photos are backed up, and you can download your entire collection easily. They offer three levels…Basic($40/yr), Power($60/yr), Pro($150/yr).

The Basic account allows for most of the functionality you could want. The Power account adds the ability to use your own domain name and further customize the site, and it adds video support for clips of 20 minutes or less, and right click protection to prevent people from saving your images. The Pro account is for those who sell their photography.

And if you like to share your photos, Smugmug supports sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress. If you don’t want people to share from your galleries, this can be turned off. You can also turn off external linking of all kinds. So, you keep control of your photos, but you have the power to do whatever you wish with them. It has given us a chance to take our photos out of an archive where they were never seen, and start getting them in presentation order.

What do you use for your photos?

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Published on January 9, 2012
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Firefox vs Chrome

Chrome Needs Color Management
Image by wabisabi2015 via Flickr

We’ve just recently returned to Firefox after some time with Chromium, Chrome’s open-source brother.

In the time since we’ve left, Firefox has iterated so fast. In the last calendar year, it has gone from Version 4 to Version 9. It did so mostly by eliminating minor version numbers. Every version is now a major version.

Over the last year, there have been a lot of changes. Firefox 4 was the first to bundle Firefox Sync, which syncs browser settings. The speed of Firefox has increased sevenfold, and the memory usage, a common complaint about Firefox, is down 50%.

The Browser Wars are an arms race to see who can make their browser faster. Recently, Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time. But it has issues, despite its features.

Chrome creates a separate process for each tab, which protects against any single failure bringing down the whole browser. However, this can have pros and cons. Both Firefox and Chrome have reputations for memory issues, although Firefox is more famous for this, the two browsers use more or less memory at different times, because of this design. Firefox has made a good push to reduce its memory usage.

While our situation might not be typical, the new Firefox is definitely seeming more snappy than it once was. There are things in Chrome that are not currently available in Firefox. One of the nicer ones, although Chrome unfairly calls it an App, are the large bookmarks of commonly used programs on the Blank New Tab menu. We’ve been able to reproduce this in Firefox, however, using a plugin called Fast Dial, which creates the same sort of visual bookmarks.

We aren’t the only ones who enjoy Firefox, while looking for some, but not all, of the features of Chrome. We located a Firefox extension to enable the HTML5 desktop notifications according to the API Chrome implements. This allows an open Gmail window, for example, to pop up a notification.

So, in the end, Chrome and Firefox both offer compelling features, and we’ll keep them both installed, but we keep running back to Firefox. It just suits us. And it suits many others.

What do you use and why?

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Published on January 1, 2012
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Google Music vs. Amazon Cloud Drive – Some Limitations

Amazon Cloud Player
Image by pmsyyz via Flickr

Out of the various online music lockers that are springing up, Google Music seems to have the best interface for metadata. This is especially important if you intend to be able to sort through your music. This is why, despite supporting Moozone, we decided to upload our music to multiple clouds. In terms of user experience, Google wins hands-down.

Amazon Cloud Drive, by comparison, seems to offer no ability to edit the metadata, which affects playback and search. It makes the experience a bit harder. Their web player is not very feature filled and their Android app is equally lacking in aesthetics. Google Music could use more functionality, but it offers a compelling set of features.

Amazon makes it easy to download files, Google does not. You can make files available offline in the Android app, but you can’t download them. So it isn’t a backup solution.

Neither company offers a public API, so third-parties can expand their offerings, however. Amazon Cloud offers a free and paid product. Google has yet to offer a paid product, and it may or may not.

We’re still on the fence about this. Ironically, we prefer the Amazon music to the Google Music store, but Google has the better interface. And neither supports OGG, unfortunately. But, so far, in this battle, Google has won. But we often find ourselves using Amazon’s MP3 App for Android right after we’ve bought a song. Something to be said for ease of use.

What do you think?

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Published on December 30, 2011
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Adventures in Global Smartphone Travel – Call for Feedback

For use on the English Wikipedia page LG Ally
Image via Wikipedia

Recently, we started making plans to travel out of the country for the first time since most of us here at the Weneca Media Group got a smartphone.

Since that time, the advice given about smartphones(once you get one, it is hard to go back), has rung true. The idea of being without one and its instant data access wherever we go seems a strange one.

However, most of us have selected a CDMA carrier. Mostly Verizon, but Jere over at Android Buffet has a Sprint phone. The majority of the world uses GSM as its standard, rendering these phones useless. However, Verizon offers a limited series of global phones, including the Droid 2 Global and the Droid 3, both available in the Gadget Wisdom collection.

So, our conversation started with Verizon. Despite the fact Vodafone owns nearly half of Verizon, they do not offer a good deal on data. Signing up for a 50MB plan is $30.

Looking around at prepaidgsm.net, which summarizes rates around the world for prepaid gsm, there are better deals to be had. The downside is that you can’t keep your U.S. number, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

As a Verizon customer, we would need to unlock our Global phones. Verizon Global Tech Support advised they would unlock one phone every ten months for a customer in good standing. The phone would have had to have been on the account at some point. So, time to decide which phone is going overseas. Perhaps the one not being used in daily life…

If we wanted to chuck all data concerns out the window, Telestial offers inexpensive prepaid world SIM and prepaid phones, and can be purchased through Amazon. They offer both a U.S. and a U.K. phone number, with cards starting at $5. We may get one of these as a backup.

Our plan is to go for something decoupled from the phone for the U.S. issue, Skype. Skype offers a service called Skype-To-Go numbers. They will assign a number that will forward to an overseas number at your expense, which is significantly less than the cost of having same done by a phone company. You can even forward your normal or Google Voice number to this number, making it seamless for friends and business associates. It would also, if we set it up after arriving and purchasing a prepaid SIM card, allow us to use the cheap local plans, instead of other options.

What do you think? We haven’t done any of this yet, but what do you suggest?

Published on October 18, 2011
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Are Bookshelves No Longer for Books?

MUNICH, GERMANY - APRIL 02: Lars Dafnas, hea...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The LA Times questioned the future of paper books, based on the information that the classic Billy Bookcase is being redesigned. Next month, the shelf will be rereleased as a deeper shelf, meant to display decorative items, and is already pushing glass doors as an add-on.

Our perspective is probably interesting, as a previous Ikea redesign on the Billy Bookcase, which is over thirty years old, halted our expansion plans. We had invested in Billy with the idea we could gradually add to it. Unfortunately, they discontinued the color, if not the bookcase.

As for the fact that over ten percent of the population now has an E-Reader, we addressed the issue of gradually decluttering your space with an E-Reader. When we first brought in the Billy Bookcases some years ago, there were three of them. We’ve since eliminated one by gradually going digital. But there are some books that we will never get rid of.

For most people, while e-readers may mean a slowdown in the purchase of paper books, it does not mean a complete elimination. For one, too many materials aren’t available electronically. E-Books are not transferable, nor can you buy them cheap used. Thus there are limits to their utility and we doubt they’ll ever completely go away, and we don’t want them to. Our prediction is that the publishing industry will migrate to a print-on-demand model. There may still be trade paperbacks printed, but if you want a copy of the majority of books, they will print it on request.

As we write this, we paused at this moment to turn around and look at the Billy behind and wonder about the future. The Billy we got rid of, we did add in a smaller bookcase which is filled with movies. Is the future visual and audio entertainment, over the written word? Maybe books of all kinds are on the way out.

If they aren’t, will we read on e-ink screens? Tablets?

Many people prefer a dedicated e-reader not just because e-ink screens tend to be less harsh on the eyes than LCDs, but because they have the same distraction-free nature as books. They aren’t designed for multiple streams of information. They allow you to focus on the book.

There are many kinds of people in this world. We all have different needs. Some are better with audio, some better visually…the newest generation has been conditioned to learn best with multimedia. There will always be demand for printed material, even as things change.

But that’s us. What do you think?

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Published on September 11, 2011
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Switching From Dropbox to Wuala

Image representing Wuala as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We were once a big booster of Dropbox. But recent events have caused us to doubt them. On July 1st, Dropbox revised their policies. This was in response to a well publicized authentication breach where, for several hours, access to accounts was permitted without valid passwords. This followed the realization that despite assurances, Dropbox employees can access your data, but only to the extent that they need to(or so they say).

Does this mean we doubt the sincerity of the company? No more than any other company. But we’ve decided to move on…to Wuala. Wuala is a secure online storage service that provides many more features than Dropbox, if less supported.

There are three core principles of Wuala:

  1. Security and privacy
  2. Bridging web and desktop
  3. Economic technology

In terms of security, Wuala offers client-side encryption, which means that the encryption is performed on one’s one computer. During the upload, data is split and stored in multiple locations. They promise that because your password is never transmitted, no one, including their employees, can see private files.

Wuala offers a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is even a web version. You get 1GB for free, and you can gain additional storage by paying for it, trading your local storage for extra storage(more on that in a moment), or inviting friends to join Wuala.

Wuala offers both backup and synchronization options. Backup saves local files regularly into the Wuala Drive, at an interval of your choosing. The backup are read-only. Sync allows you to sync files and folders across multiple computers. Dropbox provides sync only.

If you want to pay for storage above the free 1GB, it is $29 a year for 10GB, $49 for 25GB, and so on. You can also trade for storage. You can trade up to 100GB on your computer in exchange for 100GB in the cloud. You get whatever you provide multiplied by your online time. You must be on for at least 4 hours a day. As they put it, this doesn’t give you extra storage, but you give up storage locally to gain it elsewhere, which has its advantages.

We’ve set up the Wuala client on our headless server to trade storage. It also resides on our desktop systems to sync our files. We have plans to expand the headless part, to generate backups of the entire Wuala sync and send it to a secondary backup site as well, but that is for the future. The Wuala client allows it to be mounted as an NFS partition for that purpose.

There is an Android client we have tested. It lacks many features of the Dropbox app, including directory download/sync/upload and support for the Android sharing functionality. Of course, the Wuala developers have acknowledge this as a desired feature, but there is no timetable for its implementation. If they are slow in doing so, there would be hope of a third-party app, however, the Wuala API is in Alpha and only supports GET requests. It has been in this state for over a year.

When it comes down to it, Wuala is not perfect. But it offers a more complete feature set than Dropbox, if a less mature API and Android client. But, like many things, it is a matter of what is more important to you.

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Published on July 5, 2011
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